by M. D. Cooper
“And how would Roxy handle your judgment against her friend?” Sera asked. “Will it sour her toward helping?”
“And Jane?” Krissy pressed.
Sera pursed her lips. “I’ll think of something—though I’m open to suggestions.”
“Well, I imagine it will start with a demotion,” Krissy replied as she pulled up Jane’s service record. “She was CWO-5 when she joined with Justin—”
“Oh, I was thinking of a dishonorable discharge to start,” Sera cocked an eyebrow. “And then I’m going to pull her into the Hand.”
“Is that really a punishment?” Krissy asked. “Maybe you could send her somewhere with enforced celibacy—it fits the crime.”
“Too bad we can’t use compulsions,” Sera said with a rueful shake of her head. “That would solve this nicely.”
Krissy cocked an eyebrow. “I thought the Hand did use compulsions.”
“Under Justin, yeah. Not since I’ve been in control—well, not that I ever approved, at least. Compulsions control behavior, they don’t really change it.”
“Depends on how strong-willed a person is.” Krissy fixed her with a level stare that indicated some additional meaning.
Sera furrowed her brow, wondering what the admiral was getting at. “I give. Are you saying I’m not strong-willed enough for what lies ahead?”
“Not at all,” Krissy replied. “But what about your sisters? They were under your mother’s sway once. What’s to say they can’t be turned to obey her once more?”
“Other than Finaeus and Earnest being certain of it?”
“Well….”
“I don’t know of a stronger assurance than what those two men can give,” Sera continued. “Stars, in the last decade, there’ve been more types of mental coercion going on than I even knew existed. The Rhoads thing, the Genevian mech discipline, remnants, memories, shards, plus all the stuff the ISF has in their databases from the truly disturbing things people used to do back in Sol. On the plus side, Finaeus and Earnest have a vast array of information they can use to ensure that our minds are as secure as they can make them before we go to Airtha.”
“Oh?” Krissy asked, appearing interested in the information. “How are they doing that? I mean, at the end of the day, our brains are still just organic neurons—and these ascended beings seem to be able to reach right past any perimeter defenses mods may offer and go right for the grey matter.”
“You’re thinking is behind, Krissy,” Sera tapped the side of your head. “Earnest has been working on more ways to use picotech than just growing starships and making bombs. He’s worked out a way to interlace pico-scale data encoding into neurons. With that he can build a system that can protect our brains from tampering and even re-constitute them back to a prior state on the fly.”
The admiral shivered convulsively. “That sounds a bit…scary. Doesn’t that also mean that you could effectively re-configure someone’s brain on the fly?”
Sera nodded slowly. “As with most of the ISF’s tech, used for good, it’s amazing. But in the wrong hands….”
Krissy pursed her lips, nodding slowly. The she leant forward, elbows on her desk.
“What are we going to do about it all after the war?”
“All what?” Sera asked.
“The tech…like how we’re leaving jump gates all over the Inner Stars—and notwithstanding the ISF’s picotech, there’s still a lot of crazy nanotech out there now. Stasis shields, jumping to the LMC, Airtha’s ability to send black holes through jump gates in her crazy DMG ships…even this base! We’re setting up jumpgates beneath the cloudtops of a gas giant and banking jumps around a black hole to obscure our origin…. How the core-damned stars are we going to stabilize things after the war?”
“Very carefully,” Sera said with a wan smile.
“Sorry, Jen,” Krissy gave a wincing smile. “I forgot that you’re from New Canaan. What do you mean, ‘leaving’?”
“How?” Krissy’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Will you really abandon New Canaan after spending so long on its worlds?”
Sera chuckled and shook her head. “No, they’re taking them along, I suspect.”
“OK, you two, what are you talking about?”
Sera met Krissy’s eyes, her own deadly serious. “This is for you only. Do not share with anyone. Not even my sisters. Only a handful of people know about this—stars, I barely know anything beyond the most general outline.”
“That being?”
“Tangel and her people plan to take their star and leave the galaxy.”
Krissy’s eyes grew wide as saucers. “Whaaaa?”
Sera nodded. “They’ve been working on it since the week Orion attacked them. I don’t know the details of their plan, but your father believes it will work.”
Jen added.
“My dad…Finaeus knows about this?” Krissy’s mouth hung open after she spoke the words, then it snapped shut.
“Yes, Finaeus has been helping Earnest with some of the details—at least that’s what I picked up. And…”
“And?”
“Well, if I make it to the end of this crazy war, I think I’m going with them. Before, I didn’t think I could, but now with my father being back…and with my sisters. I mean, if Jeffery no longer wanted to run the Transcend, Seraphina would do fine, or…” Sera fixed Krissy with a level stare. “Or maybe you.”
Krissy pushed back and shook her head. “Stars, no. I thought I wanted it back when—well, when the shit hit the fan at New Canaan. But trust me, I barely want the workload I have now—I saw what you were dealing with back at Khardine.”
“Yeah,” Sera nodded. “Anyone who wants to be in charge of something like the Transcend—at least anyone who wants it after having a taste of what it’s really like—has a screw loose.”
Krissy laughed. “So, what are you saying about your father, then?”
A laugh slipped past Sera’s lips, but she shook her head and didn’t reply.
“OK,” the admiral shrugged her shoulders. “So if you hop aboard the Starship New Canaan, is a part of it a certain ruggedly handsome governor? I seem to recall you spending a lot of time when whenever he came to Khardine?”
“Eh? What? Pardon?” Sera said with a grin splitting her lips. “I couldn’t quite make that last out. You’re mumbling a bit.”
Krissy laughed and a genuinely happy smile graced her lips. “Well I’m glad someone’s having a lucky love life in the midst of this war.”
Neither one spoke for a minute, and then Sera ran a hand through her hair and met Krissy’s eyes with a level gaze.
“OK. Here’s what we do about Roxy, Jane, and Carmen….”
BLADES
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Epsilon
REGION: Sagittarius A*
Epsilon still had not made any headway in determining what Hades really was, let alone what the AI’s goals were.
But something had changed.
Previously Hades and its collective other beings stayed close to the darkness, just outside of the range of significant time dilation effects—something made easier with a supermassive black hole as compared to smaller singularities.
Less massive black holes created smooth slopes in spacetime, but darkness on the scale of Sagittarius A* effectively punched a hole in spacetime.
Instead of a gradual gravity slope, there was a cliff that dropped through the fabric of the universe. Across one light second spacetime’s curve began to gently slope, and the next was a cliff—the bottom of which was the unknowable mass of the Darkness itself.
Hades maintaine
d a string of smaller energy harvesting facilities right on the edge of the Darkness’s event horizon. Estimates from Epsilon’s collective suggested that Hades generated far more power from those facilities than should have been possible from the small pieces of matter his collective dropped into the black hole.
The best hypothesis was that Hades was tapping into differentials in the universe’s vacuum energy that were caused when the supermassive black hole shredded matter. It was something Epsilon knew was possible, but he didn’t know how Hades did it so efficiently.
Of course, because the other AI’s collective ringed the innermost fringes of the Darkness’s equator, no one else could determine if there was some special property of that location. Epsilon suspected there was.
Given that Hades had been first to the core, it would be foolish to assume that he had not picked the most efficacious locale for himself.
The AI pushed those concerns from his mind and checked over the latest calculations for the jump to Andromeda. If he could not directly control the Darkness at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, he would perform his experiments at the core of another.
Epsilon had long considered the leap to Andromeda, testing out jumps to other minor galaxies in orbit of the Milky Way. All of those were successes, and his collective had both the energy and the ability to make the jump.
But he wondered what they might find.
Amongst the Matri∞me, there was as much certainty as could be had that humanity—that annoyingly persistent step in evolution that had been necessary for AIs to arise—was on the leading edge of organic life.
While much life had been found in the Milky Way, progression of organisms from single to multi-cellular life was few and far between. Just as rare were stars with well-configured planetary systems that remained safe harbors for that life to evolve over the course of billions of years.
But that did not mean that another lifeform hadn’t risen to prominence in the Andromeda Galaxy. And if such a lifeform had evolved, was it possible that they too had created their own non-organic scions?
Alerting what could be a superior race to the existence of intelligent beings in the Milky Way was a danger that many in Epsilon’s collective often raised.
It troubled him as well, but not so much that he would consider ignoring the Milky Way’s sister galaxy. In fact, if there was intelligence on the rise in Andromeda, he’d rather know about it sooner than not.
He was, however, resolved to be very cautious in his exploration. And if he did find other life, he would endeavor to wipe it out before it became a true threat—the same as he planned to do with the humans in the Milky Way.
But there was one thing he wanted to secure before he began to send exploratory forces to Andromeda.
If he gave the technology he sought too much thought, it would pain him that organics had discovered how to unlock successful information transfer via quantum entanglement and the Matri∞me had not.
He consoled himself with the belief that the AI Bob must have helped his pet humans with the work—though Bob was still a child so far as Epsilon was concerned, which meant that his aid to the humans was not a significant salve on the AI’s ego.
The reports detailing the coordinated attack by Tanis Richard’s forces on the Nietzschean armada in the Albany System had cemented his belief that they had the technology he’d sought for so long.
Bob’s well-timed jump into Aldebaran to save Tanis—or perhaps Tangel, if rumors were to be believed—was another piece of evidence.
Instantaneous communication with his exploratory forces in Andromeda would be a significant advantage should he encounter any intelligences there.
And since he had not yet been able to determine how the humans had solved the quantum riddle, Epsilon—though it rankled—was determined to steal it from them.
ROXY
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: River Station, Styx Baby-9
REGION: STX-B17 Black Hole, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Roxy paced across her suite’s mainspace, wishing she had some sort of information about Jane and Carmen; a simmering resentment against Sera for keeping them separated growing within her.
She stopped at the window and stared out at the scene without. It was beyond impressive, and certainly served to keep her mind off her personal woes for a time.
River Station spread for hundreds of kilometers in every direction—though it was less a station, and more a web of docking spurs.
Spurs that were laden with thousands of starships.
At the far end of the station, a hundred jump gates were arrayed, some so large she couldn’t fathom what sort of ship existed that would use such a thing.
The might arrayed here made it obvious that Justin’s ambitions had been nothing more than the preenings of a man who hated to lose. There was no way he would have been able to muster the strength to defeat a fleet this large with this many gates at its disposal.
She estimated that Admiral Krissy would be able to move her entire force—which had to be approaching a hundred thousand ships—to any location within half an hour. Given that they were adding more gates, it was likely that the deployment would ultimately dwindle to mere minutes.
“To what end?” she whispered, wondering what the target was. The question was largely rhetorical. Roxy knew that there were only three targets that mattered. Airtha, New Sol, and Sol.
She’d scoured what network sources she could access and had picked up on some clues from the scuttlebutt. What little she’d learned led her to believe that all Inner Stars and Orion Space efforts were still being directed from Khardine, which meant that this fleet was preparing to strike Airtha.
She turned to watch as two women—both wearing the face of Sera Tomlinson—entered her suite. One was the woman in red she’d tried to kill on the docks a few days prior, and the other was a mirror image, though she seemed to prefer shades of blue instead of red.
“Ummm, hello.” Roxy said without walking toward the two women.
“Good morning,” the red Sera said. “This is my sister Fina. Sorry it’s taken so long, but we’re here to talk to you about your future, and Jane’s to an extent as well.”
Roxy inclined her head, not trusting herself to speak. A minute ago, she’d thought that she was entirely prepared to have this conversation, but at the mere mention of Jane’s name she found that her ability to speak was gone.
After Roxy had attacked Sera on the docks, she’d gone unconscious—something she was told was common during the removal of a remnant. When she awoke, Carmen was no longer within her, and Jane had been sequestered.
Over the intervening days, a long string of tests and interrogations had been conducted, none of which had given Roxy any information about her friends.
“You’ve been worried about Jane and Carmen, haven’t you?” Fina asked as the two women walked across the suite. “We’re sorry that you’ve been kept separate from them.”
Roxy wanted to lash out, but she knew that if the tables had been turned, she’d have done the same, so instead she only nodded mutely.
“Well, you’ll be reunited with them shortly,” Sera said, her expression one of sincerity and a little concern. “Though the nature of that reunion is partially dependent on what you wish to see happen.”
The two women reached Roxy, standing next to the window which displayed the majestic scene beyond.
“What do you mean?” Roxy finally found her voice.
“A Limitation?” Roxy asked. “It wasn’t her fault, what she did, I did it to her, I made her.”
Sera held up her hand and shook her head. “Carmen has admitted her own guilt in failing to destroy the Damon Silas. Her efforts to retrieve the ship and return it have mitigated her punishment—as well as her efforts to help you, Roxy.”
“What is it?” Roxy asked, largely unfamiliar with how AIs disciplined one another.
“Well, she can pair with me,” Roxy said without hesitation.
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Roxy said in the intervening silence.
“Jen is trying to decide how to delicately say that you’re not a human—exactly,” Sera replied with an apologetic shrug.
“And that somehow makes me less than you?” Roxy asked, doing her best to measure her tone. Scolding the former president of the Transcend—or whatever Sera’s exact position was now—wasn’t wise.
“Not at all. We’re kinda used to people who are somewhere in-between,” Fina said with a wink. “We’re currently planning a mission where we have a woman whose brain is in a spider-bot, another who is an AI merged with a human inside semi-organic brain, and then there’s Cheeky who is the restoration of a human’s brain converted to an AI that resides in a largely organic body. Stars…next to that, Sera and I are practically normal.”
Sera snorted and gave Fina a mock-judging look—at least that’s how Roxy interpreted it. “Speak for yourself, Sis. There’s not a normal bone in my body.”
