by M. D. Cooper
He pulled it up on his HUD and saw the transport tube the Widows had taken from the abduction site. As Saanvi drew near, it was apparent that a hole had been cut directly into the cylinder; her closer inspection confirmed Joe’s fear.
The hole bored down directly into Iris’s body. And her core was gone.
He updated priorities on the combat net and was about to signal Brennen to bring the final squad in, when drones picked up movement atop a rack holding sheets of steel.
Joe sent a single click on the combat net, and the Marines moved to cover, weapons sweeping the area around them. He was pleased to note that Cary and Saanvi didn’t hesitate to drop behind the workbench where Iris’s body lay, one covering the side facing the front of the shop while the other swept her gaze up along the racks of conduit above them.
The drone that had spotted motion moved in closer and dispatched a cloud of nano, propelling them toward the top of the rack. Moments later, the cloud made out the figure of a Widow.
He waited fifteen seconds to see if any more were found, and then sent two clicks across the combat net as he casually rested the butt of his railgun against his hip where he crouched, took aim via his HUD, and fired.
The weapon’s report shattered the stillness, and the flash of light that came from the slug’s impact against the Widow’s torso illuminated the area.
The woman spun and fired at him, a stream of rail pellets tracing a line up his left side. Then she leapt off the high rack, sailing through the air, aiming for the door beside him and the freedom beyond.
“Not likely,” Joe muttered, and tossed a web-grenade at the soaring Widow.
The ‘nade exploded, and the web stretched wide, capturing the Widow and wrapping around her. She crashed to the ground, curling up in the web’s tightening grip.
Before he could approach the woman, more shots lanced out from atop the racks, and the Marines returned fire, the glow of beams and rails lighting the shop up as though a noonday sun had peeked in.
Without prompting, Brennen blew the bay doors, and his squad leapt into the fray, setting up behind the hover pallets and laying down suppressive fire.
Faleena was at the man’s side in an instant, dragging him through the doors and behind a workbench while the other members of the squad took what cover they could, firing within and without the shop.
Admiral Pender,> he called out to the LoS flag officer.
From what Joe could see, there were only three of the Widows—four, counting the one he’d webbed—within the facility, but those three were well protected atop their racks, shielded by meters of plas and steel. The Marines below, however, were mostly in the open, protected only by workbenches and scattered machinery.
He was about to order one of the fireteams to move to the far end of the racks and climb up, when one of the Widows suddenly flew off her perch, sailing most ungracefully through the air to crash into the deck at the feet of two Marines.
Where she was hastily put down.
Moments later, the final two Widows also fell from their hiding places, landing heavily on the deck, where the Marines moved in and subdued them.
Cary’s words were cut off as the rear door slammed open, and a beam of light streaked toward her head, stopping only centimeters from her helmet, electrons splaying into bolts of lightning all around her.
Two Marines were already facing the door, firing on the shooter—another Widow—and taking her down.
He moved toward the bay doors, taking up a position where he could see down the passage, and added his fire to that of the Marines.
A few seconds later, distant shots rang out, and the incoming fire from the attacking Widows wavered and cut out.
Joe watched on the combat net as the three fireteams covering the most expeditious routes out of the area engaged and took down what he hoped were the last three Widows.
Seven and a half minutes after it had begun, the engagement was over.
Nine Widows had died, and four were captured alive, though in varying states of health. One Marine had taken a shot to the head from one of the Widows’ beam weapons and had died instantly, while three others had non-fatal wounds that their armor had stabilized.
There were so few ISF Marines that Joe felt anguished over the loss of just one. Every single time it happened, his thoughts went back to New Canaan and the near-deserted planets that should have millions of people living on them. Instead, most of the colonists were out in the ass-end of space, fighting for their, and humanity’s, very survival against what felt like a never-ending stream of enemies who sought their deaths.
Easy on the melodrama, bud.
Joe shook his head at his doubting thoughts, and squared his shoulders before walking through the shop to his daughters, posted near Iris’s body.
Faleena approached from the front of the shop, and joined Saanvi as she opened the first tower to reveal an AI’s core that looked as though it had seen better days.
The second core tower was empty, but the third—to everyone’s great relief—revealed Iris. Saanvi wasted no time in pulling out a mobile core housing, while Cary carefully reached in and removed Iris’s core from the socket.
The moment the AI’s core was seated, her voice came from the mobile housing’s speaker.
“Deia! Did you stop her? Is everyone OK?”
“Relax, Iris,” Joe said aloud. “The Widows failed. Tangel is safe.”
“Stars, that’s good to hear,” the AI said, her voice conveying ample relief even through the small speaker. “When I realized they switched Deia’s cores, I really thought they’d pull—”
“Wait! What?” Joe demanded.
“Deia’s core,” Iris repeated. “They cloned her and then swapped the cloned core into the senator’s frame. I only know because I’d managed to breach their systems for a minute and saw it before they killed the power to all my interfaces.”
“Crap,” Faleena muttered from where she stood next to the first tower they’d opened. “She’s right. This core is completely powered down, but the housing has the senator’s ident.”
“Shit!” Joe swore.
* * * * *
Tangel was reviewing the feeds from Brennen’s Marines as they placed the surviving Widows in stasis pods for later interrogation.
The two that Jessica had captured in Orion Space had hinted that there were many mor
e of their kind, but Tangel hadn’t given them further thought, due to the belief that the Widows only functioned as enforcers of technology bans in Orion space—not as assassins in the Inner Stars.
Though I suppose there could be more than one division.
She added the Widows’ base of operations to her ever-growing list of targets to seek out. Knowing that these clones could come out of the bulkheads at almost any time was a worry she did not need.
“How many of them do you think there are?” Captain Rachel asked, apparently on the same train of thought.
“Here? In Aldebaran?” Tangel asked, glancing at the captain, who had risen from her command seat and was reviewing the deployment of nearby LoS ships on the main holotank. “Hopefully we got them all. If they had a larger team, I think they would have hit us harder.”
Rachel turned to Tangel and opened her mouth to speak, but then shook her head and turned back to the holo.
Tangel placed a hand on her shoulder.
Rachel pursed her lips.
Tangel laughed aloud and nodded.
Both women turned to watch the bridge’s entrance. A minute later, Deia entered with two ISF Marines following behind. Tangel waved the senator over, and stood with hands on hips, ready for another bout of the woman’s barely tolerable behavior.
As the senator reached her, extending her hand to shake, Joe’s voice sounded a warning in her mind, and Tangel twisted to the side as a lightwand’s beam burst from the AI’s palm and thrust up at Tangel’s head.
The AI had moved with dizzying speed, and Tangel’s cheek was torn open by the electron blade, but that was the extent of the damage done.
One of the Marines leapt forward and clamped a hand around Deia’s wrist, holding it aloft, while the other fired a series of pulse blasts at the AI’s frame.
The senator’s body shuddered under the concussive shockwaves and then fell still, the lightwand blade flickering once before deactivating.
“Holy shit!” Rachel swore. “She really can’t take losing.”
“It was the Widows,” Tangel said, as the Marines moved to secure the AI. “Hold up,” she instructed them, kneeling next to Deia’s body.
With her non-corporeal limbs, Tangel pulled apart the frame’s torso and exposed its core housing. Within lay an AI core that looked entirely unremarkable.
It was Joe’s turn to laugh.
Tangel reminded Joe.
A VIEW INTO THE PAST
STELLAR DATE: 10.06.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Cora’s Triumph
REGION: Interstellar Space, Inner Praesepe Empire
Terrance stood on the Cora’s Triumph’s bridge, staring out at the sea of stars arrayed before the ship.
Before the jump forward into the ninetieth century, he had been one of the Intrepid’s crew to have visited the most star systems—nearly a dozen, counting Estrella de la Muerte and Kapteyn’s Star.
But there in the cluster, even sub-light ships could take a person between hundreds of stars within the span of a few centuries.
Of course, that had turned out to be a part of the problem for the FGT scientists attempting to get a clear view of the event that had occurred nineteen years prior.
The Praesepe Cluster was filled with not just stars, but clouds of dust and gas. Gravitational eddies and lensing effects from all the stellar bodies had made finding the best spot to view ‘The Shift’, as the science teams were calling it, rather difficult.
Eventually they’d settled on the center of a one-light-year gap between a number of A-Class stars. The position granted them a relatively unobstructed view of the cluster’s core. However, the difficulty in selecting the observation location was where the need for sending the Cora’s Triumph came in, rather than just a pinnace, as was the original plan.
Wyatt and Emily had concurred that a single observation point may not gather sufficient data to assess the event, and had stipulated that a wider sensor array was necessary.
Being an FGT research vessel, the Triumph had a wide array of sensor drones on hand, and now a one-hundred-AU-wide grid of drones was in place, awaiting The Shift.
“Are you certain you don’t want to go down to the observation deck with the scientific team?” Captain Beatrice asked from Terrance’s side. “You’ll get firsthand information that way.”
Terrance glanced at the ship’s captain, a woman of middling height with rather pixie-like features.
“I think they’ll do better without feeling like I’m looming over their shoulders,” he said decidedly.
Beatrice chuckled and shook her head. “Well, I’m not too familiar with Emily, but I know that Wyatt is immune to any amount of looming. He works at his own pace no matter what pressures are applied.”
“I imagine that can be a good and bad thing,” Terrance replied.
“You’ve the right of it,” she said with a knowing smile. “You’ve worked a lot with scientists, I assume?”
“Oh yeah,” Terrance replied with a chuckle. “I operated a few R&D divisions of Enfield in the past. Technically, the Intrepid was an Enfield venture, but it shifted in scope pretty quickly.”
Beatrice snapped her fingers. “That’s right. I remember reading that, now. Enfield Technologies was the largest backer of the Intrepid. Why was that?”
“Picotech,” he replied. “We’d developed it and needed a place to commercialize the process. Every other system that Enfield was established in was too populated for us to perform the work.”
“And the colonists?” the captain’s brow lowered. “Did they know what they were getting into?”
Terrance felt a twinge of guilt at the question. More than a twinge, if he was being honest with himself. Everything that had happened to the Intrepid’s colonists had happened because of his plan to use New Eden as a place to develop Earnest’s picotech further.
He and
Jason had spoken of the matter on many occasions, sharing similar feelings about what they’d done. In the end, it had taken Tangel and the rest of the command crew taking the pair aside and telling them that all was forgiven before that part of his past had ceased gnawing at his soul.
Though it still nibbled.
“They did not,” Terrance replied, shaking his head. “Though the charter did specify a list of Enfield research sites that would be used for advanced R&D. Anyone who read between the lines was able to tell that we planned to do research that wasn’t possible in the Sol System.”
“And the risk?” Beatrice asked.
“Of sabotage and war, or of a picophage?” Terrance asked.
“Well…both, I suppose.”
The former Enfield executive let out a long sigh. “Well, we hoped that moving the research to a distant location like New Eden would reduce all those risks. The logic was that if Earnest had unlocked how to harness picotech, others would too. Turns out that was in error. Five thousand years later, no one else has pulled it off. We could have just left well enough alone.”
“You’ve not heard the stories?” Beatrice asked.
Terrance quirked an eyebrow. “I’ve heard a few rumors, nothing more.”
“No one else has pulled off functional picotech like your scientists did, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.”
“More phages?” he asked with a tremor in his voice, remembering the events on Tau Ceti, events that brought to mind Khela, which reminded him of later, equally painful events.
Stars, time never really does wipe it away completely.
“Several that I know of. Entire systems sterilized to prevent spread. I imagine there have been more that got swept under the rug.”
He shook his head in remorse. “I guess we didn’t really help much by removing it from the timeline.”
“Who’s to say?” After a brief pause, Beatrice gave Terrance an apologetic look. “I didn’t mean to bring it up like this. So much of what we do has unintended consequences. The FGT doesn’t have a perfect record, either.”
