Airthan Ascendancy

by M. D. Cooper

  “So long as we try to do the right thing at the time,” he replied. “Which leads us to what the hell the core AIs are trying to do here.”

  “If it is the core AIs,” Beatrice replied.

  “We caught two remnants in the Inner Praesepe Empire. I think that’s a pretty strong connection.”

  “A connection is not causation.”

  Terrance laughed. “If I had a credit for every time I’ve heard that…. Either way, that’s a part of why we’re out here. To learn what the heck is going on with those stars.”

  “True,” Beatrice said with a slow nod, signaling her acquiescence. “All that aside, how accurate do you think their timing estimates are?”

  “It’s your team,” he replied. “Though I was surprised that Wyatt narrowed it down to a one-hour window with such confidence.”

  She snorted. “He portrays that level of confidence in everything he does. Somehow, he even admits failure with the same level of certainty. I still can’t tell if it’s a character flaw or not.”

  “Seems to be working for him thus far.”

  “Most of the time.” Beatrice’s lips formed a thin line for a moment. “He’s come close to making a trip out the airlock a few times. Stars, the only thing that stopped me was thinking about how much he’d complain when he was resuscitated.”

  “I’ve worked with a particular engineer that has elicited similar feelings in me before. Still does, if I have to do a project with her.”

  “Ma’am!” the ensign at the scan console called out. “I think we’re picking up the event.”

  “Put it up,” Captain Beatrice ordered, and the forward holo changed to a three-meter-wide view of Astoria, its blue light washing over the bridge.

  The view of the star was a composite of data that the sensor grid was picking up all across the electromagnetic spectrum, showing every attribute of the star’s emissions. Already, an anomaly was flagged at the star’s poles.

  A reference image appeared to the left of the ‘live’ view, or rather, the light that had left the star nineteen years ago, and it was plain to see that the star’s poles had dimmed, while the luminosity at the equator had intensified.

  “That doesn’t match flare of CME activity,” Beatrice muttered.

  “Not even close,” Terrance confirmed.

  Then a point on the equator facing the sensor grid almost directly began to intensify further. Energy emissions spiked clear across the spectrum, climbing highest in the gamma range.

  “Estimates show the emission to be coming from a point nearly ten thousand kilometers across,” the ensign reported. “It’s still intensifying.”

  “Well,” Terrance muttered. “Two things are for certain.”

  “Oh?” Beatrice asked, not turning her gaze from the display.

  “For starters, that’s not any sort of natural phenomenon—or if it is, we need to throw out everything we know about stars and start over.”

  “And secondly?”

  “There is no way that anyone in the IPE has the technology to do that.”

  Beatrice gave a slow nod as she turned to face Terrance. “Perhaps. If so, then the core AIs are playing a far deeper game than we’d expected.”

  * * * * *

  “So, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the star’s output in the northern and southern hemispheres begins to dim several hours before the event itself,” Emily said as she gestured at the display in the observation deck, where Terrance and Beatrice had joined the scientific team for their analysis.

  “Which doesn’t match any of the later progression of energy transfer within the star,” Wyatt interjected. “That dimming does not align with a general change in the star’s energy output.”

  “Right,” Emily said with a sidelong look at Wyatt. “There were also fluctuations in the dimming, which align with occlusion.”

  “But if something was big enough to occlude Astoria’s output, we’d see it, right?” Terrance asked, already knowing the answer from his involvement in Project Starflight.

  “Right,” Emily nodded. “Which means it’s a swarm of smaller objects. Probably orbiting the star in patterns that periodically overlap and cause the precise effect we see.”

  “So these objects settle over the northern and southern hemispheres, and then?” Beatrice prompted.

  “And then something alters the star’s internal convection pathways,” Emily explained, “directing more of the energy release toward the equator than normal. This is not ferociously difficult to achieve, it just takes time and careful planning.”

  Terrance was surprised to see Emily give him a rather pregnant look and wondered if the FGT’s stellar engineer was aware of the work to affect a similar result with Canaan Prime.

  She paused for a moment longer, and then continued. “But what is surprising is how they managed to get the star’s emissions to focus in on such a fine point. I don’t currently have anything beyond a raw guess at some sort of alteration in the star’s magnetosphere that caused such a focused CME. We’re still analyzing the data and will need to compare the next few weeks of information to see how the star transitions back to its normal burn pattern. That should give us some answers.”

  Terrance nodded slowly. “OK. The gate should be here in a few hours; I’m going to need your reports ready to jump out with me. I’ll forward them on to whomever you wish. We need our best minds working on this.”

  “So do you think it’s the core AIs?” Emily asked, her eyes widening as she said the words.

  Terrance saw that every face was turned to him, and he shrugged. “We’d already guessed at that before. It seems like this evidence points in favor of that hypothesis. But it means something else, too.”

  “Oh?” Wyatt asked. “Something we haven’t already guessed at?”

  “It’s tangential,” Terrance replied. “But you don’t just create what is effectively a dyson swarm out of nothing. There’s some sort of manufacturing facility in the heart of the IPE that is making whatever does this.”

  Beatrice whistled. “Damn…between the ISF and the TSF, we have hundreds of ships in the Inner Praesepe Empire….”

  “I know. Get a pinnace ready. I want to jump out the moment the gate gets here.”

  AN INTERVIEW WITH GARZA

  STELLAR DATE: 10.06.8949 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Tangel’s Lakehouse, ISS I2, near Lunic Station

  REGION: Aldebaran, League of Sentients Space

  Tangel took a sip of her coffee while gazing out the kitchen window at the view of the orchard stretching behind the house. It was a serene view, the leaves rustling in the slight wind, bots visible here and there, flitting amongst the trees, plucking fruit for the I2’s galleys.

  She breathed in the normalcy of it, the simple joy of soaking in a view she’d seen so many times in the past. It created a calm within her that grounded her and reminded her what she was fighting so hard to achieve.

  That calm was broken when Cary careened into the kitchen and collapsed in a chair.

  “Coffee?” Tangel asked as she turned to give her daughter an appraising look.

  Cary only grunted, but it sounded like an affirmative noise, so Tangel prepared a cup and set it on the table.

  “Rough night?”

  With a nod of her head, Cary made another grunt and then picked up the cup and took a long draw of the dark liquid within.

  Once she had downed half the cup, she gave Tangel a steely-eyed look. “How in the stars do you look so good this morning, Moms? What I did yesterday…the shield, the graviton fields…I’m totally wiped. I could sleep for a week.”

  Tangel pulled out a chair and sat next to her daughter.

  “Do you want to know my secret?”

  “I’d consider killing for it.”

  A laugh burst from Tangel’s lips, causing Cary to wince.

  “Dammit, Moms. Easy on the volume.”

  “Sorry. I had a response that was way funnier in my head than it would have been out lo
ud. So anyway, I think that it’s just because I’m further along than you are. You know…with the whole ascending thing.”

  Cary took another sip of her coffee, fixing Tangel with a dour look over the rim before setting it down. “Which is fine by me. I don’t want to be anywhere with the ‘ascended thing’.” She scowled and made air quotes as she said the words.

  Tangel leant back in her chair and gave her daughter a level stare. “Liar. I saw you when you were fighting those Widows. You were enjoying it.”

  “OK…I guess grouchy me isn’t that clear. What I mean is that I like the fun benefits of being able to see into other dimensions. Manipulating matter through them is a great added bonus, but I don’t want to turn into a glowing ball of light. We’ve been over this.”

  “Right,” Tangel nodded with a wink. “No glowing balls of light. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen to you.”

  “I’m being serious, Moms.”

  “So am I. I don’t have any special way of making sure that doesn’t happen to you, but so far as any of us know—Bob included—you don’t shed this mortal coil of yours until you decide to.” As she spoke, Tangel touched her daughter’s arm and gave it a pinch.

  “Ow!”

  “See? Still good ol’ flesh and blood. Even without my edge over you when it comes to time in the ascending business, you’re a lot more organic than I am. Which means that our bodies replenish energy differently making our recoveries different. Or maybe you just need to build up more stamina.”

  Cary nodded and took another sip of coffee. “I was already a bit worn out after fighting Myrrdan. Stars, I really hope that was finally the real one.”

  “You and me both,” Tangel replied. “That guy has been such a thorn in my side that I have more thorns than side.”

  Her daughter snorted a laugh. “All-in-all, that was a pretty amazing trip to the LMC. I mean, just going there is freakin’ awesome on its own, but taking out Myrrdan, and getting that intel from Kent…I deserve a promotion.”

  “Nice—wait…intel from Kent?”

  Cary peered over the rim of her cup, another frown settling on her brow. “Yeah, the details on Orion and Garza. I sent it all along through the normal channels. Didn’t it get to you?”

  Tangel sifted through all the intel updates she’d received, and then searched the I2’s databases for new intel on Garza.

  “No, there’s nothing new. It must have been hung up somewhere.”

  “Seriously?” Cary sat up straight. “Then you don’t know?”

  “Cary…what?”

  “The first Garza, the one that Jessica’s team captured on the Britannica two years ago…. He’s not a clone.”

  * * * * *

  Tangel let slip a rueful laugh as she walked through the I2’s brig to Garza’s cell—the first one. The Garza they’d captured in Scipio was in the next block over, neither aware that the other was on the ship.

  Her laugh was directed at all the times she’d considered sending both of the Garzas to The Farm—the large stasis facility holding the enemy forces that had surrendered after the Defense of Carthage. Luckily, she’d never gone through with sending her Garzas there; she was more than glad for the result of her indecision.

  She slowed as Garza’s cell came into view, assessing the man within through the thick pane of clear plas.

  He looked haggard, as though sleep had eluded him for some time—except for at this exact moment.

  Stretched out on his bunk with an arm over his forehead, the man didn’t move or acknowledge her presence in any way.

  “Two years is a long time to be in here alone,” Tangel said after she’d regarded him for a minute. “Well, mostly alone. I see that they do give you an hour in the park every other day—so long as you behave.”

  Garza still didn’t move a muscle. His breathing remained the same, and his heart rate was steady.

  “I suppose you’re dying to know how the war’s been going. I’m pretty sure that no one’s told you—or they’d better not have. We’ve got the Hegemony of Worlds ringed in, we’re hitting the Trisilieds, and Nietzschea is on its knees. Things on the fronts with the OFA have been a bit dicey, but mostly it’s just been some minor back and forth there.

  “We also have fleets operating within Orion Space. I think that by this time next year, we should be paying the praetor a visit at New Sol.”

  With her report ended, silence set in. It stretched on for over three minutes, until finally the man cracked an eyelid for a moment and spoke, his voice filled with scorn.

  “Should have led with something more believable than having the Hegemony encircled. There’s no way you could have pulled that off in two years.”

  “A lot’s changed,” Tangel said with a nonchalant shrug. “Without you and the Transcend holding the Inner Stars in check, we’ve really been able to get the ball rolling. Currently, the I2 is at Aldebaran, capital of the League of Sentients—an alliance that wraps partway around the Hegemony. It had just come into existence when you attacked New Canaan, so I imagine you’ve not heard of it.”

  Garza’s cheek twitched, but he didn’t respond.

  “I’ll admit, there are a few gaps here and there, but on the far side, we have Scipio pressing the attack, which counts for a lot. One of your clones tried to stop that alliance, but let’s just say that he ended up in a similar situation to you.”

  That statement elicited a response from Garza. Mention of Scipio had his eyes opening, and when she referenced the clone’s capture, he sat up and fixed her with a penetrating stare.

  “Now I know you’re lying.”

  “Because of Scipio, or your clones? We’ve encountered three of them now, but one died. The Hand has spotted what they think are four others in various systems, so I imagine there are a lot more running around out there.”

  “Diana wouldn’t ally with you,” Garza sneered as the words dripped from his lips. “That woman’s a preening fool. Thinks that by acting like an unhinged power-hungry debutante, no one will contest her.”

  “Yeah, she was quite the character,” Tangel said, chuckling at the memory. “Your clone abducted her at a ball. It was a tricky thing to get her back in one piece. She was grateful and signed the accord. The alliance of nations arrayed against Orion is now known as the Scipio Alliance.”

  Garza groaned and shook his head. “I think that’s the worst one yet. And if it is true, it’s the greatest indignity of all time.”

  “It’s been interesting, that’s for sure,” Tangel nodded as she considered some of her conversations over the past year. “Lisa Wrentham is quite the character, too.”

  The general shook his head, lifting an eyebrow as he regarded her. “So you’ve run into her Widows, have you? How’d that go?”

  Tangel shrugged. “A lot of them died. Ten? Something like that. I mean, we killed Xavia the other day, so wiping out some Widows wasn’t a huge feat.”

  “Xavia?”

  The man’s physiology—which was an open book to Tangel—confirmed that he didn’t know who she was referring to.

  “She’s one of—rather, she was one of—the independent operators in the ranks of the ascended AIs. I think you’re familiar with the Caretakers, though. They’re the ones that have been seeding this never-ending war.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Garza said, rising from his cot and walking to the plas, where he stared into Tangel’s eyes for a moment before continuing. “It’s all of the AIs who have been seeding this war. Either they’re complicit, or they’re unwitting pawns, but either way, they’re the issue. The ascended ones are just the worst.”

  “What about ascended humans?” Tangel asked.

  Garza snorted and turned away. “There aren’t any of those.”

  “Have you heard of Star City?” Tangel asked, the words causing the man’s head to whip back around.

  “How…”

  “My people have been there. AIs who are the children of New Canaan are now the Bastions of Star City. It
was they who defeated your attack over a decade ago—I assume it was you who orchestrated that.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and Tangel didn’t even need the ability to see the thoughts on the surface of his mind to know that he had.

  “You get around a lot for a lost pack of colonists from the past,” Garza finally admitted. “But space is vast, and there are a few surprises out there for you, I’d imagine.”

  “A few,” Tangel agreed. “Finding out where the Widows operate from is something I’d like to check off my ‘lingering uncertainties’ list, though.”

  “I bet you would,” Garza said with a cruel laugh. “If my clones have sent Lisa after you, then you’d best be prepared for a long fight. She has quite a few clones of her own.”

  “They’re different than yours, though,” Tangel said as she leant against the plas. “Yours are much more…functional.”

  “Hegemony tech,” Garza said. “Their president uses it. Makes her own body doubles that are intended to merge back in. Lisa wanted a different sort of tool, but she had to make…alterations to get it to work well.”

  “Crazy that she left Finaeus for you and Orion,” Tangel said with a furrowed brow. “I mean, why would she go into Orion Space, where advanced tech is forbidden—or at least heavily frowned upon—when research of that sort is her bread and butter?”

  “She believes in our vision, she’s just made the personal sacrifice to be the means to counter the Transcend’s rampant tech.”

  “Must be a secret base that your praetor doesn’t know about,” Tangel mused. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know about half the stuff you’re up to.”

  “This is so weak, Tanis. If you were going to use mental coercion on me to learn what I know, you would have already done it. Your interrogators have spoken to me for hundreds of hours, and I’ve learned more from them than they have from me. Your pathetic attempts to get me to slip up don’t even rank.”