Roxy determined that she would do as she’d promised. She would keep Carmen safe, but she would not put her in an escape pod. She was going to keep the AI safe with her.
The thought of hiding something from Justin never fully formed in her mind, but Roxy skirted around the edges of it, careful to keep the idea from being suppressed. For it had occurred to her that perhaps this AI could work out a way to free her from the mental prison she was in.
And then she’d kill Justin.
FAILURE
STELLAR DATE: 08.29.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Regent Mary, Interstellar Space
REGION: Near Vela Cluster, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Krissy bent over the holotable in the Regent Mary’s CIC, staring incredulously at the display before her.
She wanted to scream, slam her fists into the table, and beat some inanimate object to bits—or better yet, find Justin and kill him with her bare hands.
Instead, Krissy took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
“OK, Colonel Kysha, walk me through this again. The Damon Silas came into the Gorham System a day late, but made good time with its convoy to Meela Station.”
Colonel Kysha swallowed before replying, clearly able to sense Krissy’s ire. “That is correct, Admiral Krissy. As best we can surmise, Justin’s strike team got onto the Damon Silas during its resupply. The Silas had just sent over four shuttles of people on shore leave, so when Justin’s Hand agents hit the vessel, it was lightly crewed.”
“That’s a policy we’ll have to change,” Krissy muttered. “We’re not joyriding through space, we’re running missions.”
“The crew of the Damon Silas had been nine months without shore leave…it was thought the Gorham System was secure—”
“Khardine is secure,” Krissy cut the colonel off. “We need to resend the orders directing captains to transfer there for shore leave during any refit. We’re in the middle of a fucking war for stars’ sakes!”
“Yes, Admiral.” Kysha nodded quickly. “I’ll see that it’s done.”
“So, do we have any intel on why the ship didn’t blow? Captain John got a message off that he had initiated the self-destruct.”
“That is correct, ma’am. In the time given, only the captain or the ship’s AI could have disabled the self-destruct.”
“Which means one of them was compromised,” Krissy mused.
“An analyst team is trying to determine if any other possibility can fit the known facts, but that is our current working hypothesis.” Kysha paused, and when Krissy didn’t ask any further questions, she noted the Damon Silas’s location on the holotable. “At 18:24 local time, the attackers had full control of the ship. They activated the stasis shields and boosted away from Meela Station.”
“And there was nothing the locals could do about it,” Krissy added.
“No, they tried firing up the ship’s engine wash, but once the enemy understood what was going on, they changed vector to keep their engines oriented away from any pursuers with enough firepower to punch through the wash.”
Kysha set the holotable to a new time: 21:39 the same day, and pointed to a location at the edge of the system.
“At this point, a fleet of four hundred ships jumped in here. These are all ships belonging to a variety of systems near the border with the Inner Stars. Each of them had declared as independent from us or Airtha. Either they have surreptitiously sided with Justin’s faction, or they had defectors who did.”
“Something we’ll need to investigate,” Krissy said while rolling her shoulders. “Just another task on the ‘Keep the Transcend from Disintegrating’ list.”
Kysha pursed her lips. “Shall I see to sending scout ships to those systems?”
“No. Well…not all. We don’t have the resources for that. Pick a random sampling. We’ll see what we can learn.”
“Understood.” Kysha advanced the clock to 23:14. “Here is where our ships jumped in. As you know, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. With the bulk of our response fleet in the Albany System fighting the Nietzscheans, and two other bait traps sprung, we could only send thirty-seven ships to help the Damon Silas. They harried it and damaged one of its engines, but more than half of our ships had no stasis shields. Once Justin’s fleet came into range, they had to disengage—especially since his people aboard the Silas advised them of the engine wash trick.”
“Fucking stars,” Krissy muttered. “Well, we have to consider that secret out in the wild, now. So, from there, the rest of the story is pretty much ‘they got away,’ right?”
Kysha blew out a long breath. “Yes, ma’am. The Damon Silas jumped ten minutes ago. The bulk of Justin’s fleet hit the system at over 0.8c. They pushed our pursuit ships back as they blew past them, then continued on an outsystem vector for a jump point clear across the system.
“The locals are harrying them, picking off a few ships here and there. He’d also sent in an escort fleet at a lower v. They took some losses, but they’ve all jumped out with the Silas.”
Krissy pushed herself away from the holotable and turned, running a hand through her hair. “Well, looks like I need to prepare a report for Sera. I don’t envy her having to tell Tanis that we just lost a stasis shield ship.”
She glanced back to see Kysha swallow again. “Yes, ma’am.”
A long, calming breath later, Krissy turned back to the table. “Hemdar, can you prepare the report for Sera?”
<Already on it, Admiral,> Hemdar replied. <You’ll have it in a minute. I’m just waiting on finalized assessments from the analyst teams about the likelihood of Justin reverse engineering the stasis tech.>
Krissy was more than a little interested in that answer. “Which way are they leaning?”
<Toward ‘slim to none’. Though having a stasis ship is a big advantage for him. But if he’s in league with Airtha…>
Hemdar let the words hang. They all knew what the outcome would be, there. Airtha stood a much better chance of reverse engineering the stasis shield systems. Not only that, but stasis shields used picotech. She’d get both.
Krissy wondered—not for the first time—how one scientist from five thousand years ago had cracked picotech, and then come up with stasis shields, while no one else had come close on either. What made Earnest Redding so special that he found not one, but two holy grails?
There were rumors that there must have been some ascended AI influence, but Krissy wasn’t so sure about that. If ascended AIs had that level of tech, why didn’t they use it?
Maybe they have something better, Krissy mused. Stars…now that’s a terrifying thought.
“OK, well, include that in the report. It’s not as though we haven’t considered this possibility,” Krissy said. “Now, what we need to focus on is getting our fleets back from Albany as quickly as we can. There are too many bait ships hanging out in the wind.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Kysha grimaced. “Ever since we jumped the fleets out to Thebes, I’ve had this twitch in my left arm. We have sixty gates disassembled and ready for transport the moment we get the word that it’s safe to send them to Albany. It will take us four hours to get our ten-thousand ships back in the Transcend, ready for deployment.”
“Ours first?” Krissy asked, pulling up the dispersal plans for the allied fleet in Albany. “I’m surprised that Greer didn’t push to have his pulled back first. I wouldn’t blame him; we don’t want Khardine unguarded.”
“Admiral Sanderson has forty-four hundred ISF ships ready to jump out of New Canaan if Khardine falls under attack.”
Krissy whistled, surprised to hear that. Officially, New Canaan would not let their home fleet fall below ten-thousand ships. It would seem they understood the importance of keeping the Khardine capital secure.
As Krissy spoke with Hemdar, Kysha set the latest status from the Albany System on the holotable. It showed the remaining Nietzschean ships in a full rout, but a terrific mess had been left behind. The S&R operations w
ere going to take some weeks. It appeared that Tanis was establishing a secure staging ground near an inner planet named Buffalo, and that was where the gates were to be set up.
“Looks like they expect to have Buffalo secured in ten hours,” Krissy said, then pursed her lips, praying nothing happened before then that would require anything more than her reserve forces. Her thoughts turned back to the mess with Justin.
Anything more, that is.
“Let me know the minute they’re ready to ship the gates,” Krissy said as she turned to leave the room. “I’m going to send that report to Sera, and then wait to see if she wants to discuss it in person.”
“Understood, Admiral Krissy,” Kysha replied. “I’ll see to it that scout ships are dispatched within the hour to begin reconnaissance on the systems that may be supporting Justin.”
“Very good, Colonel,” Krissy replied, as she walked out of the CIC in search of a strong cup of coffee before sending the report to Sera.
Maybe a whole pot.
TRUTH AND REALITY
STELLAR DATE: 08.29.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Node 1, ISS I2
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
Tanis stepped through the node chamber’s doors and strode toward the railing that ran around the catwalk. Behind her, the door locked and sealed.
Not to keep her in, but to keep any intrusions at bay.
In front of her was Bob’s primary node, a ten meter cube hanging in the center of the chamber. Conduits carrying Bob’s lifeblood—power and data—connected to the node in a dozen places. Cooling systems ringed it, and light glowed from deep within the multi-layered cube.
<You came to speak with me ‘in person’,> Bob said, his voice carrying no inflection that Tanis could hear.
But she didn’t need to hear Bob to gain insight into his thoughts. She could see them. It was why they’d come to his node to have this conversation.
“Do you remember the last time we were here?” Tanis asked. “You, Angela, and I?”
<Of course I do,> Bob replied. <You came here after I woke you from stasis at Estrella de la Muerte. You saved the ship.>
<We saved the ship,> Angela corrected the multinodal AI.
<It is the same thing when referring to the two of you,> Bob replied, his tone nonchalant, almost dismissive. <Even then, the distinctions between you were diminishing.>
Tanis nodded, working to remain sanguine about the situation. “Because of what you did to us.”
<Are you accusing me, or thanking me?> Bob asked.
The question hit Tanis like an atom beam, shredding the arguments and accusations she was about to make, the blame she was prepared to lay at Bob’s feet.
<Shit, he’s got us there,> Angela said privately.
Tanis nodded absently as she stared at Bob’s mind. It was unlike any other human or AI mind she’d seen. She thought it would be like most minds, only deeper—like an onion with layers upon layers of thought. But that analogy failed utterly. If Bob’s mind was an onion, it was a galaxy of onions that became larger—not smaller—the further you went in.
Over the day since her rescue, Tanis and Angela had learned how to interpret the surface thoughts of others the same way they could read expressions on a human’s face.
They could even do it with AIs, watching their n-level matrices of thought and emotion shift and change in response to stimuli.
But not so with Bob.
His mind was so vast, so far-reaching, that it was impossible to determine what aspect of him was responding to the words she’d uttered. Or even to interpret his mental responses at all.
<Even if we were fully ascended, I don’t think we’d be more than a mote next to him,> Tanis replied. <Do you think he sees our mind?>
<Yes,> Angela admitted after a moment’s pause. <I think he has for some time.>
<Why do you think separately?> Bob asked. <You became one. I know this; Priscilla shared it with me, and I saw it in the mind of Rika.>
“At least we’re back on track,” Tanis said as she lifted one leg over the railing, followed by the other, to sit on top with her feet hooked behind the middle bar.
Despite her unconventional perch, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was supplicating herself before some ancient deity, seeking wisdom and guidance.
Angela’s laugh wreathed her thoughts. <You can’t shake that feeling because I’m thinking it.>
No one spoke for a moment, then Angela replied to Bob’s question. <We think separately because of what Priscilla gave us to stabilize our form, to keep us from moving beyond this physical body.>
“You knew there was a risk that we’d ascend in a situation like what happed on Pyra, you didn’t just whip up the subatomic stabilization that Priscilla provided. Did you know what would happen down there, Bob? Brandt died down there. She’s gone, and I’m going to have to face her daughter someday and tell her about her mother’s final moments! Do you know what that’s like?”
Tanis’s tone was strident; she wasn’t yelling, but she really wanted to.
<I didn’t know Brandt would die. I didn’t expect the Nietzscheans to bring so many ships.>
<The fuck, Bob!> Angela exclaimed. <You knew the Niets would attack?>
<It was in your own analyst’s reports. They didn’t expect a fleet this size either, and their probability of attack was very, very low. Mine was higher, but I got it wrong too. I’m neither omniscient, nor omnipresent. You both understand that better than anyone. Your involvement makes it even harder to predict.>
Tanis resisted letting out a groan. “So we’re back to my ‘luck’ again, are we? There’s no mystical power controlling my destiny, Bob. From what I can see, it’s just a bunch of AIs who think they know better than everyone else—except they don’t seem to know anything at all.”
<You raise good points, Tanis. I will do my best to address them,> Bob replied, his tone even, carrying no rancor after Tanis’s accusation.
<The floor is yours.> Angela’s tone, on the other hand, was sardonic in the extreme.
<Some of this you know, Tanis-Angela, but some of it you do not. However, perhaps you need a reminder. Firstly ‘luck’ is just a convenient term for your condition. What you really do is alter probability on a quantum level. Because my advanced predictive algorithms must take everything into account, your presence skews the results. Even after studying you for centuries, I still do not know how you do it—though the information that Katrina has provided us leads me to believe that you were made to be this way, a suspicion I have harbored for some time.>
Tanis opened her mouth to respond, but then closed it. She wanted to hear Bob out. Her emotions—and the outburst they were bound to cause—would only get in the way of this discourse.
<However,> Bob continued, <I have also suspected that you operated in such a fashion that caused you to be so unpredictable—and too difficult for those who altered your base physiology to control—that they tried to do away with you. Several of your exploits in your youth point to this, events such as your assignation of the Toro mission.
<Again, these are not fully formed beliefs, they are based on suppositions I have made after considering what Joe learned from Katrina and the Xavia remnant. I do know that I brought you into my fold deliberately, though I don’t know if all of my actions were of my own volition at that point. I was young, and it was possible that I was influenced to help you.
<Regardless of these things, I identified your ‘luck’—as we shall call it for lack of a more concise term—and began to attempt to map it. Around the same time, Earnest alerted me to the fact that your minds had become inextricably linked, that we would never be able to separate you, and that you would, before long, die.>
“Die?” Tanis couldn’t help but interrupt. “When did you come to that realization?”
<Before we left Estrella de la Muerte. At that point, you had five or six years before you went insane, shortly after which you would have died.>
<I never knew it was so…real and present,> Angela said.
<We hid it from you,> Bob’s tone was matter-of-fact. <We had to. Earnest and I pored over myriad solutions in an attempt to save you. One thing we determined early on was that with your luck in the mix, the less you knew about what we were doing, the less likely you were to inadvertently affect it.
<Our first step was to stabilize your minds. That was a long, slow process, one that took us nearly fifty years to do. Something about the way you two became interlinked after you fought off those STR attack craft in the Sol System made your mind very resilient to any sort of influence we tried to effect.>
“Probably because Angela is so stubborn,” Tanis muttered.
<Seriously? Me, I’m not the stubborn one. You realize this is why he kept us out of stasis during the journey to Kapteyn’s Star.>
“Bob? Really?”
<Partially, yes. I was also trusting in your undeniably efficient ability for self-preservation to protect us all.>
Tanis had to admit to herself that what Bob was saying was truly fascinating. Though it was taking some effort to divorce herself from the anger caused by the knowledge that he had altered her brain—her mind—without her knowing, and had been doing it for nearly the entire duration of their friendship.
She understood that it had saved her life, but the secrecy was still difficult to accept. Alongside that, the issue she had with Bob’s theory was that he believed she unpredictably altered the fabric of the universe at a quantum level.
“Bob, hold onto that, because I think I see where you’re going, but I want you to explain it. I want to understand how we alter quantum-level probabilities. How did you ever come up with that idea, and how did you test the theory?”