by M. D. Cooper
“You’re right.”
Rika walked to the cradle, waiting as Chase’s shuttle passed through the bay’s grav shield and settled into place. She considered reaching out to him across the Link, but since he hadn’t spoken on approach, she decided to let him take his time to share whatever was on his mind.
It only took a minute for the door to open, Shoshin hopping out first, followed by Chase a moment later. His expression already told her what she needed to know.
“That bad, was it?” she asked.
“Worse,” he replied, lips barely parting as he fumed. “They sat us down to watch a holovid. A holovid. Like we were recruits or something!”
“I doubt they even make recruits watch that,” Shoshin muttered. “It was horrid. Like something a government propaganda agency made when they were desperate for anyone with a pulse to sign up.”
“Is that all you did?” Rika asked, angry on her husband and Shoshin’s behalf. “You spent all day at the space force’s headquarters watching some vid?”
“No.” Chase shook his head. “We got up just a few minutes in and told them we wanted a proper tour. They obliged, but somehow managed to consume half the day showing us nothing—or trying, at least.”
“So I take it you did learn a few things?”
“Yup.” Shoshin nodded while rubbing his hands together. “Firstly, that they don’t have much defense against our breach nano. We also learned that they can’t even detect an ISF hackIt when it’s stuck on a console in plain sight.”
Rika couldn’t help but laugh. “We also ended up breaching systems everywhere we went to get the intel we need.”
“Oh yeah?” Chase arched a brow. “What’d you learn?”
“That they have neither the systems nor the governmental infrastructure necessary to function as a travel and commerce hub. In my opinion, Farsis is a bust.”
“Just as well—they have plaaaaans,” Chase drew out the word. “Big plans.”
Rika crossed her arms. “Spill it.”
“As soon as they get a gate, they’re going to attack their neighbors. They want to take the independent systems of Lupus, and unite them all as one interstellar empire under President Estee.”
“Faaawk,” Rika whispered.
Niki said.
“So, how long till we boost out of here?” Shoshin asked.
“Zero amount of time,” Rika replied. “We’re making tracks. Stars…I really thought that Estee was better than this. I guess her wife was really just echoing the president’s true sentiment, and we didn’t see it.”
“Maybe,” Chase said. “Or maybe she’s just a bitch on her own.”
Rika nearly barked a laugh. “Shoshin,” she turned to the AM-4 to cover her reaction. “Get Kelly and Keli, and make sure we’re ready to rumble. You know the drill.”
“Yes, Admiral. Like the back of my hand.”
“Good. And stop calling me admiral.”
“Would you prefer I call you queen?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder as he jogged out of the bay.
“No!” she shouted at his back before turning to Chase. “I swear, someday, I’m going to get him to call me Rika.”
“You can try. He doesn’t even call you Rika when talking to me alone. You’re the admiral, captain, commander, magnus, and every so often, queen.”
“Shit…that’s more than I’m prepared to go up against.”
“And what about the locals? You prepared to go up against them? I guess we know why they have an unusually large space force,” he added. “They’ve been planning on using it.”
Rika shrugged. “Let them come at us. We have stasis shields. With the number of CriEn modules on the Overwatch, every ship in this system can fire on us, and we’d shrug it off.”
Chase pursed his lips. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
CHAPTER 40 - CARY
STELLAR DATE: 01.14.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Cora’s Triumph
REGION: Trian 58-X11, Norma Arm
“I swear,” Earnest muttered under his breath as Cary walked into research CIC. “Sometimes I think the core AIs wrote shitty code just to make it harder for us to undo these things.”
It was early in the third shift, and the room that had been dubbed ‘Star Central’ by the crew of the Cora’s Triumph was empty other than the two occupants.
She sat down next to him, reading over the engineer’s shoulder as he worked through the issue at hand on his console. “Damn…that really is different than prior installations. Why the change?”
Earnest heaved a sigh before glancing at her. “I think it’s to deal with the high metallicity in this star. Not to mention its spin—thing is just whipping around.”
“Makes you wonder why they chose it,” Cary replied. “A lot of other stars in this cluster could have caused the same chain reaction.”
“Not as quickly, though—and for the core AIs, this would have been trivial. Alas, for all my knowledge, I am not a multimodal ascended being.”
Cary pointed at a method on the display. “You’re not passing the correct object into that. You need to run it through the transformation so it’s structured properly for this library.”
Earnest quirked a half smile and shook his head. “You’re not multimodal either, but being ascended seems to be working in your favor.”
“Partially ascended,” Cary corrected. “And I don’t think my extradimensional nature had anything to do with it. Sleep, however…that’s probably key.”
A tired smile formed on the engineer’s face. “Are you saying I need to take a break?”
Cary tilted her head, regarding him with a sympathetic gaze. “Well, Captain Beatrice is hosting a dinner today, a welcome to the new members of the team that just shipped in.”
Earnest leant back and wiped the back of his hand across his brow. “Stars, is it that late?”
“Not yet, but it will be by the time you clean yourself up.”
Earnest grunted a laugh and rose from his seat. “I suppose you’re right. Staring at this for another few hours today isn’t going to make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things.”
“That’s right.” Cary nodded. “Maybe you could turn it into a test for the newbies. Let them sort it out.”
The engineer barked a laugh, shaking his head as he walked to the room’s exit. “Newbies…that makes it sound like we just got a batch fresh out of university.”
Cary snorted. “No, they’re top minds from all across the Inner Stars and Transcend. At least, that’s what their dossiers say. I’ve not had a chance to speak with any of them yet.”
Earnest paused at the exit. “Are you coming?”
“I’m going to soak this in for a bit.”
He snorted. “I see how it is. You’re throwing me to the wolves.”
“Maaaaaybe.” She shrugged. “I mean, I did the last three meet-and-greets while you hid.”
“I didn’t hide, I was touring installations, and…and…important things.”
“Like hiding.”
Earnest winked and nodded. “Exactly.”
Cary rolled her eyes and turned back to the console. “Well, off with you. I’ll be there, too, I just want to look this over a bit first—and I won’t take as long to clean up as you.”
Earnest glanced down at his shirt and sniffed at the collar. “OK…yeah, I see your point.”
He waved and ambled off as Cary looked through the control code.
Unlike the code most humans used—which was typically well-abstracted—the core AIs had written theirs only a layer above the direct hardware interface. At first, she’d been surprised they’d made such a choice, but the more she worked through it, the more she gained an appreciation for the elegance and simplicity of it all.
Granted, she was one of a very small number of people who could effectively parse and manipulate what the core AIs were t
rying to do—which was why new groups of trainees were rotated onto the Cora’s Triumph every few months.
Once the recruits finished their time aboard the research vessel, they’d be sent to start new teams, assigned to other starshifting projects. Most would be monitoring stellar drift correction that Cary and Earnest had already set in motion, though a few would begin work in newly discovered locations.
“Why?” she whispered aloud, shaking her head as she stared at the code. “Why set all these stars on collision courses, go through millennia of effort, only to abandon the project?”
“Maybe.” Cary shrugged. “Or maybe it was an experiment to prove out a theory.”
“Or it couldn’t succeed in the presence of an aggressive lifeform that they’d allowed to spread through too much of the galaxy.”
Pita’s silvery laugh filled her mind.
Cary winked at the overhead. “I didn’t want to cast aspersions on any other sapiens. Figured we humans could take the hit for that on our own.”
“Most,” Cary agreed. “We seem to have had a habit of uplifting predators.”
“So, how does that help me with this?” Cary asked, gesturing at the screen. “We still have to slow this white dwarf down before it slams into that B0. Because if that happens, this whole cluster goes up and turns into a rather sizable black hole.”
“Uh…well…I guess. I kinda don’t want to just give up on our first problematic starflight project.”
Cary slumped in the seat, letting out a long sigh. “That’s just the thing, right? This might be that unsolvable problem. They boosted the white dwarf toward the B0 by focusing its output like a laser. Ingenious, honestly, but now that it’s caught in the blue giant’s gravity well, I don’t see how we can push it away…it just doesn’t have enough output.”
“Sorry?”
Cary pursed her lips, considering that possibility. She and Earnest had looked at moving the B0 star, but they hadn’t considered forming its solar wind into a column that could push the white dwarf away.
“It might work…though it’ll take a bit. Plus side, the big girl’s gonna get pushed further away from the white dwarf, too.”
“Who would have thought that playing with stars would be so complicated?”
Cary laughed as she rose from the console. “That’s fair. Alright. I’m going to work on a model for that while I get ready for our shindig.”
“Would you? I’m suddenly feeling like I should have left with Earnest in order to get ready.”
Cary snorted. “I don’t really need to do any of those things anymore.”
“Creature of habit, I guess.”
The AI sent a feeling of encouragement across the Link.
“OK, OK, you don’t have to tell me thrice.”
Cary rose from her chair and walked out of the Research CIC and into the Cora’s Triumph’s long central R&D corridor. After years aboard the vessel, the passage felt like an old friend; one she’d traversed at least ten thousand times at this point.
Suddenly, the idea of walking down the passage yet again seemed intolerable. The knowledge that they still had hundreds, maybe thousands of star collisions to avert bore down on her like the weight of one of the very stellar objects they were trying to shift.
Without a second thought, she turned left, passing directly through the bulkhead and into a storage room. She didn’t bother walking around the crates and equipment, instead pushing herself through them and then the far bulkhead, another passage, bulkhead, conduit runs, still more bays, and finally the ship’s outer hull.
The brilliant light of the white dwarf bathed her the instant she passed into space, warming her inside and out as the more energetic photons slipped through her body.
Cary laid down on the hull, staring up at the stellar remnant, letting the energy it radiated feed her cells, both biological and extradimensional.
A silent sigh escaped her lips, and she allowed herself to relax—truly relax. Twenty-six additional limbs splayed out from her body, sinuous strands of light undulating in the light the white dwarf blasted into space.
It was something she rarely did inside the Cora’s Triumph. After the events of the Orion War, many people were uncomfortable working with ascended beings—even one such as herself who had nothing whatsoever to do with the core AIs.
Granted, there is what I did in Orion. That’s reason enough for people to be uncomfortable with me.
It had been over ten years since Cary had subsumed A1, drawing the woman’s memories and persona into herself so as to better masquerade as the leader of the Widows. It took causing the death of her mother to bring her back from that brink…though she’d never fully returned. A1, the woman once known as Lisa Wrentham, would forever be a part of Cary.
For better or worse…probably worse.
She stilled her mind, shifting from her two-dimensional, biological eyes to her extradimensional vision. It was a quirk of reality that had always amused her. Two-dimensional eyes were required to perceive the third dimension, and three-dimensional eyes were necessary to see the fourth, and so on.
Cary had only extended her existence so far as the fifth dimension, giving her the ability to perceive and move in the sixth, but not occupy it. Not fully, at least.
In the higher planes of existence, starlight was a wonder to behold. The streams of photons were less ephemeral, just shy of physical bridges one could follow to the surface of the stars themselves. The light felt as though it was spearing her body, driving into it, feeding her with life and sustenance.
She looked behind herself, through the ship’s hull and back out the other side, to take in the sight of the type-B0 star the white dwarf was accelerating toward. It was still seven hundred AU away, but its twenty-three solar masses gave it enough luminosity to rival the nearby stellar remnant.
A tale of two stars, she thought with a laugh.
Of course, it wasn’t just two. All around them lay several thousand more stars, all members of a young globular cluster, many within a quarter light year of several others.
If the white dwarf collided with the B0 giant, as the core AIs had established, the type II supernova would begin a chain reaction that would ripple through the entire cluster, slowing its momentum just enough for the remaining stars to draw in the debris of their deceased neighbors, accelerating into a collapse of the cluster.
Forming a rather large and rather hungry black hole.
Cary closed her eyes—all of them—and thought about the Cora’s Triumph’s current location in the galaxy.
Sol was over thirty-five thousand light years from their current location; even the furthest expansion of the Transcend was well over twenty thousand light years away. The light from the event may take l
onger than the remainder of the human race’s existence to reach settled space, meaning the physical repercussions would likely never affect any sapient species.
At least, none alive at present.
Maybe Pita is right. Maybe it doesn’t matter if we let this one go. What’s one more black hole in the galaxy?
It occurred to her that they didn’t know for certain that there were no evolving species on worlds that could be destroyed by the formation of a new massive black hole. If they did allow these two stars to collide, they’d at least need to survey the surrounding hundred thousand systems to determine if anything would need to be relocated.
Seems harder than solving the problem at its source.
Cary felt a pang of envy for the survey teams that were moving ahead of the Starflight ships. Those teams were exploring hundreds of new systems, often visiting several in the span of a week.
Already, a thousand systems had been flagged as containing multi-cellular life—a hundred of those hosting large animals with clearly observable sentience. As much as she enjoyed the challenge of setting stars on their courses, the exploration that people like Sera were getting to undertake seemed far more exciting.
Maybe after this group of trainees, I can ask to transfer out to another position.
She stilled her mind once more, pushing out the thoughts of the current task and the difficulties it presented, and instead imagined what she might like to do.
Part of the problem was that she loved working with Earnest, and there was no way he’d abandon the Starflight Initiative.
Thought of the old engineer caused her to check the time, only to realize that half an hour had slipped by, and she was about to be late for the welcome dinner.
With little more than a thought, she fell back through the ship’s hull and into a perimeter corridor where she almost scared an ensign out of his skin.
“Ma’am,” he saluted once he’d regained his composure. “Sorry I shrieked like that, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t look before I popped in here,” she said, returning the salute. “As you were.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”