by M. D. Cooper
Jessica had never seen a grav-beam strong enough to hold a ship like an ARC-6A against its will, not even from ships much larger than the fishbone.
A bay door began to open on the enemy vessel, and Jessica knew that the moment her fighter touched down on that deck, she was done for. Without another thought, she activated the ARC’s stasis shields.
You want me? Here I come!
She spun the ship and punched the engines, hurtling the fighter toward the fishbone vessel. Her ARC traversed the gap in less than a second, and she slammed into the fishbone, plowing into the forward sphere. She expected to punch clear through, but moments after impact, the stasis shield died, and the ARC fighter ground to a halt.
Though the fighter’s a-grav dampeners eased the abrupt cessation of forward momentum, Jessica found herself glad for Tangel’s insistence that the ARC fighters still use gel-filled cockpits, as the substance solidified around her and kept her from being slammed against the forward end of the cocoon.
She tried to reactivate the stasis shield, but saw that it had failed due to a grav-generator failure. She realized it had died because an integrity field modulator for the shield bubble had suffered a malfunction. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but the fallback system was one that had been damaged by the EM surge before she even left the Lantzer.
What dumb luck, she thought.
Exterior visuals showed that the ARC was lodged partway down a corridor—or what was left of the corridor. One side of the bulkhead was gone entirely, and the other side was mostly slag.
Since I’m here, I might as well find who’s running the show.
She fired the ARC’s grav thrusters and twisted the fighter so that its exit was facing the aft end of the corridor. Once the vessel was situated as best she could get it, Jessica triggered the fighter’s pilot disconnect, and her consciousness collapsed back within her body. She felt the hookups disconnect from the shoot suit, and a moment later, the ship disgorged her, dropping her onto the deck.
Once outside the fighter, she quickly took stock of her surroundings while passing a command to the ARC to drop a rifle and a sidearm.
They fell to the deck next to her, and she scooped them up while eyeing the corridor around her. It was made of a smooth, grey material somewhat like plas, but it reflected EM, making the meager scan her shoot suit possessed entirely ineffective.
She’d never been on a ship where the bulkheads of a corridor were entirely unadorned. Not only were there no conduits, there weren’t any markings of any sort. It was more like a tube than a passageway.
Am I in a pipe?
If it wasn’t for the fact that a light strip ran down the top, she would have settled on that determination. So far as she knew, even aliens wouldn’t light a pipe.
Focusing on something that made sense, she checked over her rifle. Once satisfied that it was powered and ready to fire, she slung the bandolier of magazines over her shoulder while making a final attempt to relay a message to the Lantzer.
Nothing. Well, that was to be expected.
Jessica began to trot down the passage, hoping to put some distance between herself and the fighter before whoever ran the ship came to investigate.
Based on the corridor’s slow curve, she knew that her fighter had lodged in the spherical forward section of the ship. It was only three hundred meters across, and she estimated that the fighter had to have punched through at least halfway, likely missing the center and ending up somewhere on the starboard side. She surmised that if there was a C&C on the strange craft, it would be in the center of the sphere, so that was her ultimate destination.
The featureless passage continued curving around to the right and Jessica kept her eyes peeled for an intersection, though none came into view for several minutes. Eventually, the bulkhead on the left opened up and she found herself on a small balcony. She looked out over the low railing and saw an atrium that spanned several decks, with a corridor at the bottom that continued on toward the ship’s stern.
Jessica realized that this was where the spherical section met the arch that connected to the ship’s engines. Surprised that she’d still not seen another soul, she looked at the drop and gauged it to be ten meters.
She sent her drones over the edge and confirmed that the passage that continued toward the rear of the ship also ran forward toward the center of the sphere. Without further consideration, she leapt over the edge, spinning in the air to land facing the ship’s bow.
The passage was clear, but as she walked across the atrium’s floor, a figure stepped out of an alcove ahead. For a second, she would have sworn that the person materialized out of thin air, which she supposed was possible with reasonable stealth tech. Nearly three meters tall, the person wore a long cloak with a deep cowl shrouding their face.
“Halt!” Jessica ordered, taking a step back as she sensed energy flowing off the figure, waves of ionized air rippling out from around it. “Who are you? Why did you attack my ship?”
“Attack?”
A man then…and probably not an alien, Jessica thought as the baritone word rolled over her.
“Yes. You knocked us out of our jump, and then sucked my fighter toward your ship.”
“And then you crashed into mine,” the man replied, laughing softly. “Though I’ll admit, I should have seen that coming.”
“Oh?” Jessica asked, backing up to where the corridor opened into the atrium. “Why is that?”
“Well, because, Jessica Keller, you’ve done it before. At the Battle of Bollam’s World, when you flew your ship through those dreadnoughts.”
“Wow! A fan,” Jessica exclaimed, a mocking smile on her lips, though she realized the enemy couldn’t see her grin through the shoot suit’s visor. “I admit, I’ve used that trick a few times too many at this point…granted, it still works. If I’d had more momentum, I would have punched clear through your ship.”
“Probably.” The figure nodded. “Not that it would have helped.”
Jessica shook her head. “You’re very confident. But your hubris won’t help.”
“No?”
“No.”
She lifted her right arm, ready to fire the electron beam mounted inside it, when she saw a tendril of light slip past the figure’s robe.
Oh shit.
“You’re a core AI,” she whispered.
“A Caretaker, yes,” the figure replied. “I rather like you, Jessica, you’ve got a lot of moxie. But I have my orders, and I plan to follow them.”
Jessica took a step back as fear crept into her mind and she desperately wondered what possible defense she could mount against an ascended AI.
“Orders from who?” she asked.
“Whom.”
“No one says that anymore. Get over it.”
The being slowly advanced, gliding down the corridor as Jessica backed up. Desperately, she deployed a nanocloud in the vain hope that she could somehow breach the ascended AI.
Stars, Jessica, of all the ways you could have gone…never expected it to be like this.
“I won’t go without a fight,” she hissed.
“That’ll be interesting. Not many people stand their ground. How do you think you’ll fare?”
Her mind grasped at the one chance she had to defeat the ascended being—and that possibility was a slim one: it involved using the alien microbes that suffused her body and consequently altered her cellular makeup. Over the past few years, they had evolved to the point where they were capable of directly harvesting and storing electrons.
She’d used the ability twice before when operating in League of Sentients space, though never against a sentient being made of energy.
Stars, I don’t even know if any part of this thing is electrons. It could be made of all subatomic particles…. Can I harvest those?
Knowing that the best way to make her body ready to draw in energy was to deplete her reserves, Jessica fired her electron beam without giving any warning.
It burned throu
gh the shoot suit’s glove and streaked toward the steadily approaching figure, but stopped short of striking directly, the bolts of electricity hitting the floor and overhead instead.
Jessica fired twice more, both shots encountering the same invisible barrier.
“Wasn’t quite futile enough for you the first time?” the Caretaker asked.
“Never hurts to be sure,” Jessica replied. “Before you kill me, do I get a name, or why you stopped us, anything?”
The figure stopped and cocked its head. “You want me to monologue about my plan? Do you really think your chances of survival are that good?”
“That bad,” Jessica corrected. “I figure since I’m gonna bite it, I want to go down knowing why you stopped my ship. How would be nice as well.”
The being let out a breath that sounded like a tree’s branches scratching against a window.
“Simple, really. We’re just keeping you from getting to Star City. Can’t have those kids of yours getting involved in things. For now, they’re content just to ascend and leave these corporeal dimensions, and we’re happy to let them do that.”
“My kids are ascending?” Jessica asked, surprised it could happen so soon.
“Eventually, yes. I don’t have a lot of details, they’re a difficult group to approach."
“Too bad you didn’t go visit them. I bet they’d mop the floor with you.”
The core AI drew in another screeching breath, and Jessica almost laughed. The thing really seemed to revel in attempting to alarm her.
“Doubtful,” he said. “But it would be interesting.”
The ascended being had closed to within three meters of Jessica, and she drew her own rasping breath, knowing that this was it. Her plan was either going to work, or her time was finally up.
Still needing to deplete her reserves further, she fired her electron beam again, backing up as bolts of lightning splashed out around her.
“Can’t fault you for having guts,” the AI said as two tendrils of white light snaked out from under its robes.
They stretched toward Jessica, and she noted that—to her eyes, at least—they looked identical to Tangel’s. They reached out to within half a meter of her and then paused.
“Any last words?” the Caretaker asked.
“Did you know that all light has a taste to me?” she responded to the question with a question.
“A taste?”
“I consume it,” she replied. “I imagine you must know that, what with your spies always watching us.”
“Well—”
The being didn’t get any further before Jessica jumped forward, closing her eyes as she grasped the being’s ethereal limbs. From conversations with Tangel, she knew all too well that ascended beings could transmute matter, and she had no desire to watch her arms dissolve.
But they didn’t.
Instead, she felt a wave of energy flow into her, a strength that threatened to overwhelm her senses. Her eyes snapped open, and she watched the two tendrils in her hands as they began to thin, the Caretaker releasing a screech that she could only interpret as a strangled gasp.
“Well I’ll be…” she whispered, feeling more and more of the ascended being’s energy flow into her body.
The creature writhed in Jessica’s grasp, trying to pull away, but she held on, a wailing laugh coming from her own throat as something more than raw electrons flowed into her arms and suffused every cell in her body.
“How?” the creature moaned as its arms thinned to nothing, and Jessica finally lost her grip.
“I had a theory.” Jessica grinned, looking down at her hands where the shoot suit had been burned away. “I can’t believe how much power you contain…do you store it in extradimensional space? What is it made of?”
The being seemed to straighten, regarding her wordlessly for a moment. Then a dozen light-tendril limbs splayed out around it, pausing for just a moment before streaking toward Jessica.
She had expected a counterattack, and channeled every joule of energy she’d drawn from the creature back at it, focusing all her power on the nexus in the center of the being where its limbs seemed to sprout from.
It shrieked its piercing wail again, but even so, it struck Jessica.
The feeling was like hard light was slamming into her body, buffeting her from side to side. She didn’t look down at herself, didn’t dare see what ruin she’d been relegated to, she only pressed forward, funneling all the energy she could muster into the thing before her.
She took a step forward, a notion occurring to her as a cry of rage burst from her lips. By this point, more power had flowed out from her than she’d absorbed. Her reserves should be dry, but the small gauge that Iris had placed in her HUD as a joke so many long years before still indicated that she had a full charge.
Am I absorbing its power even as I shred it to pieces?
Before her, the last vestiges of the ascended AI’s robe burned away, and Jessica saw that the thing had been using a simulacra as a body—at least she hoped it was a simulacra. Much of that physical form was gone, skin and muscle burned and shredded to reveal bone and the being of light that cowered beneath a corporeal shell.
Unable to stop herself from checking her own condition, Jessica looked down, expecting to see her body in similar condition, but only saw a brilliant lavender light, the smoking remains of the shoot suit laying on the deck around her.
“Would you look at that?” she laughed. “Seems like my little alien friends like to eat ascended being.”
“Please,” the creature of light wailed. “You’re killing me!”
“It’s no less than you deserve,” Jessica hissed as she directed the energy flowing from her hands to slice off the last of the creature’s limbs.
At that, the remaining orb of energy slowly began to fall to the deck. For a moment, Jessica wondered how gravity affected such a being.
Does it have some amount of mass? Maybe in other dimensions, what I see as energy is mass.
The remains hit the deck, pooling almost gently on the smooth surface, and Jessica realized that she had a decision to make. Containing an ascended AI was certainly no simple task, though there were shadowtrons and remnant-containment cylinders back on the Lantzer.
The question was how quickly could the being recover, and what danger would it pose to her before she captured it?
“Can you move?” she asked the thing on the deck before her.
It didn’t respond, and she realized that either it was too wounded to speak, or that it currently had no facility to do so. Just then, a signal reached her, and she nearly laughed for joy.
BAGGED
STELLAR DATE: 10.04.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Lantzer
REGION: Coreward of Stillwater Nebula, Orion Freedom Alliance
“Hoooleee sharding stars,” Trevor muttered as he approached Jessica, shaking his head, eyes fixed on the glowing orb that lay on the deck.
Following him down the curving passage were Corporal Jay and the three other members of his fireteam. Meg and Peers each held shadowtrons, the slepton emitters tucked against their shoulders, business ends aimed at the remains of the Caretaker.
Private Marc carried a containment cylinder, and Jessica found herself wondering if it was large enough for a fully ascended being. They had been made for remnants, and the ones she’d witnessed seemed smaller than the Caretaker’s remains on the deck.
“Is it dying?” Meg asked as she circled around the softly glowing creature.
“Maybe.” Jessica shrugged. “I hope not. Ta
ngel would probably love to talk to this thing.”
“It has a lot to answer for,” Trevor growled. “Stars…these montsters are responsible for the dark ages. How many people needlessly suffered and died because they were trying to keep humanity in some sort of eternal purgatory?”
“So you’re saying you want it to stay alive?” Jessica asked, laughing softly.
“Yeah, so Tangel can make it answer for what it’s done.”
Jessica was surprised to hear so much vehemence from her husband, but he was much more closely connected to the trials of the dark ages than she was. His parents had been alive for some of the final major conflicts that swept across the Inner Stars before the age of reconstruction finally began.
“OK, well,” Jessica gestured at the pulsating light on the deck. “Let’s get it in there.”
Meg activated her shadowtron, striking the Caretaker with a barrage of sleptons. It shuddered, but did not move further. Peers launched a black brane at the being, the M6 field encircling the remains and compressing them further, while Marc set the containment cylinder on the deck.
“Lucky these remnant prisons were in especially well-shielded storage,” Corporal Jay said. “As it was, two of the cylinders were damaged, and these are the only functioning shadowtrons.”
“Still would like to know what it did to our ship,” Jessica muttered.
“It didn’t tell you?” Trevor asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “We didn’t really have a nice chat, just kinda jumped right to killing one another—or trying, at least.”
“Speaking of which,” her husband said, his gaze not leaving the Caretaker as Meg held it over the cylinder while Marc activated the containment vessel, drawing the being of light and energy down into its confines. “How did you beat it? And are you injured?”
“Well…not injured. Sore, though. Really sore.” Jessica massaged her forearms. “Plus, I feel like I lit every cell in my body on fire. Repeatedly.”
“But how, ma’am?” Jay asked. “I thought these things were the baddest of the bad. I mean, no one has gone up against a remnant without a shadowtron and survived, let alone a fully ascended being.”