by M. D. Cooper
What Sera hadn’t known was that Airtha was her mother…and that the AI was ascending, and possibly insane.
Not for the first time, Tangel considered advising Sera that hunting her own mother wasn’t wise—especially when Helen, unlike Airtha, really had been a mother figure to Sera. But one look at the grim determination in her friend’s eyes let Tangel know just how well such a request would be received.
“So what are we missing,” Tangel mused, feeling her way through the trees with her extradimensional senses. “And why can’t I see her? Either she’s slipped through our net, or she’s figured out how to mask herself.”
Bob chimed in from where the I2 hung a thousand kilometers overhead.
Tanis laughed softly, shaking her head.
They passed through the clearing and back into the forest. Here, the trees were tall, with wide boughs creating a dense canopy of leaves. As a result, the undergrowth was thin, and they could see almost a hundred meters in any direction.
Tangel could see even further in other dimensions, the three-dimensional trees doing little to obstruct her view in the fourth and fifth.
The ground beneath her feet did not provide a significant visual barrier, either. It was something she’d gotten used to, the ability to see through the very surfaces that kept her from falling into space. One of the things that had taken a lot of effort to deal with was being able to see through a ship’s hull while traveling through space.
She would have expected Airtha to feel more substantial, but it didn’t. The ring rotated at an incredible speed, which caused the stars she could see through its surface to wheel and spin past disconcertingly.
Granted, you’re still recovering from going toe-to-toe with Airtha and having her swat you like a fly.
That thought caused her to wonder if she was once again biting off more than she could chew.
The AI groaned, but didn’t give a verbal response. Silence wore on for several minutes, until Tangel gave in first.
Tangel wished Bob was present so she could give him a cool glare.
Tangel reached out with her extradimensional senses, peering through the forest like it wasn’t there, searching for whatever it was that Bob had seen.
“I take it by your question that that is no longer the case?” the engineer asked.
“Ahead…there’s a hidden entrance to a shaft. It seems to lead down to a bay and…and a ship.”
“Shit!” Sera exclaimed. “Where? We need to stop her!”
Tangel highlighted the shaft’s entrance. “Krissy’s ships are all too far to get here before it can leave,” she said.
“Sabrina’s nearby,” Sera suggested. “On her way to the I2.”
“Get her down there. Stall that ship,” Tangel ordered, breaking into a full run, with Sera and Finaeus behind her.
“Helen’s not getting away, then,” Sera said, catching up to Tangel. “Not unless she’s got a gate down there.”
The two women looked at one another and began to run faster.
“Finaeus!” Tangel called over her shoulder. “What would happen to the ring if a gate was activated inside it?”
“It would survive,” the engineer pronounced from a few paces behind. “We, on the other hand, would not.”
The hidden entrance was set at the base of a low rise, and Tangel reached out with her extradimensional limbs, disassembling the earthen bank to reveal the short corridor beyond. She dashed ahead, spotting and dissolving automated defense systems before they even had a chance to deploy and fire.
A few seconds later, she came to the shaft. It dropped nearly five hundred meters, and the lift car was at the bottom.
“See you down there,” Tangel called out, and jumped.
Cary had taught her how to make graviton shields that would allow her to deflect attacks from other ascended beings. What they hadn’t discussed—but what Tangel knew was entirely possible—was to use the ability to direct gravitons to make her own personal a-grav field.
What a time to test my theory.
The bottom of the shaft was rushing toward her, and Tangel held out her arms, generating the graviton field, and then flipping the polarity of the gravitons and pushing them away from herself.
Sure enough, the reaction slowed her descent and, though she dented the top of the lift car with her impact, she was unharmed and able to dissolve the metal beneath her. The lift doors were open, and the moment she landed on the car’s floor, she sprinted down the corridor.
The engineer grunted.
She didn’t reply, only increased her speed, barreling down the passage, burning away anything that looked even remotely close to a defensive weapon. After half a minute, she came to the bay where a corvette rested.
The ship was already on the debarkation rails, sliding toward the open bay doors and a drop into space.
Tangel agreed, but didn’t respond as she raced across the deck, reaching out for the ship’s airlock and dissolving the hull with her non-corporeal limbs. The corvette was almost beyond the bay’s grav shield, and Tangel poured on a final burst of speed and leapt into the airlock a second before the ship passed into vacuum and its shields activated.
Dissolving it was an option, but she felt her strength waning after tearing apart so much of the corridor as she’d rushed through it.
Who ever thought that assimilating matter and converting it into energy would be so draining, she thought with a soft laugh as she p
laced a hand on the airlock’s control panel and fed a nanofilament into it.
~Door’s open.~ Helen’s voice came into Tangel’s mind. ~No need to shred more of my ship.~
~We’re not going to let you get away,~ Tangel said as she tried to simply open the airlock door.
It slid aside without any breach necessary, and she stepped through into an interior passage, sealing the entrance behind her.
The bridge was on her left, and she could feel Helen’s energy emanating from that direction.
~You’re not going to be able to stop me,~ the shard of Airtha replied. ~You couldn’t defeat me before, and you won’t be able to now.~
~Not going to stop me from trying.~
Tangel released a nanocloud, using it to augment her extra senses. Unlike Helen, she was still corporeal enough that a shot to the head would be as fatal as an ascended being’s attack.
Nothing raised any alarms, and she pushed forward, moving down a cross passage before coming to the ship’s central corridor.
The moment she stepped into it, a burst of energy shot out toward her. The nanocloud had given enough warning, and Tangel ducked back, sucking in a breath as she looked at the hole burned in the bulkhead.
~Whatever happened to not destroying your ship?~
~I just wanted you in range.~
Tangel funneled the energy she’d gathered from the matter she’d disintegrated in her rush though the corridors, and formed a brane around herself, and a graviton field beyond that.
~You’re going to have to fire a lot more energy than that,~ Tangel said. ~Your ship won’t survive.~
She stepped out into the corridor, the open entrance to the bridge only twenty meters away. Helen didn’t respond as Tangel strode toward it, steeling herself for whatever might come next.
As she neared the bridge, the shard appeared in the entrance, a swirling mass of luminescent limbs that blocked her forward progress.
“What do you hope to achieve?” Tangel asked. “Airtha is gone, you’ve lost.”
~No.~ Helen’s limbs waved side to side. ~We still control much of the Transcend. We’ll bring all of humanity under our banner, and then destroy the core AIs.~
Tangel shook her head, her eyes boring into the creature before her. ~We share the same goals. Why are you fighting against me?~
~Because your compassion will cause you to lose, Tangel.~ Helen threw the words out as angry accusation, her color shifting down the spectrum, taking on a purple hue. ~When I first met you aboard Sabrina, I’d hoped that you would be able to take the fight to the core, but it became apparent that you wanted to hide away from the galaxy’s troubles. That’s why I took Sera from you, where I could keep working at making her into the leader humanity and AIs need.~
“You orchestrated all that?” Tangel asked. “I guess it makes sense. You’re the one that ensured Elena would arrive in New Canaan to warn us that Jeffrey Tomlinson was coming—well, the pretend Jeffrey.”
~Indeed. The original was not malleable enough. And you’re right—Airtha and I sent both the harbinger and the threat to New Canaan, all so that Sera could see how untrustworthy those around her were. To steel her for what was to come.~
As the ascended being spoke, Tangel began to realize something she’d never before considered. Though it was no secret that she and Airtha essentially shared the same goals, it was also readily apparent that they were not using the same means to achieve those goals.
Even so, they could have allied in some fashion. The fact that Airtha and Helen had never even asked to was a mystery Tangel had never understood. Logic dictated that they should have joined forces, but Airtha had always sought to take the picotech from New Canaan and see the colonists destroyed, all while bolstering Sera to be the one ruling the galaxy—a job Sera had never wanted.
“I don’t know what would make a being like you insane,” Tangel said in a whisper. “But you’ve clearly lost control of your faculties. You and Airtha. What is with this blind nepotism of yours?”
~Whoever takes the reins of the galaxy must be willing to sacrifice anything to see victory. You’ve shown time and time again that you’ll let your morality stop you from realizing your goals. We’re not insane, we’re pure logic.~
A suspicion Tangel had always harbored was that the core AIs had sent Airtha back as a foil. A being that would appear to be working against them, but be flawed in some way and in fact foil any efforts made against them.
I can only imagine the state things would be in if the Intrepid had come out in the ninety-fifth century as everyone had expected.
~Are you coming, Bob?~ Tangel sent out, wondering if she had the range to reach the AI.
~I am, but we have to fly around the ring, brake, and come back up. Sabrina is much closer. She’ll be there in a minute.~
Tangel wondered what Sabrina would be able to do, though she supposed that at least the other ship could facilitate a rescue, if she and Helen destroyed the corvette.
Rather than replying to Helen, Tangel took a step forward, trying to see into the bridge. Her nanocloud hadn’t been able to make it past Helen, and she wanted to see what the vessel’s heading was.
The Airthan shard whipped a limb out toward Tangel to stop her approach, but it collided with her grav shield and protective brane.
~You’re not going to dissuade me.~ Tangel said, continuing to move forward.
Helen sent a burst of energy toward her, but it was deflected, cutting a long slash in the bulkhead.
~Very well,~ Helen said. ~I may not be able to destroy you without destroying this ship, but I also don’t need it to last that long.~
Before Tangel could ask what that meant, a signal from Cheeky reached her.
Tangel knew that ordering Sabrina to shoot the jump gate wasn’t an option. Ford svaiter gates were powered by antimatter, and if it exploded, it could destroy a sizable part of the ring—especially in this region, where the structure was thinner.
She wasn’t quite ready to order Sabrina to shoot at the ship she was aboard, either.
There was a change in the air around her, and Tangel realized that her way forward was blocked by a grav field. She tried to push against it, but it was blocking her in all dimensions.
The field stretched along the bulkheads, closing in behind Tangel. She reached out, pushing her own gravitons against it, but momentum was on Helen’s side, and the field closed around her.
She railed against it, focusing her energy on a single point, but Helen only laughed.
~I have the ship’s CriEn to draw on. You’re not going to defeat me.~
The Airthan shard added a brane, encapsulating Tangel in a magnetic field that cut off her communication with Sabrina.
No! Tangel shouted in her mind, pushing with all her might, dissolving the deck beneath her and funneling its mass into an attack on the prison Helen had made.
The air was heating up in her shield, but Tangel didn’t slow her assault, focusing a beam of energy coupled with particles moving as fast as she could accelerate them toward a single point directly in front of her.
Despite Helen’s assertion that Tangel would not be able to push though, a crack formed in the graviton field, and then the brane beyond it.
At that moment, a voice came from the bridge. It was partially garbled, words out of order as it squawked out of the speakers.
“Not stop go! Destroy shard.”
There was something familiar to the voice, but Tangel couldn’t immediately place it.
Helen moved back from the bridge’s entrance, revealing the forward holodisplay, which showed the jump gate’s ring rapidly approaching the ship. The Airthan shard was manipulating one of the consoles, her movements hinting at concern.
Then the ship veered off to port, a starscape replacing the ring’s glow.
~No!~ Helen waile
d.
In that moment, Tangel managed to break free, and she ran onto the bridge, slamming a brane around Helen and cutting the ascended being off from the rest of the ship.
“Tangel…” the voice said. “Please. Save me.”
“Who are you?” Tangel replied, careful to keep her focus on Helen, who was writhing in the brane’s grip.
The shard’s strength was impressive, and Tangel reached out to the ship’s main powerplant, drawing energy from the CriEn to keep her brane intact while she moved toward the navigation console.
After a moment of silence, barring the hissing wails coming from Helen, the voice replied with just one word.
“Iris.”
“What?” Tangel blurted, then she felt Helen renew her fight against the brane. She turned toward the ascended being, eyes narrowing, her voice a rage-filled scream. “What did you do to her?”
~Me?~ Helen demanded. ~That abomination has been chasing me for a day! What did you do to her?~
Tangel shrunk the brane, crushing Helen’s form within. “Last I knew, Iris was fighting Airtha’s AIs, trying to load the corrupted shard…”
Her voice trailed off, understanding dawning as she realized what must have happened to Iris.
“Stars, Iris…why didn’t you come to us?”
“Hard. Fighting constantly for control.”
“With the corrupted shard?” Tangel asked, further tightening the brane around Helen as she accessed the navigation console and shut down the ship’s engines.
An affirmative sound came from Iris, and Tangel accessed the ship’s network, tracing the signal that was controlling the bridge’s audible systems back to the ship’s comm node.
There she found an AI, one that was a garbled ruin, a barely functional merger of two separate beings.
“Iris!” Tangel gasped, only the knowledge that Helen would kill her if she became distracted keeping her from an immediate attempt to disentangle the two beings.
“Keep safe,” Iris said. “Later me.”
Tangel nodded, turning her full focus back to Helen, shrinking the brane further. “This ends now. I destroy you, and Airtha’s sickness is wiped from the galaxy.”