by M. D. Cooper
~Tangel.~
The single word from Bob stopped her in her tracks.
~No, Bob, we don’t need to save her. Helen being alive will only torture Sera.~
~You’re not a murderer.~
~You know that’s not true,~ Tangel’s reply was cold, the words slashing out through spacetime with more malice than she intended. ~I’ve killed in cold blood more than once.~
She was shocked when Bob laughed in response. ~Well, try to keep it to a minimum.~
Tangel had no idea how to respond to Bob’s statement, but it had surprised her enough that the desire to kill Helen faded. A moment later, Cheeky reached out.
Tangel glanced at Helen, wondering if she’d fit in a containment vessel.
~What are you going to do?~ Helen asked, saving Tangel from having to come up with a response for Cheeky.
“I’m going to let Bob deal with you. So far as I’m concerned, when it comes to ascended beings, he’s judge, jury, and executioner.”
~And you play at having morals….~
Tangel laughed, surprised that the shard thought she could be played so easily. “I thought you saw my morality as weakness. You need to make up your mind.”
Helen didn’t reply, and Tangel kept her focus on containing the being until the team from Sabrina made it to the bridge.
“You know part of the corridor is missing out there, Admiral?” Usef said as he entered the bridge a minute later.
“Shoot,” Tangel muttered. “I should have turned off the a-grav.”
The colonel tapped a foot on the deck. “Maglocks to the rescue.” He turned to the writhing ball of light that was Helen, now compressed down to a half-meter sphere near the navigation console. “Shit…that does not look safe.”
“My containment, or what’s inside?” Tangel asked, wiping sweat from her brow as the energy being consumed and expended to contain Helen warmed the air beyond what the environmental systems could contain.
“Both, I guess.”
Usef set the meter-tall cylinder on the deck and stepped aside as Erin and Katrina entered the bridge.
“Stars…that looks too familiar,” Katrina said, while Erin’s eyes grew wide.
“First time seeing one of these…other than you, Tangel,” the engineer said. “What do you need us to do?”
“Just be ready to shoot it if it tries to get away.”
The two women nodded, and Tangel drew Helen closer to the containment vessel, activating it once the ascended being was above it.
The two branes merged, and with a wail only Tangel could hear, Helen was sucked into the device. Tangel sealed it, and checked that the CriEn powering the field was operating properly.
“There we go.” She rose, satisfied that Helen was secure. “It’ll last till the end of time, if needs be.”
Erin shook her head. “That’s just depressing. I mean…I know she’s basically one of the worst people ever, but I don’t know that she deserves that.”
“Yeah…it was hyperbole,” Tangel said. “I wouldn’t want that, either.”
Usef stepped forward, a look of grim determination on his face as he picked up the cylinder. “Nope, not frightening at all. Being centimeters away from an entity that can dissolve me at will.”
Tangel reached out and touched the colonel’s arm. “Now you’re nanometers away.”
“Not helping, Admiral,” he grunted, turning back to the corridor, while Erin covered her mouth with a hand. “And not funny, Erin.”
Katrina glanced at Erin and mouthed. “Totally funny.”
The trio’s interaction brought a smile to Tangel’s lips. She thought about all the time and space that had passed between these three since they’d first met on the Intrepid so long ago in the Kapteyn’s Star System.
In Tangel’s mind, that they’d remained friends, or rekindled friendship, gave meaning to what often felt like a never-ending struggle to build a home for her people.
She followed the others off the corvette’s bridge. “Erin, Sabrina tells me there are several blank AI cores in Sabrina’s medbay. Can you grab one and meet me in this ship’s comm node?”
“Uhh…sure. What’s up?”
“I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up…least of all mine. Meet me there.”
“Of course,” Erin nodded and followed Katrina and Usef down the corridor that led to the airlock, while Tangel continued aft, reaching the communications node a minute later.
The ship was pristine, clearly never used beyond a shakedown cruise. The node consisted of a trio of towers in the center of the room; overkill for a corvette, but likely just the thing an ascended AI needed to launch a variety of attacks on ships and stations. They were also just the sort of thing capable of housing a fractured AI that had been relegated to mobile software.
Memories of fighting against the AIs of Luna came back to Tangel, actions that Angela had been involved in long before she’d ever met Tanis. Iris and Amavia had also fought against similar foes on Cerka Station, when they had gone up against the Non-Organic Supremists.
“Badly,” the AI replied through the room’s speakers.
Tangel frowned.
“No, routes…data…mess.”
“Odd,” Tangel muttered as she placed a hand on the central tower, funneling a strand of nano to create a direct connection to the comm node.
She sifted through the system’s internal structure until she came to the storage system Iris had settled into. What she saw there caused her to bite her lip in worry.
Pieces of Iris and the corrupted Airthan shard were intermixed like two separate puzzles that an angry child had tried to force together into one image.
“Determination.” The single word was spoken with a quiet vehemence.
Tangel chuckled as she worked to identify which pieces of the being were Iris, and which were the corrupted shard. Having been one of Iris’s mothers, and present for her birth, Tangel was better suited than most to determine which parts of the being belonged to her daughter, and which were part of the shard.
Several minutes later, Erin entered the room holding an AI core, and Tangel beckoned silently for the engineer to place it into her left hand.
With her right hand still connected to the comm tower, Tangel began to select the pieces of neural network that were clearly her daughter’s and place them into the AI core. Bit by bit, she reconstructed Iris’s mind into the form it should have, all the while wishing she had the crystal backup of the AI’s mind, but unwilling to leave Iris in the living hell that was being merged with Airtha any longer.
She was partway through the process when the corrupted shard began to understand what was happening. It started to destroy parts of Iris’s mind, and Tangel was forced to wipe out core parts of the other being to paralyze it.
After another ten minutes, she’d extracted every part of Iris and reconstructed her in the core she held in her left hand. All that remained in the comm tower was the corrupted shard. She swept through its remains three more times, ensuring that no further parts of Iris remained.
So much missing, she whispered to herself and pulled her hand away before glancing at Erin, who was watching with wide eyes.
“I can’t believe you did that…and so quickly.”
“Stars,” Tangel muttered, looking down at the core in her hand. “Felt like years.”
“I was monitoring the node…it was Iris in there, wasn’t it? You saved her.”
“Most of her,” Tangel qualified, then reached out to Iris.
With that, she activated the node’s shutdown process and let Iris fall into sweet oblivion.
Turning back to the comm node, Tangel gave it one final look, and then reached out, dissolving the matter and letting it fall to the deck as a pile of oxidized dust.
“That’s final,” Erin said.
“Best end for that thing.”
“No argument here.”
The two women walked out of the room and down the ship’s central corridor.
“I suppose that means only Fina and Seraphina hang in the balance now,” Erin said after a minute. “Could you piece them back together like you did with Iris?”
Tangel pursed her lips as she considered it. “Maybe…though I’m better with AIs than organics…that’s the Angela part of me at play there.”
“Makes sense.” Erin’s words were sober. “I suppose we need Earnest back for that.”
“Yes. Once he and Terrance are done dealing with the core AI installation in the IPE.”
Erin’s head whipped around, and she stared open-mouthed at Tangel. “Wait…what?”
“They found the installation that was manufacturing the star-shifting drones,” Tangel explained. “Sorry, I meant to pass that on to you—I knew you’d be interested.”
“Stars.” Erin shook her head, a far-off look in her eyes. “That’s an understatement. What are they going to do?”
“Destroy it, I believe.”
“OK, for the second time, what?”
Erin’s question was nearly vehement, and Tangel wondered what she was missing.
“Well, I guess they said ‘shut it down’. Sorry, I haven’t slept in a few days and I barely had time to consider that message. It came through Khardine and routed to Sera. She told me about it.”
“I’m going to contact Earnest,” Erin said after a moment. “I can’t imagine he’d destroy the core AI facility there, but I need to be sure. For starters, we need that facility to re-position the stars. Then we need to understand how it’s working so that when we find more clusters that are being shifted, we can correct them as well.”
“Can’t we use the same system we’re using for Project Starflight?” Tangel asked. “Asymmetrically burn the stars to shift them back into place?”
Erin laughed and shook her head as they reached the airlock. “Sure. I mean, it’ll work, but what if the core AIs worked out a more efficient system? It’s worth investigating at least.”
“Fair enough,” Tangel said. “Let me know what they say.”
“Sure will,” Erin said, gesturing for Tangel to pass down the umbilical first.
When she reached the other side, Sera and Finaeus were waiting, the former president of the Transcend tapping her foot as she glared at Tangel.
“You know I hate being left behind.”
“Couldn’t be helped, Sera,” Tangel said with a grin. “As it was, I almost didn’t make it. But we got her, and I saved Iris. Plus, that rogue corrupted shard is done. I’m going to count this as a very good day.”
“Just five more Widows out there as well,” Finaeus added. “Who knows? We could have things squared away here in just another day.”
“Then where to?” Sera asked.
Tangel glanced at Erin and then back at the others. “I have a suspicion we’re going to be visiting the IPE again.”
DIRECTION
STELLAR DATE: 10.11.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS I2, Airtha
REGION: Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
“We have to quit meeting like this.” Tangel gave Bob a wan laugh as she walked into his primary node chamber.
“Did you not get it?” Tangel asked. “I feel like you asking means you got the joke.”
She shook her head, a rueful smile on her lips as she settled onto a seat next to a monitoring console.
“I can’t believe it’s done—well, other than taking out a couple of Widows.”
Tangel made an instant connection, surmising where he was going next.
“Are the girls OK? And Priscilla?”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming. A big one.”
Tangel was out of her seat in a heartbeat, her hands gripping the railing at the edge of the catwalk. “What!?”
She peeled her hands off the railing and began to pace across the catwalk. “It’s the conditioning, isn’t it? Somehow it took hold more than it should have.”
“Because it fits. Saanvi would never let Cary do something so crazy, but with the conditioning to make them better able to fit in with the Widows, they must be obeying her unquestioningly, since she’s assumed the role of A1.”
She looked through the inbound messages and saw that it had been routed via the regular message queues—which was why Bob saw it first. Tangel willed herself to calm down, knowing that if things were dire, Joe would have reached out to her directly.
“He must know that I’d rush out there,” she said after a minute.
Tangel shot Bob’s node a cool look, held it for a second, and then nodded, her self-deprecating laughter echoing around the chamber. “I thought you couldn’t predict what I do. Aren’t I the great unknown in your algorithms?”
“No, I suppose you don’t need any advanced algorithms for that, do you?”
This time, a truly amused laugh came from Tangel as she wondered how Bob had phrased the question when he’d queried other mothers on the ship. She decided not to ask—it might have ended in her laughing at him, not herself. Despite his elevation to an ascended AI, he still didn’t quite understand things like playful mocking.
“Annnnnd now I’m uncalm again.” She wondered if he was carefully managing her. Probably is. It’s probably necessary.
“Oh shit,” Tangel muttered. “Have you forwarded that to New Canaan yet?”
Tangel snorted. “Now that’s a new way to say that the ends justify the means.”
Tangel considered Bob’s words, seeing the truth in them, even if it was a near-semantical nuance. “OK, I can go with that. Either way, you’
re right. If that use of pico gets us Garza and the Widows, then no one is going to raise a big stink about it.”
Especially because the general sentiment amongst the population is to end the war quickly and get their families back home.
She stopped her pacing and leant against the railing.
“That will just about neutralize Orion—at the very least, stop them from gathering new allies in the Inner Stars.”
“True, though the intel alone will be invaluable.”
“We don’t have details as to where we’d jump into the Karaske System, do we?”
“I guess I’ll have to wait till someone is in dire need and says, ‘jump here, now!’ ”
“Why indeed.” She drew in a deep breath and pushed off from the railing. “OK. I’m going to let my girls and husband handle things and trust that they’ll call if they need me.”
“Be nice, Bob.”
Yet another laugh burst from Tangel. “Stars…you’re just a jokester tonight. Something in your power supply?”
That was the topic Tangel had expected to discuss before Bob dropped the bomb about Cary masquerading as the A1 Widow. She wasn’t sure if it would be any easier.
“OK, lay it on me.”
“I noticed that.”
“Technically, didn’t Airtha make Helen do everything? She is a shard, after all.”