by M. D. Cooper
“How do you know what I did?”
“I confirmed that I absorbed it, but that’s hardly enough detail for you to have anticipated it. I could have done that thousands of ways.”
“Bob, let her tell it,” Tangel said, and the AI fell silent.
“Well,” Jessica began, shooting a mock-angry look at the overhead. “I’ve directly absorbed electricity before, so when I came face to face with the Caretaker—after crashing an ARC into its ship—I decided to try to absorb it. It swung two of its arms at me, and I grabbed them. Then I just sort of sucked the power out. Once I was brimming with it, I blasted it back at the thing, slicing all its limbs off.”
“Stars,” Tangel muttered. “Remind me to be extra careful next time I hug you.”
“I don’t do it all the time,” Jessica said. “It’s not like absorbing light. Conscious effort is required.”
Rachel snorted a too-loud laugh, earning her some curious looks from the bridge crew. “Sorry, I just had a funny thought.”
“Share with the class,” Jessica said.
“I was just thinking ‘Ascended Problems’.”
Tangel raised an eyebrow while Jessica shook her head.
“OK. It sounded funnier in my head,” the captain said in a muted voice.
“Plus,” Jessica held up a finger. “I’m not ascended.”
The captain shrugged. “You may not be all transdimensional like Admiral Richards, but you’re clearly at a higher level. That’s ascend-y in my book.”
“Missiles have reached the gates,” Scan announced, and the three women turned their attention to the location where the Exdali were still appearing as though from nothing.
“We jumped them a hundred klicks from the ring, just to be sure,” Tangel informed the other two. “We should know in about five more seconds.”
A single, slow breath later, the Exdali stopped appearing. It was almost as though a faucet had been turned off. The remaining trail of creatures continued to march toward the rift until the last one disappeared. Then Rachel nodded to one of the bridge officers, and the rift closed, sealing the strange creatures back in the dark layer.
Tangel dusted her hands off and grinned at Jessica. “OK, your mess is all cleaned up. Let’s go talk to your prisoner.”
Jessica blew out a long breath, nodding in silent relief.
“I guess I’ll coordinate with Carson while you have all the fun,” Rachel said.
“Privilege of rank,” Jessica said with a wink.
“She’s a rear admiral. Same rank as you,” Tangel said, elbowing Jessica as the two women turned and walked across the bridge.
“So? Pretty sure I have seniority.”
“Not time in grade,” Tangel said.
“You want to make me angry?”
Tangel laughed as they walked off the bridge and into the corridor beyond. “Stars no. I think I’m still just reveling in the fact that you’re back here with us.”
“Well, I’m not going to be a permanent fixture. I still need to get to Star City.”
“Of course,” Tangel replied with a nod. “Maybe this time I’ll come with you. Make sure you don’t get lost on the way.”
FATHER FIGURE
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Keren Station
REGION: Khardine System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
“I don’t know that I want to do this anymore.”
Jeffrey Tomlinson’s words stunned Sera. He had delivered them in such a weary tone and with so much remorse that she felt a pang of sorrow on his behalf.
She pursed her lips and rose from the sofa, walking across the small room to look out the window at Keren Station’s gently rolling hills that appeared to undulate around the interior of its habitation cylinder.
He didn’t speak as she stood for a minute, collecting her thoughts. When she finally turned and looked at the man who wore the face of her father, she still hadn’t come up with anything cogent.
“I don’t blame you,” was all she could manage.
A look of understanding came over Jeffrey’s face. “It’s hard to reconcile me with him, isn’t it?”
“It really is,” Sera replied. “He was such an…asshole. You seem like a half-decent guy.”
“Well, thanks for the ‘half’ at least,” Jeffrey replied. “Finaeus would probably agree with you about my partial assholeishness.”
“Sorry,” Sera said in a quiet voice. “I thought this would get easier, but it really hasn’t.”
Jeffrey nodded. “You’re telling me.”
“Because I look like her?”
He nodded, and for a moment, Sera thought he would look away, but he straightened and maintained eye contact.
“You should know that you’re the daughter I always dreamt I’d have,” he finally said.
The statement elicited a laugh from Sera, and she gestured to her red-skinned body, which currently had the look of a shipsuit.
“This is what you dreamt?”
“I don’t care what you do with your looks,” Jeffrey said, rising from the chair he sat in. “I care about your passion, your drive, and your honor. You’ve taken on so many difficult tasks, and they were all thrust upon you. You never complained, you just soldiered forward.”
Sera snorted and shook her head. “Oh, just ask Tangel and Finaeus. I complained a lot.”
“Well, that’s not the story they tell.”
“Then they’re too kind…and liars.”
“Probably.” A corner of Jeffrey’s lips turned up. “Finaeus always did like to bend the truth to suit himself.”
Sera nodded wordlessly, staring into the eyes of the man she didn’t know—yet did—as he looked back at her with a similar expression.
“So, what do you want to do?” she finally asked, thinking back to her conversation with Jason.
Everyone wanted out of the war, wanted out of the endless responsibility for the fate of humanity.
Jeffrey stepped up to the window and stared out into the settling dusk. “It’s all just so different. Did you know that we thought that the FGT was just going to fracture when I…left? Everything was getting so big and far apart, communications took decades. I’d hoped that Kirkland wouldn’t be able to maintain his myopic vision, and we could all just muddle along. Trust Finaeus to invent jump gates and turn all that on its head.”
“So you’d hoped everything would fall apart?” Sera asked, mouth agape once the words tumbled out.
“Yes!” Jeffrey threw his arms in the air. “It’s all too big, too hard to control. It would have been better if humanity could have just spread and spread and become disconnected.”
“War would destroy a lot of that,” Sera countered. “Like the dark ages. People just clawing at one another till there was nothing left.”
“I guess it was stupid anyway. Now that I understand how the core AIs were manipulating everything, there was never any safety in general dispersal. They would have kept us at one another’s throats even when it made no sense.”
“Well, we’re winning.” Sera offered the words with the hope that the man before her would show some of the spirt she knew him for. “In a few years, it’ll be over.”
“No,” Jeffrey shook his head. “Not until the core AIs are destroyed. Until then, we’re all at their mercy.”
“Agreed. Tangel intends to do just that, ultimately. There are plans underway.”
“Like Finaeus’s secret base in the galaxy’s 3KPC arm?” Jeffrey’s tone was derisive. “It’s going to take a lot more than that.”
“Oh, we know,” Sera replied. “There are more facilities in the works, which you must know about by now. Don’t be so argumentative.”
“I suppose I saw something about them,” he allowed. “It’s a lot to absorb. You know…two weeks a
go, there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to carry on with my duties as president. So far as I was concerned, no time had passed, and in my mind, I was still the president. But….”
“But?” Sera pressed.
“But I’m not. That Transcend doesn’t exist anymore. Back then, we were a loose conglomerate that supported the FGT’s continuing mission. In addition, we were quietly working to rebuild the Inner Stars. We weren’t this massive empire.”
“Neither was Orion.”
“They were closer to it than we were…I was proud of that.”
Sera turned and leant against the windowsill. “I can’t imagine how it feels, coming back to see everything so different.”
“That’s just the thing.” He continued staring out the window, not turning to look at her. “I didn’t ‘come back’. For me, this was the blink of an eye. Everything changed in an instant, and….”
Sera nodded. “And it’s all insane, right?”
“That’s putting it mildly.” He turned and met her eyes, his filled with sorrow. “Yet…”
“Yet?” she prompted after he didn’t continue speaking.
“We set all of this in motion,” he finally said. “Set the stage for all of this.”
Sera opened her mouth to respond, but he held up a hand to forestall her.
“I know what you’re going to say.” Jeffrey threw a hand in the air as he spoke. “Others have said it before. It all would have happened anyway, even if the two Tomlinson brothers hadn’t come up with this crazy idea of ‘Future Generation’ terraforming. And maybe it would have. But I still had a hand in it…. A lot of the way things are is my fault.”
As Sera listened, the man changed before her eyes. Gone was the father figure who had lorded over her for so long, a specter in her mind even after death. Instead, there stood a man like any other. Someone who wanted to do the right thing but was beginning to buckle under the weight of all his past mistakes.
She smiled. “As someone who has held the title you now bear, I can’t level a single iota of judgment at you.”
A look of sorrowful acceptance settled on Jeffrey’s face. “I feel like such a failure. I all but demanded the presidency from you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I all but pushed it on you.”
“Funny how even with perfect recall, our recollections are so very different.”
Sera nodded. “I’ve noticed that in life. So is that why you called me here? To ask me to take the presidency back? You know that I was transitioning it to Tangel even before we found you.”
“I saw signs of that.” He chuckled. “She had a better handle on things than I did, and she’s only been aware of the Transcend for a few years.”
“She’s really good at figuring out what makes things tick.”
“Still, we both know that our people need their own leader—just not me.”
“Well, it’s not me, either,” Sera replied, feeling a sense of panic. Her sisters were in no condition to take over; she’d thought that her father would be her salvation.
The crushing weight of responsibility began to lever its way back onto her shoulders, and if it weren’t for the presence of the man who wore her father’s face, she would have let her tears flow.
Then he said something that completely surprised her.
“Of course not. It’s clear you don’t want it at all.”
Her brow creased in frustration. “When has that mattered?”
“When has it not?” he countered.
Sera wanted to reply ‘Always’, but she knew it wasn’t fair to berate Jeffrey for the sins of his clone.
Instead, she responded with a question of her own. “So if you don’t want to run the Transcend, and you know I don’t want to, then who? Finaeus would just disappear into the ether if we tried to foist the job on him.”
“What about Andrea?” her father asked, his expression unreadable.
“Oh, fuck no!” Sera exclaimed. “I’d take over again before I let her ruin everything further.”
Jeffrey’s face fell, and she realized that he took ‘further’ as an accusation.
“You know what I mean,” she grumbled.
He nodded. “Of course.”
“OK, so now that you’re done baiting me, who are you actually proposing?”
“What about your cousin, Krissy?”
Sera raised an eyebrow. “She wanted it, back when other you died. She only let me have it because I had Admiral Greer’s and Tanis’s backing.”
“And now?”
“Maybe,” Sera allowed. “I don’t think she’d say no. What about Greer?”
Jeffrey laughed. “I’ve known Greer for a long time. He has zero political aspirations. The fact that you got him to take as large a role as you did was a miracle.”
“Honestly…” Sera drew out the word. “I think some of that was Mother’s doing. She maneuvered me into just the right spot to become the leader of the Transcend, with all the right people around me. If Sabrina hadn’t appeared at the perfect time with Finaeus aboard…. Stars, who knows where we might be.”
“Stars indeed,” her father said. “OK, I’ll talk to Krissy. I’m happy to stay on as an advisor, but….”
Sera reached out and took his hand, unable to remember the last time she’d touched her father outside of a handshake.
“We can plan later. For now, let’s just take a breath,” she suggested.
He nodded silently, and she gave him an encouraging smile.
Neither spoke as they turned back to the window, watching as dusk fell and lights came on across the inner surface of the habitation cylinder.
He’s not my father, though I suppose that’s one of the things that’s helping.
PART 5 – COMMS
INTO THE MAW
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Cora’s Triumph
REGION: Interstellar Space, Inner Praesepe Empire
“So, what do you think?” Terrance asked Earnest as the engineer reviewed the readings.
“Only so much we can tell with passive systems,” he said after a minute. “Logic dictates that there’s got to be a planetary core down there, otherwise why have your drones all clustered like that?”
“Maybe it’s convenient.” Wyatt’s tone suggested that it was exactly how he’d store his planet’s worth of drones when he wasn’t using them.
Terrance clenched his jaw, surprised at how difficult he found it to get along with the FGT scientist—which was saying something, considering that most of his life had been spent amongst engineers and researchers.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Emily, the FGT’s stellar mechanics engineer, said. “Maybe because dumping them together like that creates a gravity well that later you’ll have to propel them out of—not to mention that the ones in the center are constantly fighting against being crushed.”
“And fuel, and repair,” Terrance added.
“Not sure about that,” Earnest said while continuing to stare at the readings. “If these drones are single-use, they won’t need those things.”
“Not very efficient,” Wyatt muttered.
Terrance sighed. “We’re not really here to determine if the core AIs could be more efficient.”
“No, but it does help us learn more about them,” Wyatt countered. “And we know damn little.”
“More and more each day,” Terrance said absently, doing his best not to engage.
“Hey, what’s that?” Emily asked.
“Been wondering the same thing,” Earnest replied. “A moonlet of some sort.”
“Think it’s command and control?” Terrance asked.
Earnest straightened and nodded. “There’s low-level EM coming from it. More than any natural source suggests.”
“Could be heavy in uraninite,” the FGT scientist said.
“Sure,” Earnest shot Wyatt a sour look. “Just a whole bunch of a useful volatile, right beside a planet’s worth of drones—and they haven�
��t tapped into it at all. I think that’s exactly what’s going on.”
“Don’t have to be an ass about it,” Wyatt muttered, and Emily barked a laugh.
“I won’t go so far as to use the word ‘consensus’, but have we reached something close to it?” Terrance asked. The others nodded, and he reached out to Captain Beatrice.
“Sixteen hours,” Terrance relayed. “I’m going to catch some sack.”
“Wait,” Wyatt raised a hand. “Sixteen hours till what? The TSF sends a fleet?”
“Wyatt,” Emily whispered, a smirk on her lips. “This ship is the fleet. We’re going in to take a closer look.”
“I’m not front-line!” Wyatt proclaimed. “I demand that we return to Pyra, or somewhere else marginally civilized, so that me and my team can leave.”
“Are you kidding?” Emily shook her head in disbelief. “This is the find of a lifetime, and you want to run away?”
Wyatt sniffed. “I’d prefer to call it a strategic relocation.”
* * * * *
Nearly sixteen hours later, Terrance stood next to Captain Beatrice on the Cora’s Triumph’s bridge, watching the moonlet grow larger on the forward display.
“Thought you’d be down with your team,” the captain said with a smirk. “Get their observations firsthand.”
“I’ll get what I need up here,” Terrance said with a quiet laugh. “Besides, for what we’ll likely be doing next, your bridge crews will be running the sort of scan we need. Down there, they’ll be…well, sometimes it’s easy for folks to sink so deeply into their profession that they have trouble seeing things other than through its lens.”
“I suspect that that happens to us all,” Beatrice said.
“Sure,” he nodded. “Just some worse than others.”
“What of Earnest?”
A grin settled on Terrance’s lips. “He’s built up a special immunity over the years. He also enjoys needling fractious people.”