by M. D. Cooper
They were clearly close, and in many ways, a family. That bond was their strength and would see them through anything their universe could throw at them.
She felt glad to have found them, as she was not sure she would have been able to locate and stop the Reavers without their help.
But all good things come to an end.
As much as she’d love to stay a while longer, she knew she couldn’t. She needed to get back home, but not before stopping by and seeing Tanis.
She’d put a fair bit of thought into the prospect over the last day, and there really was only one way to make it happen, given how this universe worked. She needed a ship.
Tanis was a long way off, but Amanda was determined to see this through. She wasn’t sure when she’d be able to return here, and she wasn’t about to head home without at least trying to see her friend.
Using her Aetheric Sight, she could see the crew in other parts of the ship. Many of them were already up and moving around.
With a last glance at Cheeky and a smile to herself, Amanda climbed off the bed and made her way to the shower. She’d not been in it long when Cheeky appeared around the corner with a smile on her face.
“Room for one more?” the pilot asked.
* * * * *
Amanda sliced off another portion of sausage and skewered it with her fork before placing it into her mouth. Misha had cooked an excellent breakfast, and now stood leaning against the stove.
“So, how long are you going to be staying here for?” he asked, his tone abrupt.
Amanda laughed and Cheeky looked up at him. “Don’t be so rude,” she admonished.
“Hey, just asking,” Misha replied, raising his hands in defeat.
“It’s fine,” Amanda smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair today I think. I’m determined to try and visit Tanis.”
“How are you going to do that?” Cheeky asked.
Amanda smiled. “In my universe, the Magi travel the stars in vessels we call Aether Ships. Basically, they’re magical starships—”
“Are you going to Magic one from thin air?” Jessica asked, walking into the room.
“Pretty much,” Amanda replied. “I’m going to need a space to do it in, though, like a docking bay or something.”
“I’m sure we can arrange a loading bay. Sabs?”
“Do you mean to say you weren’t watching us last night?” Cheeky asked.
“I know what you meant,” Amanda smirked. “And yes, you can watch. You can all watch me do it.”
“Speaking of ‘doing it’, did you have a good night?” Jessica asked. “I could hear you and Cheeks all the way across the ship.”
Amanda laughed. “It was a very pleasurable evening, thank you.”
“Shame you couldn’t join us,” Cheeky added with a wicked smile.
“Maybe another time. My man needed some attention,” Jessica replied.
Amanda smiled, loving the open and uninhibited nature of the crew. She wondered if it was like this everywhere throughout human space in the universe.
“He could have joined in too,” she shrugged. “The more the merrier.”
“I see that some of Cheeky’s nature has rubbed off on you,” Jessica commented.
“Not really, there were other things of Cheeky’s that rubbed off on me though.”
“Too much information,” Misha exclaimed, looking flustered, much to the amusement of the girls.
“Excellent, thank you,” Amanda replied. “Are we able to disable any security cameras in there?”
“Good morning,” Jinx said, greeting everyone and moving to sit beside Amanda.
“Careful, Jinx, you’ve entered the innuendo zone,” Misha said in mock warning.
“Morning,” Amanda said to the AI.
She’d enjoyed talking to Jinx the night before; the AI had chatted with her for a while, asking about her universe and what it was like there. She’d seemed genuinely interested, and Amanda had enjoyed explaining it to her.
“I’ve been processing everything we talked about last night, and I wanted to put something forward for you to consider,” Jinx said.
Amanda nodded. “Sure. What is it?”
“I explained to you about how I have spent most of my life inside a navigational computer. It was only by the aid of people like the crew of Sabrina that I am free and here today.” She turned her attention to Jessica. “I am eternally grateful for everything you guys have done for me, but I feel like I need a fresh start, somewhere else.” She focused again on Amanda. “Which brings be back to you. I am fascinated by what you described to me about your universe—it sounds like an incredible place. So I was wondering if you might consider taking me back with you?”
“Oh, wow. Okay,” Amanda replied, a little surprised by the request. “Um, I’m not sure—”
“I of course would understand if you would prefer not to, or if there are restrictions about this kind of thing that I am unaware of,” Jinx said.
“Are you sure about this?” Jessica asked, concern in her voice.
“I spent much of the night going through this, and spoke to Sabrina and Iris about it too,” the AI told her.
“And you think this is a good idea?” Jessica asked the ship’s AI.
“I will not go back to that life.” Jinx’s tone was steely.
Sabrina said plainly.
“Well, you can’t get much further than another universe,” Cheeky commented.
Amanda nodded, thinking through the implications of what this would mean.
There were AIs in the Nexus, so it wouldn’t be as if she were bringing anything truly unique over, and there were plenty of others crossing between universes it seemed, so an AI shouldn’t make too much of a difference. She wasn’t sure how Void would feel about it, but she honestly couldn’t see it being too much of an issue.
“So, what do you think?” Jinx asked, looking up at her with hopeful eyes.
Amanda nodded. “I think we can work this out. I’m going to say yes,” she replied.
A huge grin spread across Jinx’s face.
“Thank you,” she exclaimed, and pulled Amanda into a hug.
* * * * *
“Alright, here we are,” Jessica said, leading the group into a nearby docking bay, complete with large airlock doors that took up almost all of the far wall.
Amanda admired the space as she entered. There were a few crates along one side, but it was otherwise empty and perfect for her needs.
“So, what happens now?” Jessica asked.
Amanda turned away from admiring the room and looked back at the purple woman and the rest of the crew.
“Well, if you want to hang around, I just need some space and no interruptions for a little while. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Jessica smiled and nodded. “We can do that.”
“Are you sure?” Trevor asked.
“We’re not exactly known for our stoicism,” Cheeky added.
“Okay, okay. Stars, you guys,” Jessica said. “Private Link chatter only until Red says otherwise.”
“Cheers, guys,” Amanda said with a smile. Then she stepped away from the group.
They fell silent. Amanda could see the Link communication between them intensify, but she ignored it as she faced the room. Picking a spot, she sat down on the deck and crossed her legs. She closed her eyes and used her Magic to slowly
draw in Essentia from all around her, being careful not to pull it in too fast and strain herself again.
In her mind, she began to visualize a ship. A small ship that could sleep maybe four people on bunks…something just big enough for her and Jinx to live in for a little while as they made their way to where Tanis was.
She envisioned a sleek, chrome vessel with red markings on it, and held that image in her head as she pulled on the Essentia within her and shaped it into the form of the ship.
She thought through the inside space and how it would be laid out, as well as the inner workings of it—which were minimal, given that it was powered, like all Aetheric ships, by a Magical core rather than an engine, an item imbued with certain enchantments that moved the ship.
In this case, a red oval gemstone in the main console.
She was unsure how much time had passed as she looked over the ship in her mind one last time, making sure everything was as it should be before infusing it with the last bit of Essentia needed to finalize the design.
Pleased with her vision, she opened her eyes and looked up to see a gleaming white chrome ship with red markings, hovering a meter above the ground in the middle of the bay.
With a smile, she sent a command to the ship’s core, and the main boarding ramp levered open with a swift, silent motion.
“That was…awesome!” Cheeky said out loud.
Amanda blinked, her acute time sense telling her she’d been at this for a couple of hours. She stood up and turned around to face the crew, who had made themselves comfortable as they’d watched the ship form from nothing.
“That was impressive,” Jessica agreed. “Nice design, too.”
“Thanks,” Amanda replied. “Now that I have my ride, I really should be going.”
Jessica stepped forward and offered her hand. “Thanks for an entertaining couple of days, it’s been wild.”
Amanda shook her hand, and then pulled her in for a hug. “My pleasure. Hopefully it’s not been too crazy.”
“Just crazy enough, I think,” Jessica laughed.
Amanda smiled. “Take care of yourself.” She turned to Cheeky and embraced the pretty blonde. “Come here, you. Thanks for everything.”
“My pleasure. It’s been amazing. If you’re ever back in our neck of the woods, feel free to drop by and say hello. I’ll keep my bunk warm for you.”
Amanda winked at her as she pulled back. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
She went down the line, shaking hands with or hugging the rest of the crew, saying farewell.
“Thanks, Sabs. Hopefully I didn’t leave too much of a mess behind,” she said.
“Nothing we can’t fix, just glad we could help,” Sabrina replied, her mobile frame smiling back at her. “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime.”
“Just don’t bring any dragons, if you come again,” Misha added.
Amanda smirked. “I’ll try not to.” She turned to Jinx and smiled. “So, you still want to do this?”
The AI nodded. “I do.”
“Then let’s go.”
Amanda waited as Jinx said her own goodbyes, then with a final wave, they boarded the ship. Amanda Linked her mind with the core, and an Aegis snapped into place around the ship as the ramp closed.
Information flooded through the Link. She took the coordinates of the system and fed them into the core so it could plot a course. She could see the a-grav shield that held the atmosphere inside the open docking bay doors, and she slowly eased the ship out through it, into the void of space.
Through her Link to the ship, Amanda could see the crew of Sabrina standing in the hangar bay, watching the ship as she moved away from the station. With a smile, she fired up the ship’s Flux Drive and jumped to warp, knowing that Jessica and the others would only see the ship suddenly streak away into the black and disappear from view.
* * * * *
Amanda sat in the command chair on the bridge of the Aether Ship, watching as the countdown on the screen grew closer to zero, and hoping the ship would drop out of warp precisely where they needed to be.
It had been a sedate few weeks, as the craft barreled through space at speeds that Amanda found almost impossible to fathom— even so, she had managed to use her Magic to give them a boost and bring the travel time down a little. She had spent her free time resting, getting to know Jinx better, swapping information about each other’s universes, and playing a few games…including Snark.
She wondered if a few weeks in this universe would translate to a few weeks in her own, or if the timestreams were different. Maybe they moved at a different speed? It would be something to look at another time, she thought.
Bringing her attention back to the HUD on the main screen, the numbers on the countdown reached single figures, and then finally hit zero, and the ship dropped out of warp. A planet shot out of the darkness to fill the viewer as they slowed to a more sedate speed, and Amanda stood up to get a better view.
“Wow, pretty awesome, huh? I wonder if this is where Tanis lives.”
“From the charts Sabrina gave me, that’s Carthage,” Jinx replied. “And stars above, that’s a lot of ships.”
Amanda nodded mutely as she looked at the display of space around the planet. There were so many vessels that the individual markers formed a solid mass.
“How many are there?”
“Ummm…” Jinx tilted her head for a moment, then glanced at Amanda. “Close to a quarter million…though it’s really hard to say, since so much of what is out there is debris from the battle Jessica told us about.”
“Any sign of Tanis’s ship?” Amanda asked.
“Nothing yet,” Jinx answered.
“And we’ve not been detected?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m not seeing anything suspicious,” Jinx replied.
Amanda nodded in satisfaction. She’d guessed that it would be a little dangerous for an unknown ship to suddenly appear insystem, so she’d built several enchantments into the Aegis that would render them invisible to both passive and active scan systems until they were able to find Tanis and Bob.
Amavia believed, given her long history with both Bob and Tanis, that the admiral would most likely be on the I2, Bob’s ship, and have told the AI about Amanda’s arrival in this universe.
“Just be careful where you fly,” Jinx warned her now. “There’s stuff everywhere out here. It’s going to take them forever to clean this mess up.”
“This shite is all over the shop,” Amanda agreed.
Using the core, she urged the ship on and boosted closer to the planet, scanning the area for any trace of the I2. She’d assumed such a huge ship would be easy to spot, but with so many other engines flaring brightly as various craft worked to clear the debris, it was hard to find any sign of their quarry.
After half an hour, they finally caught sight of the massive craft as it came around the far side of the planet, high up in a geosynchronous orbit.
Amanda set a course and eased their ship toward it, taking care not to disturb any debris that was likely being tracked by monitoring systems.
“How close should we get?” Jinx asked as they closed to within one hundred thousand kilometers of the ship. “Wow…that thing is over thirty-six kilometers long! It’s gotta be bigger than a whole battle fleet.”
Amanda nodded absently as she considered her options. “I think for now we should stop here, and I’ll Port over to find Bob.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
The Magus conjured a second set of senses close to the huge ship and looked it over, hunting for something that mirrored Sabrina’s node. The AIs aboard Sabrina had informed her that Bob’s would be similar—though much larger, as he was a multi-nodal AI, and comprised of several AI cores linked together throughout the ship.
She grunted in surprise on
seeing thousands of AI nodes, spread throughout the ship. So, not so straight forward after all.
She was quickly able to sort out the ones that were paired with humans, and the ones in mobile frames, such as Jinx and Iris. Once those were filtered from her view, there were still hundreds of AI nodes embedded through the ship.
Then she noticed a cluster standing out very brightly against the others, the interconnectivity between them far more complex than anything she’d seen so far.
One of the nodes rested in the center of the forward section of the ship. She made her choice. Concentrating, Amanda Ported, appearing inside.
“Hey, Bob.”
A SURPRISE GUEST
STELLAR DATE: 06.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS I2
REGION: Carthage, New Canaan System
Bob watched the space surrounding the I2 with an intensity few could match.
Too many fleets had gotten too close to the worlds of New Canaan for him to trust that the Intrepid Space Force could detect them before an attack commenced.
And so he watched.
At present, the multi-nodal AI was observing a periodic disturbance roughly one hundred thousand kilometers off the I2’s bow. It wasn’t visible on normal EM bands, but that was not the boundary of Bob’s vision.
In extradimensional space, there was a definite flicker of energy. Something he had been expecting to see for some time; an encounter that he didn’t expect to be convivial.
The energy surge flared brighter, and then was gone. Fourteen nanoseconds passed in which he searched earnestly for its new location, when suddenly, a surge of extradimensional energy registered in his primary node.
A woman stood on the catwalk surrounding it. She was short, wore a white shipsuit with no insignia, and had long, red hair. This assessment was made in the space of twenty-two microseconds.
The lack of a helmet ruled out her being a human infiltrator—in his experience, humans were unlikely to expose their heads in dangerous situations.
The only other possibility is that she is one of the core AIs.
A millisecond had passed between when the woman appeared and when he arrived at this conclusion, which was estimated with only seventy-one percent certainty, but that was more than enough for him to snap a stasis field into place, encasing her in a solid bubble that burned away part of the deck in a brilliant flare, before the grav field lifted it in the air and surrounded it with vacuum to keep stray atoms in the air from impacting the stasis field.