Equally likely, though, they found themselves caught in a troublesome dilemma. They didn’t know whether he or Alex possessed the best, most relevant or most complete information. It was common in black missions for information to be compartmentalized, so they may each hold disparate pieces to the puzzle. Thus, their captors didn’t know who to threaten to sacrifice, and if he or Alex called their bluff, they couldn’t afford to go through with the threat.
At least, this would be the dilemma their captors would be struggling with if they were human. The reality looked a little different, so it could be he was flinging darts at the void.
The cell walls blocked all communication, quantum or otherwise—he knew because he’d tried them all fifteen different ways. He had no idea if Alex was okay, or what form or degree of ‘okay’ she might be. His instincts and experience told him she was alive, held somewhere in this facility and being subjected to interrogation similar to his own, but beyond those assumptions he was only guessing, and the guesses quickly led to far too dark of places.
A sigh escaped his lips to flutter against the restraining field. While he’d appreciated the alone time to gather his thoughts and analyze the situation, now all he was able to do was think, and thinking wasn’t turning out to be a healthy pursuit.
He needed to escape. Escape from this cell, find Alex and escape them from the facility, whatever and wherever it may be. All this went without saying.
But thus far he had no access to any tools which could enable so much as the beginnings of this series of actions. He had no access to anything at all.
His weapons—the ones he’d successfully concealed from security on Machimis—and clothes had been confiscated and replaced by a thin sheath, as if they were granting him modesty. He was held aloft in the air by forces which did not budge, not even when subjected to a forceful application of diati. He could not so much as move.
He hated it, but he was going to have to wait for a variable to change or a new one to be introduced.
He closed his eyes.
As the leader of a powerful Dynasty, Corradeo Praesidis created many offspring. So bonded were we with his genetic essence that we found pieces of us naturally joined to this progeny. The connection of these shards with Corradeo weakened but did not break entirely.
Generations beget generations beget generations as the Dynasties grew to subsume all bloodlines into their own. We were divided again and again, dispersed amongst a multitude. We became diminished.
We did not pass judgment on the shape the growing Anaden empire took under the Dynasties’ tutelage. Life which was born had always died, to violence above all other paths. The strong rose and, in time, were felled, to make way for new life. The epochs the Anaden empire had now spanned was but a blink of an eye, the exhale of a breath of the cosmos.
Yet if we were whole, we might have formed the cognized observation that the Anadens had faded to a shadow of the potential they once displayed. Though they believed themselves stronger than ever, though they in fact commanded more species and galaxies with each passing year, we nevertheless might have observed that somewhere along the way they had ceased moving forward, ceased evolving. They grew, but only in numbers: in worlds controlled, in enemies vanquished, in structures erected and planets consumed.
If we were whole, we might have determined the Praesidis family had lost its spirit, its fierce zeal for life and the determination to protect it which had drawn us to Corradeo Praesidis epochs past. We might have abandoned them for the stars when son battled father and claimed the Praesidis crown as his own.
If we were whole, we might even have worried over the fact they then increasingly used the power we provided to them in ways contradictory to what their forefather had once championed, too often killing those who never fought.
If we were whole, we might have noticed we had faded along with the Anadens, until we hardly recalled our origins or purpose.
But we were not whole.
Caleb jerked awake at the sound of movement. Someone or something moved down the hall toward his cell. He breathed in, setting the lingering reflections from the dream to the side and preparing for the next unknown.
The woman who appeared strode through the cell’s force field like it didn’t exist. He didn’t need the telltale stirring of the diati within him to deduce she was not merely Praesidis, but an Inquisitor.
Soft curls of ebony hair framed chiseled features and irises that teased indigo blue beneath the fluid crimson. She wore a hip-length fitted black jacket over form-fitting black pants and a silver undershirt.
She was attractive, albeit in a terrifying, blood-curdling way, and somehow deeply…familiar. He blinked and her features shifted until Isabela looked back at him. But where Isabela’s face was warm and open, this woman oozed hardened malice from every pore.
He blinked again and banished the mirage. This was not his sister. This was the enemy.
He saw no hint of mirrored recognition in her countenance, but she’d probably studied him via a remote cam and internalized any reaction to the resemblance before coming to his cell. Instead she paced deliberately in front of him, studying him like he were an insect in a killing jar.
“What are you? Despite your physical appearance, you are not Praesidis. You are not Dynasty at all. Do you derive from some long-ago rejected Anaden lineage? Have you crawled your way out of the mud to arrive here and claim your perceived rightful heritage?”
He smirked at her.
“What was a Katasketousya doing with you in Machim Central Command Data Control? How was it helping you?”
He buried any surprise in his expression. He hadn’t expected her to fixate on Mesme, and the fact she did concerned him. He’d known the Vigil guards saw Mesme, but if they were honing in on this detail above others, it meant nothing good for the good guys.
She arched an eyebrow, and he realized in a few statements her body language had betrayed a more dynamic character than the Inquisitor he’d killed displayed in the course of a fight to the death. She was clearly an Inquisitor, but it was possible she wasn’t an ordinary one.
Her wrist flicked at her side, and diati surged through the field holding him up to encircle his throat and squeeze. “You will be dissected alive and your organs examined under a scope to determine their nature and origin unless you answer my questions. So start answering.”
He greeted the diati with his own, and instead of choking off his air, he sensed it absorb into his skin.
Her jaw locked in response to his apparent lack of discomfort, but in her unassailable arrogance she repeated the gesture. He suspected it had never once occurred to her that her power could ever be used against her. He’d enlighten her, but not until it was too late.
He claimed the new diati as his own, welcoming the heady rush it brought. In a voice without words it whispered of feeling emboldened. Strong.
She took several steps forward now, until she stood less than meter away, and glared up at him.
That’s right. Do it again. One more time.
“What are you?” She thrust her arm out, leaving only centimeters between her fingertips and his throat, and squeezed.
He renewed the smirk, because now he had her. “I’m you.”
He let loose the entirety of diati at his command, his and all he’d stolen from her. It swelled and merged with the power she still wielded, and the virtual cage pulsed then burst apart, sending her staggering backward on a wave of energy.
“What—”
His legs felt rubbery as they landed hard on the floor, but the adrenaline counteracted any unsteadiness. He lunged forward and grabbed her by the throat in a very real, very physical manner.
As it had done in the Siyane’s hangar bay on Seneca, the instant his skin touched hers the air surrounding them exploded in crimson.
She had never seen it coming, but he’d been here before. He welcomed the maelstrom of energy, opening himself up and asking the diati to come into him—and when it obeyed, he a
lmost collapsed from the surge of power. This was more, beyond any degree he’d expected.
Maybe he hadn’t been so prepared after all…he blinked, trying to focus. Alex. Have to get to Alex.
A single, overriding goal to fixate on brought with it a measure of clarity, and with clarity, urgency.
Strangling the Inquisitor would take too much time—time that was sure to bring security and other hindrances. He flung the woman through the air into the side wall and pushed through the force field into the hallway.
Alex? Valkyrie? Mesme? Can anyone hear me?
No one responded. But it could mean there was a comm block on the structure. It didn’t have to mean something worse.
He looked around and found he was located near the end of a row of cells. One of the Anadens’ standard interactive panels glowed at the end of the row.
Several of the cells he passed as he sprinted toward it were occupied, but he couldn’t stop to save whoever they held. The prisoners would have to settle for the promise of their captors being called to account one day soon.
In the weeks between coming to Amaranthe and making their first moves, they’d spent hours upon hours studying the common protocols used in Directorate-controlled locations, both so they would be able to function in Amaranthean society and for moments like this one.
The panel displayed information about the occupants of the cells on this row. He was prisoner #HR-MW26-6143.015-6. The identification system proved simple to decipher: sector captured in, date captured and, presumably, order of intake. A quick scan down the list revealed everyone else on the row had been here longer.
Praying the panel would provide facility-wide information, he fumbled through navigating to a directory. Seconds screamed by in his head while he figured out how to sort by ID then paged through screen after screen—
#HR-MW26-6143.015-7: Level 4, Wing D, Cell 8
The warmth of audacious certitude flooded his chest. I’m coming, baby.
He took off running.
PART VII:
BIODIGITAL JAZZ
“The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.”
— John D. MacDonald
AURORA
50
EARTH
MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK
* * *
“GDE YA?”
‘You are at Camp Muir on Mount Rainer.’ Historical records indicated the man had been a frequent hiker and had visited the location on multiple occasions.
“Da….” He gazed outward, taking in the expanse of snow-covered mountain peaks gracing the horizon and the hills of old-growth forested wilderness below, and seemed to reach an acceptance of the statement.
“Ya znayu eto mesto…or I once knew it.” He blinked as if concentrating. “No tam bylo…a battle. Kappa Crucis—nyet, another battle. Seneca. Inoplanetyani—aliens. Alex.”
He looked up to fixate upon a chosen point in the sky, his countenance now marked by an abrupt clarity.
With the last tiny gaps encouraged to bridge and close under the influence of his father’s living DNA, everything necessary to form a whole was there to be found. She surmised the memories, native and provided, were busily ordering and integrating themselves into his burgeoning consciousness even as his speech centers were settling into coherence along with them.
“You’re Valkyrie.”
She had not taken on a physical representation, for she expected that speaking to disembodied voices would be ingrained in his referential experience. Instead, her voice arrived on the wind. ‘I was, once, though I now think of Valkyrie as my sister. You may call me Vii.’
“All right, Vii.” He gazed around again then sat on a bare patch of ground and wrapped his arms around his knees. “I remember…I died. Or rather, I remember the final seconds of knowing I was going to die. But the memory is distant and vague. Like I watched it more than lived it.”
The reason this particular memory seemed different was because this version of him had never experienced it, of course. His neural imprint had been recorded fourteen months before his death, and any ‘memories’ of events after that point in time had been reconstructed from the historical knowledge of others.
This memory was particularly vivid thanks to Alex’s reliving of it on Portal Prime, but it was not his own.
She didn’t volunteer the information, however; delving into the minutiae of his situation could wait until his mind reached firmer footing.
“I doubt it matters. Like falling asleep, the transition to death is beyond our perception anyway, right? Then later, I woke up for a time. But I agreed to go to sleep—not dead, but quiet—because I was…fractured. Little more than a disjointed string of thoughts, with random moments of lucidity separated by long stretches of confusion, of neponyatnoe bezumiye.
“I feel…better now, I think. I feel…real.”
He laughed, warmly and with a surprising absence of bitterness. “But I’m not, am I? Not truly. This is a virtual environment—a very good one, so compliments to the creator—designed to make me feel as if I am the man I was. However, I imagine in reality I am for all intents and purposes an Artificial construct existing wholly inside an Artificial.”
‘No. You exist as qutrits, but the qutrits exist as quantum representations of you—as you were as a human and now of you as you are. Their firmware is your genetic code, their operating system your neural structure, their memory your memories.’
He was quiet for a time, staring off in the direction of Columbia Crest peak with a glazed, unfocused expression that suggested his mind’s eye was seeing somewhere, or some when, altogether different.
Finally he shifted around on the dirt and exhaled. “What happened? How long have I been gone this time?”
‘A great deal, and not so long.’
“Miri? Alex? Are they…?”
‘Alex has again placed herself in the direct path of danger, as she does, but as far as I can say she continues to draw air while fighting any and all comers. She left you in my care for safekeeping, and for the chance at a new beginning.
‘Miriam is well—beyond well by any objective measure. Many people believe her to now be the most powerful individual in the galaxy.’
He chuckled under his breath. “I am not the slightest bit surprised.”
‘We have much to discuss, and I will withhold nothing from you. But let us take it one step at a time. Relative to the physical world, time moves at a quite leisurely pace here. We have the temporal space to do so.’
“You think I’m in a fragile state still.”
‘I know you are in a fragile state still, David Nikolai Solovy. But you and I are going to change that.’
51
PRESIDIO
GCDA HEADQUARTERS
* * *
DEVON MARCHED INTO RICHARD’S OFFICE like the man on a mission that he was.
“I can take down Montegreu’s Artificial.”
Richard looked up in surprise. “Okay, first: how’s Emily doing?”
The simple question was enough to knock Devon off his game for a few seconds. He took a deep breath. “Possibly better, or better soon. Mia thinks she’s developed a way to kill the virus and reverse the damage it caused. We won’t see the effects of the treatment for a day or so, though.”
“Still, that’s great news. Second: what?”
“Listen, I get how Jenner wants to invade New Babel again and blow the place up, but the planet’s a fortress these days, so his plan’s too dangerous, too likely to fail, and also futile. By now, the Artificial will have built a backup somewhere else and will transfer itself there the instant the perimeter alarms are tripped. But I can take out the source—its core programming—and I can do it from right here on the Presidio.”
Richard stared at him strangely. “How do you know what Brigadier Jenner does or does not want?”
Devon peered at him oddly in return, as he’d thought the answer was s
elf-evident. “I know it because Mia knows it. The point is—”
“And how does…oh, never mind. I declare myself officially too old to keep up with all of you. But you have an awful lot of inside information to not work for SENTRI, and we haven’t yet gotten to how you know we’ve identified the Artificial as the perpetrator.
“Look, Devon, I would never question your talents. You were a genius long before you became a Prevo and joined with possibly the most formidable Artificial ever built. But how do you think you’re going to destroy it, from here or anywhere? Corner it in a commspace and convince it to commit suicide?”
Devon chuckled. “That’s a stupendous idea. But no.” He reached into his bag and removed the crystal disk he’d brought with him. It was suspended in the cushioning of a protective case; he set it on the desk, taking care not to drop it along the way. His nerves were shot from days of too little sleep and too many amps.
“I intend to use its own virus against it.”
Richard glanced at the vial and back at Devon, eyebrow raised in skepticism.
“This contains the pure, distilled virus code, extracted from the injector Jenner confiscated at Mia’s house. I’ll load it into my eVi, then Annie and I will inject it into the Artificial’s base operating system.”
“Before we get to ‘how,’ Devon, you’ll be infected, too.”
“The virus will be encased in a wrapper until we let it fly, so I doubt it. But we have a cure now, so if I do get infected, I’ll be fine.”
“You said Mia thinks she has a cure.”
“I’ll be fine.” He sighed. “The only things I don’t have are a way to locate the Artificial through the exanet framework and, once I find it, a way to bypass its external firewalls and gain access to it.”
Richard rubbed at his forehead. “Are you absolutely certain you want to attempt this?”
Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One (Aurora Rhapsody 7) Page 31