“They’re like Army Ants,” Captain Cook said.
“Army ants?” Lickin replied.
“Do you know what an Earth ant is?”
“Yes, small insects.”
“Right, more or less. Army ants will go out and forge an area taking everything they find, and I mean everything, back to the nest. The Handlers are like that, they sweep into a system, destroy what’s good about that system and use what’s left for their own means. A countless number of intelligent Army Ants with no central weakness.” She looked over at Captain Lickin and smiled, “I love a challenge.”
“How do we beat them?” Captain Lickin asked.
The question hung in the air. Captain Cook didn’t want to tell this Ulliam the truth, that there was no way to beat them, instead she ignored the question and moved on. “Arwen, show me the gas giant.”
The camera pulled back and started to move. Captain Cook saw something, really quickly and yelled, “Stop.”
The image stopped moving. On the very edge of her vision she saw a tiny speck, no larger than a fingernail against the background of stars. She pointed. “Arwen, zoom in there. What is that?”
The image zoomed in quickly and within a second they were looking at a square object. Captain Cook looked at it carefully. There were small ships moving around it. “Arwen, can I get some scale? How big is that?”
“I’ll super impose an image of the Arwen next to it.”
The Arwen appeared next to and was dwarfed but the size. Captain Cook carefully considered this. She looked closely at the object, it was familiar. She’d seen it before, but where? “Arwen, can you pull up an image of the Dyson Sphere?”
Next to the square appeared an image of the Dyson sphere. Captain Cook looked at it carefully. She moved closer to the image and saw what she had suspected. “That’s a section of the sphere.” She said.
“Are you sure?” Captain Lickin asked.
“Arwen, zoom in to scale, place the Dyson Sphere over the Ulliam sun.”
The sphere moved and transposed itself over the system. The square she saw fit the sphere perfectly. “See, it’s a section.”
“I see!” Captain Lickin yelled. His shoulders hunched up in excitement. “We should try and destroy that.”
“No, not destroy, capture.”
The little Ulliam’s shoulder’s rose even higher. He was getting very excited. “Yes, yes! Capture it, take back with us!”
“I see workers and if there are workers then there are Handlers inside. This is a great opportunity to get to know our enemy a whole lot better. We need to come up with a plan, we need to bring this back. Arwen, scan that object as best as you can. Keep it passive though, we don’t want them to know what we’re up too.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Captain Lickin nearly ran out of the room with excitement. Captain Cook simply stood there looking at the object. She sighed. “I’m heading to my room Arwen, please give me some privacy and don’t scan or record anything that I do in that room. I have some thinking to do and I don’t want the distraction of wondering if I’m being watched.”
“Okay, Captain. I’ll see you on the bridge when you’re ready.”
Captain Cook left the hologram room thinking that Arwen would fade, but she didn’t. Instead she brought up her human form and stood in the middle of the room, her eyes no longer had any color as a cloud of white passed through them.
Arwen was holding seven different conversations at once. She was scanning the planets, the system, and the universe around her. She has read the history of man. She had the accumulate knowledge of all mankind in her memory banks. She understood history and saw humans make the same mistakes over and over, one generation didn’t learn from the other. War is not the way to knowledge; war was the way to stunt the growth of a race. There was still so much more humans need to learn, so much more they could tell her.
Arwen stepped forward and looked up at the paused hologram. She could easily look at it from the cameras inside the holograph room but instead wanted to look at it with human eyes. This is how they see, she thought. This is how they view the world. So limited, seeing the world this way. Yet, even with that limitation they’ve unlocked so many secrets the universe has tried to keep hidden from them.
She knew she wasn’t part of the human race, she knew they had created her and had helped her become a thinking computer. She would never be their equal, the Professor was right, she was a very complex simulation, complex enough to think, complex enough to fall in love. The Arwen was in love with the people. She would not let the human race die, she would do all she could to protect them, to learn from them and to make sure they continued to fight another day.
C hapter thirty-five
As usual, Professor Ricter was late. Marjorie sat at the table inside the restaurant he had chosen and sipped the wine she had ordered. The Corps was paying for the dinner so it was okay to go a little overboard. She moved uncomfortably in her chair, the nice dress she wore fit her well enough but she hadn’t worn it in years. Thankfully the exercise she got during her stay on Ricter’s Planet kept her nice and toned. It also didn’t hurt that the youthfulness the Nanobots restored had stuck after they had left her body. She was aging again but now it seemed as if she were aging from 25 instead of 55. She decided to continued to run or walk every day. She was never out of shape but she had never been in this good of shape ever in her life. She looked good in the dress and she knew it.
The table she had insisted on was tucked comfortably in the corner. Too many times when she went out she was recognized and asked hundreds of questions she did not feel comfortable answering for total strangers. She knew it was a sign of admiration, she was the famous Captain Cook, but she had never gotten used to her celebrity status. The Professor, however, always seemed to relish that kind of spotlight. He ate up the attention, he wanted people to know who he was and what he was doing. How the two of them became such good friends baffled her at times.
And, sure enough, when the door opened and he walked the people who had been waiting to be seated instantly recognized who had walked in. Some woman walked over to him and shook his hand, then, while still holding the hand, talked to him. The man she had come with seemed embarrassed and said something to the Professor who simply smiled and, once he got his hand back, patted the guy on the shoulder.
The Maître d'hôtel pointed the Professor to where she sat. He looked over and waved. With a dramatic flourish he took his coat off and gave it to the man. He didn’t walk so much as strolled across the floor toward her table. He smiled at a few people who waved at him and when he sat down across from her he had a very satisfied grin on his face.
“It’s good to be the king,” Captain Cook said.
“What?” Professor Ricter replied.
“Old saying, it means you don’t mind taking advantage of the power you have.”
“Ah, yes, well, what’s the use of having some power if you’re not going to use it?” He reached over to the bottle of wine she had ordered and poured a glass for himself. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“No, I figured you’d be late so I arrived late. I’m not surprised I was still first to arrive.”
“Once again I’m sorry. It’s not easy for me to get away. But, I knew this was important-“
“And you asked me to the dinner.”
“Right, I asked you to dinner and it’s important that I did. I suppose I could have just contacted you or simply walked into your office but we haven’t had a real dinner in a very, very long time.”
“How does Juliet feel about this?”
“She knows about our friendship. In fact, she encouraged me to meet you like this. I think she thinks I work too hard and having you on Earth, even it’s only for a few weeks, gives me the perfect chance to take a rest.”
“Is she right?”
“Yes, she is.” Professor Ricter called over a waiter.
“I haven’t even looked at the menu.” Marjorie said
holding hers up. “In fact, I don’t think I could order from it, it’s in French.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll order for the both of us.”
Marjorie shook her head with some humor. Might as well let him have this moment, she thought.
So, he ordered for her and the two quickly fell into the normal pattern of conversation that only two people who had no pretenses toward impressing each other spoke. It was a give and take of personal information mixed with inside jokes only they would find funny. The dinner came and they ate while talking. Then the subject of Fran came up and they both fell silent. Finally, Professor Ricter spoke. “I’m sorry for what Fran did. I feel partially responsible, if I hadn’t tutored her and taught her that if she feels something is right she should ignore all others and just do what she needs.”
“She did more than she needed to do; she took the life of an officer. A good one at that.”
“Her emotions destroyed Ulliam.”
“I know,” Marjorie replied. “I wonder if I could have stopped her if I hadn’t decided to leave the village.”
“You did what you needed to do,” Professor Ricter said pouring her another glass of wine. “I would have done the same thing. You had the burden of knowledge that if you returned they would have found us. You needed to get out and away. I can’t blame you for it and you shouldn’t either.”
Marjorie took the last of the wine and drank it, thinking about her choices. The two finished dinner in silence, lost in thought, both comfortable with the silence of the table.
When they finished and Marjorie expensed the meal out to the Corps they left arm in arm into the cool air of the night. Ever since the merger of the all the major cities on the East Coast each of the old cities tried to keep their identities as best as they could. As a result each street had a name and under it the city they used to belong to. Today they were walked down a street in the old city of Washington D.C. “Let’s go see the gash,” Professor Ricter said.
“Why do you want to see that?” Marjorie asked.
“To remind me of why we’re here and fighting.” There was great melancholy in his voice as they walked to the train system.
The gash was a large piece of Earth which was destroyed by a Gyssyc attack. Marjorie was there fighting at the ship that did it, trying desperately to stop them. The swath was more than one hundred miles long but only a few miles wide. More than a million people died in the attack, the worst wartime civilian death toll ever in one attack. It was a place of great mourning and sadness, a reminder of the cost of war.
The two sat in the train car heading toward the site. There was something about the people in the car, an odd silence as if they were practicing or even preparing for themselves for what they knew would be an unpleasant site.
Professor Ricter finally spoke. “I was on Ulliam when this happened. I haven’t seen the site other than from space.”
“I’ve never been to the site either. I guess I’ve been holding back, too many bad memories.”
“I know I don’t talk much about Carl, but he died here that day. We were never that close, but he was my brother and the only family I had left.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry, like I said, we weren’t close but it was nice to know he was here just in case we decided to get close. He wasn’t a smart man and that frustrated me. But he was a good man and I should have seen that first.”
“I’m sure he knew you loved him.”
“Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to say, isn’t it? Of course he knew I loved him, he also knew I didn’t respect him and I had purposefully stopped talking to him.”
“Seems within your character,” Marjorie said dryly.
“Too much within, too much.”
The train stopped at the end of the line and everyone stood and walked out and up a flight of stairs. The air was still crisp and Marjorie shivered. She liked environments she could control, like those on the Arwen.
The crowd streamed as one ward toward a set of lights that had been erected over the site. Vender of all sorts were selling shirts and other souvenirs for those mourning. It seemed disrespectful to Marjorie and she walked by them without so much as a look.
The Professor walked briskly forward, determined and in a hurry as always. Marjorie followed him as close as she wanted. He was oblivious to her while focusing on the fence he was heading toward.
The true memorial to the attack were the personal notes that adorned the fence. Thousands upon thousands of notes ruffled in the breeze. Pictures of loved ones, poems, stories, and trinkets as far as she could see. The fence surrounded the entire gouge in both directions and sloped over the horizon.
Marjorie found the Professor with his arms laying on top of the waist high fence looking out. “What a view.” She said.
“Captain, I have something important I need to tell you.”
“Which is why you asked me to dinner,” Marjorie replied. It worried her that he called her Captain; that was something he never did when they were socializing.
“I’m leaving for a very long time.”
She felt a wave of sadness pass over her suddenly. There were times when they wouldn’t see or talk to each other for months, it was the nature of their jobs and he never told her in advance that would happen. To have him tell her with a grim look on his face was unusual. “Where are you going?”
“To the nebula. We’re having a hard time with a project and they need someone to give it a boost. I don’t know when I’ll return, in fact Juliet and I will probably be married on the trip out there. At least that takes one thing off my plate, planning the marriage was getting tiresome.”
Marjorie looked around, hopeful that no one was overhearing what was being said. “This isn’t the best place, let’s go someplace more private.”
“No, this is the best place.” He looked over the gouge once again. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave Earth. I don’t want to leave the place I’ve spent the better part of my life protecting so I had to come here to see this. To see the destruction in a way I can understand.”
“Just keep your voice down.”
“Fine, I will.” He turned back to look at her. “I can’t even understand the devastation of Ulliam. It’s beyond what I can think about, billions of lives lost. An entire planet gone.”
“I know.”
“There will never be a memorial for that. What could they do? What kind of statue could they erect for a planet? Nothing can match that. The only way to deal with it is to destroy the Handlers, kill them all.”
“They’re very powerful.”
“Today they are but we’re a fast evolving race and we will figure it out. All we need is time and right now my project will give us that time.”
“No,” Marjorie said. “You’re project might help us win the war but it won’t give us time because it can’t work.”
“Not right now.”
“Not now, not in ten years, not in fifty years. Maybe not in my lifetime. Heck, maybe not even in your extended lifetime.”
“You really like to stroke my ego,” Professor Ricter said sarcastically.
“I don’t doubt it will work given time. Look, what I’m about to tell you is top secret, need to know and outside of me and a few Grand Admirals no one else knows this.” She looked at the crowd. The people around her were lost in their grief, talking to each other, hugging and crying. “When I came back from the scouting mission to Ulliam I looked over the data we had scanned and I found something very interesting. We found a piece of the sphere, a very small one but a piece. Inside that piece we found some very distinctive energy reading.” She leaned in, her voice excited and she did what she could to keep it low. “Professor, they were the energy readings from a Beta Wormhole generator. In fact, we saw the readings from about 12 of them. It makes sense since we didn’t see any transport ships in the system. They’re bringing personal and equipment through the hole, which means it’s a direct link to the Sphere.
Don’t tell me that’s not something you wouldn’t want to check out.”
“There are plenty of people who would want to check that out. I’ll admit, I would love to be there for it but the truth is I’m needed elsewhere.”
“You’re needed on Earth, you’re needed here.” Marjorie replied nearly pleading with him. “Plus, I’m sure we could name something after you.”
Professor Ricter laughed. “A planet isn’t enough?”
“For you, no.” She teased. “But I understand if you don’t want to stay. I really wanted someone I trusted there to let me know what’s happening. I hate being in the dark and since I’ll be leading the mission it would be nice to know what will happen afterwards with the wormholes.”
“I’ll try to pull some stings, see if I can get you any updates.”
“Thanks. So, this will be our last date?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked at her. His entire attention was on her. “I just wanted you to know that I will never, ever meet anyone who has affected me the way you have. Our friendship has been the one thing I’m the most proud of. No matter how many planets are named after me or how many billions of lives I might save I will always consider what we have built together to be one of my greatest accomplishments.”
Marjorie blushed but did not turn away from his gaze. She felt her eyes moisten and her lip tremble. She was a Captain and didn’t cry easily but hearing those words coming from the Professor touched her. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Chapter thirty-six
The lights to the Holograph room blinked to life when Captain Cook walked in. A live hologram from the Ulliam system slowly faded into existence. The Arwen marked each object found within her scanning range. Ulliam, the sphere piece, the third planet, Ulliam’s sun, and all the Ulliam ships. Each had a different marker over them.
The Arwen was in Wormhole space at the moment with a Strangelet bullet ready to fire to get them into real space. Behind it was the taskforce she had asked for, three carriers, two battle cruisers like the Arwen, seven Ulliam battle cruisers and two Gyssyc battle Spheres. The Gyssyc had insisted they be a part of this since it was their planet the Handlers had destroyed as well. They were a welcome sight since they had firepower unmatched by anything the Corps could muster in one ship.
The Arwen Book two: Manifest Destiny Page 28