The Arwen Book two: Manifest Destiny

by Timothy P. Callahan

  “Good, find the code and remove it.”

  The Arwen found what Juliet was talking about. A small section of code which didn’t look out of place to her. When she complied it she found it was the message the Admiral gave ordering her into the wormhole. If she removed it that order would be lost and she would stop. This was a direct order from the highest level of the corps and needed to be followed. “Commander, I can’t do that. This is a direct order and I can’t ignore it.”

  “No, it’s not an order,” Juliet said. Arwen detected panic and frustration in her voice. There was even a trace of anger in the vocal analysis.

  “Could you ignore a direct order? What is your plan Juliet? Are you working for the Handlers now?” It all made sense. Of course she was working for the Handler’s, she has always been working for them. Strange images of Juliet talking to a Handler formed in her memory banks. Arwen watched video of Juliet using a private communicator to give the Handler’s the location of the Arwen. It was her that provided the details to them on how to open wormholes inside a ship. As she looked at this evidence she felt sicker, was it a human emotion for treachery or something else? “I have proof! How did you keep it from me for so long? You are working for the Handlers!”

  “What?” Juliet said. Now there was fear and confusion in her voice. “Arwen, that’s part of the virus, it has to be. It’s making you believe things that never happened.”

  “No,” Arwen replied. “My system is too complex for that. I’m going to alert security. You’re going to be under arrest. I’m going to take over the Arwen and we’ll continue into the Wormhole.”

  Juliet turned and ran out of the Hologram room without another word. “You can run, but they’ll get you! They’ll get you!” Her childlike hologram in the hospital gown yelled before fading away.

  *******

  Captain Cook watched as the battle played out around her. The ships of her fleet, even in their depleted state, were holding off the assault. Years of research and tactics, earned from the blood of thousands, played out in front of her in a triumphant dance of destruction. The battlesphere was alive with bright explosions, the glow of missiles and the blinking of powerful energy cannons. They would probably win this battle. For the first time since the war started Marjorie felt they might possible win the entire war.

  Lee stood next to her watching the same thing she was. She could see pride beaming from his eyes. A lot of the tactics being used he had pioneered, seeing them working must have been a thrill that she could only imagine. “Isn’t it wonderful?” He asked, mostly to himself but Marjorie nodded in agreement.

  The communication officer walked over to Captain Cook. “Captain,” he said, “The Arwen just sent out a strange broadcast message to all the ships in the fleet.” He handed her a data pad with a transcript of what he had heard.

  The Arwen had ordered Commander Monrow under arrest. She was a Handler trader and no longer in command of the Arwen. A fear gripped Marjorie in her heart. This was her worst case scenario; the Arwen had taken over with nothing she could do to stop her. “Admiral, I’m heading back to my ship.”

  “Captain Cook, you can’t.”

  “Stop me,” she said handing him the data pad. As she walked out he read the report.

  “Hal,” Admiral Lee said, “get a shuttle ready for the Captain. Have the closest escort ship protect her as she heads back to the Arwen.”

  Captain Cook paused at the door, turned and nodded in thanks. The elevator door opened and she jumped in.

  *******

  Juliet ran down the hallway hoping not to meet any security personnel. She had no idea what she was going to tell them but she had to convince anyone that the Arwen was compromised.

  It made sense now. That code she found when the Arwen was first acting strange, she couldn’t understand it not because it was encrypted but because it was written in the Handler’s language. And it was still there, she never removed it. She cursed herself for her own shortsightedness. They must have activated it when they attacked.

  She turned a corner and nearly ran into a group of seven guards. The man in front grabbed her, but not hard, mostly it seemed as if he were trying to stop her from crashing into anyone else than to retrain her. “Commander, we got a strange message from the Arwen to arrest you for treason?”

  She sighed in relief. Of course they wouldn’t believe the Arwen when she gave a strange command, it was simple common sense. “The Arwen has been infected with a virus enplaned by the Handlers. It’s reprogramming her personality and giving her strange orders. I’m heading to the computer room to shut her down. I may need some help. There are some safeguards in place that we might need to disable.”

  The guard gave her a skeptical look. She noticed and ear piece and from the look on his face and the brief pause she knew he must have been listening to it. “The Arwen said you’d say something like that.”

  Juliet pulled the earpiece out of his ear, her voice got forceful. “I’m the second in command of this ship. Captain Cook handpicked me for that duty. The Arwen is a computer program and can be easily deceived. You decide who to believe, me or her and while you’re waiting I’m heading to the computer room to save our lives. Now move.”

  She pushed passed the stunned guards and ran as fast as she could down the hallway. She let a small smile pass her lips when he heard the guards say, “come on, we need to help the Commander.” Followed by the heavy footsteps of seven guards her.

  “Commander, what kind of countermeasures are we looking at?” The head guard asked breathless.

  “Not too sure,” Juliet admitted. “They didn’t tell me too much, only that if an alien force tried to get into the room they had some countermeasures to be sure it wouldn’t be easy. What would you have done?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Guns located in static places. Probably some sort of force field to protect the door.”

  “Great,” Juliet said with sarcasm. “We’ll have to look out for those things and whatever else the Corps came up with.”

  All seven of them boarded the elevator and headed down. The computer room was deep inside the ship and took up a large portion of the lower levels. Arwen’s computer was very complex, it normally took a team of seven to keep it up and running smoothly. The fate of those people worried Juliet, could Arwen actually kill a person? Wasn’t that against her programming? Rule number one or something?

  However, this wasn’t the Arwen she had known. If they couldn’t get her back Juliet would have no problem killing this one. They had just backed her system up a few months ago, the backup that wasn’t infected so even if they had to wipe the memory of Arwen she could always be rebuild.

  The door opened and right away Juliet saw the first of the countermeasures, a machine gun lowered from the ceiling and opened fire.

  Things happened so quickly she didn’t have time to processes them right away. Once the gun fired she found herself on the floor of the elevator, a knee in her back holding her down. She heard the guard shout something followed by a violent exchange of gunfire that rattled her to the core. Debris from the wall fell all around her body. She heard someone scream in horrible pain before it was suddenly silenced. The firefight lasted several seconds but Juliet knew she would be reliving those seconds for the rest of her life.

  “Clear!” The head guard yelled and she felt his knee off her back. He held out a hand and helped her up. “I’m sorry about that, didn’t want you getting in the way.”

  “What was the scream?”

  He pointed to a body on the ground. Juliet gasped at the site and turned away. The question of whether the Arwen could kill someone was answered in the bloodiest way possible. “Who was it?”

  “Baun,” the guard said. “He was a good man. We’ll worry about that later. We have a long way to go before we reach the main door. Don’t even know how many of those turrets we’ll see.”

  ******

  Captain Cook pushed the shuttle as fast as it could go in an effort
to reach the Arwen. So far she saw no slab slowing her ship. The engines were glowing white with a large plume extending outwards, a clear indication she was moving at full speed and heading for one of the many silver beta wormholes.

  The wormholes had surrounded the fleet making escape impossible. She saw the destruction of the fleet she was responsible for in details too clear for her to ever forget. The battlesphere was filled with black slabs trying to attach themselves to any ship they could find. If not for the protection of from three destroyers and about fifty fighters she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  She didn’t want to outrun her escort but she needed to reach the Arwen soon. She tried her best to contact her ship but was unable too.

  Something exploded in front of her and she had to cover her eyes for a second. When the flair faded she saw something that put fear into her heart. A Beta wormhole had opened and she had only a second to react.

  The shuttle banked to the left and barely missed the first wave of black slabs that poured through. She thought she was dead, there could be no way to avoid them all, no way her escorts could do anything but delay the inevitable. It was a nice ride, Marjorie thought, but now it’s over.

  Captain Cook watched with amazement as the slabs changed color from black to white. It was so unexpected she hardly noticed that they had surrounded her shuttle and were forming some sort of protective cocoon around her ship. Some of the slabs in front of her changed their colors from white back to black. It took a moment for her realize they were forming word, words in Common: Follow.

  Follow where? She thought and, as she did the words shifted to form a second word: Friend.

  They could have killed me at any time, she thought. Maybe they were the ones who brought Ann into my life. She looked around at the hundreds of slabs surrounding her. What other choice did she have? She had to follow and she did.

  Chapter forty-six

  The hallway was lined with the deadly machine gun turrets. They had been discreetly tucked behind the walls. Juliet had spend many hours walking down the halls toward the computer room and she had no idea they had been installed. They were impossible to see unless you were looking for them and even then you needed to know where to look to even spot the seams in the wall.

  The guard, which Juliet discovered was named Adams, looked around a bend then quickly returned. “Okay, we have three on the right wall, two on the left. Schmid, Jules, and me will take out the ones on the right, Kellso and Wats take out the ones on the left.”

  Juliet felt helpless as she watched Adams and his team work. She should have been helping, she should have been giving the orders, it’s what the Captain would do, right?

  The five men jumped into the open and each one fired their rifles at nearly the same time. One shot was all that was needed to destroy the guns. One gun got off a short burst before exploding and one of the men, Jules, went down in a heap. Juliet ran over to him and turned him over. The energy beam had sliced through the armor and the flash under it. Jules gasped for breath for a few seconds before his body fell limp and his eyes grew cold.

  “At this rate we’ll never make it,” Adams said. “Can we cut the power to the guns somehow?”

  Juliet thought about it for a moment. She was, after all, one of the people who helped put the Arwen together. She had to have known something. She looked up and saw ducts lining the ceiling. “Her power goes thought those ducts. We could cut it to her if we knew which wires to cut. That’s a main power duct so there are probably a lot of other power sources running through it. I don’t want to disrupt any vital systems.” She pulled out her communicator. “Chief, are you there?”

  Seconds later the voice of Chief Mcferren replied, “Go ahead.”

  “Chief, we need to cut power to the Arwen’s main computer. She’s gone rouge. Do you know where that power is coming from?”

  “Not off the top of my head but I can find out. Give me a few minutes.”

  “We might now have that much time so hurry please.” She turned him off and switched channels. “Bridge, this is the commander, what’s going on up there?”

  A young female voice replied. “We’re still heading toward the Wormhole, I figure we’ll be inside in less than seven minutes.”

  “Understood, keep me up to date on what’s happening. Commander Monrow out.” She looked at Adams. “Have some of your men get some force fields out of storage, we’ll wait here until they return. Hopefully the Chief will get back to me about the power.”

  Adams waved two of his men away to get the generators while he leaned against the wall. “I don’t have much hope that the people inside the Arwen’s computer room are alive.”

  “She could have just locked them down, made sure they couldn’t get to her.”

  “I hope your right,” Adams said.

  “I wonder what’s going on outside,” Juliet mussed. Her communicator beeped and she scrambled to answer it, “go ahead Chief.”

  “I found the power supply but you’re not going to like what I’m going to say. The power for the computers are tied into the power for the ship. From what I can make of it that was done to prevent an alien force from doing what you’re thinking of doing. If you cut those wires you cut off all power to the ship.”

  “Well that we don’t want,” Juliet replied. “Okay, keep looking for something.”

  “I found something else,” He said before she could turn him off. “That system only extends to the hallways. Once you’re inside the room you can cut power to the computer and it won’t affect the ship. You just need to get into that room.”

  “We’re working on that. Thanks for the information, I’m sure we’re going to need it.” She turned to Adams, “Okay, we have less than 6 minutes to get down the hallway, into the room, and disable the Arwen.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to do that before my men arrive,” Adams replied. “We need a direct frontal assault and we need it soon.”

  “Wait for your men with the shields, that’s an order. I’d rather go into the wormhole and see what’s in store for us there than to have any more of your men killed.”

  “It’s sort of our jobs to put our lives on the line to save the ship.”

  “I know, but don’t be brave to the point of stupidly, we have time to plan. Also, don’t think anything we do is going to surprise her, she’s probably monitoring everything we’re saying and is planning a way to defend against it so even with the force fields this will be a tough fight.”

  Adams nodded in acknowledgment and the small group waited in silence.

  *****

  Grand Admiral Park watched the destruction around him with a never ending grin on his face. This was the first major engagement of the Hander’s under the new tactics, using the new shields and it was working. The space station was protecting those ships which didn’t have the new shield technology, those that were out of range were being protected by his ships that also carried the new shields. Without fear of the shields being vibrated apart Captain Cook’s fleet was able to deal with the Handler’s slabs at their leisure, destroying anything which came close.

  The Captain, where was she? He looked at the scanner readouts and was unable to find her shuttle amongst the noise of the battle. Even the Arwen was hard to spot. “Sensors, can you spot the Arwen or the Captain’s shuttle?”

  “No, sir,” His sensor officer replied after a quick glance at his readings. “They’re in a very strange section of the battlesphere, lots of interference from the opening Beta wormholes. I’ll focus more on those areas to see what I can find.”

  “Thank you,” Grand Admiral Park replied. He worried about the Captain and her ship. That ship was the most important ship in the fleet from a moral standpoint. If they lost the Arwen it would be tough blow to withstand.

  Fifteen slabs flew in front of the view screen. One by on the gunners blasted them out of space before they had a chance to even attempt to get close to his ship. The black debris continued to zip through space and would
for all eternity.

  How much longer could they keep this up? He wondered as the battle raged around him. They were using mostly energy weapons and had an unlimited supply of power but they didn’t have an unlimited supply of time. Eventually they would need to leave and with the wormholes preventing them from moving they would have to leave using Alpha Wormholes and using those in battle was a very dangerous task. He was sure they were up to it, he just didn’t want to plan for it.

  One of the monitors caught his eye. He walked over to it and watched as a large group of slabs pulled away from the battlesphere and formed up. Soon the others left the battle and added to the pool. “What’s happening?”

  Hal chimed in this time. “Sir, they’re leaving the battle and forming up outside the sphere.”

  “I can see that Hal, why? What’s going on?”

  “I speculate they are either regrouping or retreating.”

  “Well we can’t have either and I don’t plan in staying around to see which. Tell all ships get their bullets ready to fire, we’ll all meet up at a secondary site.”

  ******

  The guards who were sent out to get the force fields arrived with fifteen reinforcements behind them. Juliet saw the extra men and nodded, thankful the crack team of specialist had more brains than she did. They passed out the force field belts and active them. Twenty personal force fields cracked into existence and shrouded each person in a shimmer. “All right, we don’t have much time,” Juliet said. “We’re going to need a full charge. I don’t think the Arwen’s countermeasures can withstand such a blunt attack-“

  “Yes, they can.” Arwen said from the speakers in the wall. “Any direct or indirect assault will end with the death of everyone in the hallway. I’d rather not kill anymore but I will if I need too.”

  “Arwen, only you can stop this.” Juliet said and got back silence in return. She looked at the security team and continued. “She’s trying to intimidate us. It’s not going to work, right?”