by M. D. Cooper
Tanis nodded absently.
Tanis grunted in response and turned her attention back to Elena.
Tanis couldn’t be certain, but Elena’s concern seemed genuine and she decided to lay it out and see what Elena offered in response.
Elena nodded.
Elena nodded, and the information flooded across their connection. Tanis passed the data on to Bob while storing a copy to review later.
Tanis sent an affirmative response. She understood Bob’s caution; if there was something in the Transcend that could produce a hack, which Bob would term ‘insidious’, then there was no need to let that entity know Bob existed, or that he could reverse its work.
Tanis shook her head at the title. She thought she had left this sort of responsibility behind in Victoria, yet now it was back on her shoulders—yet this time not as Lieutenant Governor—now the buck really did stop with her.
Brandt replied.
Tanis chuckled. Brandt was right about that. In a corps where the average Marine stood well over two-hundred centimeters, Brandt’s diminutive one-sixty was almost comical. Her slight build had earned her the nickname “The Pix” though it was something no one called her to her face.
Brandt made up for her small stature with a command presence that cowed even the largest Marine under her command—but the one thing she couldn’t bully into place were a lot of mods in her small frame.
Tanis leaned against the wall and took a look around. Knowing that Sera could be restored took a load off her mind, but that was just the beginning. Andrea and Mark had tried to assassinate a foreign head of state, and she couldn’t just let them off with a slap on the wrist.
Just as she was thinking she needed to see him, Joe materialized in front of her, holding their tiny daughter in his arms. She wished he really were there, not just a hologram projecting from their cabin. Embracing her family was just what she needed right now.
“You need a hand?” he asked. “I can have someone look after Cary.”
Tanis leaned over and looked into the face of her little girl. She hated that she had to be away from her so much, but soon they would be out of Ascella and things would calm down.
“I hate to ask it,” Tanis replied. “She needs her parents—at least one of them—to be around.”
“She needs them to be alive and their starship to remain in one piece even more,” Joe said with a raised eyebrow. “I’m at Tracy’s—she’s off for the next few days and can watch her. Even if she gets called in, her oldest two are used to looking after little ones.”
Tanis nodded. Tracy was a good woman, and her cabin wasn’t too far from theirs. “I see that you already planned to get back on duty.”
“Well, technically you outrank me and can tell me no…but yes, I need to be out there.”
Tanis understood what he meant. “Corsia has the pinnace coming in with a…friend of Sera’s. Catch a ride on the return trip and get to your captain’s chair.”
Joe smiled and tossed her a casual salute. “Aye, aye.” He held up their daughter. “Say goodbye to Mommy. We’ll check on you real soon.”
Tanis blew her daughter a kiss, then took a deep breath as Joe and Cary disappeared from view.
AWAKE
STELLAR DATE: 12.29.8929 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Intrepid
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
Sera’s head screamed with pain, as though someone had drilled a hole in her skull and poured acid inside. She bit back a sob and tried to regulate her breathing.
“Good, you’re awake,” a voice said. “From what I can tell, you’re probably in a bit of pain. We’re working on that. Helen should also be back with you in a minute or two.”
Helen! That was part of the pain. Sera was subconsciously trying to access her connection with Helen and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t the phantom limb sort of ache one got when an AI had been removed cleanly, but r
ather the screaming agony of a pulverized appendage.
The pain began to recede and Sera thought that perhaps she recognized the voice that had spoken—though she couldn’t place it. She knew that she should be able to, but couldn’t drum up the name no matter how hard she tried.
That was the other part of the pain; she had no access to her digital data stores. She was thinking with pure organics, something she hadn’t done in decades. She tried to focus, to access her data volumes, but where there once was instant information, there was nothing but searing agony.
She felt so slow and stupid. Her state should have been immediately obvious, but she hadn’t even realized how severed she was from her implants. A dim recollection of how this could have happened clawed its way into her conscious mind, and she whispered a single word.
“Mark.”
“Good,” the voice said, “you have access to your organic memories. Means this is working.”
Sera began to hear other voices around her, of people moving about, focused on their work. She was indoors, in a room, perhaps a hospital by the sterile smell. She shifted and, in the moments before her nerve endings set new fire to her brain, she realized that she was strapped down.
“Try not to move. You got hit by no small number of pulse blasts,” a different voice said. “The Marines exercised some restraint, but not as much as they could have.”
Sera could not place the new voice, but she knew what Marines were. If she had been shot by them and still lived to tell the tale, then she had reason to be grateful. Still, try as she might, she could not remember enough to even guess at why she had been shot.
“OK,” a third voice said, this one only vaguely familiar, “let’s try and re-activate her internal mods.”
“Brace yourself,” the first voice said. “This is going to hurt.”
Sera couldn’t imagine anything hurting more than the pain she already felt, but she was wrong. A scream tore out of her; she felt as though her brain was tearing itself to shreds, but then the agony subsided to tolerable levels.
That was when the pain from her body began to take over—her broken bones and damaged organs letting her know just how upset they were over her current state.
“Can you do something about how much this hurts?” Sera managed to whisper, her voice cracking as she struggled to speak.
“In a moment, dear,” the first voice said. “We have to finish with Helen, then you’ll be back in full control of your mods and you can suppress the pain.”
Sera grunted in response, and, true to her unseen benefactor’s word, Helen was back just a few seconds later.
Sera said in agreement.
Sera sent agreement to Helen. Her AI was right; somehow they had been subverted—and in very short order, too.
Helen’s response was a pulse of mental uncertainty, and Sera gauged the wisdom of opening her eyes to see who was tending to her wounded mind and body. Curiosity won out and she cracked her eyelids and peered around the room.
The first face she saw was that of Terry, head of the Intrepid’s Net Security division. Terry’s presence didn’t surprise her. Aside from Bob and his avatars, few knew the ins and outs of the human mind and its many possible modifications—and weaknesses—better.
At the foot of the bed was a woman she recognized vaguely, but that her re-established digital archives identified as Dr. Summers.
Beyond her, in the shadows, stood Flaherty. He hadn’t spoken, but she wasn’t surprised to see him there at all. Sera gave him a weak smile, and turned her head to the left, looking for the third person.
The face staring down at her was vaguely familiar, but the long fangs and red eyes made recognition difficult. She didn’t recall any suckers being present on the Intrepid. That sort of behavior didn’t fit well with people looking to build a colony.
“Don’t you recognize me? We’ve been through too much to think we could be strangers,” the woman said.
“Elly!” Sera exclaimed. “How the hell are you here...and why are you a sucker? Never mind, I know it’s a cover—I hope it’s a cover.”
“Nice to see you, too. And of course it’s a cover. Do you know how much of a bitch it is to eat around these damn teeth?”
“I can only imagine,” Sera replied absently. “What I really want to know is how did Mark hack me? I thought we removed The Hand’s access.”
Elena nodded slowly and looked up to Terry. “I’m not really sure, to be honest. As far as I can tell we had completely removed it ten years ago, but when they brought me in, it was there the same as before. Almost like I hadn’t done a thing.”
“Great, does this mean I will be at their mercy forever?” Sera asked, looking between Terry and Elena.
Elena appeared uncertain while Terry shook her head. “Absolutely not. We’ll square this away.”
Helen passed a feeling of agreement to Sera.
A memory of what she had done while subverted flashed into her mind.
“Oh shit, is Tanis OK? Stars, she must want to kill me right now,” Sera said aloud.
“She’s fine,” Dr. Summers said from her place at the foot of the bed. “And you seem to be nearly recovered—mentally at least—if you can recall those events.”
“Do you remember what happened when you were in private with the envoys?” Terry asked.
Sera did, and it shamed her that her people would do such a thing. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath.
“I do,” she said after a minute. “They want Tanis dead and…they were willing to sacrifice me to do it.”
“What?” Dr. Summers exclaimed. “Those bastards!”
Sera ignored the doctor’s outburst and her eyes darted between Terry and Elena. She saw Terry nod slowly, and Elena become more guarded. She knew that Bob and Tanis would have ferreted out the truth behind Andrea’s intentions by now. Terry would have been briefed and the concern in the woman’s eyes was palpable.
It was an understandable emotion. The colonists aboard the Intrepid really couldn’t catch a break. Even the Transcend, who should have been their benefactor and savior, was opposed to them. Or at least to Tanis.
“Do you guys think you could leave me for just a bit?” Sera asked. “I really need a few minutes to myself.”
Dr. Summers and Elena both looked to Terry, who nodded.
“And the restraints?” Sera asked.
“I’ll advise Tanis on your condition,” Terry replied solemnly. “They’ll come off on her order only.”
Sera nodded silently, keenly aware that much of the goodwill she had earned with the Intrepid’s crew had been lost—involuntary actions notwithstanding.
ESCALATION
STELLAR DATE: 12.30.8929 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Intrepid
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
Tanis paused and placed a hand on the wall. She took a deep breath and Linked with the bridge.
Tanis stepped into the center of the hall outside the entrance to the holding room. She surrounded herself with holodisplays showing the space surrounding the Intrepid.
The two stars of the Ascella system danced around one another in a tight orbit—tight for stars, at least—with a current separation of only one-hundred and fifty AU. Their proximity was one of the reasons that the system remained uninhabited; the stars stirred up too much chaos to make Ascella a safe place to settle down.
Between the two stars, there were seventeen major planets and hundreds of dwarf worlds. A morass of asteroid belts circled the stars, with clusters of dust, ice, and rock in the Lagrange points between the stars and their major satellites.
The moment they dropped out of the dark layer and back into normal space, she had taken one look at the system and known why the Transcend used it. It was all but purpose-built for war.
Angela said.
Angela sent an affirmation, and Tanis briefly considered the power of the Transcend—to remake worlds within the Inner Stars less palatable, just so that they could hide in them was serious long-term planning.
Beyond the initial three locations Corsia had reported, the Intrepid’s probes and cloaked fighters had positively identified seven more base locations and several more suspects.