by M. D. Cooper
Elena had tried to explain to Jutio that her own skin was just that, a part of her. It was one of the few things that The Hand had not altered during her service. Now that was about to change, as well.
Ahead, and on her left, a woman rose from a console and left the room. Elena thought her gait looked familiar and then bit her tongue to hold back an expletive. Sera had been in the room with her the whole time!
Elena waited five minutes, the longest she dared, given the tight timeframes, and then rose from her console and exited the room.
Back in the hall, her Link to the local networks came back online, and she resisted the urge to message Sera directly. Instead, Elena piled up verbal abuse she would heap on Sera in the lift, or wherever she was going to ‘upgrade’ her.
She moved as quickly as she dared to the lift Sera had mentioned and stepped into it three minutes later. Seconds before the doors shut, the woman she had seen in the comm hub slipped in and gave her a grin.
The smile slowly shifted as the face changed to Sera’s.
“We’re secure,” Sera said.
“If we’re secure here, why did we have to type at each other in the comm hub?” Elena asked with a scowl.
“You look so fierce when you’re angry,” Sera chuckled and traced a hand down Elena’s cheek. “I had to hide in there so his tracers couldn’t pick me up. I still have fifteen minutes here before I’m visible. It’s as long as I can get.”
“What about this elevator? We can’t stand in here for seven minutes, anyone could come on,” Elena replied.
Helen said.
“OK, let’s do this,” Sera said and took Elena’s face in her hands as the lights went out and the elevator fell silent.
Elena closed her eyes. “I’m going to get you for this, Sera. Does it hurt?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s somewhere beyond excruciating. Actually, Jutio, could you knock her out?” Sera asked.
“Oh, for fuck…do it, Jutio,” Elena said.
* * * * *
Elena woke up and her internal HUD informed her that eleven minutes had passed. Her skin felt strange, as though it were tingling and burning at the same time. She held out her hands to see that her skin looked mostly normal—though more tanned than her usual pale complexion.
Sera stood above her and extended a hand for Elena to grasp.
“Gaahaahhh, that feels so weird,” she said when Sera touched her.
“Yeah, it has really heightened sensitivity, far more than natural skin. I’ve told you that,” Sera replied.
“You have…but it’s different to experience it. So that’s it, just a few minutes and now I can do that face-molding thing you do?”
“You’re a bit more limited—at least right now. Your new skin is still just skin-deep, your bones are unchanged, so you can’t alter their structure like I can—that’s another upgrade I picked up from Tanis—but it’s enough for the cover I set up.” Sera gestured to the lift’s shiny doors and Elena could see that her skin was more olive than tanned in its shading, and her eye-shape was much different. Her cheeks and lips were also filled out, a stark difference from her normal, almost gaunt look.
“And I can just change this whenever I want?” she asked.
“Yeah, but don’t do it ’til you get on your ship. It can be a pain to master right away and I don’t want you messing up your cover.”
Elena gave Sera a long look. “You be careful with your father. If he suspects you for some reason—something we’re giving him with my hasty departure—you never know what he’ll do. Stars, he exiled Andrea, and he liked her.”
Sera nodded somberly and embraced Elena before giving her a long kiss. She pulled back and stared into her eyes.
“I will. I’ll see you in Canaan. One way or another, wait for me there.”
“Until the end of time if I have to,” Elena replied, getting caught up in the moment, though she knew she shouldn’t.
“Hey, no! Don’t wait ’til the end of time. If I get put in prison or something, come break me out!”
Elena laughed and gave Sera one final kiss as the lift’s doors opened. “Sure. Whatever you say, boss.”
* * * * *
“As do most of the last-minute missions Sera sends us on,” Elena replied. “I do wonder what her father is suspicious about. I feel like there’s something she’s not telling us.”
Elena knew that all too well, and walled off her internal thoughts from Jutio as she ran through her pre-flight checks, trying to keep from lingering on Jutio’s words.
“Prepared for what? Losing my best friend? How do I prepare for that?” Elena snapped.
Jutio agreed.
“You could take a physical form,” Elena said aloud.
“No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” Elena said with a sigh. “If this doesn’t all get sorted out soon, you’ll have to get extracted at New Canaan—I wonder what they call themselves. Canaanites? Canners?”
“By the way,” Elena asked. “Any ideas how we’re going to fake out gate control and jump to New Canaan?”
Elena laughed. “I had the same thought. You can’t run comms, though—you don’t have a fake ident set up.”
“Har, har,” Elena replied.
She completed the pre-flight checks and received clearance for departure. Elena signaled acknowledgment and triggered the cradle’s ladder drop.
High Airtha was a crescent spur hanging outside—or below, given Elena’s current perspective—the Airtha ring. Lifting off a rotating ring, or a spur arch like High Airtha, was tricky because the motion of the ring was accelerating you toward its approaching arch.
A pilot had to gain altitude much faster than on a planet, or the ring would appear to rush upward. A much simpler method was to simply drop through the surface of the ring and out into space.
The cradle’s ladder drop counted down to zero, and then, with a stomach-lurching sensation, the pinnace fell out into space. Once through the chute, gravity systems kicked on and Elena felt her internal organs all settle back into place.
“Stars, I love that,” she said with a grin as she activated the pre-plotted course.
“Now, to see if Sera’s fake ident will pass muster,” Elena said.
Elena laughed and spoke aloud. “Jutio, I don’t think you’ve ever announced to me that you’re not worried before.”
Elena looked at the ships ahead of her. They were a pair of the newest class of TSF cruisers. Still nowhere as big as the Intrepid, at only twelve kilometers in length, but they sported a new type of shielding that the Transcend scientists hoped would be at least half as effective as stasis shields.
She pulled up the space around Airtha and saw an abnormal number of TSF vessels. They only made up three percent of the traffic within a hundred thousand kilometers, but that still totaled over four thousand ships.
Elena nodded in response as she deftly guided the pinnace toward its gate, readying the override command that would give her control of the jump-gate’s orientation and destination vector. Once the two cruisers had cleared the gate, Elena eased the pinnace into position and bit her lip as she sent the override.
The response was almost immediate.
“Think they’ll be able to calculate our exit point?” she asked Jutio.
“Aw shit, this should have worked—maybe Sera’s father had protocols altered,” Elena swore. “This was the shortest interstellar trip of all time.”
And a huge wasted opportunity, she thought privately.
“You have forty-five seconds,” Elena replied while drumming her fingers on the armrests.
“Nice work!” Elena shouted as she engaged the Ford-Svaiter mirror on the pinnace’s nose and punched a wormhole through space to the New Canaan system.
As the pinnace moved into the event horizon, Jutio responded, his tone confused.
HELEN
STELLAR DATE: 02.19.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Airtha Comm Node #4249.1311.9987
REGION: Airtha, Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
the ring-construct’s overmind replied.
Helen felt a sense of relief, and guilt for feeling it. Her time within Sera was coming to an end, though it was not something that her little Fina was aware of. Everything was proceeding to plan, and with Elena on her way to New Canaan, Tanis would be warned and ready to stop Tomlinson.
Our daughter…Helen let the thought resonate in her mind as she watched her daughter, now the Director of The Hand, sit at her desk and check on Elena’s departure. She felt sorrow that she would never get to speak to Sera as a daughter, that the knowledge of her true nature would sour Sera’s memories of their time together.
Airtha did not reply for a moment.
THE NEXT GENERATION
STELLAR DATE: 02.19.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Andromeda
REGION: Near Sparta, Moon of Alexandria, 5th Planet in the New Canaan System
Tanis stood on the bridge of the Andromeda and returned Joe’s infectious smile.
“Admit it,” he said. “You’re impressed.”
She chuckled. “Of course, I’m impressed. Look at them, just barely eighteen and they’re piloting a cruiser. But they’re our girls, I expect to be impressed by them.”
“They practiced in sims for months, after I told them this might be a possibility,” Joe said, his voice filled with fatherly pride. “They’re going to rock it at the academy.”
Tanis watched as Cary and Saanvi operated almost as a single person. They had traded roles several times, but Saanvi had the conn, and Cary was managing scan and comms as the ship eased across the last four kilometers toward Gamma III, where it would undergo its retrofit.
She was impressed by how focused they were, yet how the girls still traded smiles and small jokes. Over the last eleven years, they had become inseparable, ever since that night when they sat before the fire, bonding through Saanvi’s decision to make their home hers.
“Admiral, General, we’re ready for our final approach,” Saanvi called over her shoulder.
“We’ve received docking permission from Gamma III,” Cary added.
“Take her in,” Joe said.
“Aye, sir,” Saanvi acknowledged. “Taking her in.”
“It’s stupid how proud it makes me to hear her say that,” Tanis said quietly to Joe.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Joe nodded.
Before them, Sparta a large moon orbiting Alexandria—a gas giant in the outer system— rotated slowly in Canaan Prime’s dim light. Its surface was pocked with deep mines and broad discolorations as the moon was slowly stripped down to its core. But within, hidden from external view, was Erin’s third base.
Tanis was almost as eager to see what lay within as she was to watch her daughters pilot the Andromeda into the hidden base.
The holotank showed that the ship had now matched the moon’s surface velocity and was directly above the hidden entrance. Saanvi used grav drives to draw the ship closer to the surface, and then through it.
Tanis imagined that anyone watching from the surface would have seen a seven-hundred-meter-long cruiser slowly approach the moon’s surface, and then, instead of crashing into it in a spectacular blaze of fire and shrapnel, simply pass through the ground and disappear from view.
That is, if they could have seen the Andromeda in the first place.
Once through the surface, the ship entered a hundred-kilometer-long shaft that would bring them to the core of the moon, where the shipyard lay.
Joe watched with a mixt
ure of fatherly concern and pride while Saanvi adjusted the ship’s velocity and lateral motion to stay perfectly centered down the shaft.
“Approaching inner lock,” Cary announced after a few minutes. “We have received final approach approval.”
“Very good, Ensign,” Joe replied.
Saanvi looked up at the steely blue pillar of light that Corsia represented herself with. “Captain, thank you, Captain…sir!”
The Andromeda, along with the Dresden and the Orkney were the only ships from the original fleet receiving the upgrades. The rest of the Intrepid’s original feet had been returned to their duties as civilian passenger and cargo haulers, though not before the creation of the second ISF Fleet, which consisted of twenty-four vessels built in the two non-secret shipyards over Carthage and Athens.
Tanis knew better than to hide all her ships. The Transcend would expect her to perform some amount of military buildup—they just had no idea how far her aspirations reached.
As she mused, they passed through the inner dock and into the Gamma III shipyard.
The yard was situated in the now-hollow core of the moon. A swarm of Earnest’s picobots had hollowed it out, then used the raw materials to build the shipyard, and now to construct the new fleet. Within the massive shipyard, five-hundred-thirty ships were under construction. Given a mean time of four years to produce the destroyer-class vessels and six to build the cruisers, she expected to have the next four fleets finished in just three years.
But those ships were not what she wished to see most.
Saanvi eased the Andromeda around a row of cruisers, whose construction was near completion, and it came into view: the I2.
It was no mystery where the Intrepid had gone—none of her military buildup was a secret from the people of New Canaan. Every person of age had voted, granting her a mandate from an overwhelming percentage of the majority to proceed.