by M. D. Cooper
And before her lay the jewel of her plan, the I2.
It was, for all intents and purposes, still the Intrepid, but where the Intrepid was a colony ship, one that had always been a symbol of peace to her—despite what they had gone through to get to New Canaan—the I2 was built for war.
“Mom…” Cary breathed, “It’s incredible! I had no idea…I mean I knew…but this…”
“General,” Saanvi whispered. “We’re active duty right now.”
“Right, sorry, General,” Carry corrected herself with a slight blush.
“I’ll let it slide this once,” Tanis smiled. “She’s quite the sight, isn’t she?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Saanvi said. “I never saw it before…at least, not in person, but even then it was one of the most beautiful ships I’d ever seen. Now…it’s so fierce!”
“Fierce,” Joe chuckled. “I bet Bob would love to be called that.”
Tanis nodded absently as they drew closer to the I2, admiring its new lines and projection of power.
Taking a page from the AST dreadnaughts they had faced at Bollam’s World, the I2 now sported two massive fusion engines on either side of its nose, and an antimatter pion drive fore and aft. The dorsal arc of the ship was largely unchanged, though it now sported over twelve-hundred fighter bays.
The cylinders were still in place, still rotating. Debate had raged as to whether or not the cylinders should be removed from the ship and installed over Carthage. Ultimately, Tanis ruled that the mightiest warship in the galaxy sporting two massive habitat cylinders—complete with rivers, lakes, and forests—showed so much confidence that it was its own form of deterrent.
Tanis worried that perhaps it showed so much hubris as well, but she liked the idea of the fleet having its own R&R facilities within its greatest warship.
She watched as Cary scanned the I2, and the Andromeda’s systems cataloged the unheard-of volume of weaponry.
The ship no longer needed stasis pods, nor medical facilities for two and a half-million colonists, and the layers of the cylinders previously dedicated to those systems now facilitated an assortment of weaponry that alone surpassed the entire firepower of the original ISF fleet.
The total number of turrets per cylinder was a mind-boggling fifty thousand. They ranged from photon beams clear up to atomic particle weapons. These main batteries could fill over two-hundred-seventy degrees on two axes with withering fire. Smaller, ten-centimeter rail cannons were also peppered across the cylinders.
More beams protected the ship fore and aft, and forty-seven rail guns of varying sizes covered those vectors, as well.
“Mo— General Richards, how is it possible to…to power all that weaponry? It’s an order of magnitude more than the AST dreadnaughts you fought back at The Boll.”
Tanis let a smile slip across her face. “It sure is.”
“So, how did you do it, General?” Saanvi asked, never taking her eyes off the controls as she eased the ship toward its berth, which was still fifteen kilometers distant.
“It was something that Sera said when we were at Bollam’s World. She told us never to use our vacuum energy modules in the dark layer,” Tanis replied. “Our modules create pocket dimensions and then mine them for energy. But those dimensions were miniscule, and were little more than batteries. We could never get more energy out of them than we spent creating and maintaining them—conservation of energy and all that. We couldn’t simply introduce more energy into the universe.”
Saanvi and Cary nodded, and Tanis continued, “But Sera let it slip—or told use deliberately, it’s hard to tell with her—that the CriEn module pulled energy from the real universe, and could even do so from within the dark layer. That triggered something for Earnest, and while we were planning the I2, he worked out how to make our own CriEn modules.”
Cary let out a slow whistle. “So, the I2 has access to the full energy potential of this universe’s zero-level?”
Tanis chuckled. “Not all at once; Earnest is pretty sure that overuse would destroy the universe. He built safeties into the system to prevent that, and the modules are all closed systems that will pico-annihilate themselves upon tampering.”
“That’s some level of concern,” Joe said. “Earnest is very particular about leaving active picotech in deployed systems.”
“He is,” Tanis nodded. “He told me that were all of the CriEn modules on the I2 to tap into zero-point energy at the same time, it would produce more energy than all the stars in the M25 cluster—shortly before it created some sort of hole in space-time that would consume the galaxy…”
“Holy-shit, uhhh, I mean, wow, ma’am,” Cary stammered.
“Operates a ship like no one’s business, but it would seem that there will be other things that she’ll need to work on at the academy,” Tanis said to Joe with a wink.
“Sorry, sirs,” Cary said. “It’s weird being with you guys like this. Normally, you’re telling me to go feed the horses or clean the dishes. Today, you’re telling me that you’ve built a weapon with the power to destroy the universe.”
“Well, probably not the universe,” Tanis replied.
Cary was faced away, but she could tell from her daughter’s silence that she was rolling her eyes. Saanvi swatted at her sister, confirming Tanis’s suspicions.
“Ma’am, do we really need a weapon like this?” Saanvi asked, her voice laced with concern.
“Stars, I wish we didn’t,” Tanis replied. “I really hoped, that as we spread out across the stars and escaped the crush of Sol, that we would abandon war—that with all our technology and power, greed would have no place in our hearts. But instead of diminishing, it seems to have grown.”
The melancholy thought made her remember her hopes for what New Eden could have been—what she still planned to build here—even if it was behind a wall of projected might.
“Even if we gave over our technology to the Transcend, or if we destroyed it and lived off the earth like humans ten thousand years ago, people would believe we still held the keys to even more, and we would never be safe,” she added.
“Why didn’t we just go further?” Cary asked. “Why not fly through the Transcend and make a new home on the far side of the galaxy?”
Tanis shared a look with Joe. She had suspicions about what would have come from such a decision, but she gave her normal answer. “Because we were tired of traveling across the stars. Most of the people on this ship—nearly all of them—expected to be centuries into their colony by now. Instead we’ve fought in two interstellar wars, and may have set a third in motion.”
“Let’s leave those thoughts for another time,” Joe said. “This is Corsia’s time for a long-overdue refit, and I want her to enjoy this triumphant entry.”
THE I2
STELLAR DATE: 02.19.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS I2, Gamma III Shipyard
REGION: Sparta, Moon of Alexandria, 5th Planet in the New Canaan System
“Stars, I want to take her out,” Tanis said as she sat in the I2’s command chair.
“Aren’t you feeling cooped up in here?” Tanis asked.
“You guys are really sucking the joy out of this moment,” Tanis said as she leaned back and closed her eyes.
Bob chuckled in her mind.
“Do you?” Tanis asked. “Why is that? You don’t have the same sort of emotional drive as we do, to one-up others, to show our superiority.”
Bob replied.
Tanis and Angela both sign
aled their agreement while sharing the mental equivalent of a long look between them.
Bob paused for a moment and Tanis wondered what could possibly take him that long to ponder—then she realized he was doing it for her, to let his words sink in.
He continued.
“When did you first suspect this?” Tanis asked. “You must have had an inkling before we learned of the Transcend.”
Tanis whistled, “So, for a little bit then.”
“Why have you told us this?” Tanis asked. “I imagine it’s not to make us feel grateful for your presence.”
“Stars, is it ever…” Tanis added. “That’s almost cruel, Bob.”
“Fuuuuck, that’s…deep? Insane?” Tanis breathed.
An alert flashed in Tanis’s mind and she swore. “Shit, we’re late for the hotdog cookout down at the lake! Cary and Saanvi are going to have my hide.”
A FAMILY COOKOUT
STELLAR DATE: 02.19.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS I2, Gamma III Shipyard
REGION: Sparta, Moon of Alexandria, 5th Planet in the New Canaan System
Angela replied.
“I don’t know, Ang,” Tanis said aloud. “What I do know is that if we merge, we’re going to be Tangela, not Angelis.”
Angela laughed in her mind—not the normal, appreciative laugh her AI typically gave, but a raucous guffaw. If she were human, Angela would have been bent over clutching her stomach.
“What…?” Tanis asked before realizing that Angela was messing with her.
“Jerk,” Tanis replied. “Not funny—but I guess if we go insane when we merge, we’ll think it’s funny.”
She and Angela had now been paired more than a century beyond the maximum safe length of time a human and AI should occupy the same mind, but ever since Earnest had examined their minds and determined them to be inseparable, they had known an eventual merger was inevitable.
The thing that surprised Tanis, and Angela too—since she could see into her AI’s thoughts—was the fact that they were still separate entities. They constantly probed one another and devised questions to ascertain whether or not they were still two beings. So far, their tests and Earnest’s examinations, had continued point to them being two and not one.
Tanis had given herself over to the fact that one day she would no longer be just herself. Ever since that battle near Sol, where she had spread her mind across the web of fighters to aid in the defense of the Intrepid, she had been walking down this path with Angela.
Even if it were possible at this point to extricate Angela from her mind, Tanis would rather cut off both her arms. Life without Angela’s constant presence was inconceivable to her. Even Joe agreed that not having Angela in his wife’s mind would make her a different person, and he didn’t want that.
He often referred to Tanis and Angela as his wives, something that used to worry Tanis, but when she asked him if it upset him, he only gave her his customary whole-hearted laugh and embraced her.
“Tanis, Tanis,” he had with his wry smile and a shake of his head. “Do you remember when we decided to get married, back when everyone else was in stasis on the Intrepid? Angela argued that maybe she shouldn’t officiate since she felt like she was getting married, too.”
Tanis did remember. At the time she had worried it would upset Joe, but he had laughed then, too.
Somehow, she had found the most understanding man in the galaxy—either that or he was more into Angela than her.
Tanis snorted in response and rose from her seat as the maglev train stopped at the station in Old Sam, the Intrepid’s port-side habitation cylinder.
Familiar birdsong greeted her as she stepped out into the forest, noting that the trees had grown tall and old—it was probably time to clear out the oldest and create some glens for new growth to take root.
On a planet, storms would solve that problem naturally, but in the habitation cylinder, the strongest winds rarely exceeded twenty kilometers per hour—hardly enough to uproot the hundred-year-old oaks around her.
A thought occurred to Tanis and she raised it to Angela.
“Then, let’s just enjoy the day,” Tanis replied.
Tanis broke into a jog, enjoying the scents of the cylinder’s spring and the smell of the lake she knew lay just over the hill on her right. Before long, she rounded the bend and her old cabin came into view.
If she squinted, she could still see its humble beginnings as Ouri’s simple abode, which Tanis had first visited when the Intrepid was still under construction above Mars.
“Mom! We’re down here,” Cary called from behind her, and she turned from the cabin to the lake, where Joe sat on the edge of the dock with their two girls.