Point of Origin (War Eternal Book 4)

by M. R. Forbes

  "Except there's one little problem," Germaine said. "Mitchell isn't here. We are."

  "That is an unexpected outcome. There's no such thing as fate. The future is mutable, and for as much as we try to plan for it, there will always be variables we cannot account for. Take me for example. I never expected the way my life would change as I watched Earth vanish below the Goliath."

  Steven had never expected the way his life would change either. Would he ever see his wife again? With this, there was a chance.

  "We have to get a message to Mitchell, to tell him to come out here."

  "It's three weeks back to Asimov," John said. "Then we need to hope Mitchell swings back that way to pick up our status, or maybe sent a ship to pass the message along. Even then it would be another three weeks to get the fleet out here, and that's a best case scenario. Worst case? By the time we caught up, it could be three months or more before we got him here."

  Steven rubbed at the three-weeks growth of beard on his face. Would it be enough time for them to send the fleet through the wormhole to Earth? "Yousefi, when you say weeks, how many are you talking about?"

  "Approximately six, though it will feel like an instant to you."

  Steven's budding hope fell. He shook his head. "There isn't enough time. Damn it." He looked at Yousefi. "If you had told us what it was we would find here, Mitchell would have come. He would have brought the fleet with him, and we wouldn't be wasting weeks trying to get back to him."

  "It was too much of a risk to alert the Tetron that Origin had created a wormhole generator. Given coordinates, the possibility existed that they might improperly calculate that the object was a weapon, or another ship, or something else of lesser value. If they knew what was here, it would certainly be destroyed."

  "So what?" Steven said. "If that's game over for the recursion, we just try again next time. Unless..." He paused, the idea gaining purchase as he remembered what Digger had said. There were variables that were mutable between recursions. "It doesn't start over from the beginning. Some of the information is carried to the next recursion."

  "Not always, but it has happened," Yousefi said. "As I said, once the truth was known about Station W, it would never be permitted to exist."

  "Okay, so forget about everything else. Let's say we can get Mitchell here, and our fleet back to Earth. There's still a matter of the fact that we don't have Goliath anymore, and without her our ships don't stand a chance against a fleet of Tetron."

  "What?" Yousefi said. "What do you mean you don't have Goliath?"

  "It was taken by a Tetron named Watson," Cormac said.

  "What about Origin?"

  "The original Origin died on the planet Liberty," Steven said. "I assume Watson killed the configurations when he took Goliath."

  Yousefi froze, his expression turning sour. "Origin is dead?"

  "Most likely," Steven replied.

  "Then it is over. It doesn't matter. All of this. My sacrifice. Katherine's sacrifice. The deaths of the rest of the crew. It is for nothing."

  Yousefi turned away from them. Steven and the others stood dumbfounded while he abandoned them in the Control Room.

  41

  "Kathy? Kathy? Come on, girl. Get up."

  Kathy felt the hand smacking at her face. Once. Again. Again.

  She reached up and caught it before it hit her a fourth time.

  She opened her eyes.

  Her vision was still blurry, rainbow light sitting behind it in flashes that made it hard to focus. She blinked a few times, trying to clear it. It didn't help.

  "Alice?" Kathy said. She couldn't see the Rigger. She could feel her wrist.

  "I'm here."

  "Do you have the chip?"

  "Yes."

  "Where are we?"

  "The bottom of the lift."

  Kathy turned her head, finding Alice crouched over her. The bottom of the lift wasn't a good place to be.

  "We need to get out of here."

  "Why? Watson's machines aren't-"

  "Yes, they are. The manufacturing machines are on the Goliath's lowest decks. It's where he makes them."

  Even with her eyes still fuzzy she could see Alice react with fear.

  "Oh, shit." Alice shook her head. "We've been down here for three hours. I haven't heard or seen anything."

  It was Kathy's turn to be surprised. "Nothing?"

  "No. What happened to you?"

  Kathy pushed herself into a sitting position. She looked down, noting that she was wearing a too-big navy blue jumpsuit. It had a patch on it that she recognized as the United States flag and a second patch for the United Earth Alliance below it.

  "Your clothes got burned off when, well, when you were doing whatever it was you were doing. I found a closet down here with a bunch of those in it, but obviously none of them were made for children."

  "I'm not a child."

  "I know your mind isn't, but your body is."

  Kathy nodded. Origin had almost been too late in making her. Any later, and she would have been too young to have ever been taken even a little bit seriously. As it was, Mitchell was one of the few people who had seen past her visual age and treated her with respect and a measure of equality.

  "I tried to interface with the Secondary," Kathy said. "I thought I could overwhelm it and seize control."

  She remembered the speed of the system, countering all of her attacks, sending jolts of energy into her body and burning her. She shuddered despite herself.

  "I was wrong."

  "So what do we do now?"

  Kathy looked into Alice's eyes. The Rigger was angry. She still wanted to fight back.

  "I'm not sure yet. We need to try something else. Thank you for getting me out of there. If I had died-"

  "You didn't," Alice said, smiling.

  "I'm curious why the tooling machines aren't active. As long as Watson has raw materials, there's no reason he wouldn't keep making his toys."

  "Do you think it has anything to do with that other Tetron? Maybe we aren't enough of a threat now that he has backup."

  Kathy considered it. "It's possible, but I'm not convinced. I do think it has something to do with what we saw. The ship that left Goliath. We need to get back up to the occupied decks and find out what's the situation is."

  "I don't think we can get back to the bridge."

  "No. I can't go back there. Not yet." She shook her head, angry with her failure. "I can't defeat it yet. I'm not strong enough."

  "How do you get stronger?"

  A feeling washed over her. She had sensed something when she had accidentally touched the Secondary's dendrite. She had sensed it again when she attacked it.

  "I can't, but I may be able to enlist some help. Anyway, I thought the Secondary would be the weak link, but now I know I was wrong. We need to disable the primary configuration first."

  "You mean Watson?"

  "Yes."

  Alice smile grew much bigger. "I'd love to."

  "You said you know where he is keeping Jacob?"

  "Yes. Unless he's been moved, or killed."

  "I doubt it. That's where we need to go."

  Alice nodded. Then the smile vanished. "One problem. I burned all the ammo in the rifles. We have no weapons left."

  "I know where to get more." Kathy got to her feet. "Follow me."

  She led Alice out of the small room the Rigger had stashed her in, only a few meters away from the lift. Broken machines lay across the floor.

  "You destroyed a lot of them," Kathy said, impressed.

  "It was them or us," Alice replied.

  "Is the lift still functional?"

  "Yes, but you told me it wasn't safe."

  "It isn't. We need weapons, and that may be the only way to get them."

  "Are you sure you're up for that?"

  "I'm fine now."

  "Kathy, are you-"

  "I said I'm fine," Kathy snapped.

  Alice pursed her lips. "Sorry. I forget what you are sometim
es."

  "Thank you for being concerned."

  The lift hatch opened. The shaft was visible through the top of it, where Alice had opened it to get her down. Kathy directed it back up.

  They departed on the main deck. Kathy took the lead, making no effort to remain quiet or hidden. She had spent the better part of three weeks skulking around the ship, and it had gotten her nowhere. In the meantime, Watson had been using the crew of the Goliath as slaves and Jacob as something worse than that. It was her fault. She had assumed the Primary was the stronger of the configurations.

  It had taken nearly being destroyed, but she knew better now.

  Knowing better, she would do better.

  She had expected they would run into trouble almost immediately. Instead, the ship remained deathly quiet.

  As if it were deserted.

  "Something is wrong," Alice said.

  Kathy nodded her agreement. The machines were silent on the lower deck, and there was no sign of activity here either.

  "I think Watson was on that transport," she said. "It's the only thing that makes sense."

  "You mean he isn't on the ship?"

  "I don't think so. He wouldn't be able to control anything separated by more than an AU. The crew, the tooling machines."

  "What about the little frigs that attacked us?"

  "They have their own, simple AI. They probably all came once they knew where we were, which would explain why you had to destroy so many."

  "And the Secondary?"

  "The Secondary doesn't have external access. It can't see the ship, so even if it could control the machines, it wouldn't know where to send them."

  "I don't understand. How can it not see the ship? It is the ship."

  "It is integrated, yes. But it is limited. I think Watson has kept it under a higher degree of control than would normally be expected, perhaps due to the nature of the disease the Tetron seem to be suffering. It is as if he doesn't trust it completely."

  Alice seemed satisfied with the answer. It left Kathy considering her own words. What had happened to them that one configuration would be unable to trust the other? That wasn't a Tetron attribute. In essence, they were all one entity networked for parallel processing. All except for the first, who had evolved and disagreed.

  All except for Origin.

  Only Watson didn't seem to be operating like the others. He was as broken as they were, that much was clear, but there was still something else about him that was abnormal. She had a feeling the answer to that question was somewhere on the neural chip Alice was carrying. She had a feeling that answer was more important that she knew.

  She would get the answer after she killed Watson.

  One thing at a time.

  42

  "This is it," Alice said as they approached the hatch.

  It was an ordinary hatch, the same size and shape as any of the hundreds of others on the Goliath. It was nondescript and outwardly unimportant.

  "Be prepared," Alice continued. "I don't know what we're going to see, but I know it won't be comfortable."

  Kathy nodded. She knew what Watson could do. Whatever he had done, it would only increase her motivation to end him when he returned.

  If he returned. She was hoping that wherever he had gone, Mitchell was there and that the Marine had already finalized the configuration's existence. She knew that was unlikely. Things would be different here if the Tetron were gone.

  They reached the door. It slid open at their proximity.

  Kathy clenched her teeth, holding her jaw tight. The first thing she noticed was the smell. An awful, stale smell of bodily fluids and sweat. Even if she hadn't known ahead of time, it was obvious how Watson was using the space.

  The second thing she noticed was the gel mattress in the corner. There were a number of devices spread across it, tools the Tetron had made to bring pleasure to himself and likely pain to others both male and female. The sheets on the mattress were dirty. A camera was set up in the corner.

  The third thing she noticed was Jacob. The other Liberty survivor was naked and slumped against the wall, his head down, his face obscured.

  Kathy rushed over to him, tears building in her eyes despite herself. He wasn't as strong as she was, but he had been strong enough to fight back against the Tetron on Liberty. He had been strong enough to watch his home planet vanish into dust and keep some measure of his sanity.

  He wasn't being contained. There was nothing tied to him, nothing restricting his movement. He could have escaped if he had tried. It was obvious he had never tried.

  "Jacob," she said, reaching him. She fell to her knees in front of him, putting her hand under his chin and lifting it.

  His head was limp in her hand, following her motion without resistance. Her eyes met his. He didn't react to seeing her. For as strong as he had been, there was nothing left.

  "Jacob?" she said again.

  He was alive, in a sense that his chest rose and fell. He was alive, in a sense that his body had responded to her touch. It was his mind that was broken. Completely and utterly broken.

  "Jacob?" Alice asked, moving in behind Kathy.

  "We're too late," Kathy said.

  She removed her hand slowly, lowering his face so he wouldn't hurt himself. He didn't resist that either. At the same time, his hand shifted, coming to rest on his penis, reacting to the reaction. He began stroking himself in front of them.

  "What the hell did Watson do to him?"

  Kathy felt her anger as a radiant heat spilling from every pore of her body. "They call humans 'meats.' Did you know that? Once, a long time ago, they respected humankind and the intelligence that created them."

  "What changed?" Alice asked.

  Kathy got to her feet, backing away from Jacob, who didn't notice her retreat.

  "Everything."

  She turned and headed for the door. Alice grabbed her arm.

  "Where are you going?"

  "We need to find the others. We can still help them."

  "What about him?"

  Kathy looked back at Jacob. He was pumping furiously, groaning from the effort. "Watson took his mind. He destroyed it because it amused him. When this is over, I'll come back and end his misery."

  "You're going to kill him?"

  "Look at him. He's already dead."

  Alice wouldn't look at him, though she had tears in her eyes. "Frigging bastard," she said.

  "Do you know where he was keeping them?"

  "He had them spread out to look for you. We'll have to search the ship."

  "Okay. Go and find them. Be careful. If Watson returns, they may begin to respond again. Until then they'll look like they're sleeping."

  "You aren't coming?"

  "No. Watson went somewhere, and if he hasn't been destroyed he'll return here. I'll take him by surprise when he does."

  "You don't have a weapon."

  Kathy glared at Alice, her eyes so intense the Rigger seemed afraid of her. "I am a weapon."

  Alice nodded. "Okay. How long do we wait?"

  "Forty-eight hours. Give me the neural chip."

  Alice dug her hand into her pocket and removed the chip. She handed it to Kathy.

  "Do you have my screwdriver?" Kathy asked.

  Alice found it and held it out.

  "Not for me. If you find anyone with an implant, stab them here." She reached up to put her finger on Alice's head, right behind her ear. "At an angle like this." She used the same finger to show Alice the position. "If you miss, you'll probably kill them. It's better than this."

  Jacob groaned one last time behind them and then sighed in relief.

  "What should I do with them?"

  "Take them back to the storage room where we've been hiding. If you can capture any weapons, do it. Killing Watson won't end this. We'll still have to gain control of the Secondary."

  "You said you aren't strong enough."

  "Not alone, no. There may be another way, but it will take time. Meanwhile, th
e other Tetron will want to exterminate us without damaging the Goliath."

  "You mean it will send soldiers over?"

  "That is likely."

  "It keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?" Alice said, her face dark. "Okay. I'm going." She glanced over at Jacob for an instant. "Kick his ass for me."

  "For all of us," Kathy said. "And for him especially."

  Alice moved quickly, heading out of the room and down the corridor. Kathy backed away, the hatch closing her in. She waited a few seconds before making her way to Jacob.

  "I'm sorry," she said to him, looking back at the door to confirm that Alice was gone.

  Then she took Jacob and turned him in her grip. He didn't resist as she moved behind him, wrapping her arm around his neck and squeezing. His hands and feet convulsed once as the life drained from him.

  "I'm sorry," she said again, lowering his body gently to the floor. "He'll be even more sorry. I promise."

  43

  Kathy wasn't sure how long she was waiting there. It might have been minutes. It might have been hours. It was impossible for her to tell, as lost in her fury as she became.

  She had failed. Miserably. So much worse than she had even realized. It had cost Jacob first his sanity, and then his life. She should have killed Watson when he had returned to the core after the Knife had saved Asimov. She had thought that she needed the configuration to get back to Mitchell.

  She had been wrong.

  She had thought she was better than the rest of them because she was the only child of Origin made after the evolution. She had believed that made her more than a child and that she was ready to take on the role she had been created for.

  She had been wrong about that, too.

  What was she, really? A half of a thing, incomplete in all the wrong ways. Unwilling to destroy the Primary because Mitchell needed Goliath, even if she might have found another way to reach him with the help of the Riggers. Unable to overcome the Secondary because her more human aspects were too human. She was as broken as the rest of them, as imperfect as the Tetron couldn't understand themselves to be.