by Jay Korza
Jeeves had quickly rolled to the main doors and jacked into the system. He closed and locked them to prevent any of the dwindling number of warriors from coming to the empress’s aid.
Emily didn’t see a weapon on or near the empress. She stood slowly and put the empress in her sights as she stalked forward.
“Put your hands in the air, Empress!” Emily ordered.
The empress did not respond or even flinch at the command.
“Now! Or so help me, I will put a bullet through your head!” Emily added a threat.
Emily wasn’t exactly sure why she hadn’t fired yet. She figured there were probably several reasons all at once.
First, Empress Hugany was the ruler of an entire world, and it just wasn’t proper warfare to kill heads of state.
She was also unarmed, and Emily didn’t like the idea of killing an unarmed woman. Though it could be argued that the empress had control of a multitude of warriors and that could be a form of armament in and of itself.
And lastly, Emily absolutely hated the empress, down to the very core of her being. Somewhere inside her, Emily felt that if she killed this unarmed woman, it would be partly because she just wanted the empress dead. Emily didn’t like the idea of killing for the sake of vengeance.
As she got closer, she knew the empress would die at that console, that she would never voluntarily stop what she was trying to accomplish.
Emily got close enough that she put her weapon to safe, slung the rifle, and then tackled the royal bitch. She may not like the idea of killing for the sake of vengeance, but Emily had no issue with beating the other woman into unconsciousness in a vengeful and spiteful manner.
“You low-down, dirty lying, sneaky bitch!” Emily yelled, along with other profanities, while she repeatedly punched the empress.
Once the empress was unconscious, Daria put her hand on Emily’s shoulder and gently eased her back into clarity.
“Okay, Captain. We got her. Let me put some ties on her. We can take her back to the Coalition to stand trial when we’re all done here.”
“Yeah, right.” Emily stood. “Thanks, Chief.”
Emily took a moment to breathe when she realized the rest of her team was still fighting and dying in the hallway beyond the chamber. She stepped up to the console the empress had been working at.
“Jenny, Jeeves, get over here. Help me with this thing.”
Jenny was much closer than Emily had realized. She slithered up to the console and worked at its controls. Jeeves rolled up and watched what Jenny was doing while he simultaneously wirelessly interfaced with the console and the facility’s AI.
He watched the Cherta’s input from the computer’s own view of things to get an idea of what was transpiring and how to control the system if he needed to take over. Emily had told him prior to the mission that if Jenny needed to be neutralized, he would probably end up being responsible for destroying the system.
“What are you doing?” Emily asked Jenny.
“I am sending out recall orders to all warriors that are in the facility. We will need to stop hostilities with them in order to get all of them to stop fighting.”
“Seth?” Emily called for him over the commlink. “Do you copy me?”
She was really asking - Are you still alive out there?
“I’m here and kind of busy. Warrior reinforcements came in just a moment ago. We’re getting pushed back. Are you in the control room?”
“We are. Jenny has put out a cease-fire order to the warriors but they won’t follow the order if they are still being fired upon. You need to break contact and retreat.”
“Copy. It will take us a few minutes to accomplish that. I’ll call you back when we do to let you know if it worked. Out.”
“Okay, they’re breaking off. What else can we do to help them?”
Jenny ran her hands over the control board; she was doing something that took her focus but Emily couldn’t tell what.
“Ma’am.” Jeeves turned slightly towards Emily. “I am watching her progress from inside the system. I cannot be one hundred percent sure, but I believe she is reprogramming the warriors to be loyal to the Cherta Empire. Furthermore, she is adding a line of code that makes any Coalition government an enemy to the Empire. I believe she is double-crossing us.”
Emily only hesitated for a moment, but then she laid into Jenny with both hands, trying to perform an impact push to get her away from the console. The huge slug barely moved as Emily’s hands sunk into the malleable flesh and did no damage.
Jenny’s large, thick tail swung to the side and knocked Emily down. Emily tried to right herself when she saw Jeeves roll forward and plow through the Cherta.
As far as mass went, the Cherta and robot were almost equal but with Jeeves barely winning out. He had been able to accelerate to ten kilometers an hour in that short distance and that translated to a lot of kinetic energy to be transferred into the Cherta.
The slug was shifted sideways, knocked away from the console and onto the floor. Daria quickly moved to cover the Cherta and keep her from interfering again. Jeeves took up her spot and Emily stood beside him.
“Can you fix what she did?”
“I believe I can. Mind you, the programming cannot be inputted into the warriors who have already been birthed. These changes were being sent only to the warriors still in their birthing tubes awaiting delivery.
“Their code can be altered before they are born; however, the warriors who are already fully grown in their tubes require extensive reworking with the new code before they can be born. The code would be implemented in all future clones, though.
“The question is, Captain, do you want me to fix what she did or just move forward with the original plan and destroy all of the warriors still in their birthing tubes? Followed, of course, by the destruction of the facility itself by more conventional means.”
“Go with the original plan. Tell the system to flush them all.” Emily didn’t like hearing her own words. Genocide, of even such a dangerous race, wasn’t a pleasant order to give.
“Yes, ma’am. That will be much easier than trying to rewrite the genetic code Jenny was already working on. She was surprisingly fast with her computations, as though she already had the plans in her head and ready for input.”
“I’m sure she did, Jeeves.” Emily looked at the Cherta still on the floor. “We will never trust your empire again. You have lied to us at every turn. Made us pawns in a war that didn’t have to take place. You have allowed so many beings to die to further your own personal agenda.”
“Not our agenda. The Protectors. I have told you that we feel obligated to follow them. They have never led us down the wrong path. They counseled us against making the warriors millennia ago, and look what happened when we thought we knew better than they.”
“You were going to program them to fight us. To do your dirty work for you. You were going to…” Emily trailed off. Another thought that had been at the back of her brain had finally pushed and kicked its way to the forefront of her thought.
“Jeeves! Wait! Don’t kill them!” Emily shouted.
“I have not initiated the protocol yet, ma’am, but it is ready. I need only send the command. May I ask why you have stopped me?”
“Remember the files we found from the laboratory? The ones Hugesh had left?”
“Of course, I remember everything I am exposed to, Captain.”
“Of course you do. I want you to access those files and find one where Hugesh had rewritten the warriors’ cloning process to add sex back into their genetic makeup. I don’t remember the exact name of the file, but it was something like ‘Warrior birthing rights.’”
“I don’t understand,” Daria said.
“I found a whole bunch of files that Hugesh had saved. She and the computer AI would play games to see who could manipulate the warriors’ code the best given a certain set of circumstances.
“They were working with the actual code this facility uses t
o make the warriors. They were, of course, not connected to the facility so they couldn’t do anything other than play these games with each other.
“Hugesh wrote a code that allowed the warriors to have their own two-sex race so they could breed on their own. It was a solution to the problem of deploying the warriors through a wormhole into another galaxy for the purpose of paving the way for a Nortes invasion. But the wormhole would open only once every ten years and you could only deploy ten thousand warriors through it.”
“I see.” Jeeves joined in. “By giving them the ability to breed, they could grow their ranks on their own once they were on the other end of the wormhole. Very clever.”
“Yes, it is. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Excuse me?” Daria asked.
“We aren’t going to commit genocide. Not when we have another choice. We can give the warriors the ability to be their own people, free from anyone’s control.”
“Allowing them to breed won’t change their warrior ways,” Daria argued.
“True, but we can. I don’t like the idea of making them completely different than who they are already, but we can take out their loyalty to the Cherta and Nortes royal DNA. We can also make sure their gestation and maturity rates aren’t absurdly fast. And we can tone down their aggression towards other species a tad. Maybe along the lines of a Shirka.” Emily shrugged.
“I see where you’re going with this, Emily.” Daria chose to speak as a friend at this point. “But do we really have an obligation to protect a species that doesn’t really exist? I mean, without this lab, they would never have been a part of the universe. Their original base species is so far lost that we can’t even bring them back.”
Daria took a small step forward to face her friend. “And on top of that, now we’re playing God and changing them to be more of something like us, making them more likeable to the Coalition. Is that the right thing to do? If we’re going to save them, shouldn’t we save them based on the beings they are without wanting to change them?”
“These are all good questions, Daria. And the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t have the right or only answer for any of those questions. I can tell you that I have thought about these questions and more for many months now.
“Knowing how the warriors are created, I have played through so many ethical and scientific scenarios, trying to determine these things for myself. I’ve constantly thought, what if I was put in a position to change them? What would I do? How would I justify it?”
“And?” Daria pushed.
Emily shook her head, exasperated with everything that was running through it. “In the end, right here, right now, it comes down to this. The decision has to be made now, by me. We can’t debate it. We can’t let the Coalition come in here and make it. And we surely can’t let the Cherta make it.
“We either destroy them and the system that created them. Or we let them live and then destroy the system that created them so they can’t be misused again.”
“Okay, so we just let them live and take out their ability to be controlled by the Cherta or Nortes. Problem solved,” Daria argued.
“But in that scenario, we are still killing them—just taking the next century to do it. Because if they can’t procreate, they will only be around as long as their natural life-span.”
“Do you know how much damage they can do in that time?” Jenny spat, still lying on the floor. “They could wipe out whole planets, systems if given the chance. We must control them if they are to be allowed to live, if we want to live.”
“Look at Baldylocks!” Emily shot back. “He has become a thriving member of the Coalition and more importantly, our team. And he wasn’t even adjusted before birth. He was born with the same programing as every other warrior for the last thousand years. He overcame it on his own. We can help others the same way and even more by changing their basic programming from the beginning.”
“Captain. I am ready to install the new coding to the system. Based on your conversation, I have gone through Hugesh’s files and found the appropriate modifications. I have spliced together multiple coding variations into one complete modification.”
“What have you got, Jeeves?” Emily moved back towards the robot.
“There will be one male and one female that can breed. The original base species laid eggs to produce offspring and so it will be with the warriors. They can only reproduce once every two to three years. They will gestate the egg for five standard months, lay it, and it will hatch two months later. Their offspring will mature almost twice as fast as human children.”
“Not bad so far.”
“They will no longer be beholden to any other races and will not feel the need to be subservient or conquering. They will still be aggressive and prone to violence, but most advanced species are, otherwise they would not have advanced so far up the evolutionary ladder.”
“That last point is debatable but so far your splicing is acceptable.” Emily urged Jeeves to continue.
“I have given them back their pain receptors and removed their nerve bundle that when stimulated makes them more agreeable. Those are the major and noteworthy changes. I have created a changelog file that you can peruse at your leisure at a later time.”
“There won’t be a later time, tin man. This is it. Our one chance. I am trusting you to do this right. I don’t have time to go through thousands of lines of code to make sure.” Emily put her hand on Jeeves’ frame. “Is the code ready?”
“Yes, ma’am. It is. I am ready to transmit it to the system.”
“Alright, Jeeves…” Emily started but didn’t have time to finish.
Daria had been too engrossed with her conversation with Emily and lost sight of guarding the Cherta on the floor. With her back turned, Daria didn’t see Jenny rear her tail back and then swing it forward to knock Daria down.
Daria’s handgun fell from its holster and Jenny scrambled for it as fast as her slug body would let her. Daria fell face first on the hard floor and was knocked unconscious.
Jenny stood up. She held the pistol in her hand and aimed it at Emily’s head.
“Jeeves, do not transmit that code. If you do, I will kill Captain Riley.”
Jeeves looked back and forth between the two women. “Captain? Your orders?”
“Transmit it now, Jeeves,” Emily said.
“Do not do it, robot. I will kill your captain and then institute my own code anyway. She will have died for nothing.”
“I do not believe you can follow through with your threat, Jenny. You could most certainly kill the captain, but you could not kill me before I transmit this code and/or kill you in return. In the end, the captain’s vision will be realized with or without either of you alive.”
“Order him to stop, or you will die, Emily,” Jenny demanded, changing tactics.
“Jeeves,” Emily began. “There will be no further delay. Transmit the sequence then enact it. If Jenny kills me, take her into custody if you can. Kill her if you can’t.”
“Yes, ma’am. Transmission sent. It will take approximately four minutes for the code to be error checked by the system and then implemented. I have further ordered the system to destroy all pre-embriotic tissue and DNA samples. The new code will be used to rebuild already grown warriors in their tubes. The embryotic samples will be altered and then grown to adulthood and born with the rest of their kin.”
“How long will the process take?” Emily asked.
“Two months, three weeks, and six days.”
Jenny smiled at Emily and lowered the gun.
“Why are you smiling?” Emily didn’t like the Cherta being happy; it didn’t bode well for her.
“The Protectors were correct. Not that I doubted them, but it is always interesting to see the events unfold for themselves.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you were doing the bidding of the Protectors? And we stopped you.”
“We were not doing their bidding. I hope that one day
you will come to truly understand what their role is in our galaxy. But we were following their advice and they were right about you.”
“Me? Why would they care about me?” Emily couldn’t even begin to fathom what was going on.
“I told you once before, Emily, that you were a pivot point for the galaxy. Do you not see it now? How you have changed the future of so many races with one single decision. How you were the pivotal decision maker in all of this.”
“And this is what you wanted all along? To save the warriors?” Emily was flabbergasted.
“Not precisely. We — I — am glad that it turned out this way. But there are many other variations that could have occurred that would have still been in line with what the Protectors wanted to happen.”
Jenny slithered forward. “I am glad that you made a decision to save rather than destroy, on more than one occasion. You saved the empress, though she might not have deserved it. You saved an entire race even at the threat of losing your own life. And you ordered Jeeves to spare my life if he could, even though you would have been dead by my hand.”
“So you were testing us this entire time? To what end?” Emily’s lack of understanding turned to anger quickly.
“We could have aligned with the Coalition from the beginning. Many lives on all sides would have been saved. But to know a peoples’ integrity, to find what is truly in their hearts, you have to see them show themselves in the worst circumstances possible. It is easy for a bad person to be good in the best of times, but only a great person can be good in the worst of times.”
“And your conclusion is?”
“At every turn, your Coalition has shown itself to be a truly honorable people. You always took the high road regardless of the difficulty or the potential for the situation to turn out badly for yourselves. We feel confident that your Coalition will make suitable replacements to the Cherta.”
“Replacements? You want us to run your empire? Where are you going?”
“We are going to another galaxy to continue exploring and evolving. We have been guiding events in this galaxy for far too long. It is time that we take time for ourselves as a species, to find out who we are and what else we can achieve.”