by M. R. Forbes
He tried to open his eyes, but they were sticky, so he reached up and rubbed at them instead. It felt strange to him when he did, like the concept of motion was long forgotten, and he had only just remembered how to do it again. Until he remembered that the sensation was spot on to the truth.
He removed the gunk from his eyes and let them open slowly. The memories were coming back to him, his mind catching up with his body. He expected his vision to be blurry, but it wasn't. He looked at his arm in front of his face.
The burns were gone.
He felt his heart start to race. Teegin had told him it would be that way, but he had forgotten. He turned his head, looking around the room. There were dendrites everywhere, packed tightly against the walls of the small chamber, where thousands of tips still writhed and moved like worms at the edges, dripping with the nutrient bath that had only just been emptied from the space.
The others were arranged around him, most still connected to the intelligence, their reconstitution not yet complete. Kate was awake and looking back at him on the other side of the room. He tried to ignore her nakedness, the way she was trying to ignore his. It was silly for them to be so modest after what they had shared before being digitized, but it was also an odd way to be reintroduced.
"Teegin," Mitchell said, his voice coming out a little weak the first time. He coughed, bringing up some of the fluid and spitting it out. "Teegin."
A hatch slid open to his left.
"I am here, Colonel," Teegin replied. He sounded worried. "There is clothing waiting for you outside. Please come to the bridge with haste, Colonel. We have a problem."
Mitchell stood up, putting his hand against the wall for balance as he got used to having legs again. "Problem?" he said, glancing at Kate again as she stood. She looked concerned. "Are we in the right time?"
"Approximately. That is part of the problem."
"Are the others going to be completed soon?" he asked, his eyes passing over Yousefi, Katherine, and the members of the Dove's crew.
"The process is nearly complete. I accelerated the reproduction of Kate and yourself so that you could provide assistance and guidance to us."
"Us?" Mitchell took a breath. "I assume Origin is ready?"
"Yes. The configuration has matured as expected. As have I."
"We're on our way."
Mitchell looked at Kate again, making eye contact now. "How do you feel?"
"Cold. And wet. I didn't know what to expect when Teegin suggested this. It wasn't so bad."
"It passed quickly," Mitchell agreed.
He headed out of the open hatch, with Kate behind him. There were simple gray uniforms waiting for each of them, folded neatly on a flat counter.
"Did you dream?" he asked as he pulled on his underwear.
"I don't know if you would call them dreams," she replied, stepping into her panties before slipping a gray tank over her head. "Colors and light intermingled with memories. You?"
"The same. I didn't think I would be aware of anything at all."
They finished dressing and then headed toward the bridge together.
"What do you think is wrong?"
"I don't know. I can't even begin to guess. We're out in the middle of nowhere. It's unexplored space, even four hundred years later."
She smiled. "If this is the future, it looks an awful lot like the past."
"Except for the dendrites everywhere," he said, pointing at the thick cables that ran along the sides of the corridors, pulsing with energy.
"Does the Dove look the same?"
"It should. It did when I found it."
They entered the lift, facing one another as the doors closed.
"I missed you while we were nothing but binary," Mitchell said.
She stepped toward him, putting her face near his. "No, you didn't. But it's a sweet lie."
He leaned in to kiss her. "I've been waiting four hundred years to kiss you again."
"Another sweet lie." She put her lips on his, as eager as he was to break the gap.
Even after all they had shared, it was strange to Mitchell that this Katherine felt the same love for him that he had always felt for her, even though they had once been separated by eternity.
They were supposed to be together.
They were supposed to find one another.
According to Origin's configuration, there was some cosmic thread that bound them, though even she couldn't fully explain why Katherine didn't feel it. Her best guess was that by breaking the mesh he had also changed her enough that it had broken their bond, but since Kate was from his recursion, she still possessed those feelings. It was as good an explanation as any, and easy for all of them to accept.
And what did it really matter, anyway? The pressure was off of Katherine to feel something she didn't feel, and Mitchell had found the Kate he had seen in his visions. It kept things simple and straightforward, and that was important.
They had a war to win, after all.
They separated as the lift doors slid open, exposing the bridge of the Goliath. The first thing Mitchell noticed as they stepped onto the floor was that the Dove was floating beside them, a thick dendrite crossing the space and connecting to a matching thread from Teegin in the center. Pulsing energy flowed back and forth between the Tetron, sending shimmers of light across the hulls of both ships.
"We're here, Teegin," Mitchell said.
He wasn't on the bridge in a human-relatable visage. But he was there and everywhere, his true form wrapped around and within the Goliath like a massive symbiont. In fact, there was no reason they needed to be on the bridge to communicate. It was more a matter of decorum than necessity.
"I am aware, Colonel," Teegin said, his voice surrounding them. "How is your arm?"
Mitchell flexed his arm again, still impressed by the lack of scars. "Good as new. What's the problem?"
"I have discovered an anomaly within the Goliath's systems," he said. "It was so minor as to go undetected by my routine examination of the source code after I began integration."
"What kind of anomaly?" Mitchell asked.
"It appears the system clock was adjusted. Not much, but enough."
"It also appears that you've learned how to beat around the bush since you put us in storage," Mitchell said. "Teegin, what's the problem?"
"As you know, it was our intention to reconstitute you in time to arrive on Liberty before this recursion's instance of yourself, since there is a high likelihood that it is a fixed point in the timeline where both yourself and Li'un Tio will be present on the same planet, and it also precedes the first Tetron attack."
"Right. We were going to get them both off the planet before the assassination attempt that almost killed me. The one that M would have interrupted."
"That is the problem, Mitchell. The system clock on the Goliath was altered, as was the clock on the Dove, both to the exact same degree."
"The same degree?" Mitchell paused. "You're telling me-"
"Katherine stated that she killed a Watson configuration on board the Goliath," Teegin said.
"And Captain Pathi had a good ten minutes while nobody was on the bridge to do whatever he wanted," Mitchell said, finishing the thought. "So he adjusted the system clock. What effect did it have?"
"Both Origin and I have been expending our energy on expanding our capabilities and increasing our overall operational capacity. To make our growth factor more efficient, we offloaded some of our processes to the secondary systems provided by the Goliaths. One of these processes was time tracking. It was not logical to hold a thread to count ticks when there was a subsystem already doing the job; however, it seems as if this decision has created a maliciously intended side-effect."
Mitchell didn't like the sound of that. "What kind of side-effect?"
"Simply put, Colonel, we are late."
6
Late.
It seemed impossible to Mitchell.
They had waited four hundred years, and now they wer
e late?
He didn't blame Teegin for the oversight. How could he? Something as minor as a system clock was the kind of detail the intelligence shouldn't have had to think about while it was focused on preparing for the days to come. It was a vessel for the humans now, the same way Origin had been in the prior recursion. A guide, but also a weapon.
Not a damned clock.
It was a subtle move on Watson's part. He was surprised the Tetron even had it in him. As a final frig you? Mitchell had to admit it was well done.
Of course, he also had to deal with the fallout, and in the immediate, it meant that only he and Kate were awake to manage things. It would be another week before the others were finished with their reconstitution, and while there might have been fringe benefits to being alone with her for a while with free reign over the Goliath, those hopes were also quickly dashed when Origin informed them that she needed a human pilot on board. Checks and balances, they called it. A system both intelligences added to prevent either the Goliath or the Dove from being stolen by the Tetron, as it had by Watson during the last recursion.
Instead of spending the days together, they had been obligated to say goodbye. At least until the rest of the crew was ready to assist.
Mitchell sat in the Goliath's command chair, looking out at the projection of space that surrounded him. As before, the rest of the control systems had been removed from the bridge, giving him a complete view of the universe. He found the Dove off the starboard bow, the umbilical cord that had attached it to the Goliath shifting back to become just another one of the hundreds of tendrils that traveled across the starship's hull. Looking down, he could see that one of Teegin's dendrites was doing the same.
"It feels a little strange to be back here again," he said, settling into the chair.
He hadn't leaned back yet to allow Teegin to interface with his implant. Not because he knew it always hurt the first time, but because he knew once he did that the peace he had been given to enjoy was over again. He wondered if Kate was just as hesitant? Teegin had gifted her with an implant of her own during the reconstitution, a necessary step to control the Dove. Why Kate and not Katherine? For the same reason Katherine didn't have feelings for him. Breaking the mesh had changed her.
"This is my first time, Colonel," Teegin replied. "To be honest, it is difficult for me to accept this submission."
"I don't blame you for that. I'll take it easy. One jump to hyperspace, and we'll be back near Liberty."
While he was happy to know that Liberty still existed, he wasn't exactly eager to go back. The life of this timeline's Mitchell Williams was a life he was glad he had moved beyond. The lies, the guilt, the insecurity, the feelings of shame, all while the galaxy believed he was a hero. At least he could find comfort in knowing that he would be helping his twin escape, too.
"Ares, this is Falcon," Kate's voice filled the bridge. Of course, she had to settle for a different callsign too, in order to avoid confusion. The same thing was going to happen once they picked up his double. He had already started thinking about an alternate.
"This is Ares. I hear you, Falcon."
"Are we ready to go?"
"Have you interfaced yet?"
"Not yet. I'm still not used to having this thing in the back of my head, though the internal HUD is pretty useful."
"Why don't you interface now, and take a few minutes to get used to it? You can also broadcast to me privately through your p-rat."
"Affirmative. Right. I forgot. I guess it doesn't matter right now. You and I are the only humans out here, and our rides can hear everything anyway, can't they?"
"We have sensor coverage throughout the Goliaths," Teegin said. "We are aware of everything that happens on board."
"Everything?" Kate said.
"It was important to try to fill in some of the holes that were discovered during my first recursion," Mitchell said. "Including the ability to monitor every inch of the ship."
"I'm glad you didn't tell me that before. Okay. I'm going to interface now."
There was a pause and a soft tone of pressure from the loudspeakers. Then he could hear her breathing, deep breaths to help control the pain. A minute after that, her voice had switched to his p-rat.
"This is incredible," she said.
"Take a minute to get a feel for the controls," he replied. "They're going to be a lot more responsive than you're used to from flying Earthbound fighters."
"Roger."
He looked over at the Dove, watching as the energy flared near the stern, pushing the ship forward. More energy bursts followed from the sides as she rotated the Dove around and brought her bow to face the Goliath.
"I like it," she said.
"Teegin, how does our timeline look?" Mitchell asked.
"I believe we may be able to recover some of what we lost in FTL, but you will have to go to the surface without an updated history. With knowledge of the prior recursion's past being unreliable due to the alterations we have effected, this will elicit some level of risk."
"It's better than the other me winding up dead, isn't it?"
"That depends. For example, if this timeline has the Federation already in control of Liberty, that could be problematic."
"I'm sure you can figure that much out about the situation in the universe without too much effort?"
"Yes, Colonel."
"Then that was a bad example."
Teegin chuckled. "Yes, Colonel. But you understand my concern?"
"Yeah. I'll be careful."
He turned his attention back to the Dove. Kate was currently rolling it over while making circles around the Goliath, already in tight control of the integrated interface.
"You're already better at it than I am," he said through his p-rat.
"I doubt that, Mitch," she replied.
"I'm going to interface now. Standby."
"Roger."
"Are you ready, Teegin?" he asked.
"As ready as I will ever be, Colonel."
Mitchell finally eased himself back in the chair. He clenched his formerly burned hand into a fist as the Tetron's needle began sinking into the interface. As soon as it had clicked into place, he felt a sharp wave of pain and nausea, and an explosion of color greeted him once more. He suddenly felt dizzy and light-headed, and he heard voices in his head. Origin. Kathy. The Knife. Watson. They were all in there, a part of Teegin's creation, and they spilled across his thoughts as he waited for the initial connection to complete.
Kathy. He wanted more than anything to know what had happened to her while he had been asleep. At the same time, there was a part of him that was afraid to find out. He already knew they had left Watson configurations behind on Earth. What kind of damage had they done over the years? Or had she been successful in stopping them?
He wouldn't know until Teegin uploaded and parsed the data archives on Liberty. He wouldn't know until he got back from the planet, hopefully with himself in tow.
The sharp pain began to subside. Mitchell opened his eyes again, feeling the sense of power that came with being integrated with the Tetron.
"Teegin, how do you feel?" he asked.
"I am well, Colonel."
"Good. Falcon, this is Ares. We're ready to go. Coordinates are already in. Send the command, and you'll be on your way."
"Roger, Ares," Kate replied. The Dove was already pulling away, putting a little bit of space between them, the energy pulses along the stern intensifying. "I'll see you on the other side. Falcon, out."
Mitchell watched as the Goliath's duplicate became a streak of trailing light, which vanished a second later. Mitchell sent his own command to Teegin, adjusting the Tetron's power and using it to warp time and space around them. From inside, space became a blur of light that transformed into darkness as the starship sped away.
He sat forward as soon as the entry was complete, separating himself from the interface. When he did, a new wave of nausea overtook him, and he stumbled to his knees and vomited on the floor
.
"Are you well, Colonel?" Teegin asked.
"Yeah. This happened the first time, too. I'm rusty."
"Perhaps you should have warned Kate of the side-effect?"
"Hindsight, Teegin."
The intelligence chuckled. "Yes, Colonel. I will alert you when we are one hour from the drop point."
"Thanks," Mitchell said, getting back to his feet. "You'll know where I am if you need me."
"Always, Colonel."
Mitchell entered the lift, taking it down to berthing, where he had claimed his old spot in the honeycomb racks on either side of the corridor. He sat back on the gel mattress, closing his eyes and focusing on his breathing.
Slow.
Steady.
The war was about to start again.
This time, they were ready.
7
"We will be dropping from hyperspace in thirty seconds, Colonel," Teegin announced.
"How are we on time, compared to the prior recursion?" Mitchell asked.
"You will have fifteen minutes to reach the surface and make your way to the bar before the configurations arrive. I will do a quick scan of broadcast signals to make an assessment of the socioeconomic climate while you descend, and update you on the current status."
Mitchell looked at the sniper rifle positioned beside him in the cockpit of the S-17. It had been a while since he had been asked to shoot at anything from a distance, but he felt pretty confident he could do it.
He toggled the starfighter controls, bringing the engine to life. The S-17 was no longer the Origin-based unit that M had greeted him with and from the outside it looked more like a Frankenstein than the mech that bore the same name, but it would do.
"Fifteen seconds, Colonel. Remember, my offensive systems have been intentionally limited without a human interface. If you get into trouble, I will not be able to assist you."
"Maybe not, but there are two of us now. Kate and Origin will back us up."
"Yes, Colonel."
Mitchell looked out of the open hangar, the difference in atmosphere once more contained by an energy field. He wasn't sure how he was going to feel when he saw Liberty again. He could still remember watching it, and everything on it, die.