by M. R. Forbes
If the torpedo wasn't going to launch, there was only one other thing she could do.
You're crazy.
She smiled at the idea. A mission like this had required someone crazy. Mitchell said he had known her in another recursion. Surely he had known she was the most qualified for the job.
She added thrust, diving into the dendrites, her thoughts a blur as she skipped the S-17 through the criss-cross of tendrils and axons, pulsing with energy that seemed almost angry when she pierced it. She kept going, head high, a smile on her face, heart pounding as the end of her life approached.
Then the dendrites cleared, the huge central sphere of the core becoming visible in the glow of energy around it. She could have sworn she saw it flinch at her approach, but maybe that was only her imagination.
She was crazy, after all.
36
Mitchell held the plasma stream at the bow of the Dove as he watched the S-17 approaching. The battle raging around the lone Tetron they had targeted was the most intense he had ever seen, a barely understandable mix of starfighters and squids, amoebics and lasers. He could hardly make out the individual ships within the crunch, and he didn't dare add the Dove's firepower to it.
Not yet.
Not until he saw whether Ella would succeed or fail in her mission.
It was a crazy idea. A brave idea, and in many ways no less than he or anyone else should have expected from the Hero of the Battle for Liberty. She had put herself on the line before for a single planet, and this was potentially for all of human civilization.
The Dove shook violently as another Tetron plasma stream bore into her, some of the blast power reduced by the eternal engine powered shields, and some of it was reaching through. Origin had given up informing him of the damage, instead focusing on shoring it up and keeping them alive. They were fortunate that the intelligences preferred to attack the Dove and the Goliath over the Federation and Alliance forces when given a choice. It was the only reason any of their ships, including Steven's, were still active.
"Colonel, Knife Two One." Teal's voice cut across the madness, filtered and brought the surface so he wouldn't miss it amidst the many other fleet communications. "We're boarding the Corleone now. Tio is with me, along with Pulin. We're under heavy fire, but we'll make it out."
"Roger," Mitchell said, still tracking Ella. She was closing in on the Tetron, threading her way impossibly through the field. She had always been a good pilot, but this recursion's version seemed to be a notch or two above what he had known. "Millie, sitrep."
"Riggers are on the retreat, Colonel," Millie replied. "Briggs is bringing the Schism in for - shit."
"Millie?"
"Frigging son of a bitch. Damn it all."
"Millie?"
"We just lost the Schism. A mess of those squid friggers jumped it. Damn it, Briggs."
Mitchell wanted to feel upset about the loss, but they had lost so many in the last twenty minutes that it was impossible to separate one grief from another or feel anything specific.
"Divert to the Corleone. I'll tell Knife Two to wait for you."
"Roger."
"Knife Two One, Ares. Riggers have lost their ride and require pickup."
"Knife Two One. Roger, Ares. We'll-"
"You'll do no such thing," Tio said, interrupting Teal. "I told you, Colonel when our mission is done, we're done."
Mitchell changed his mind. He could still feel something specific. Anger.
"You son of a bitch. Those people are going to die down there without pickup."
"That isn't my concern, Colonel. You should have brought them another ship."
"Millie, what's your position?" Mitchell asked, switching conversations.
"We're inside the facility, approaching the hangar."
"Can you see the Corleone?"
"Affirmative."
"Can you hit it with anything?"
"Colonel?"
Mitchell clenched his teeth, keeping his eyes on the battle ahead of him. Keeping his eyes on Ella and the S-17. She was getting close to the Tetron, almost ready to release the payload.
"Tio's ready to leave you behind," he spat. "Don't let him."
"Roger," she replied, her voice venomous. "We'll take care of it."
"I'm in position," Ella said. Mitchell tried to continue tracking her, but she vanished, too close to the Tetron for him to monitor. "Firing now!"
Mitchell's heart jumped at the words. He had committed everything to getting her there, and she hadn't let him down. He could feel his hands tensing on the arms of the command chair as he waited for a resolution.
"Shit," she said, her voice a little less confident.
He froze, unsure of the reason for the expletive. "Teegin?"
"The launcher is malfunctioning," Teegin said. "It must have been hit on the way in."
Malfunctioning? He felt his heart race a little faster. He knew Ella. He knew what she would do if the torpedo wouldn't fire. "El-" he started to say.
The small green dot that represented her on his overlay vanished.
His breath caught in his throat.
Damn it. Not again.
He stared at the Tetron, a chill coursing down his body, the emotion passing through his integration with Origin and causing the Dove to shiver as well, the energy running along the dendrites crackling into space.
She had done what she had to do.
He would have done the same thing.
Had it worked?
"Teegin?" he said again. "Tell me her sacrifice wasn't for nothing."
"The payload is delivered," he replied. "It will take up to a minute for the control module to self-install and begin passing itself to the others. We will not know if it was successful until it completes."
Mitchell looked out the viewscreen, forcing himself to refocus. There would be time to mourn her and honor her if they survived. The battle was still raging, the Tetron's efforts seeming to rekindle at her apparent success. A plasma stream swept across the area ahead of him, crashing into starfighters and squids alike and leaving nothing in its wake.
He found the Tetron who had fired, a cluster of three off the Dove's stern. They had cleared the Federation ships that had been distracting them and were preparing to use their main weapons again. He pushed the Dove into motion, diverting as much power as he dared from the shields to give her thrust, turning her around and bursting forward. He couldn't take them all on alone, but he could get between their plasma and the remainder of the nearby units.
"Colonel," Millie said. "The Riggers are in control of the Corleone."
A small part of him felt a sense of relief at the news, but only a small part. He continued to add velocity, racing to intercept. The infected Tetron stopped firing amoebics behind him.
"Where's Tio?" Mitchell asked.
"Firedog is sitting on him. Teal is getting us out of here. Colonel, the Manibus is orbiting the other side of FD-09. They're reporting an increase in the strength of the unidentified signal Tio has been tracking for you."
"I can't worry about that right now," Mitchell said. "Get to the fallback position; we'll rendezvous if we survive."
"Roger."
Mitchell cut forward velocity, turning the Dove's bow as one of the Tetron fired its plasma. He responded in kind, unleashing the energy he had stored. It intercepted the attack, creating a flare of light and heat as the two streams collided and canceled one another out.
"Colonel," Steven said, his voice shaky amidst the hiss of static. "I think it's working."
Mitchell turned his head, looking back to the infected Tetron. It had stopped firing altogether, and the energy pulses along it had slowed to a crawl. He had seen a similar reaction before, but it hadn't lasted then.
"Miiiitttcccheeellll." The voice came out of the bridge loudspeakers, surrounding him. "What are you doing, Miiittchelll?"
"Origin? What's going on?"
"A transmission from the Tetron," Origin replied. "It is being broadcast on every
channel and frequency."
"Miiittcchellllll."
"Colonel?" Millie said. "That is creepy as hell."
"Miitttchhellll." The voice seemed to double. To his left, he saw a second Tetron dim.
"Miiiitttttttccchhheellllll." A third joined them.
"What are you doing to me?"
"Miitttchelll."
The voices gained in number and began overlapping one another in a sudden cacophony of confusion. The Tetron were dimming one after another, the amoebics no longer firing, the squids falling inactive.
"It's working," Mitchell said, softly at first. "Teegin, tell me it's working."
"It appears to be spreading," Teegin replied. "Watson is being written across the Tetron."
"The virus?"
"We will know soon."
"Good, because I can't stand this noise."
"Miittccheelll."
"What are you doing?"
"What is this?"
"I'm going to kill you."
The voices gained in volume and frequency, filling the channel.
"Colonel," Millie said. "The Manibus has finished downloading the transmission."
"Millie, I thought I said not right now," Mitchell replied.
"Colonel, they've also decrypted it. They said you need to hear it."
"When this is done."
"Damn it, Mitch, now," Millie shouted.
"Have it transferred," Mitchell said. Something about the message had gotten her worked up. Why? "Origin, are you receiving?"
"Yes, Mitchell. One moment."
"Colonel, the virus is spreading," Teegin said. "Observe target zero."
Mitchell found the original infected Tetron once more. It had gone completely dark, and now the dendrites were decomposing, losing rigidity and crumbling into dust. "Is it?"
"Dead? Yes."
"Mittttccheelll? What have you done to me? What have you done?" The other Watsons were starting to react, realizing that they were poisoned. "What have you done? Miiiitttccheelll?"
He couldn't help but smile at the level of panic in their voices. The first was dead, and the rest were going to follow. The virus had worked, and in a minute the war would be over. She had done it. Ella had done it. The Hero, just as the Tetron had named her. Just as they had feared her to be.
He started shaking. Not with pain or grief or sadness, but with a sudden, difficult to contain hope and joy. He would celebrate this victory when they were all crumbling to dust, and not a second before.
"Transfer complete, Mitchell," Origin said.
He had nearly forgotten about it in his elation.
"Let me hear it."
37
"Father."
Kathy's voice sounded ethereal. Ghostly.
The single word sent a new chill down Mitchell's spine.
"I hope this reaches you in time. I hope you will get to hear it at all. I wish I could be confident in its delivery, but what I have learned has led me to believe the likelihood is slim. Even so, I promised you I would report on my discoveries, and a small chance is better than none at all. Such is the importance of the information I have gathered."
"Miitttchelll. What have you done?"
The Watson voices continued to fill the background behind the message, slowly becoming softer and less numerous as the virus caused them to self-destruct. Stillness reigned over the space beyond FD-09, where the battered remains of their attack force waited for the cries to end.
"I inserted myself into the Nova Taurus network with the goal of learning what had happened to the Watson configurations. At first, it seemed as though they had all been disbursed. Destroyed or otherwise abandoned. I followed the threads that connected them to the corporation. I followed the money, the deals, the mergers and brokering. I followed the technology, the research, the studies. I followed every trip by every executive to every city around the world. Petabyte upon petabyte of data, and I found nothing out of the ordinary."
"Miiitttchellll."
The voices were down to three or four. How much longer could they last? Not long.
"Colonel," Millie said. "Are you listening?"
"Yes," Mitchell replied.
"The Manibus is reporting that the signal is still getting stronger. Wherever it's coming from, it seems to be moving toward us."
"What?" Mitchell didn't understand why that would be. Would Kathy explain it to him? "Standby."
"I had hoped to report that back to you. I had hoped to tell you that Watson was gone. His configurations had failed. His plans for the future had died. I only wish that was the case. Two hundred years ago the Nova Taurus Corporation began offloading their assets from Earth, shifting them to a new colony they had established in a sector of the galaxy that other studies suggested was uninhabitable, including the Alliance and the Frontier Federation. They effectively cut ties with Earth, and as I soon discovered were also working to bury their own history, removing any and all links between their corporate roots and their new position as a nation unto themselves."
"Miiittchell."
A single voice remained, barely able to say his name.
"The name of the nation is New Terra. The same New Terra that will become an enigma to both the Alliance and the Federation in your time. I have discovered why, and I am putting every effort possible into warning you. Nova Taurus sent ships of people to populate their original colony; nearly fifty thousand souls in all. None of them survived the journey. We were fooled. Tricked by Watson. I know Teegin captured his core. It wasn't enough. He escaped. We only saw the fullness of him. We didn't guess at his distribution."
"Mii-"
The last Tetron voice faded away. A haze of dust floated among the fleet, among the ships both active and inactive, among the wreckage, among the dead and the alive.
"Distribution?" Mitchell said, as though he could talk back to Kathy.
"Father, Watson didn't create Nova Taurus. He is Nova Taurus, and by extension, New Terra. He didn't run the Nova Taurus network. He is the Nova Taurus network. His consciousness, his code, was distributed across thousands upon thousands of computers, each containing a small slice of him that would go undetected by our efforts to locate him. The people of New Terra aren't human. They are configurations, every last one of them, created to be controlled by Watson, who is in the process of forming a new core. There are currently hundreds of thousands of them. By the time you receive this, there will likely be tens of millions, if not more. He needs them for his war. He needs more bodies than the Alliance or the Federation can create on their own. He needs them to fight the Naniates. He also needs them to stop you."
Mitchell swallowed hard, his heart pulsing, his breath suddenly ragged. He was cold. Very cold. How could this be happening? How could this be real?
"Mitchell," Origin said, interrupting the message, and breaking him from his shock. "I have identified incoming vessels."
He checked his HUD. The incoming ships were so densely organized that they appeared as a solid blob.
"How many?" he whispered.
"Eight hundred," Origin replied.
"Eight hundred?"
"There are three Tetron with them as well."
Watson's secret. His perfect, horrible secret. He had built an army of unimaginable size. He had also either convinced the remaining Tetron to join him or had managed to seize control of them himself.
"This isn't the first time," Mitchell said, realizing the full extent of the truth. New Terra had always been an isolated nation, and Watson had been in Katherine's timeline in his recursion as well.
"There's always another contingency, Mitchell," Watson said. "Always another way. I had been hoping my inferior brothers and sisters would have taken care of you, considering I told them what you were planning to do. But you've always been resourceful. You've always gotten the job done. How many people that you care about did it take this time? And how does it feel, knowing that you finally defeated the Tetron, that the master plan you hatched with Mother so many recursions pa
st bore the fruits of your labor, and it will still be for nothing?"
Mitchell didn't speak. He could barely breathe.
"Nothing to say?" Watson said, amused. "Try to run, Mitchell. Try to hide. Try to find a world that isn't coming under siege as we speak, or that won't be soon. I'll enjoy hunting you down. I'll enjoy every minute of it until I finally end your pathetic life. Humankind is mine. I require them, and you will not take them from me. Not you. Not anybody. A child, Mother? I will show you what a child can do, once they have grown up."
Mitchell was numb. He couldn't think. He couldn't move. Watson. It was always Watson.
"By the way. Kathy? She didn't send that transmission. She didn't survive two minutes inside the Nova Taurus mainframe. Inside of me. I just thought it would be more fun to introduce myself this way. More dramatic. Don't just sit there, Mitchell. Do something."
He sat and stared out of the viewscreen, Watson's words echoing in his head. Do something. Do what? They couldn't stand and fight against this. They couldn't escape it. For a moment, he had tasted victory, but it had been false. There was always only ever defeat.
"All ships," Kate said, her voice cutting through the silence. "If you are FTL capable, get out now, regroup at the fallback point. If you can't run, do your best to hide. Keep your systems down; your power drain low. It might save you. Mitchell, whatever the hell you're thinking, snap the frig out of it. We need you. I need you. It isn't over until you're dead, remember? You aren't dead yet."
Not dead? They would be soon. He could see the glint of reflection from the coming New Terran fleet in the distance. They were within firing range, but they were giving him a chance to run. That's how confident Watson was in his victory. The Dove, the Goliath, Teegin, Origin, Kate and him. They were no longer significant. No longer a concern.
It was the thought that broke him from his stupor. The thought that woke him from his despair. That, and Kate's words. "I need you."
"Origin," he said. "I want as much power as you can give me, pull it from the eternal engine if you have to."