The Edge of Infinity (War Eternal Book 7)

by M. R. Forbes

"Mitchell?"

  "Just do it. I'm not leaving without a parting gift."

  "As you say, Mitchell."

  He began gathering the power, pushing it to the front of the Dove, while at the same time turning the ship to face the coming storm.

  "Mitchell, what are you doing?" Kate said.

  "Ensuring that you get away," he replied. "I'll meet you at the fallback position."

  "I'm not going to leave you."

  "Do it. I'll be there. I promise."

  "Roger."

  "That's the spirit," Watson said, his fleet surely registering the spike in power output from the Dove. "I didn't want to stab you in the back."

  The energy continued to build on the Dove's bow. Mitchell pushed a small portion of it to the rear, adding thrust and moving toward the New Terran fleet. He could see the outline of the ships now. They were sleek and smooth, and more advanced than anything the Alliance or the Federation controlled, but that wasn't much of a surprise. He could only imagine what kind of damage they were going to inflict on the rest of the galaxy.

  A few of them began to fire, a mixture of amoebics and sharp beams reaching across the distance. They weren't aimed at the Dove. Instead, they struck a few of the derelict ships. The amoebics exploded as expected. The beam weapons tore right through the ships, cutting them instantly in half, along with anything else that was in their path.

  "Do you like that?" Watson said. "It's a newer design."

  The Federation and Alliance ships began to limp away, jumping into FTL one by one, escaping from the massive fleet. Mitchell continued toward them, still building power along the bow. The amount of energy stored in the eternal engine was enormous, but not unlimited, and even Origin had limits to how much she could carry at once. He tested them now, forcing more of it ahead, gathering it in one location.

  "Mitchell, this is becoming painful," Origin said.

  He could feel it too. The feedback from the integration started to creep into his nerves, triggering waves of searing pain. He couldn't see Watson's fleet in front of him anymore. All he could see was the green ball of energy he was collecting. It had expanded outward nearly an entire kilometer.

  "I cannot contain it much longer," Origin said.

  Mitchell clenched his teeth against his own pain.

  "Mitchell? Your maneuver is curious," Watson said. He sounded slightly worried.

  "You like to underestimate me," Mitchell said. "You like to think you're in control, before you really are. This is just a taste, you asshole. You should know by now I'm not that easy to get rid of, and I'll do whatever it takes to stop you."

  "Hit me with your best shot, Mitchell."

  He howled as he released the stored energy, sending a massive stream of it washing forward, crossing the gap of space and slamming into the New Terran ships. The lead column vaporized beneath the onslaught, the plasma barreling through them and continuing on, through the second row, then the third, then the fourth. The ships vanished beneath the attack, and as the beam struck one of the Tetron it too was torn apart.

  As the beam subsided, a clear path remained where it had passed, separating the New Terran force with a wide, empty gap. Nearly one hundred ships were destroyed in the single strike.

  Mitchell stared at the crack with satisfaction for a moment and then diverted power to push the Dove into FTL. The remaining New Terran ships were still, the residual energy disrupting their systems. It was a side-effect he hadn't expected but appreciated.

  "Nothing to say now?" Mitchell asked.

  This time, Watson didn't reply.

  "You haven't won anything yet. I'm going to stop you. Just wait and see."

  The world changed in front of Mitchell as the Dove went into FTL, leaving the stunned New Terran fleet, and its master, behind.

  38

  "Teegin, give me a status report," Mitchell said, the moment the Dove dropped from FTL amidst the remains of the combined fleets. He gazed out the viewscreen at the gathered ships, his heart sinking.

  Was this all that was left?

  "Colonel, we have lost ninety percent of our original assets, along with nearly ten thousand souls. Battle Fleet Carver has nine ships remaining, though all have suffered heavy damage and will likely require immediate restoration. Battle Fleet Samurai has four ships left and is now under the command of Lieutenant Xin Chang on the Sumo. Knife has also suffered heavy casualties. Only the Manibus and the Corleone have arrived."

  "And the Goliath?" Mitchell asked, trying to wrap his head around the losses. Not that he couldn't visualize them with the arrangement of battered starships lined up nearby.

  "I am fine, Colonel," Teegin replied. "Damage is minor at best, though my eternal engine is no longer sufficiently powered to leave this recursion."

  "Neither is mine," Origin said. "Mitchell, we will not be able to leave this timeline without building a new engine, a process which takes many years."

  "I have no intention of leaving this recursion," Mitchell said. "Ella didn't die for that."

  "Colonel, the probabilities of survival given the emergence of New Terra as an opposition force are less than one percent," Teegin said.

  "Based on what?" Mitchell snapped. He didn't want to be told they were finished, whether or not it turned out to be true.

  "New Terran technology is vastly superior to anything the Alliance or the Federation have to offer. They hold a major advantage in sheer numbers, and it is logical to assume that they are better organized and synchronized. Furthermore, Watson mentioned worlds under siege. It is safe to postulate that his forces are attacking Alliance and Federation planets at this moment, and he is distributing the same short-range systems that allowed him to gain control of the Defense Council on Earth."

  "You mean slaves?" Mitchell said.

  "Yes, Colonel. He has instituted an alternative means to gain the numbers he needs to fight against the Naniates. Those same units can also be utilized against us."

  Mitchell pushed himself forward, separating himself from Origin. He had never been connected for so long at one time before, and he had to lean on the chair to stay upright. Even so, he could taste the bile as it rose into his mouth.

  "Colonel," Steven said. "We have to do something, regardless of any probabilities or calculations."

  "We will," Mitchell replied. "Tetron logic has failed us before."

  As much as he hated it, he was referring to Teegin and Kathy's assumption that they could control Watson both in the past and the present. Kathy had failed in the end, sacrificing herself for nothing. Nova Taurus had been able to disappear, replaced with New Terra, a nation of an estimated forty-two planets or so that was populated by Watson configurations.

  "Colonel," Millie said, adding her voice to the channel. "I don't want to focus on the wrong priorities, but there is also the matter of the Knife. He was ready to leave my Riggers stranded on FD-09."

  "Your Riggers," Tio said behind her. "Not mine."

  "Quiet down, mate," Cormac said.

  "Millie, we'll get to that. Steven, Lieutenant Chang, Tio, Millie, Kate, Katherine, and Yousefi, I expect all of you here on the Dove within the next twenty minutes. We all have questions and concerns, and we need to figure out how to respond to them."

  "Yes, Colonel," Steven said.

  "Yes, Colonel," Millie said.

  "Colonel, you have no jurisdiction over me," Tio said. "I do not- mmmph." His voice became muffled.

  "I'll bring Tio over with me, Colonel," Millie said.

  "Teal, are you with us?" Mitchell asked. "Or strictly with your boss?"

  "I'm with you Colonel," Teal replied.

  "Then I want you here as well. Bring the Corleone. Thirty minutes. In the meantime, determine the most critical repairs and do what you can to get your people working on them."

  "Colonel," Lieutenant Chang said, "What about notifying our superiors?"

  "I have a bad feeling your superiors will all be dead or under Watson's control by the time any message we send reaches them,
Lieutenant. I was placed in command of this joint operation, and until this operation is finished, you'll continue to take orders from me."

  "With respect, Colonel, your command is unofficial at best, and the mission is complete. We lost the battle."

  "What do you want from me, Chang?" Mitchell asked. He was tired and angry and didn't have the energy to deal with stupid.

  "My intention is to return the remainder of Battle Fleet Samurai to the nearest Federation starbase and await further commands."

  "Fine," Mitchell said. "If you want to go, then go. You can be captured or killed with the rest of your people instead of working to set them free."

  Chang didn't answer.

  "That goes for any ship out here, except the Manibus," Mitchell said. "Steven, you too. If you want to go, you can go."

  "I'm not going anywhere, Mitch," Steven said. "None of my people are. I can see the writing on the wall. The best hope we have is here, even if that hope is slim."

  "Thank you," Mitchell said.

  "You can't hold me here, Colonel," Tio said. "You have no right."

  "You're a wanted criminal, Tio," Mitchell said. "I'm an Alliance military officer. I do have the right." He paused a moment to let the statement sink in. "Thirty minutes. Origin, close the channel."

  "Channel closed," Origin replied.

  Mitchell shut his eyes, enjoying the sudden, complete silence. He needed time to think, time to regroup, time to recover. Thirty minutes wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

  "What about you, Origin?" he said. "Are you damaged?"

  "Physically, it is nothing I cannot repair, Mitchell, though once again Watson has injured my pride. I failed in my creation of him."

  "You couldn't have known things would go this way. You didn't have feelings when you made him."

  "It seemed logical to reproduce, to increase the rate of discovery and learning. I never considered the potential consequences."

  "Said billions of parents across the galaxy," Mitchell said. "You can't take it back, so we have to adjust."

  "You were prepared to give up when Watson appeared," Origin said.

  "Yes. What about it?"

  "It would have been a logical decision, but not the appropriate emotional one."

  "I'm doing the best I can. I'm only human."

  "Are you well, Mitchell? You ask everyone else, but there is no one to ask you."

  Mitchell smiled weakly. "I appreciate that you noticed. I'm taking it one second at a time. I'm hurting, I'm angry, and a large part of me still wants to lay down and give up, and I hate myself for that. Ella died for what? Nothing, if we don't find a way to stop this." He paused. "We won, Origin. Damn it, we frigging won." He shook his head, feeling tears of pain and exhaustion make their way into his eyes.

  "We can still win, Mitchell," Origin said.

  "Teegin said less than one percent."

  Origin laughed, the sound a rhythmic echo through the loudspeakers. "If there is one thing I have learned from humans, and from you especially, it is that as long as there is a more than zero percent chance, anything can and probably will happen."

  39

  Mitchell stood at the front of the group he had gathered as the last arrival, Lieutenant Chang, made his way into the conference room.

  "I'm glad you changed your mind, Lieutenant," he said.

  "You can thank my crew," Chang replied. "They asked me not to go. They believe without the Dove and the Goliath, none of our ships would have survived."

  It was probably true, but Mitchell wasn't going to push the issue.

  "Teegin, are you connected?" he asked.

  "I am present, Colonel," Teegin replied.

  "Colonel," Tio said from his position near the back. His hands had been bound when he entered, but they were free now. He used them to point at him accusingly. "I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but-"

  "Game, Tio?" Mitchell said, keeping his voice calm. "This isn't a game. We just lost thousands of good people. If you want to stop AI from taking over, you need to stop making this about what you can get, and make it about what you can give."

  "Colonel, I-"

  "Tio," Teegin said. "I contain an aggregate of your prior recursion's consciousness. In that timeline, you sacrificed yourself to save the Goliath from Watson. You gave your life to this cause, and to give me life. I know that there is a person behind the posturing. That is the person we need now."

  Tio slumped back in his seat, remaining silent. Mitchell didn't know if Teegin's words connected with this recursion's version of the Knife, but at least they had shut him up.

  "Colonel," Yousefi said. "I'm unclear regarding this turn of events. Katherine has explained a lot about Watson to me and the others, but I don't quite understand."

  "I don't either," Mitchell replied. "Not completely." He had spent the thirty minutes before the meeting trying to work it out, and as usual had only generated more questions. "But let's start at the beginning, and maybe we can find a way to change our fate."

  "Agreed," Katherine said. The others voiced their approval as well.

  "We brought the prior recursion's Watson back to Earth with us, to this recursion, with the goal of using him as a baseline for an improved version of a virus that was created in a recursion before that, a virus that weakened the Tetron by introducing them to emotions. It didn't weaken them enough that humankind could overcome their technological advantage. Origin, is that accurate so far?"

  "Yes, Mitchell," Origin said.

  "Except Watson, being the asshole that he is, figured out a way to manipulate the spacetime effects of the engine and come out in this timeline years before we did. With that time advantage, he started building configurations and founded the company Nova Taurus, the same company that was given the clearance to begin studying the XENO-1, which was actually the Goliath. We tangled with him a bit, and in the end, Teegin defeated Watson and captured his core, which is basically his main set of operating instructions."

  "Correct, Colonel," Teegin said.

  "We left my daughter, Kathy, a hybrid, on Earth to hunt down the Watson configurations that remained after the core was captured. She spent nearly two hundred years searching for them and trying to track Watson, but they had all vanished. She knew there was a connection between Watson and Nova Taurus, but she didn't know how deep it ran, and so she enacted a plan to enter the Nova Taurus network and figure out what had happened. Only now it turns out that she never learned anything because as soon as she entered the network, Watson destroyed her."

  Mitchell paused, feeling a wrenching in his gut at the words. As if he didn't have enough reason to hate the Tetron already.

  "According to what Watson revealed to us, at some point he moved himself off-world to evade her detection, and to begin his expansion," Katherine said.

  "But how could he expand?" Mitchell asked. "Configurations require raw materials. Bodies."

  "He had bodies in the colonists," she replied. "Thousands of them."

  "That would only be a start. He would need a lot more than that to populate dozens of worlds."

  "It is logical to assume that the configurations he created were more similar to the ones Kathy and I made," Teegin said. "They did not know what they were until they were activated."

  "Sleepers?" Yousefi said.

  "Essentially. In this way, Watson could use the colonists as expected, letting them found a new nation while he pulled the strings from behind the scenes."

  "But a distributed Tetron wouldn't be able to build configurations," Mitchell said. "You need a physical form for that. A platform."

  "Yes," Teegin agreed. "It is likely Watson used the resources he gathered under Nova Taurus to begin construction of a new form."

  "That isn't possible," Origin said. "Only a Tetron can create this form."

  "Then how did you come to be?" Tio asked. "You said that you're the first."

  "The original Tetron structure evolved over thousands of years," Origin said. "I could
not create configurations for many millennia. While we don't have an estimate of the number of configurations that were created by Watson, it is likely he would have had to start producing them soon after forming New Terra in order to arrive at significant numbers."

  "Then where did the form come from?"

  "Perhaps it was not created," Teegin said. "What if it was already there? What if Watson knew it was already there?"

  "A derelict Tetron?" Mitchell said. "How?"

  "From a previous recursion. None of us know how many there have been, Colonel. It is possible that the Tetron predetermined this eventuality, and prepared for it."

  "That's a bit of a stretch if you ask me," Millie said.

  "I don't know," Mitchell replied. "The Tetron can follow a decision tree trillions of levels deep. I don't think we can rule it out."

  "What does it matter, anyway?" Chang asked. "These events have already occurred. What we should focus on is how to stop the New Terran's advances on the Alliance and the Federation."

  "It is important to understand the root of a problem in order to dig it out completely," Teegin said. "In this case, the root is Watson's means of creating the forces that are now threatening humankind. By understanding how he created an entire civilization of his own, we may be able to devise a means to undermine it."

  "Clearly, we can't approach the problem from the top down," Tio said. "The New Terrans are too numerous and their technology too powerful for either nation to compete directly. If the size of the force Watson dispatched to deal with our fleet is any indication, there is no doubt the Alliance and Federation will both be overrun."

  "Our fleet?" Millie said.

  "Yes, Admiral Narayan. If I am being conscripted into this war, then it is my war as well. Our war. Our fleet."

  "Do you think you can participate without killing innocent people?" Millie asked.

  "Okay, that's enough," Mitchell said. "Tio is right, and I don't think anyone here disagrees. We can't challenge the New Terrans out in the field. If we're going to do anything to stop this, we have to find a way to cut off the head."

  "That is the problem with a distributed system, Colonel," Tio said. "There could be a hundred heads. There could be a million heads."