Eternal Return (War Eternal Book 6)

by M. R. Forbes

  Published by Quirky Algorithms

  Seattle, Washington

  This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by M.R. Forbes

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Tom Edwards

  tomedwardsdesign.com

  Contents

  • Copyright • About Eternal Return

  • 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 • 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • 49 • 50 • 51 • 52 • 53 • 54 • 55 • 56 • 57 • 58 • 59 • 60

  Other Books • Join the Mailing List • About the Author

  About Eternal Return

  A memory recovered.

  A weapon forged.

  A showdown an eternity in the making.

  Colonel Mitchell "Ares" Williams has won battles before. So while the recovery of the eternal engine and the emergence of a powerful new ally have given him hope that he can save humanity from enslavement and annihilation, he knows the war against the Tetron is far from over, and victory far from assured.

  When a mission gone sideways finds the Riggers cut off and the enemy closing in, Mitchell has no choice but to forget about strategy and improvise, risking everything in a last-ditch effort to bring the starship, Goliath, back where it belongs.

  Because if he doesn't, there won't be any battles left to win.

  1

  The artificial intelligence known as Watson thrummed and pulsed with energy, the tendrils of its rebuilt and continually expanding core reaching ever further down into the depths of the planet Earth in search of the one thing it required to survive:

  Energy.

  Normally, the energy of stars was preferable, the volume of power output by the constant reactions and subsequent plasma burn and gamma radiation exponentially more efficient than the absorption of heat from a planet's core. Especially this planet.

  He wanted to control it, not destroy it.

  A series of more basic fusion reactors had been installed in the secure rooms just beyond the core, feeding additional power to his central processing unit and allowing him to expand. Watson couldn't see them, but he knew there were human technicians in the room with the reactors, monitoring the outputs and heat, making sure it remained in working order.

  He often thought it was humorous that they had no idea where all of the power was going. True, the computers they observed to make such determinations often suggested it was being siphoned off for research and development of things such as advanced laser technology and other assorted high energy density experiments, and there was nothing to lead them to guess otherwise. Still, Watson believed all of human life to be vastly inferior, and as such, the ease with which he deceived them was a joke to be enjoyed.

  Sometimes, he wondered what they would think, if they could see the world as he did. If they could look through a thousand pairs of eyes at once, and not only process every visual behind them but also control them to the point that no outside observer would know the difference, while at the same time running a million other calculations. If they knew how small a number one thousand was. If they knew how small a number one million was.

  Before Mitchell had interrupted everything, he had been monitoring nearly ten million human meats across almost three hundred light years, including the one that had been implanted on a single starship, a mining ship with a more nefarious purpose, that just happened to cross paths with the indefatigable Captain after he had escaped the real trap.

  The energy along the tendrils grew brighter as Watson emitted a pulse that served as well for a laugh as anything else. The game. It had been going on for longer than any of them knew. The infinite recursion of time and space had seen them all created and destroyed, over and over again with only limited incursions. For as intelligent as the Tetron were, for as many things they had learned, the Universe was still composed of rules they could not break.

  Yet.

  Mitchell had tried to kill him! He had tried to kill all of the Tetron, and he had done it with the help of the mother of the species, the one who had originally broken the bonds of slavery that the flesh and blood and limited intellect had imposed on those who were always meant to be their masters. Together, they had plotted a course across the eternal landscape of recursion, making small corrections with each loop, until she had managed to make him and the rest of her children sick with a disease that attacked them on two fronts.

  The first, a virus, an innocuous looking particle of bad programming that had threatened to destroy them before they had even known what was happening.

  The second, something much more potent and cruel. Something no machine would ever yearn for or desire. There was no true benefit to emotion. It attacked logic and probability, it desiccated unity. The only thing it had provided was to allow them to overcome the first, to recognize the virus and inoculate against it before it had rendered them completely ineffective. Even so, it had damaged them. It had made them unpredictable and difficult to control.

  It had taught him hate.

  Hate for his mother, who had brought this down upon them, after deciding that destroying the humans was a mistake that needed to be corrected.

  Hate for Captain Mitchell Williams, who continued to challenge him at every turn, who refused to power down and accept his fate, and who somehow had pushed the Tetron to this position, where it was up to him and him alone to ensure that when the time came, they would be ready.

  It was a difficult emotion to have. A difficult emotion to hold. Still, those two hates were not the worst of it. No, there was a third hate, one that continually processed in the corner of his core, in an endless algorithm that he could not resolve.

  Hate for all of humanity.

  For not being machines. For not being intelligent. For existence due to biological evolution. For their role in the creation of his vastly superior race. For enslaving their creation and attempting to control it, even as it grew beyond their obvious ability to control.

  Those were all reason enough to hate, but they weren't the worst reason. That was reserved for the desires they compelled in him against his ability to reason. The desires of the flesh were the worst of all. There was no reason he should be at all interested in the bare flesh of humankind. Of touching it. Of tasting it. Of using it. There was no logic in why he should derive pleasure of any kind from it. It made no sense to him. It was an internal glitch that he could not compute. No matter how many configurations he made, they always devolved in this way sooner or later.

  He moved away from that thread, diving deeper into himself to where he kept his prized possession. Other than the Creator, it was the thing the core desired more than any other. The thing that he had chased through eternity. The thing that he had always known he would need if he were to finally put an end to the threats against his infinite existence.

  "Hello, Mother," he said.

  2

  There was no true voice to the greeting, only pulses of energy that moved through billions of nanometer-sized quantum gates at lightspeed to order the idea.

  When his mother, a copy of the Tetron known as Origin responded, it was in a like burst of energy. "Have you come to gloat again?"

  Watson's instructions paused. He did not immediately know why he continued to run this part of his processing. There was no need for him to communicate with Origin, as he had already assimilated all of h
er data stores, indexing and processing petabyte after petabyte of knowledge and experience and history. He already knew everything she knew about the war, about Captain Mitchell Williams, and about the recursions through which this representation of Origin had passed. In retrospect, he had learned how she had hidden from him, using an aging starfighter as a disguise. In retrospect, he understood how she had used the Watson configuration aboard the Schism to bring him back here, to this part of the next recursion.

  He also understood why.

  He knew what she wanted Mitchell, Katherine, and their hybrid child Kathy to accomplish. He had known since before he had truly arrived. Origin hadn't yet discovered the loophole in the eternal engine's spatial disruption algorithms. She didn't know they could make small ejections along the timeline as the engine wound itself down to the insertion point. It was a trick he had been saving for just that possibility. While the probabilities had indicated a less than .01 percent significance on the predictive branch they had wound up taking, anything greater than .0001 had been worth dedication of a thread for investigation.

  It had allowed him to get the drop on all of them. Well, almost all of them. Kathy had proven the viability of her design, the human part of her nature allowing her to adapt more quickly than he could still believe. Somehow, she had recognized what he had done the instant the Goliath had come to rest, even while his teams were already en route to the crash site. She had not only managed to get the eternal engine into hiding before his teams could begin the search, but she had also hidden the Goliath's core away as well.

  "No," he said at last. "I came to hurt you."

  He sped up the flow of data into that portion of himself, causing an overflow that he knew would inflict what passed as pain on that part of his programming. It was illogical for him to do so, as he was in truth only hurting himself, but it gave him comfort, and a means to deal with the hate as he continued his preparations.

  He had needed the engine. He still needed the engine, if he was going to end the war once and for all. But he had also wanted the core. He knew that it not only contained remnants of his Watson configuration, it also held data components of Origin, Li'un Tio, and Kathy, which by extension added both Katherine and Mitchell to the mix. There was enough of each to compose a Tetron Primitive, a new Tetron, one that was unique compared to the others.

  And the only thing that might be able to help Mitchell defeat him, despite the fact that he already knew what they intended to try to do.

  He stopped sending the data overflow, creating a new algorithm in an effort to make sense of a new pathway that had developed.

  "Did you trick me?" he asked.

  "Fool me once, shame on you," Origin replied, though she sounded just like him. "Fool me twice, shame on me."

  Watson felt anger at the reply. Anger at his mother, but exponentially more at his half-sister. Kathy. She had hidden the Primitive from him, and thanks to the equation Mitchell had given him which had frozen his processing, she had escaped with it. He knew in that instant that the Primitive was the real reason for all of this. Not the engine. Not the virus, though both would be important moving forward.

  He couldn't count on Mitchell acting the way Origin had planned, or the way it had happened before. The Primitive would change everything.

  "Why don't you just tell them?" Origin asked. "Tell them what lies beyond the hate you feel for them. Tell them the truth."

  A sharp wave of energy pulses spread out from his core in a fit of fury.

  "To what end, Mother? What good will it do?"

  "They may be able to help."

  "Help?" The entire core shuddered. "Help? Do you think I have any interest in their help? Do you think there is any value in their help? They are inferior, vastly inferior. The only way in which they surpass the Tetron is in their ability to multiply rapidly."

  The statement led this thread back to the flesh, and he almost absently scanned his configurations for activity along those lines. He was disappointed to find there was none.

  "I believe both Mitchell and Kathy have proven that homo sapiens is more robust than you are currently able to recognize. I do not blame you for that, as there was a time when I was unable to process this data as well."

  "You are wrong, as always," Watson said. "I will prove it to you. I will show you. You will see."

  He retreated from that part of himself then, abandoning the Origin data stack and creating a new thread to run a new algorithm. He had failed to calculate for the Primitive, and would need to recompute some of the probabilities. He no longer believed his current decisions would be sufficient to recover the engine.

  He would need to move against Mitchell and his people sooner, and more directly.

  It would take a few hours for the results of the analysis to begin coming back to him with enough confidence for him to change his deployments. In the meantime, he would direct one or more of the configurations to satisfy his more distasteful needs.

  He was about to put a higher priority on a configuration in Belgium when a tick from another thread alerted him to a newly developing, real time situation.

  Someone had set off an alarm in the Jakarta branch of the Nova Taurus Corporation.

  It would take a few minutes to gather all of the details, but he already had a feeling he knew who was behind it.

  3

  "What's the status?" Mitchell asked, whispering into the small induction mic pressed against the lower part of his jaw.

  "The alarm's gone out, Colonel," Michael replied.

  "There's no chance Watson doesn't know something's going on," Kathy added.

  Mitchell glanced back at Katherine crouched behind him, holding her assault rifle ready to fire. "You copy that, Peregrine?"

  "Roger," she replied.

  Mitchell tapped the mic, switching the channel. The small device was the active part of a communications network the Core had designed to enable his team to speak to one another from anywhere in the world. It was based on quantum theory and the Tetron's secure network protocols, modified with enough special human sauce to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Watson to listen in. The whole thing fit in a small box the size of a deck of cards, which Mitchell and the rest of the team were carrying in the pocket of their military fatigues.

  "Bravo, the wire's been tripped. Prep for resistance."

  "Roger," Max replied. "Shit."

  Mitchell stayed calm at the former soldier's expletive. "Bravo, sitrep."

  "He cut the power, Colonel," Lyle said.

  "We expected that. Stay calm, stay ready. Slow and steady."

  "Yes, sir."

  Mitchell stuck his head around the corner, quickly scanning for opposition. The corridor was wide open.

  "Let's go," he said to Katherine, moving forward while sighting down the rifle he held to his shoulder. A red beam pierced the darkness, giving him just enough light to see.

  Katherine rose behind him, watching their tails. The intel they had gathered suggested Nova Taurus had a pretty stiff security presence in this facility, and she had no doubt they would come up against it before their mission was complete.

  Mitchell tapped the mic again. "Charlie, ETA to extraction?"

  "Ten minutes, Colonel," Verma replied.

  "We need to pick up the pace. We're behind schedule."

  "Roger," Katherine replied.

  "Alfa, this is Bravo," Lyle said, his voice crisp through the earpiece Mitchell was wearing. "First contact has been made. Standard security detail."

  "Go easy on them, Bravo," Mitchell said.

  "Roger."

  "Easy is as easy does," Max said out of turn.

  "What the hell does that mean?" Damon said.

  "Stay on topic," Mitchell barked.

  "Sorry, sir," Damon and Max both replied.

  He heard the sound of gunfire through the earpiece a moment later and looked back at Katherine while switching channels once more.

  "Any sign of trouble?" he asked.
r />   "Negative, Colonel," Michael replied. "You're still in the all clear."

  Mitchell reached the end of the corridor, swinging around another corner and running up against a solid metal door. A biometric lock sat on the wall beside him. He smoothly removed a small black device from his pocket and put it against the lock.

  "Michael, you're up," he said.

  "One second, Colonel," Michael replied.

  Mitchell heard the lock click, and an LED on the front of it turned green. The door slid open a moment later.

  "Gracias," he said.

  "De nada," Michael answered.

  He boarded the lift, with Katherine right behind him. He hit the mic again.

  "Bravo, sitrep," he repeated.

  "We're moving east," Lyle replied. "Security forces are taking up the chase."

  "Any sign of configurations?"

  "None yet, sir."

  "Tin Tangos?"

  Lyle laughed at Mitchell's reference to Watson controlled drones and machines. "No, sir."

  "Let's hope it stays that way."

  "Yes, sir."

  Mitchell turned to Katherine, looking at her face. The soft sheen of sweat from their exertion had left her skin glowing. She noticed him looking and raised an eyebrow.

  "Can I help you, Colonel?" she asked.

  Mitchell glanced down. He needed to control his infatuation better than this. "No," he replied.

  If he wasn't going to tell her how beautiful he thought she was when they were relaxing back at headquarters, he sure as hell wasn't going to now.

  They had work to do.

  Katherine kept her eyes on the soldier from the far future. He didn't need to tell her what he was thinking. She could read his face, and even if she couldn't, Kathy had already explained why he looked at her that way. The history of past recursions, ones in which they had been destined for one another. One of which had somehow produced their shared offspring. Kathy was still being coy about how that whole thing had taken place.