by M. D. Cooper
The fact that her ‘father’ had been under Airtha’s control clarified so much of what had gone on over the last twenty years. She’d blamed him for sending a fleet to New Canaan, but really it had been her mother who had forced Tanis’s hand and escalated tensions between the Transcend and Orion.
It was perfectly clear now that Airtha had hastened the war’s arrival. The only thing that still didn’t make any sense was the fact that her mother, ascended AI though she was, seemed uninterested in allying with Tanis. Together, they could have fought against Orion and then the core AIs without wasting so much time and energy on a civil war.
You should have seen this, Helen. You should have seen that we could have been allies.
Sera felt like she’d never stop struggling with the mysteries that lay so many levels deep.
And new ones kept being added, such as how her real father—whatever that even meant—had ended up in the LMC, held in stasis for over a millennia, while yet another clone took his place.
The man they’d recovered from the LMC had passed every test, and even Finaeus was fully convinced that it was his real brother, but Sera was finding herself more and more uncertain of the wisdom of turning the Transcend’s governance over to him.
Only the fact that the Transcend was bound by the Scipio Alliance, and thus under Tangel’s oversight, kept her from rescinding her transfer of power to Jeffrey Tomlinson.
In the entire galaxy, Sera trusted only one thing: that no matter what, Tangel would do the right thing.
That belief was her North Star.
“Relay has logged us,” Seraphina announced. “Passing you the inbound vector, Cheeky. Applying for a berth at Sandstar Heights.”
“Sandstar?” Sera asked. “Why not Kelsey Outer Ports?”
Seraphina flushed as she looked up, her eyes meeting Sera’s. “Well, there was an attack there a year back, and…Kelsey Outer didn’t make it.”
“Oh. I see.”
Sera hadn’t made any strikes, and from what Roxy had shared, neither had Justin. There was only one other person who could be responsible.
“Have a lot of things like that happened?” she asked.
“A few.”
The bridge fell silent as everyone considered what they were flying into: a realm ruled by a despot who had no compunctions about killing millions of her own people.
“Well, buck up, people.” Finaeus tossed a smirk at each of his nieces. “At least Airtha hasn’t blown the whole ring yet. There’s still hope.”
* * * * *
Outside, the ship was settling onto a cradle at Sandstar Heights, but Sabrina was barely paying attention as she looked over her appearance and gave a brief nod.
A laugh came from the hold’s audible systems.
Sabrina snorted.
Sabrina replied.
the shard said.
The ship’s AI didn’t respond for a second.
Sabrina laughed again.
* * * * *
Twenty minutes later, all the pep talks were over, and the teams had dispersed.
Sabrina dropped her status update in small segments distributed across a number of data drops, then picked up the same from Troy. They shared acknowledgements, and then went comms silent.
The teams would take some time to disperse across the massive Airthan ring. Each had their own plans and destinations, but come 0600 Standard Airthan Time the next day, they would all be planting their bombs in the CriEn plants.
From there, they’d move on to Airtha’s nodes to implant the virus, and then bluff the great AI into thinking that she was going to die.
What a long shot, Sabrina thought to herself.
She knew that it was entirely possible that an AI could be tricked into suiciding. The concept of ‘a fate worse than death’ wasn’t foreign to her kind.
But to trick an intelligence as powerful as Airtha?
If it hadn’t been an idea concocted by Finaeus and Earnest, she would have dismissed it out of hand.
Ironic that even though I’ve sent out a shard of myself, I’m still left back here waiting. And now I’m worried about other me, along with the rest of them. Trust me to make things worse.
Sabrina pushed the melancholy thought from her mind and set to watching the ground crews working nearby, while monitoring local feeds and looking for signs that anything was amiss.
Of course, the Transcend was in the middle of a civil war, and this was one of the capitals. Everything seemed to be amiss.
Even so, vigilance kept her from worrying about her teams.
A bit. A very little bit.
OTHERS
STELLAR DATE: 10.24.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Airthan Ring
REGION: Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
D11 examined the map of the Airthan ring, wishing for some new insight, some clue that would give her a better route to the CriEn power facility that her group had been assigned.
It was deep within one of the exclusion zones. Even the ring’s residents were restricted from passing within five hundred kilometers of the power facility.
She didn’t fault Airtha for keeping people away. It was a time of war, and the facility was a sensitive installation, but that didn’t do anything to make D11’s job easier—which she supposed was the whole point.
The original plan hadn’t taken into account this added level of paranoia, but the Widow wasn’t dismayed. She’d undertaken dozens of missions where reality bore little resemblance to the plan.
At least the power plant is actually there.
D11 had been on her fair share of missions where the objective wasn’t even present when she’d arrived. Granted, many of those had been in the years before jump gates, but even with the gates’ hyper-FTL travel, the timescales for intel to make it back to the Perilous Dream were often measured in decades.
she said to the two other members of her team.
supportive.
D11 shook her head at the other Widow. C419 had a way of being contrarian, even when there was absolutely no reason to do so.
The final member of her team was Y2. She only nodded in agreement.
* * * * *
Sera settled into a seat in the back of a bar which bore the name ‘The Smokey Ruin’. Flaherty sat across from her, his gaze sweeping across the space, cataloguing the entire room—likely weighing threats and assets with that single glance.
Though she’d done the same, Sera didn’t for a second think that she was as efficient as the man who had been her constant guardian for so many years.
However, she didn’t need his assessment to know that the people were tense, unhappy, and clearly imbibing more than normal in an effort to pretend that they weren’t living under a despot.
The woman outside the bar sent a long sigh over the Link.
Sera wondered if the man was mocking Kara, and the woman’s reply indicated that she felt the same.
Kara didn’t respond for a moment, and then asked,
Jen made a disapproving sound.
The man only grunted, and Sera laughed.
Sera and Flaherty ordered drinks and a meal, and then some food to go before eventually rising from their table and returning to the streets of Dima.
Night had fallen, which meant that grav fields were bending the light of Airtha away from the ring, with only a dim glow filtering through. The effect was one that caused an amorphous light to fill most of the sky, creating a near-shadowless moonlight.
When she was young, Sera recalled Finaeus often talking about how he wanted to engineer a new solution to the nighttime effects on the ring. If she recalled correctly, he had discussed making some sort of moon configuration that would orbit off the elliptical between the ring and the star.
Maybe once this is all over with, he can actually get to that.
Kara stepped out of the shadows. “I don’t see a drink.”
“You doubted me?” Flaherty asked, and pulled a bottle from his jacket. “Stout, right?”
“Wow, you do notice everything.”
“I got you onion rings and a chili sandwich,” Sera held up a bag.
Flaherty gestured for the trio to begin moving as well.
Sera glanced at her companions and gave a reassuring smile.
Flaherty grunted indifferently.
Sera didn’t reply to either of her companions, wondering how she got saddled with the two sourpusses.
Eventually, her thoughts turned to the fact that somewhere on the ring was yet another one of her ‘sisters’. Except this sister was different: cruel, villainous—everything that Sera knew she could be if she didn’t keep her baser instincts in check. Ironically, the visage the new version of herself had chosen was of a pale-skinned woman who was always sheathed in glowing white. It reminded her of stories Katrina had told of her Lumin ancestors and their near-cultish worship of light.
She watched a day-old feed in which the white Sera made a proclamation, declaring that a new armada was being built and would strike Khardine and end the war in just a few months.
Standing behind her otherself was a haggard man, who had stood behind Tomlinsons for longer than most people had been alive: Adrienne.
Sera glanced at Kara, wondering if she’d sought out any feeds showing her father.
The winged woman had expressed a desire to free her father, but strangely not a desire to talk to him. It wasn’t as though Kara had spoken ill of Adrienne, it was more in what she hadn’t said.
Of course, Sera knew what the underlying reason was. Adrienne wasn’t so terribly different from Airtha in how he treated his children. But now there was no doubt in any of their minds that Adrienne would be under Airtha’s control. The only way to free him—and the other trillion souls on the ring—was through Airtha’s destruction.
Or so they hoped.
Fifteen minutes later, they reached their destination, a maglev platform, where they caught a train to a larger station where they milled about in the crowds for half an hour, disappearing one by one until all three were stealthed near where their target train would board.
TSF soldiers patrolled the platform, and drones swept by overhead. Twice, the guards nearly bumped into Sera, but both times, she managed to twist to the side at the last moment. Ten long minutes later, the train arrived for CEPP41—her team’s ultimate destination, deep in one of the exclusion zones.
She slipped onto the lead car while the guards re-checked all of the waiting passengers, moving to a corner that she hoped would remain vacant. Pings from Flaherty and Kara confirmed that they’d also boarded the train and were thus far undetected.
She was relieved to see that only two passengers boarded her car, each settling in on opposite ends of the car. One appeared to fall asleep almost instantly, while the other was lost in the Link, his eyes flicking rapidly as he absorbed information displayed just for him.
Just before the doors closed, a drone flew into the car and scanned the space, stopping at each of the workers to chec
k them over.
Sera pursed her lips, wondering why Jen seemed to enjoy needling her so much.
The AI must have taken the hint, because she didn’t reply. Suddenly Sera realized why Jen had stated the obvious.
the AI admitted.
Sera laughed softly.
Sera shared the same sentiment in many respects, but she also knew that if there was an army at their backs, there’d be one before them as well.
Sera was a little worried about that herself. But from their reports, they were still in play; it was just taking longer than expected.
Nothing to worry about.
She repeated that assurance to Jen as the drone completed its sweep and then stopped at the car’s doors. It spun and moved across to the far doors, appearing to give the area a detailed scan.
Sera worried that it had found some sign of her passage, but she couldn’t think of what.