by M. D. Cooper
“You’ll have to forgive me if this is uncomfortable. It’s my first time doing it.”
In newtonian space, Cary’s limb bled photons, appearing as a tendril of light stretching toward Lisa Wrentham. To her other vision, it appeared as just another hand, though one that wasn’t constrained by the same laws of spacetime that governed the narrow slice of reality that her corporeal body inhabited.
Lisa’s eyes widened, and she recoiled—as much as possible—from the light stretching toward her.
“You’re one of them!”
“I’m not an ascended AI,” Cary corrected. “Just a woman with some added features.”
Saanvi passed a long groan across their connection, but didn’t say anything more.
Lisa was twisting her head from side to side, eyes bulging further and breathing becoming ragged, as Cary’s ‘hand’ slid beneath her skin and into her mind.
The woman’s thoughts had become utter chaos. Fear was mixed with a continuing desire to keep her root codes private. Memories of a thousand events flooded across the connection, from Lisa’s time in the ancient Sol System to the centuries she’d spent on the Perilous Dream, perfecting her Widows, her ultimate assassins.
“Guh,” she grunted aloud. “She’s…stars, she’s a mess.”
Cary realized that Lisa was flinging random thoughts on purpose, trying to keep her from the information she sought. But in the chaos, there was a pattern, and in that pattern were gaps. Memories of her analyzing reports, and accessing her ship’s vast datastores were absent.
There was a hole, a space where no thoughts came from, and Cary delved into it.
There!
She saw memories of Lisa accessing her datastores, performing her experiments on her Widows, creating her army.
At the bottom of it all were her root tokens. The keys that would give Cary access to everything about the woman, and everything she controlled.
“Got them!” She gasped as she withdrew from Lisa’s mind.
Her vision returned, and the room swam back into view, rising up out of the thoughts she’d nearly drowned in.
“Are you OK?” Saanvi asked. “You were getting a bit unsteady on your feet.”
Cary nodded, her mouth dry and parched. “I’m…I had to go deep, I got lost for a minute, I think.”
She glanced at Lisa, but the woman was out again.
OK…now I know why Moms said not to do that. I feel like half her memories came back over with me.
“We’ve got a problem,” Priscilla said as she disabled her lightwand and slid it back into her thigh. “I’ve made my way onto the general shipnet—which isn’t so general here—and the bridge is trying to reach A1. They’re about to sound an alert.”
“I’ve got it,” Cary announced, quickly recoding her Link’s keys and encryption with A1’s root tokens. She took a breath and activated her connection, immediately receiving a message from T101.
Cary knew that A1 did that from time to time, detached herself from the shipnets so she could focus.
Damn, it’s like I’m still in her head. Or I somehow duplicated her memories into mine.
“Crap,” Cary muttered aloud. “Looks like Lisa here dispatched a message drone to Garza.”
Cary pursed her lips.
“They’ve detected Dad’s ship,” Cary explained. “Some of the energy from the gate reflected off it. They must have a better sensor web out there than we thought.”
“Damn,” Saanvi muttered. “That complicates things.”
“Give me the codes,” Priscilla said. “I’ll go to the bridge as A1 and deal with this, while the three of you go to the data node and access her records.”
Cary shook her head. “It has to be me. I have…a lot of her memories up here. I can pull her off better than you can.”
“That strikes me as the exact reason that you shouldn’t go,” Priscilla said. “You’ve already had problems with the conditioning going too deep. Like I said, I know what it’s like to lose yourself in another being.”
“I can do this.” Cary drew herself up. “I climbed out of her thoughts and I’m still me. Not A1, not C139. I’m able to better protect myself on my own, too. I can do this.”
Neither of the other three women spoke for a few moments, and then Priscilla nodded.
“OK. But if you start to have any second thoughts, any, you get the hell out of there.”
“You got it.” Cary nodded to Lisa. “What are we going to do about her?”
The unconscious woman took a step forward, then another. “I have her on remote,” Faleena said. “Good thing she’s so modded up; I can do this without having to get into her biology too much.”
“Also good that all the Widows walk like they have a stick up their ass,” Saanvi added with a laugh as she picked up Lisa’s helmet and put it back on the woman’s head.
“We ready?” Priscilla asked, and the four women nodded silently to one another before filing out of the room.
* * * * *
[You’ve been detected. Cary has A1’s root tokens. She’s going to the bridge while we get the data.]
Joe pursed his lips as he read the message from Faleena. She didn’t say it, but he understood the subtext. Cary was masquerading as A1.
“Everyone get ready,” he said through thinned lips. “Things could light up any second now.”
Over the past few hours, the Falconer’s scan team had been establishing baselines and dropping small probes. Joe didn’t believe that the Perilous Dream was alone. There had to be other ships nearby. Thus far, there was no conclusive evidence other than a few gravitational anomalies.
The scan team had extrapolated from those, and the worst-case scenario was that there were a dozen enemy ships in formation around the Perilous Dream.
Whether or not they were crewed or just drone ships remained to be seen.
One thing was for certain. No matter what, they were going to be fighting their way out of the A1 System.
[Keep a channel open to Cary,] he sent back to Faleena, wishing that at least one of them had gone with her to the bridge. [And get out of there as soon as possible.]
He knew that was already their plan, but the father in him had to say something of the sort.
MEETING SERA
STELLAR DATE: 10.10.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Uplink Tower 7-1, Airthan Ring
REGION: Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Fina pursed her lips, considering her options. She was still within the lift shaft, hanging below the doors to the top level. The most effective plan—for Jane’s objective, anyway—was for Fina to simply open the doors and start shooting at the AIs. That would certainly give Jane an opening.
And it’ll get me killed.
Jane’s voice dripped with sarcasm, but Fina ignored it, making another attemp
t to tap into the tower’s automated defenses and use them against the AIs holding Roxy.
So far, they hadn’t done anything other than stand around the former Hand agent and stare her down; it was almost as though the entire scene was a frozen tableau. Fina knew that meant it was a trap. A trap so obvious they weren’t even bothering to hide it.
She turned her full attention back to the defense systems she was attempting to breach. She was almost through an open port, when suddenly the system went offline.
What the hell?
“Why don’t you stop messing around and just come up here already, Sera?” a voice called out from the other side of the lift doors.
Her voice.
She switched back to the optics she’ d threaded through the door and saw that a new figure was standing amongst the AIs. A woman with pale skin and white hair, wearing a glowing white skinsheath.
And Fina’s face.
“Seriously, get up here…today,” the clone called out. “Or I just kill this weird blue girl here then wait for the elevator car coming up the lift to crush you against the top of the shaft. Either one works for me.”
Fina glanced down and saw that a car was indeed rising from below—and it was coming fast.
“Dammit,” she muttered and issued the command for the doors to open, pulling herself through as soon as there was enough room, rolling to the right where she ducked behind a rack of transmission equipment.
“Hiding?” the clone called out. “No. No hiding. I just want to talk. But I guess that if you don’t want to do that, then I’ll just kill your friend here and go on my merry way.”
Fina pursed her lips and blew out a long breath. She didn’t think that she’d have so readily killed in cold blood while under Airtha’s sway, but from what she’d heard of the latest clone, it was possible that the woman across the room would.
“Are you just looking for someone to chat with?” Fina called out, slowly rising to her feet.
She was formulating a new plan, but this one would require getting a lot closer to the enemy.
Fina didn’t reply as she stepped out into the open, getting a clear view of her otherself. “I’ll admit, white looks good on us, but don’t you think it’s a bit pretentious?” she asked.
“Better than red,” the other Sera said with a snort. “I feel like that’s some sort of personal shame issue you have going on.”
Fina took a few steps closer, noting that her otherself held no weapon, but that three of the five AIs had shifted and were now aiming ther rifles at her and not Roxy.
“You’ve got me mixed up with Sera,” Fina said with a languid shrug. “She’s the red one.”
“No. I’m Sera. She’s a clone. Just like you.”
Fina couldn’t help but laugh. “Sure. Whatever helps you sleep at night, Whitey.”
“I—” the other Sera began, but Fina interrupted her.
“Roxy, are you OK?”
“No,” Roxy’s voice came out in a soft moan. “Airtha’s stooges haven’t been too kind…they’re trying pretty hard to get into my head—I’m lucky I don’t have a standard noggin.”
Fina took another step toward Sera, holding out a hand in a placating gesture. “Look, you got us, no need to go tearing anyone’s mind apart. That’s not who we are, it’s not what we do.”
“No?” the white Sera asked. “If someone was trying to destroy your home, you wouldn’t do whatever it took to save it?”
“Sera,” Fina whispered, sweeping a hand around herself. “This is my home. That girl who used to sneak off, with Helen chastising us for missing our classes? That was me too. Those days in Finaeus’s lab? We both did that. Other than the last few weeks, you and have I shared the same life.”
“No.” Sera shook her head. “I don’t share anything with you. You were one of the mistakes. I’m no mistake.”
Fina couldn’t miss the note of anguish in her sister’s voice. Just as she’d still been Sera even while under her mother’s control, so was this other woman.
And I may be a bit on the weird side of the spectrum, but I’m not evil. Fina extended her hands palms-up. “I still hear her voice. Did you know that? Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s a memory, or if she’s still reaching out to me somehow. Can you hear her? Is she in your head too?”
The white woman didn’t respond, but her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and Fina had her answer.
“I’m going to remove my helmet,” she said before lifting her hands, releasing nano with the gesture, hoping that the motion would propel it toward the AIs fast enough for her plan to work.
“By all means,” the other Sera said. “Makes you an easier target.”
Fina flipped the latches and then twisted the helmet, speaking as she lifted it free. “You’re not going to do that. We’re sisters, you and I. We have so much more in common than we have differences.”
“Huh…blue,” Sera said. “We do have a thing for color, don’t we?”
Fina shrugged. “I like it.”
“What did the third one pick…for her color?”
“Seraphina,” Sera said. “She’s our vanilla sister. Went with a rather stock look. Blonde, even.”
“Blonde?” the white woman snorted. “Now I know Tanis’s people have messed with you. No way would we go blonde.”
“Think about Tanis. Do you remember her as a bad person?” Fina asked as she continued to approach, half her attention on the five AIs, knowing that even if she could make Sera reconsider her actions, the AIs would remain loyal to Airtha. Or fully under her thrall, which ever was the case.
Of course, it’s more than likely that I’ll not convince this Sera. I know that it wouldn’t have worked on me.
“Tanis is not her people,” Sera countered. “They are not reflections of her.”
“You’ve spent nearly as much time aboard the Intrepid as I have,” Fina said, now only five meters from where Roxy knelt, with Sera and the AIs arrayed in a semi-circle on the far side of her. “What do you remember of that ship and its people? Do you think that Tanis would condone some sort of manipulative mind control over me?”
“I think Tanis is the sort of person who does what she has to,” Sera replied. “She possesses the most deadly weapons in the galaxy, and she’s used them on several occasions.”
Fina pursed her lips. She knew that argument well. Airtha had whispered it in her mind many times. She also knew that there was no counter for it other than to speak to Tangel and see the fierce sincerity in the woman’s eyes when she said that she’d do it all again to protect her people.
“I—” she began, when an alert sounded, and the overhead lights flickered.
Fina’s heart leapt into her throat, and she sent back an affirmative response before shifting to her channel with Jane.
A smirk had formed on Sera’s lips. “Did you get some bad news? And here you thought you were delaying me when it was the other way around. Seems like you get dumber when they enslave you, too.”
“No fucking way,” Fina hissed setting her jaw before she dove forward, tucking and rolling beneath the shots from the AIs, her armor shedding their rounds as she slapped a hand on Roxy’s back, giving the woman a fresh batch of nano to fight off the AIs.
Then Fina was back on her feet, coming up right in front of the white Sera, lightwand in her hand, thrusting the beam forward.
Just as her doppelganger did the same.
A MOTHER
STELLAR DATE: 10.10.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Stellar Tower 3, Airthan Ring
REGION: Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Sera eased along the corridor, with Flaherty just a few meters behind
. Kara was moving down a nearby passage, moving toward an overwatch position in the chamber. She’d reach her mark first, and set up to provide cover while Sera and Flaherty reached their assigned Airthan node.
A second later, a pair of SAIs in battle armor stalked down the hall, one narrowly missing Sera’s left arm. This was the fourth patrol they’d encountered in just a few minutes, and she was beginning to worry that there’d be no way to breach Airtha’s node chamber without a pitched firefight.
While Airtha’s nodes were in a variety of locations across the ring, Sera’s target was situated at the base of one of the four massive towers that stretched out to the Airthan star, holding the ring steady around its primary.
The node chamber was a kilometer-high conical space set within the tower itself. Airtha’s node would be several hundred meters off the floor, accessible only by one of three catwalks.
Sera turned left, and they walked down a short corridor to a lift. It would take them up to the same level in the tower as the catwalks. After Jen performed a quick breach, they boarded the car and rode it to their destination.
Jen snorted.
The AI sent a feeling of disagreement.
Sera resisted the urge to laugh.