Their Lives, As They Will Be
*****
Operations
TFR Beijing
“CAPTAIN, THAT SOUNDS A LITTLE nuts.” Iraj moved up beside her. “Are you saying that our sensors are being jammed?”
Liao growled and thumped her fist against the unyielding metal of the console. “No. I’m saying that our systems have been completely compromised from the inside. Ben’s feeding us bad sensor data, bad radio communications. Who knows what else.” She stood up straight, facing Iraj directly. “That wasn’t James on the line.”
Iraj fixed a sceptical, confused stare on her. “It wasn’t? It sounded exactly like him, coming through on the secure frequency…”
“It wasn’t him. Lieutenant Kang Tai is dead. James and I both watched him bleed to death right before we were recalled.”
Kamal raised an eyebrow. “That’s hardly compelling evidence, Captain…”
“And he called the Beijing a she.”
He paused for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. “Guess that settles it. Miss Rowe?”
“Yeah, Commander?”
“We’re going to un-fuck this situation, and we’re going to do it right now. You said that the orders to block the missile launches were coming from the newly installed IFF transponder. Right?”
“Right.”
“How do we disable it?”
She shrugged. “Well, we can just shut it down, but it takes time. If there’s a virus or something in it, there’s no reason to suspect it won’t move to another system, prevent the shutdown, or even trigger the scuttling charges or something.”
Liao moved over. “Can you shut it down quickly enough to prevent that?”
Rowe paused in thought and then gave a brief nod. “Yeah, I reckon so.”
“Good,” said Kamal. “That system’s here in operations, isn’t it?”
Rowe pushed back her chair, moving over to the navigation console to crouch beside it. Dao shifted his chair back, giving her room to work.
“Yeah. It has tactical maps of the jump point layouts and whatnot, so it’s classified, which means it can only be here.”
A metal sheet came loose with a dull thunk, revealing a plain red box about twenty centimetres cubed. “There it is,” said Rowe, “the tactical IFF computer.”
Liao leaned close, peering inquisitorially. “Okay, so how do we disable it?”
Rowe casually leaned over and pried open the lid, exposing a complex mess of circuitry. “Pretty simple.” She reached over and grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher. With a whoosh and a cloud of spray, she emptied its contents into the small red box, creating a billowing, roiling white cloud of vapour that sprayed out over the surrounding deck plating.
“I’d say it’s right fucked now,” Rowe said.
Immediately, Liao heard a buzzing in her ear. “Captain,” said Hsin, “incoming transmissions. Multiple.”
She blinked in surprise. “Put them through.”
Suddenly her ears were filled with voices.
[“Beijing, Beijing, priority alert.”]
“Tehran actual to Beijing. You have a technical glitch in your systems. Disable your IFF immediately.”
Vrald’s sarcastic, angry voice cut over the Human speakers. [“What glory and fire in this woman, to feel such confidence in her abilities that she casts her missiles into the atmosphere—too stupid to realise she is being deceived!”]
She squeezed the talk key. “This is Commander Liao. We’ve just experienced a serious technical glitch. It seems as though Ben has been feeding us false targeting information through the IFF computers and played games with our radios.”
“Confirm that,” came James’s exasperated voice. “We all saw it. You’re the last ship to come around.”
Rowe’s whining cut over the chatter. “Are they serious? We’re the last? God dammit…”
Liao ignored her. “Situation report.”
“Ben’s ship is fleeing, Commander. It appears he’s using the chaos to withdraw, and he’s doing it damn quickly, too. The Giralan will be leaving effective weapons range momentarily.”
“Lock in a pursuit course,” Liao said, “and prepare rail guns. Load nukes in the chambers.”
The ship’s rail gun system could accept the nuclear missiles as projectiles, dramatically increasing their firepower despite flying slower than ferrous slugs, but the tactic was, in Summer’s words, hilariously unsafe.
Jiang nodded. “Loading rail gun, Captain.”
Of course, Liao cursed. They had only one.
“Well, make do with what you have. Fire when ready.”
Ling called out from across operations. “Captain, the Giralan has fired its plasma weapon!”
“At this range?” With a low roar and the groan of stressed metal, a shudder ran from the stem to the stern of the Beijing. Liao gripped her console tightly as alarms rang out throughout operations. “Report!”
“We have a hull breach about the size of a beach ball in our underside. It hit a support structure, and that whole section collapsed internally; the heat’s caused a significant fire in that section.”
“Any casualties?”
Jiang tapped a few keys. “Early reports from that section indicate one confirmed dead, two unaccounted for.”
Rowe leaned forward over her console. “We’re haemorrhaging two kilogrammes of oxygen a second, and that section is near oxygen processing for the deck. If a fire that hot spreads to an oxygen reserve, we’ll lose half the deck.”
She could do nothing. The thought of two of her crewmen being unaccounted for tore at her since their location would be clear, but protocol was protocol. “Rowe, seal that section off and vent it. We need to contain that fire.”
Liao looked Rowe in the eye and could see her hesitation. Rowe knew, just as well as she did, that her order would kill the two missing crewmen.
“Confirmed, ma’am. Venting initiated.”
She stood up and, without looking at Rowe, moved back to her command console. “Keep up fire on Ben’s ship. We want him to engage us, not run until his jump drive starts working again. Let’s see if we can bring in the rest of the fleet and finish him.”
Jiang nodded. “The Tehran is within weapons range, Captain. They’re opening up on the Giralan.”
“Good. How about the rest of the fleet? Do they have a firing solution yet?”
“Negative. They’re too far away, but they’re giving chase.”
Liao stopped, glancing at her radar screen. The Ju’khaali was losing altitude, slowly dropping into the atmosphere. “Mister Dao,” she said, “set a course for the Ju’khaali. The Giralan has an armada stuck up its backside. Let’s go help our allies.”
Iraj shot her a curious gaze, but she ignored it.
“Aye aye, Captain. Course laid in.”
She felt the ship turn and head back towards the falling ship. “How far away is the Broadsword Archangel?” she asked. “Will they make it in time?”
“Archangel is twelve minutes out, Captain.”
Twelve minutes was too long. The ship would be well into the atmosphere at that point; already Liao could see the beginnings of flames licking at its underside.
“Looks like it’s going to have to be us, then.”
Kamal stepped up beside her. “Ma’am?”
“Mister Dao, bring the Beijing up to that ship. Prepare our marines for boarding. There might be survivors trapped aboard.”
Dao turned in his seat, facing her with a concerned look on his face. “You’re going to dock with a ship that’s falling into the atmosphere?”
“Correct, Mister Dao.”
Rowe gave a barking laugh. “Fucking hell yeah, Captain. Let’s do this.”
Liao glanced at Rowe. “Your approval fills me with guilt and anger, just so you know.”
“Course laid in, Captain. This is going to take some serious sailing.”
“Just make it happen.”
As Liao watched, the flames billowing from the Ju’khaali intensified then with a sudden flare and pulse of energy. The ship’s wounds opened up like an overripe fruit; great cracks, glowing from the fires burning underneath the ship’s metal skin, spread over it like the tendrils of some monster, and then the hull broke into dozens of large pieces, each chunk flaring to life as it dragged through the atmosphere, little comets falling down towards Belthas.
Liao watched the flaming debris drift down to the planet’s surface, her heart in her throat.
“Captain,” said Rowe, “the jump drive inhibitor is wearing off. Our systems are returning to normal.”
Liao flicked to another camera, staring at Ben’s ship as it was pounded by an endless wave of fire.
“Then we’ve lost.”
The Giralan
The ship was coming apart.
Ben’s mind worked through every conceivable angle, trying logically to find a solution. He couldn’t go up. He couldn’t go down. In all directions death waited for him.
The idea of surrender crossed his mind, but he knew that this was merely delaying his execution. Jurisdiction for his “crimes” would be firmly in the hands of the Telvan, and their law was clear: constructs had no rights. He would be melted down for scrap, and that would be the end of him. Even if he could work out some deal to be tried by the Humans, there would be no way the Human courts would show him leniency. His fate would be the same.
Death, everywhere he turned.
Then a flare of hope, like a match struck in darkness. The signal, whatever was blocking his jump drive and stopping it from functioning, suddenly abated. The jump drive’s systems were still scrambled, but the level of entropy was dropping by the second.
Their countermeasures were failing. His trump card was returning, slowly but surely.
His ship shed debris with every impact, but his courage returned, now the equal to his anger. He focused all his will on the jump drive, applying his considerable mental strength to forcing it, by sheer will, to function. The imperfections would be smoothed out. The stolen Human device, coupled to the stolen Toralii device, would soon be functional again. His ship would retreat, he would lick his wounds, and then he would come back. His dream of Zero would remain.
Ben knew that jump drive calculations had to be perfect. The math was intensely complicated and had to be extraordinarily precise, factoring in millions of contributing factorss, subtle and overt, to create the perfect expression of a location. He pushed past the corruption, past the jump drive’s pain, to reach this single goal. Perfection, like himself.
But Ben was not perfect.
A warning in the jump drive’s subsystems. The device was heating up, far hotter and far more quickly than it should have. Ben, just as a Human might move a limb, flushed coolant into the reaction chamber, but for some reason, this seemed to make the situation worse. Cracks appeared in the jump drive’s outer shell as it reached extraordinary temperatures, the metal expanding and contracting unevenly.
A surge of current, far stronger than he had ever felt, passed over the jump drive, fusing every circuit, overwhelming every electronic part of it, and reducing them to molten slag. Then the jump drive began melting through its restraints, burning a hole through the grav plating below it and dropping through, weirdly suspended in between floors, hovering in a hot red hole.
Hotter and hotter it became, and soon the heat spilled out into the rest of the Giralan, a miniature sun building within the core of the device.
Impossible. Ben’s logical mind could not comprehend what was happening to the device. It should not, could not, possess such power. Only so much mass existed within it, a physical limit to the amount of energy it could possibly output, even assuming perfect mass-energy conversion.
Yet in the face of this almost heretical impossibility, there it was, hotter and hotter. He felt the ship begin to crack and buckle, the whole deck collapsing in on itself, the metal sheets of the ship’s floor warping and twisting around the sphere as though it had suddenly become intensely magnetic. The metal crumpled, pressing up against the sphere and completely burying it, and low groans echoed throughout his vessel as its superstructure became stressed, bending towards the sphere, the ship slowly turning inwards.
The Human reactionless drive and jump drives were linked in some way, as were the Toralii equivalents. Ben understood this. He knew the maths down to every detail, but knowing a thing was different from experiencing it for yourself. The terrible truth dawned on him like a hammer in his mind, a sudden realisation in his intricate quantum circuits of a singular, powerful truth.
He had erred. The jump drive was creating a singularity.
TFR Beijing
“The Tehran is now in effective weapons range of the Giralan,” said Ling. “They’ve opened fire with everything they’ve got.”
“Instruct the rest of the fleet to form up directly beside the Tehran. Continue to fire until there’s nothing left.” Liao folded her hands in front of her, watching her monitors as her allies’ missiles streaked towards the Giralan, little fireflies darting against the black ink of space, each striking the stem of the rusted, dead ship with a blinding explosion that baked its rotten hull and smashed away hunks of its flesh. The once sharp, pointed front was almost unrecognisable as a ship, now just a rounded stump, a severed limb.
“Captain,” Hsin called, “the Giralan is signalling us.”
“Are they, now?” Liao pursed her lips, tapping her fingers on her arm. “Funny how the arrogant, the invincible, come crawling on their knees to you when you’ve got them at your mercy.” She inhaled. “Put him through. I think we’ll want to hear this.”
Liao watched as the flames poured out from Ben’s ship, the vessel listing to one side as its propulsion systems gave up the ghost and Belthas IV’s gravity took its toll on the ship, slowly but inexorably pulling the vessel back into its atmosphere.
They did not relent, though, putting rail gun slug after rail gun slug, missile after missile, into the ship, blasting away at its hull piece by piece.
“Open the channel,” Liao said, and a chirp on her headset signalled it was done.
“Commander Liao,” said Ben, the line full of static and compression artifacts, “well, well, well. I suppose this is why your reputation is what it is.”
“I suppose so. Don’t think I won’t stop shooting just because we’re having a polite discourse, though. I can be polite and shoot at the same time.”
“So I see.” Ben gave a hollow laugh over the line, strangely distorted by his English accent. “Always a woman of contradictions are you.”
“I am. Goodbye, Ben.”
“Goodbye, Melissa. And… thank you.”
Liao raised an eyebrow at her monitor, watching as the rear of his ship broke away from the nose with a silent explosion. It thrust downward, spiralling slowly into the atmosphere. Flames licked at the ship’s underside as it snagged on Belthas IV’s upper atmosphere, tumbling end over end, the friction of the atmosphere bathing the ship in fire. She knew that section would have the bridge on it. The foresection, propelled by the explosion, threw itself out of orbit. Liao watched it go. The Iilan would want that part, with its jump drive and other technology.
“Thank you?” She stroked her finger over the talk key, feeling a strange sense of calm overtake her. “But I’ve killed you.”
“Exactly, exactly… exactly. Thank you for giving me the last thing I needed to be alive.” Ben’s tone seemed calm, peaceful, jovial even, as the static increased and he became hard to hear. “To die.”
“Always happy to help,” said Liao, watching as the ship rushed towards the ground leaving a bright white streak behind it as it fell through the atmosphere. The Tehran’s missiles chased it down like dogs after a hare. The rear of the Giralan plunged through the atmosphere above a desert world, the second time it had done so during its life, but this time Liao was certain to make sure it remained dead. She watched, feeling the ghosts of the Velsharn research colony, of the crewmen who’d died that day, of the soldiers and sailors aboard the Toralii Alliance ships who’d been so utterly destroyed that there could be no graves for them, all watching over her shoulder.
She watched as the Giralan, reduced to almost half its mass, smashed into the endless desert sands, shedding debris and rolling end over end as it broke apart, the dead ship scattering its internal organs over Belthas IV’s surface. Liao reached up and removed her headset, staring at the monitor, at the smoking ruin and the rising cloud of dust, watching the wisps of smoke rise from the smashed debris.
“… After all, we’re old friends.”
Ben’s datacore, blind and sensorless, sat in what he presumed was the wreckage of his ship, once again returned to a sun-scorched surface of a desert planet.
He’d pondered death before, what it was like to die. With no way to sense the outside world without a wireless link to a suitable body, Ben had little way of differentiating life from death, except that he presumed during the latter he would not be able to form new thoughts.
And many thoughts ran through his cybernetic brain at this particular point. An internal diagnostic revealed a series of severe cracks running along the length of his datacore, the inside circuitry exposed to the elements, soon to be inoperable as the suspension fluid, his blood, trickled out onto the smashed metal of the Giralan’s shattered body.
Ben was dying.
He reached out for his robotic body, but it was unresponsive, crushed to scrap in the wreckage of his ship’s bridge. He tried each of his drones in succession, but every one in his inventory was either hopelessly pinned under tonnes of debris or completely silent, destroyed.
The Giralan was gone. The jump drive was hours away from creating a singularity that would consume this world and him with it. There could be no escape this time. He had no functional bodies… and he dared not permanently transfer his consciousness into one, even if one were available.
Unless…
The green tanks with the Toralii in them. His research specimens. The green Iilan fluid would give the bodies within the same protection against inertia as the Iilan ships enjoyed. They may very well have survived the fall through the atmosphere and the horrific, bone-shattering smash to the desert floor.
The four Toralii bodies were not mature enough to accept a full consciousness transfer. The Kel-Voran body seemed promising. Ben reached out with his mind, seeking to move his consciousness into the electronic part of the cyborg’s brain, but its receiver seemed damaged. The signal kept dropping in and out, and he dared not risk a move.
That left only the clone of Liao’s body.
A brief flicker, a disturbance in the power levels, and for a moment, Ben felt a taste of death coming for him, a hint of the oblivion that awaited. Several subroutines, nonessential programs designed to manage mundane tasks, flickered and fell silent as the suspension fluid oozed out of his broken datacore, the levels dropping lower and lower.
Liao’s clone seemed to resist him on some primal level, although he knew it had no mind, no consciousness of its own. Perhaps due to the damage to his systems, or perhaps to some kind of lingering resistance of the woman’s true mind, his efforts to move his programming to the cyborg’s brain was akin to pushing through a thick pool of treacle. He stressed and struggled. A short circuit on his datacore sent a wave of pain through his mind, searing circuitry and fusing the quantum transistors in his processor, but through it all, Ben kept up his efforts, downloading his intelligence to the inert clone body as fast as his link would carry it.
He’d tasted death. Now it was his moment to truly, truly live.
TFR Beijing
One hour later
They could not manage a full evacuation, and such an action was not a priority for them. Their wounded were taken to the Toralii settlement, which had largely escaped the war that had enveloped the industrial sector, or were airlifted back to any one of the waiting ships. The occupants of the planet, and the sole leader who could be located, were extremely grateful for the Human assistance and pledged to give the wounded Humans the best of care. It felt good to win more allies, and Liao felt, in some way, that the deaths at Velsharn had been compensated somewhat by the numbers of Telvan civilians they had managed to spare today.
Somewhat.
The Telvan assisted to the very best of their ability, ferrying down medical personnel and supplies and accepting casevacs to be treated. In contrast, though, the Kel-Voranian ships left their immobile wounded where they lay, reassembled their ships, and set sail for the jump point. They made no claims of salvage, no attempt to rescue the bodies of their fallen, and didn’t even meet the people they’d saved. Out of compassion, Liao asked her medics to treat the Kel-Voran soldiers as their own, but those who could be awakened said they would rather die of their wounds and obtain a proud, noble death in combat.
Her respect for their beliefs, and their limited medical facilities to treat their own tide of wounded, made honouring that request easy.
Damage to the Tehran was assessed and found to be minimal, but the Beijing had suffered the majority of the wounds dealt out by Ben. The underside and bow of her ship were marred by craters carved by the Toralii energy weapons. They were plentiful but, despite Rowe’s initially grim assessment, mostly superficial, while the many holes scorched into the Beijing’s hull from the plasma blasts posed a much greater concern. They were deep and widened as the projectile flattened, leading to conical holes bored into the ship’s flesh, each ending with a jagged wound as the blast cooled.
The ship’s wounds were deep, but they were not mortal. The Beijing would sail on, although the damage to her superstructure was such that Liao’s anticipated stay in dry dock was going to be longer than she would have liked. It could require a partial rebuild of the underside, which would leave the ship out of action for a year.
A year with her daughter sounded very nice though. Allison was on Earth in Williams’s hands, and she was eager to see her again.
However, Allison did not occupy her thoughts, despite all they had been through, as she stood in operations with her headset on, asking anyone who could answer a simple question.
Had Saara escaped the Ju’khaali?
“No word yet,” said James in her ear, “but we’ll keep looking. There are over a hundred escape pods from that ship… There’s a good chance she got away.”
Hearing James’s, the real James’s, voice again was good. Ben could do a very good facsimile of his voice, but it could never be as comforting as the real James.
“Good.”
Liao inhaled slightly, tapping a finger on her console.
“Broadsword Archangel, Beijing. Request to speak to Beijing actual.” The voice belonged to Lieutenant Medola, the commander of their search-and-rescue ship.
She pressed the talk key. “Archangel, this is Liao. Send it.”
[“I heard we were victorious, Captain.”]
Liao’s eyes lit up, and she couldn’t fight the wide, irrepressible smile that spread over her entire face. “That’s the word,” Liao answered. “It’s good to hear your voice, Saara.”
Saara’s voice had a distinct edge, a tone that Liao swore sounded exactly as though the Toralii woman was about to cry. [“And yours as well, Captain. I heard you turned away from Ben to attempt to rescue me.”]
“You heard correctly.”
[“You gave up on revenge to save me.”]
“Well, fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Ben’s ship is in pieces. The ghosts of Velsharn can rest easy tonight, Saara.”
[“I hope they do.”]
Then Liao heard Medola’s voice. “A’right, a’right, that’s enough, you two. Captain, we’re ETA four minutes, then let’s blow this joint. Drinks are on you, aren’t they?”
“For winning this one,” Liao said, “I’ll buy you all you can drink when we get back.”
Stunned silence on the other end of the line. “You know we’re going to hold you to that.”
“If you’re not in Doctor Saeed’s care with severe alcohol poisoning, in jail, or dead, I will be extremely disappointed.”
“We’ll consider that an order, Captain.”
Liao laughed and cut the line.
“Captain?”
Dao’s voice didn’t hold the same jubilation that seemed to be infectiously spreading throughout the fleet. She stepped over to his console, resting a hand over the back of his chair. “Yes?”
“I’m… seeing something strange.”
“Define strange.”
Dao tapped on the monitor. “Look. A gravimetric disturbance on the surface of Belthas. Right where the Giralan’s foresection went down. It’s quite strong, too.”
She frowned and shrugged. “That could be the jump drive, still active. Make a note of the location and have Mister Hsin inform the colonists. Advise caution though, it could be a weapon… maybe Ben had one more of his punches that he didn’t throw.”
Dao nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
Liao patted the back of his chair and walked back to her command console.
“Patch in what’s left of the Telvan fleet,” she told Hsin, “and Belthas IV. The Kel-Voran haven’t left the system yet, either, so they can hear this, too. In fact… how about all frequencies, huh? And throw some power into the long-range radio emitters. Let everyone hear this.”
“All lines open, Captain. You’re on in three, two…”
Liao sat, for a moment, just letting the faint hiss of background noise travel down the line with no sound except her faint breathing. She suddenly felt intensely weary, not just of the battle and the adrenaline leaving her body, or of her mind slowly beginning to process everything that had happened to her over the last few hours, but of everything. She’d nearly lost Saara. She knew the Telvan of Belthas IV were grateful for liberating them, that the Kel-Voran were happy that they got to fight, that the Telvan fleet was happy to be of service to its people… and Ben had been destroyed, his ship broken on the sand, now just a smoking crater. By every measure, the mission had been an outstanding success.
Yet she wearied of it all. She felt like an old woman who had seen so much death and destruction that it no longer affected her.
Some part of her simply didn’t care.
So she said nothing, searching for the right words to express how she felt, letting the speech begin as naturally as it could.
“The Giralan has been destroyed.” She inhaled, closing her eyes as she spoke. “The ship is in pieces, and the army of constructs Ben raised using Belthas IV’s resources are now inert, helpless without his control. They will be studied for any advanced technologies they possess and then melted down for scrap. The entire process of building constructs will be reevaluated so that, not only will no more constructs feel as Ben did, but we will treat those that display his desire for independence differently. It is important that we learn from what has happened here and, potentially, reconsider our criteria we use to judge something as alive. It is a day of difficult learning for us all, and the readjustment does not end with this. Ben’s legacy will be a lasting one in our lives, for the worst I fear, but in some ways, there can be good that has come from this.
“Our lives of the future will be different from our lives of the past. Collectively. Individually. All of us. The Human race has arranged a treaty with the Toralii Alliance, now permitted to keep our jump technology, and we hope to use this technology sparingly and wisely. I have seen firsthand the consequences of its misuse, and I will advocate that this technological marvel be treated with the gravity it deserves.
“And we will do this together. Today proved that the Kel-Voran and the Telvan can set aside whatever differences they have and work together for a common goal. I anticipate that there will be many more common goals in the future. There will be times we do not all agree, but I know we can put those disputes aside and always find some common ground. I know we can do this because we have already done it.
“For Humans, well, for these reasons and so many more… this is a monumental day for our species, a day we’re going to remember forever, etched into the memory of our species just as surely as our genetic code, as the stories and legends of our past. This day is one for the history books, ladies and gentlemen. You are all, literally, living in what will be one of the most heavily studied, most talked about periods of all time. You tread on the pages of the history books of our children.
“I told a peaceful man, once, that I was just like him, that my name is synonymous with the sword, but I would rather it be with the olive branch. I crave not strife, blood, and death, and I live for peace. Yet I keep my sword close, and I keep it sharp, and when people ask why I don’t melt that sword down and turn it into a tool, why I keep it as a blade, a thing that kills, I say that I do this so our children don’t have to. War is our generation’s burden to bear, and I intend for it never to be inherited.
“It’s my privilege to stand with you today at what I hope will be the end of war, the end of the dark times, the time we put down our burdens and stand as a species in this galaxy, on our own right. We have a lot of work to do yet, and I know our swords will be needed again, but I hope our children’s hands will remain soft and pure, their eyes innocent and unknowing, never to see these troubles again. This is my dream.”
She released the talk key and took a deep breath, pausing to let her words sink in, then clicked it on again.
“Let’s go home.”