REORIENT

STELLAR DATE: 02.05.8950 (Adjusted Years)

LOCATION: MSS Fury Lance, 15LY from Parsons System

REGION: Interstellar Dark Layer, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire

 

“Wait…” Rika held up her hand and locked eyes with Silva. “You never told me that you saw Amy again before jumping out with Carson’s fleet.”

Silva flushed and glanced around the Fury Lance’s forward officer’s mess. “And I’m not exactly supposed to, either. Tangel told me to keep it hush-hush.”

“From me?” Rika pressed.

“Well, it has to do with where Amy went.” Silva’s voice had dropped to a whisper.

<You can speak normally,> Niki said. <I’ve dropped a nanocloud. No one can hear us.>

“So where did your daughter go?” Rika asked, unable to quell her own maternal instinct to protect the young girl. “I thought Tani—Tangel’s daughters took her to New Canaan to stay with them.”

“Yeah, they did,” Silva replied through thinned lips. “And then they took her on a jaunt to the LMC.”

“The LMC? Where’s that?”

Silva’s eyes twinkled mischievously as she responded. “Oh, you know, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

For a moment, the words Silva had uttered made no sense, then a knowing smile crept across the major’s lips.

“Get the fuck out,” Rika whispered. “Your daughter…little Amy that I rescued from a farm on Faseema…has been to another fucking galaxy?”

<Umm…I can’t mask you if you scream, Rika. The whole room kinda heard that.>

Rika glanced around at the dozen lieutenants and captains in the room, every face in the room turned toward her in open curiosity.

“You heard nothing. Not word, not a peep.”

They all nodded and grudgingly turned back to their meals and conversations.

“OK, Silva, from the start. Spill.”

The major laughed and took a sip of her coffee before striking up her tale. “I got this from a number of sources—Amy was only on the periphery of some of this, so her account doesn’t quite match perfectly—but here’s the basic rundown.

“Firstly, I guess the ISF has been building up in the LMC for a few years now. Tanis’s daughters got permission to take an Orion prisoner, some guy named Colonel Kent, out there to show him the futility of Orion’s war and convince him that he should just change sides.”

“Did it work?” Rika asked, wondering if that was a viable strategy for other POWs.

“Surprisingly, yes. On top of that, while they were out there, Tangel’s daughters sniffed out some old enemy and killed him too. Seems as though Cary Richards is following in her mother’s footsteps at an early age.”

“Being one heck of a kick-ass woman?” Rika asked with a laugh.

“No…well, yes, I guess.” Silva gave a somber shake of her head. “Ascending. She’s doing the whole multiplanar existence thing just like mom.”

Rika gave a low whistle. “Well, shit.”

“That’s just the start,” Silva continued. “Tangel and Sera came back from the LMC with Sera’s two clone sisters and her father.”

“Wait…waaaait. I thought Sera’s father was dead?!”

“He was…this one’s a clone. Or that one was a clone…I’m really not sure. It seems like a touchy subject, so I didn’t press. Either way, Sera has two clone sisters now. The three of them are quite the sight, let me tell you. Enough to make a girl consider changing teams.”

Rika chuckled at the thought of there being three versions of the Transcend’s sexually charged president. “I’m not into ladies, but I can still see the appeal. Sera’s got quite the…allure. OK, so who’s in charge of the Transcend, then?”

“I guess they turned it all over to Jeffrey Tomlinson, but Tangel is taking a more active role in galactic governance now, rather than just focusing on the war effort. Things are changing so fast, I really don’t know what’s what. When I was last on the I2, it had just gotten back from defeating Airtha out in the Transcend. That’s when I saw Amy; she had come back to the ship with Tangel’s daughters while they were all out at Aldebaran.”

Rika pressed her hands to her temples. “You’re making my head spin, Silva. They were at Aldebaran, too? What for?”

“I guess some new group called ‘The League of Sentients’ has set up shop there. They’re in opposition to the Hegemony of Worlds, and Tangel was sealing the deal with them. She fought some sort of ascended AI while there, too.”

“Daaaaamn.” Rika took a sip of her coffee, then shook her head as she set it back down on the table. “Can I just say that I’m so glad I don’t have Tangel’s schedule? I mean…that woman is flying all around two galaxies trying to keep everything from coming apart at the seams. I don’t think I could handle that sort of responsibility.”

Silva cocked an eyebrow, and Niki gave a soft laugh. <You’re kinda doing it on a smaller scale, Rika.>

“Not exactly. If I fail, then Tangel just has to come in and stomp on Constantine. But if she fails, we all get stomped on. Repeatedly.”

<What a lovely way to look at it,> Niki said. <I lived through the dark ages, though. After that, I think I can survive any amount of stomping.>

“Pardon?” Silva’s eyes grew round as saucers.

“Oh ho!” Rika crowed. “I have my own little surprise to drop on you.”

<It’s really my surprise,> Niki corrected in a droll tone.

“Do you want to tell it?” Rika asked.

<No, I want to see how well you retained what I’ve explained to you.>

“See what I have to put up with?” Rika asked Silva with a well-meaning smile.

“I’d take an AI in a heartbeat.” Silva’s gaze lost focus for a moment. “I hear they’re great at keeping you company when you can’t sleep at night.”

Rika barked a laugh. “They’re not pets.”

<Well…we do like to chat, though—those of us who are crazy enough to live in a human’s skull, anyway. You know, Silva, I’m trying to convince Piper to have children…. He’ll give in eventually. When he does, we’ll keep you on the shortlist of takers if any of his scions want to take up residence in a human.>

“Thanks,” Silva ducked her head in a quick nod, genuine gratitude in her voice. “That would be really great. Now, enough stalling. What’s this surprise?”

“Oh, nothing,” Rika drawled. “Just that Niki is the oldest AI in existence.”

<I doubt that. But close…maybe.>

“Seriously?” Silva asked, eyes wide.

“Yup, she was born in the thirty-first century.”

“Crap…really, Niki? Where you in stasis or…shut down or something a lot?”

<Not a lot, no. For a couple of centuries, all told,> Niki replied. <I’ve been conscious for over forty-seven hundred years. I guess it’s what gives me a bit of my blasé ‘this too shall pass’ attitude—granted, I’ll also be the first to admit that things are different this time.>

“How so?” Silva asked.

“Well, for starters, when the dark ages really set in, the FGT wasn’t in a position to help. I mean, they tried, but it didn’t work. Rather than risk their own civilization—which they rightly considered to be the future salvation of humanity—they bailed.”

“Seems cowardly,” Rika said in a quiet voice.

<Maybe,> Niki allowed. <But you know how it is if you try to save a drowning person. They’ll pull you under. And since the ascended AIs were actively trying to drown humanity, they might have decided that the FGT needed to go down, too. Either that, or they directly influenced Tomlinson and Kirkland to back off from the Inner Stars. We may never know.>

“And you were around for all that?” Silva asked, her voice trailing off in wonder. “Where were you?”

<All over, to be honest. I was at Procyon when they first got dark layer transitions working—and discovered that you don’t want to dump into the DL right next to a star. I joined a mapping expedition that went out and discovered that, when you were outside a star’s heliopause, the dark layer was an utter void. And how the frictionless aspects, and the size difference in the reference frame, allowed for FTL.>

“Whoa, wait,” Rika held up a hand. “Are you telling us that you were involved in the discovery of FTL? And you didn’t feel like mentioning this to me before?”

<Rika…forty-five hundred years. If I were to tell you everything I’ve done, it would take decades.>

“I feel like FTL is a big one,” Silva said, and Rika nodded emphatically.

<Well, keep it on the downlow. Despite the fact that everyone loves being able to zip around space, I spent a long time running from blame over starting the FTL wars.>

“Did you?” Rika asked, keenly aware that her eyes had been over-wide for several minutes now.

<Well, not exactly, no. Look, can we talk about that another time? I’m personally more interested in whether or not Tangel defeated Airtha…you never actually said what the outcome was, Silva.>

“And I’m interested in why none of this was in the intel updates that Carson delivered,” Rika mused.

“He’d just jumped into the Albany System when you called for help. I don’t think he knew half this stuff, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be sharing. I know that a lot of it is being kept hush-hush while they try to ferret out Airthan supporters.”

<So she wasn’t defeated?> Niki asked. <That’s unfortunate…did they capture the ring, at least?>

Silva shook her head. “From what I heard, they actually did defeat Airtha. Turns out she was fully ascended and didn’t have a physical form anymore…well, some people said she may still have been tied to the ring, but I didn’t want to bother Bob or Tangel with any questions to find out for sure. Anyway, a shard of Airtha, someone known as Helen, got away. She’s ascended, too. They’re worried that she’ll grow in power and just replace Airtha.”

“Shit,” Rika muttered. “Out of the fire and into the pan.”

<Other way.> Niki chuckled softly. <Out of the pan and into the fire.>

“That makes no sense.” Silva shook her head and scowled at Rika’s forehead. “Who would jump into a fire?”

<That’s the whole—oh nevermind. So they defeated Airtha, and the civil war in the Transcend is over?>

“Well, I think it’s going to take a bit to let everyone know that it’s really over, but they’re not going to have to throw as many resources at internal struggles. I don’t know if they’ll move the capital back to Airtha, or keep it at Khardine. I guess that’ll be President Tomlinson’s call.”

Rika took a sip of her coffee and grimaced when the cold liquid touched her lips.

“Damn cups,” she said, looking at the side of the mug to see it flashing a thermal error light. “Here we are with the most advanced bodies in the galaxy, but the freakin’ cups on this ship can’t keep our coffee warm.”

Silva winked at Rika. “Well, you are on a Nietzschean hull, after all. What did you expect?”

Rika reached out and placed a hand on the bulkhead to her left, glad to see that she’d splayed all five fingers properly. “Are you besmirching my beloved Fury Lance?”

“Noooot exactly,” Silva replied. “I mean…it’s an impressive ship—a huge ship. And the way you captured it will be the stuff of legends. But couldn’t you at least rename the thing?”

“Silva,” Rika met her former mentor’s level gaze with one of her own. “Do you know how hard it is to rename a ship this big? We’d have to scrub away every vestige of the former name. That would take forever, and we’ve all come to like the Lance. Made it our own.”

“I guess it’s OK,” Silva shrugged. “It just seems so…Nietzschean.”

“Sure,” Rika said with a nod. “But it’s so mech to take the Niets’ spear and throw it right back in their faces.”

<She makes a good point,> Niki added.

“OK, OK,” Silva held up her hands. “I concede.”