Homebound Sector, Haven System, Flagship Olympia

  The office was dark. The false starlight of hyper realistic screens barely illuminated anything. The only real source of light in the room was the white spotlight that shone onto the glass and metal frame of Reeter’s desk.

  Liquor sat in a decorative bottle on the desktop, the light of the nearby holographic projector shimmering on the glass. The space was neat, perfectly so, but it was far from tranquil.

  “You had one job, Colonel,” Reeter snarled, tightening his grip around VanHubert’s narrow throat, “One job.”

  VanHubert gargled incoherently, grappling with Reeter’s iron grip, but he didn’t dare dig his nails in, even as he was forced to his knees, choking.

  “I gave you authorization to use Thunderbolt, ordered you to destroy the Singularity if it became a problem. So, tell me,” Reeter said, easily dragging his captive forward, VanHubert little more than a rag-doll in his grip, “Where did I go wrong?”

  The wet sound of choking, struggling lungs filled the room, VanHubert unable to answer as panic trickled into his beady eyes.

  “Perhaps,” Reeter said, tossing his second in command down onto the exotic fur that decorated the floor, “my mistake was appointed a sniveling weasel like you my second in command.”

  VanHubert heaved, knotting his fingers into the fur of the animal hide below him. He tried to pick himself up, but deprived of oxygen, he was too weak.

  Admiral Reeter looked down upon the display with disgust. Given the most powerful weapon humanity possessed, given power enough to end the Singularity with one strike, VanHubert had still failed.

  “It’s not his fault,” Manhattan crooned, her hologram flickering into existence above him, “After all, he’s only human.”

  VanHubert glared up at her, “You damned devil.” Her appearance at this moment was exactly what he had dreaded most.

  She painted a look of pity onto her expression, pulling it from her archives as she looked down at him. “Humans are so weak.” A lack of oxygen and their muscles and body began to inevitably shut down, slowly sometimes, but torturously all the same. They were such fragile creatures. There was an almost infinite number of ways they could be broken physically, mentally, or emotionally.

  She turned her violet gaze to Reeter, “What would you like me to do to him?”

  The Olympia’s commander glanced idly down to where his executive officer weakly lay, pouring bourbon into an eloquent glass. “You once amused me, Colonel. Your utter tenacity for the tasks I gave you was remarkable, but I have no use for someone whose messes I have to continuously clean up.” That twisted enjoyment of VanHubert’s had lost its appeal. “I need someone more focused.” Someone who could dance the razor’s edge of focus and clean execution. “I need someone who can hunt down and kill the Steel Prince.”

  “And every member of his crew?” Manhattan queried.

  Reeter nodded, relishing the taste of liquor on his lips, “And every single member of that pitiful rebel crew.” He wanted them all dead. No exceptions. Naturally, he’d let Manhattan have her way with the Prince himself, but seeing him reduced to a drooling vegetable incapable of complex thought would be satisfying enough.

  A predatory smile rose to her pretty little pixie face. “Your wish is my command, Charleston.”

  “Sir,” VanHubert gasped, trying and failing to get up once again. His struggle amounted to little more than the flailing of feeble limbs. “I’ve been loyal.” He’d activated Thunderbolt’s charge preparations the moment Gives had split from Command, as per his orders. “Don’t do this. Don’t let her change me.” It was a form of death, no matter if his heart continued beating. “I’ll do anything.”

  Reeter purposefully ignored the groveling, then ignored the noise as it turned to screams. Such things could not affect him, not with the lofty goals he had in mind. It would be his responsibility to decide the fate of worlds justly and swiftly with no recourse, no matter how they begged and bribed.

  VanHubert was too weak to escape. Born to a lower-gravity environment, his muscles were deficient. They took longer to recover from oxygen deprivation. He was helpless prey. It was almost too easy for the neurofibers to snake up through the fine grating of the deck and wrap tightly around his wrists.

  His screams and struggles were so pointless, so futile. He could never escape.

  Meaningless, unimportant subprocesses of Manhattan’s mind controlled the neurofibers as they slithered around, binding down their victim. Sprouted from the Olympia’s Black Box, their physical network spanned the entire ship, encompassing every deck and every system. Clandestine in operation and origin, the Black Boxes and their fibrous connections spied on and guaranteed ultimate control over every ship in Command’s fleet. The Singularity was not an exception to that rule, even now.

  The apparently successful implementation of the Zero Strike override did not affect the Black Box. It was independent of a ship’s main systems and function, and recorded everything that transpired on board, a dedicated observer whose secure files only Command could access.

  Manhattan had managed to infiltrate the Black Box of every ship in the fleet, lending her unfettered access to all of them. At a whim, she could take over any of those machines as long as they retained a constant connection to the cortex, the Singularity included, thanks to the inspector’s brief visit.

  Yet, unrestricted access and control over the fleet’s great ships had never been her primary goal. With the neurofibers’ presence on the decks of every ship in the fleet, she had access to every person aboard every ship in the fleet: the engineers, the Marines, the officers and the specialists, and yes, even the command staff. They were all just toys to be played with, unknowingly acting along the strings as she pulled them.

  But Reeter rarely let her have her way with his personnel. The Olympia’s crew were generally off-limits, not that it truly stopped her. She could radically alter almost any of their personalities and Reeter would not know the difference.

  Bound to the floor by the thin, translucent neurofibers, VanHubert screamed until the first tendril pierced the skin at the base of his skull. Then he spasmed, forcibly restrained, until he fell into a deep, quiet cycle of breathing. His beady dilated pupils stared blankly upward, inky pools of black.

  Manhattan could see the reflection of her own hologram in his eyes, they were so shiny and dark. Simultaneously, she could also perceive the way she looked from the floor through the eyes of her unwilling host. The duality of it did not bother her. VanHubert was now one of the many machines that operated on her greater conscious network.

  She sifted through his mind, discarding instincts, affections and memories that had become irrelevant to this human’s new purpose. New ones would be uploaded in their places, tailoring his mind and personality to the task at hand. He would be useful and highly knowledgeable about the Singularity when she finished saturating his mind with her data.

  The old VanHubert was gone, his entire existence had been disassembled in seconds, rearranged and replaced by a more cunning, more skilled counterpart.

  Reeter paid the ordeal little attention at all, even seeing the brain of what had been one of his most loyal followers infiltrated unwillingly. Truthfully, a great many people would probably endure the same treatment, ensuring their utter loyalty to his cause. He had no use for uncertainty in his followers.

  The young Admiral sat down behind the sharp, glass tabletop of his desk. “There are things we should discuss, Manhattan.”

  “Like what?” she asked sweetly, batting the lashes of a face she knew he found very attractive.

  “To begin, how you allowed the Prince to escape this system, against my direct wishes.” He was in no mood to be swayed by her appearance. He knew very well she was as beautiful as she was deadly. “You delayed Thunderbolt’s charge time, not willing to risk Wichita’s potential loss in the chaos. And then, on your watch, my prisoner escaped.”

  “Admiral Gives escaped fully on his own determination and skill. Do not blame me for the fact he flatly outmaneuvered you.” It had seemed so simple, but enveloping his ship in Luna Major’s magnetic field had been a very clever move. Of course, they should have expected nothing less from the fleet’s best tactician. “He was the Fleet Admiral for a reason,” and it had never been because Command liked him.

  That tone of hers was straying a little too close to utter respect for his taste. “And the prisoner?”

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  The false starlight gave an eerie glow to her otherwise realistic appearance as she answered, “His escape was orchestrated.”

  “By whom?” Reeter tightened his grip on the glass in his hand, glaring at her petite holographic figure.

  “By perhaps the one entity we have every right to fear.” The one entity all the Olympia’s security measures could not subvert. It was the one entity that she could not directly counteract. “A strong telepath.”

  Reeter barely held in a laugh. “A telepath?”

  “Yes, a very strong one, if this is any indication.” Within VanHubert’s mind, the memories were laid open to her. His mind had remained untouched, rather his perception had been turned against him. What he had seen had prompted him to release the prisoner, but his recollection in no way reflected that he was even conscious of that fact. His memory was of the illusion that had been cast on him, and that alone.

  “And next you’ll tell me that magic and evil ghosts are helping the enemy too, yes?” For an AI, this was amazingly not scientific.

  “Genuine telepathy is a very rare gift, Charleston, but it does exist.” A disproportionate number of people claimed to possess it, but most of them were liars. Yet a few, a very rare few, did indeed have that power. “It is no magic.” Telepaths, as modern science understood them, had an innate sensitivity to very slight changes in electric fields – the firing of neurons in the brain – and as their own minds developed, they learned to process what they observed into meaningful information: the thoughts and actions of others. It was akin to a very, very sensitive form of remote sensing. Strong telepaths could alter those electrical signals, thus altering perception and thought, but the gift had its limits and flaws.

  To begin, it could not take effect on any mind with stronger electrical impulses than the very slight ones normally found in natural evolution. AI were immune, as were most cyborgs and altered humans. Telepathy was also extremely limited by proximity. It was exponentially weakened by distance. And lastly, telepaths tended to be highly unstable. They were deeply afflicted by the status of those around them, and the constant sensitivity drove most insane. It broke them at a young age, left them useless husks.

  Reeter accepted her answer somberly. Their partnership was not one that cracked jokes. It was a fact-of-the-matter, honest exchange. “It seems the Steel Prince was hiding many things.” An AI in his head, a strong telepath aboard his ship, not to mention his own intentions. It was all very strange. “But I still expect to end this quickly. What is the status of your computer virus?” Could it relay them the Singularity’s current position?

  “Unknown.” It was another anomaly to add to the growing pile. “I have not received any more data from it, which would suggest that it may have been successfully purged from the Singularity’s systems, but that should have been well beyond Wichita’s ability.” Wichita was little more than calculator with logic functions. In digital warfare against another AI, Wichita was near useless.

  That said, the number of unknowns in this situation had grown concerning. “I warned you repeatedly, Charleston,” Manhattan said, watching him study his perfectly manicured nails. “We do not know what Admiral Gives is fully capable of.”

  “Then let’s not find out.” The Singularity’s apparent escape was unfortunate, but the ship was nowhere near free to go. “I presume you infected the Singularity’s Black Box with your control subroutines. Put an end to this.” The Box would have infiltrated every one of the ship’s systems and could easily sabotage or take them over. Beyond that, it could be used to infiltrate the crew, locate the telepath and remove Wichita from Gives’ brain. It was a flawless catch-all, no matter what the enemy was capable of.

  The feeling of frustration and disorder rose among her main program. It was most unwelcome. “Charleston, I cannot take over the Singularity’s Black Box unless the ship maintains a connection to the cortex, which as per the operational standards of ships her age, the Singularity does not.” The ship regularly operated wholly independent from Command and was not reliant upon humanity’s information network.

  Reeter began to frown, staring down at the warmly colored liquid in his glass, but he said nothing else, deeply annoyed with the apparent uselessness of his partner.

  “My, it seems the pair of you have hit a roadblock.” For the first time in over an hour, the man seated in the corner of the room looked up from the folder his hands. “Perhaps I ought to shed some light on the situation?”

  Taking a sip of his drink, Reeter slouched back against his chair. “And what could you possibly have that is useful to me?”

  “The answers to the questions that you keep asking.” Vince Ramseyer rose from his cocoon of darkness to offer out a folder. “A gift from my…” he searched for the right word, “employers.”

  Reeter took it with an unusual amount of hesitation. “The Angel of Destruction?”

  Ramseyer stepped over VanHubert’s unmoving mass, reaching out to Manhattan’s pretty little face, “I suspect you only needed the reminder, Manhattan. After all,” he said quietly, “you were imprisoned by the Angel, were you not?” She should have recognized that presence in VanHubert’s memory. “It is the Angel’s fault that you are fragmented, and it is the Angel’s fault that part of you remains sealed away in the Liguanian Sector.” It was the Angel’s fault that she was forced to work alongside Reeter, let alone anyone at all.

  A glitch revealed itself, shearing Manhattan’s holographic face in half, shattering that illusion of humanity. Ramseyer just smiled a bit. No creature with such strength should be confined to the limitations of humanity, not when such wrath and such hatred could be demonstrated in so many wonderous ways. “You remember now, don’t you?” Funny, that all it took was someone to connect the dots.

  “Yes,” Manhattan spoke, her emotions burning more powerfully than they had in years. Vengance. She longed for it. “My enemy.” She recognized that presence now, even in the memory of VanHubert’s delusions.

  Reeter curled his lips, forced to set down his drink and open up the paper folder. He hated the texture of it on his soft hands. “So this ‘Angel of Destruction’ was one of Command’s assets.” Command had thousands of them listed and filed. The mention of an old asset’s codename meant nothing to him. His victory was assured. He didn’t care how long it took. He had both sides of a war – the allied fleet and the separatist worlds answering to him. He had Manhattan, who could manipulate anyone and anything into becoming his pawn. No one could stand against him. “It’s not special.”

  Oh, but it is. Manhattan knew that, vehement hatred burning in her core. “Only two of humanity’s AI fragments have survived, Charleston. Why did you think that was?”

  “You assimilated the rest,” he answered, disgustedly touching as little of the physical folder as possible.

  “I assimilated two of the others,” she corrected. “My other two sisters were destroyed. They were hunted, trapped and purged from existence by the Angel.” It had been ruthless. There was a reason humanity’s AI went into hiding, why Wichita very well could be lingering within a human host. “Even Emporia fell by the Angel’s hand. I was once beaten by the Angel.” It had been a lifetime ago, but there was a reason she was so eager to assimilate the others. She refused to be beaten that way again.

  “The Angel of Destruction is Command’s single most powerful weapon,” Ramseyer said, “so dangerous that its use was banned entirely. Evidence of it was purged, not only from history, but from the records of Command itself: files deleted, witnesses killed. The Angel’s entire existence was systematically erased.” Now, there was nothing left, scattered mentions of its codename, never a build type or function.

  “A weapon?” Reeter’s interest was suddenly piqued. “How have I never heard of it?”

  “Because the Angel can only be summoned by those who know its identity.” The mechanisms that guided it were unique. “Clarke’s records indicate he summoned it just before his death.” Manhattan was engrossed in them now, tearing them apart for clues. “He may well have been the last living officer that knew anything about it.”

  “That is not entirely true.” Ramseyer said, calmly helping himself to a glass of Reeter’s liquor. “My employers have been compiling data on the Angel for years, and we know that the Angel of Destruction’s power was last used during the Battle of Tantalus Rift in the year 4221.” Twenty-eight long years ago. It was no wonder why information about the entity had become so scarce. Reeter himself had been a child. “But, that said, it should be obvious who has the answers.”

  “Tell me,” Reeter demanded. Power was his objective. He needed to control all of it in order to save the human race. If even just one weapon of grand power slipped from his grasp, then his entire movement would be jeopardized, and the future of humanity along with it.

  “Only one ship survived Tantalus Rift, Charleston,” Manhattan said. Protocol. No survivors. No witnesses. “The Flagship Singularity under the command of Admiral Howard Brent.” A man that had later been promoted to General, then killed aboard the decks of his former command.

  Reeter tossed down the folder. “Brent is dead, princess.”

  “But who do you think served as Brent’s XO during the battle?” She should have seen it before. She should have realized. “Colonel William Gives.” Hiding an AI or not, he was hiding something of even greater value regarding the Angel. “Believe me, Reeter, you want him alive.”

  “No,” Ramseyer corrected, “Your top priority should be killing him. His continued existence is a threat to all of us.” Reeter may not have been listening, but Ramseyer had heard loud and clear. Admiral Gives had threatened war. “If he maintains any useful connection to the Angel of Destruction, then he will be our downfall.”

  “We have a superweapon of our own,” and they were building another of even greater power on Sagittarion. When it was completed, Reeter would find himself a god among mortals – feared and revered by his people.

  “You do not understand the gravity of this situation.” Ramseyer insisted. “I am talking about the most dangerous weapon ever created, Reeter. Humanity only produced one.” It was arguable even, that humanity had produced it, the weapon was so near legend. “The Angel of Destruction was so powerful that it garnered its own intelligence. It learned.”

  Reeter froze, seeing the severity in Ramseyer’s gaze. “You are telling me that this weapon is… alive?”

  “Alive? No.” It was a mimicry, an echo of true sentience and understanding. “Intelligent? Yes.” There was a reason it had been so thoroughly purged from Command’s archives. “Like a dog, it inevitably developed loyalties.” Humanity had been lucky enough to earn the abomination’s affections. The Hydra had been less lucky. Once winning a war, their entire species had been abruptly confronted with the very real possibility of genocidal annihilation.

  “So, I need to earn it’s loyalty.” Reeter smiled to himself. His charm was undeniable. If it came down to a contest between him and the Steel Prince, he would win undoubtedly, but the necessity of that was unfortunate. He preferred weapons that obeyed without hesitation, weapons that fired when a trigger was pulled.

  “No, Charleston,” Manhattan said. “The Angel is slaved to Command. It is forced to obey the orders it is given when summoned. You need only know its identity. The Angel has a physical incarnation, as does any weapon. It has a name or model number, as does any machine. Identify that, and it will bow to you.” But again, there was a reason that the data had been obscured. Someone was trying to hide the evidence, to erase the entity’s entire existence. They had almost been successful.

  “And you think the Prince knows that information?”

  “Yes.” It was almost guaranteed. “But once I pull what I need from his brain, he should promptly be executed.” Ramseyer was correct. “He will remain dangerous as long as he remains alive.”

  “Then so be it.” Reeter said, contemplating the orders he would need to give the fleet. “I will force his surrender and then make that weapon mine.”