"Admiral, I know what you're thinking, and boy do I disagree." I told the man over our neural interface.
The reply was instantaneous. "Of course you do, I know what you're thinking too, Dr. Sen"
Ah. I hadn't realized the link went both ways, but he hadn't spotted the secrets embedded in my lace. I tried not to think about it too hard just in case.
"Well, my point is, there's absolutely no need for you to go down with the ship."
There was a gap of a few milliseconds before he replied. "I wasn't set on that anyway, I can be a bit of a romantic. You're right, when the time comes, I'll hand things over to the Captain and bail too."
I felt the Captain accept his words with a pang of digital sadness, I'd become a bit better at understanding how the thing's mind worked. It was the ship even more than Franconi was. In much the same way that Gupta gave guidance to the struggling fleet, the Admiral gave it commands while it handled the moment to moment needs of the vessel while reporting up as needed.
It had a name, but it felt far too small and weak for something this beyond me. Beyond even the Admiral, who was already at the pinnacle of transhumanity, reaching out for true posthuman existence.
It felt grim acceptance, from the moment of its birth, dim memories of the endless training and drilling in a Turing facility buried beneath endless seas of hydrocarbons, it had prepared itself to die beneath alien suns, showing the invaders that Mankind, which it considered itself a part of, imagining itself a child grown tall and strong that still cared for its primitive parents, wasn't a pushover. It wished to make their craft remember its name.
If it had regrets, the first would be that it knew it would die so close to home, unable to feel the tingling of negative mass on its hull as it joined its comrades in crossing the wormhole. No opportunities to test the mettle of its systems against the enemy, the real enemy that is. The last, and this one surprised me, was that it was deeply disappointed that it never had a chance to talk to SAMSARA.
It had questions, just like I did. Far bigger, deeper questions, perhaps some that might be worthy of a being that had walked through the abandoned gates of Heaven and set itself up there with flaming sword in hand. Perhaps not, it thought, maybe we were all insects in its eyes, less than that, cellular automata, forced to follow the lockstep of our programming till the board was reset.
Maybe not the Metahumans, it mused. There was something different about them, and my ULTRAVIOLET clearance was insufficient for it to be able to clarify its thoughts, even if it felt sad that I too grappled with questions that the world had been unwilling to answer.
"Adat Sen. I have seen your thoughts, I have traced your lace and spoken wisdom to the budding consciousness in your back. Weep not for me, I know there are no answers in death, merely the serenity of non-existence, but sometimes, the works we do in our lives will stand in our stead till the stars go out. Good luck, you're going to need it."
I felt the intent, the words are merely paraphrasing of terabytes of knowledge passing through my lace, careful not to overload a mental infant. It cared about me, the Admiral had me listed as part of the Crew, and it would die for the Crew with no regrets at all.
If I had cried, the tears with no time to form were lost in the shock foam that still cushioned me, in my moist and warm cocoon. Too warm, the life-support was failing, and just a few seconds back we'd jettisoned the civilians aboard in the ventral shuttles.
As this was an orderly battle, both sides refusing to end it all, such life vessels had been left mostly unmolested, even if accidental damage had killed many of the helpless humans drifting around a burning planet.
Mars had seen better days, centuries, perhaps even aeons. The last time it had undergone this much abuse was when the Solar System was still young, comets and asteroids not yet swept up by Jupiter or the Sun regularly adding their mass and energy to a yet warm surface, vaporizing oceans only for them to rain back down again.
The AI told me that it had received word that the Patriots had revealed hidden refuges, likely built by Silt deep in the crust. The authorities, out of better options, had no choice but to evacuate their wards into the deep tunnels still shaking under the assault. Maybe they'd hold up, both the Kill Star and Deimos had been using a large fraction of their gravitational traction beams to stop the largest chunks from hitting, even if they too were powerless to stop the skies from burning.
If I've learned anything today, the Gods are often just as helpless as we are.
And now, the two of them had decided that the small fry were no more impediment, the Kill Star and its lunate cousin turning weapons that could crack the planet upon each other.
Spacetime ruptured, again and again, nanoscale blackholes only visible as tiny fizzing sparks of light in otherwise empty space. Time itself had become less than reliable, internal clocks on the ships reported a tiny but measurable discrepancy from aft to prow. The AI told me that both craft were notably slower than they could have been, after all, they were at the center of their deep gravity wells. Nothing too obvious to a human, we're not built for it, but it was a small contributing factor why the other ships were still alive, the small fraction that remained.
The atmosphere below billowed up, drawn away from the pull of an entire world, where it turned into plasma sheaths that wreathed the titans. The endless red of the surface below was turning black, then glossy, polished into glass by the heat. Cities collapsed, the Space Elevator had detached from its tethers and was now wrapping itself around the world like a fiery necklace.
It was warm at the poles, a human with a respirator could likely walk otherwise unaided, the atmospheric pressure there had risen to acceptable levels as so much water entered the air.
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"Adat. Brace yourself."
I didn't need to do anything, the foam firmed up further, trapping me beyond the power of even my augments to budge. We hit max burn, accelerating so hard that portions of the ship tore themselves off, momentum dampening was a luxury we no longer could afford.
It grew hot, stifling, my own systems struggling as I bathed in fluids hot enough to curdle the proteins in my skin. I could still take it, for a minute longer, maybe.
Deep inside the ship, antimatter bottles were uncorked, the laser systems carefully levitating each drop with picosecond pulses now doing the bare minimum needed to stop the charged particles from touching their walls, the convoluted magnetic field lines more than powerful enough to hold fusing hydrogen not fast enough to compensate.
"Iskra! Sleep when you're dead!"
The man blinked eyes that were threatening to close even after the endless infusion of stimulants into his bloodstream from the systems of his even better built cocoon. This had been hard on him, he was close to dying, if not quite there. He was physically baseline after all, barring his powers, and the jerks and jolts that only fazed the augmented crew had ruptured endless blood vessels in his brain. His lungs were filling with fluid, there hadn't been enough time to fully flood them with oxygenated substitutes.
His power was fading, used more than had been expected even over the course of a days-long engagement in AC. A lesser Teleporter would have evaporated ages ago, smearing their atoms across endless space when their powers failed outright.
My wife would have been fine. She might even have brought us back to Earth by now. Still, he was doing more than could have ever been expected of him, and the gentle hand of the Ship did its best to ease his pain with as much narcotic as was possible without killing him or putting him to sleep.
It wasn't nearly enough.
"Captain. I can't take all us of us, or at least not the full crew compartments."
"Why? You told me you could." The Admiral's voice signaled frustration, but I knew he felt awful about the demands he was making of a dying man.
"The Reality Anchor has recalibrated, it's set to broad-spectrum suppression of metahuman mobility, particularly teleportation." The AI spoke on his behalf, the man had broken into coughing that dislodged clots of blood and broken tissue, whisked away by suction tubes before they clogged his airways for good.
"Can you jump at all, if we upload?"
"Yes Admiral. Maybe once, maybe twice. I'm ready."
The ship built up speed, far more than was necessary to escape the Sun's grip and break out to the nearest stars. Should it miss its target, there was nothing in the world that could arrest it again, at least nothing without metahuman powers.
Iskra didn't conserve velocity or momentum in his jumps, always bringing things out at rest relative to his internal concept of his target. This wasn't strictly true, at relativistic speeds, his powers were taxed by the increase in total mass-energy even if the rest-mass remained the same. But while the ship was hitting twenty or thirty gees, it would take a while to get close enough for that to matter.
I felt alarm, something was working close to the Admiral's brain, a similar process underway with the rest of the augmented crew barring me and Iskra.
There was maybe just as much normal brain tissue left in Franconi as I had in my frontal lobe, and it was being vaporized, aggressively and destructively scanned. It had already been flooded with nanites, each one chewing on dying neurons and then conveying the report to the ship's systems, building a microscopically accurate model of the connectome, replicating in-silico the workings of axons, dendrites, synaptic ion pumps and the more compact representations of information hidden away inside temporary RNA and proteins. It wasn't perfect, there was no time for a measured approach that promised lossless transfer, but it worked.
Within seconds, the Admiral no longer had a head, the heat had cooked his brains from the inside, and then systems purged the dead nanites and disconnected the minimal life support that remained in his now redundant cyborg form.
He was happy. Yes, this had been something he had dreamed of, his consciousness fully transferred to the immense computational hardware of the Promises Kept, where he now found himself with more subjective time to bid goodbye to his most loyal shipmate.
The hardware here was bleeding edge, back in Xibalba, which was built only a decade back, it took dozens of billions of dollars in compute on a cutting edge node to run the Director at twice real-time, even if the shard I'd spoken to had been a fork running slower than my meat did.
I didn't know how fast the now uploaded crew were, but it was too quick for even my augmented neurons to keep up with their chatter.
Yet it couldn't last, the hardware was failing, quantum computers losing the cooling needed to maintain their qubits entangled in superposition, the optical backup units melting into the wrong type of glass.
It was alright, compressed down into densities where bytes were scratched onto individual atoms and molecules, the minds of the crew, if not the far larger AI, were transferred to media that could be carried by a damaged Teleporter burdened with a half-man like me.
The ship had built up speed, the AI Captain would stay the course, turning the ship into a weapon when all others had failed or turned into slag.
I told it the last goodbye I could, my mouth fighting against the choking fluid, forcing out only bubbles struggling to stand out from the foam, with my lace already disconnected. I hoped it understood, but it's far smarter than you and I. I clutched onto the bag that held my weapons and gear, cradling it close to my chest in the hopes that would aid things.
Jump.
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