Ysl hung brown and muddled against the stars, peering through the viewports of the bridge. The faint trace of light from a departing shuttle streaked against it briefly before disappearing into the murk, drawing a nod of satisfaction from Jesri. “That’s the last of them,” she sighed, slumping back into her chair.
Anja closed her eyes and leaned back, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Finally,” she grumbled. “Herding civilians is bad enough when they are not on your ship.”
“Refugees,” Jesri admonished her. “Give them some allowance for circumstances.”
Anja opened her eyes to look tiredly back at her sister. “I did, sister,” she said flatly. “They used it. I will never fail to be amazed at how quickly the goodwill from a rescue wears off when people find themselves discontent with their food or bedding.”
Jesri shook her head. “Well, whatever,” she muttered. “You don’t have to worry about it any longer. Odds are we’ll be dead and the ship destroyed before the time comes to deal with resettlement.”
“Hah,” Anja snorted. “And here I thought I was the pessimist.” She leaned forward, resting her head on her hands. “Is the research on the pedestal going that poorly?”
“I don’t even know,” Jesri grumbled. “I’ve been so tied up with the damn shuttles that I haven’t been able to check in on Rhuar and David in nearly a day. They could have defeated the Gestalt already, I wouldn’t have a clue.”
Anja grinned. “We should be so lucky,” she said, her fingers tapping lightly on a console. “One moment.”
There was a pause before David’s face swam into view on the screen. He still looked terrible, but there was a new resilience underlying his haggard appearance. “Ladies,” he said tiredly. “How’s the cat-herding coming?”
“Finished,” Anja replied, pulling a face. “Finally. How about the research?”
David made a face of his own. “Proceeding, albeit slowly,” he grimaced. “Rhuar and I have been able to map out most of the pedestal’s capabilities, but it was much more complex than we initially assumed.”
“Where is Rhuar, anyway?”, Jesri asked. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“I’m here!”, Rhuar’s voice said, crackling from the display. “I’ve been down in the cargo bay running tests on this stupid thing for hours. What’s a cat?”
The three exchanged looks. “...we’ll explain later,” Jesri said slowly, shaking her head. “Did we at least confirm that the pedestal will be useful against the Gestalt?”
David shrugged noncommittally. “Yes and no,” he said. “We were able to map Trelir’s communication protocols to the pedestal’s hardware, and the pedestal itself seems like it should function. Unfortunately, we also confirmed what Rhuar originally suspected - that the protocol is fundamentally incompatible with his shipjack.”
“Not a huge surprise,” Jesri said with a shrug. “I suppose we’ll just have to have the ship generate the activity feed.”
“What?”, David said, startled. “No, we can’t do that. The device is a two-way interface, we can’t risk exposing the ship’s infrastructure to the Gestalt like that. It has to be an isolated system, and it has to be capable of generating the traffic necessary to fill the link.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it has to generate meaningful traffic, otherwise the Gestalt might find it easier to isolate and terminate the feed. We may have to make a simulated Emissary mind in one of the spare cargo bays and find a way to wire it up to the pedestal’s inputs.”
Anja blinked. “Can we do that?”, she asked uncertainly. “We have a fair amount of data on Trelir, but not enough to recreate his mental processes with any accuracy. How accurate does our counterfeit need to be?”
“No way to know,” Rhuar replied. “But probably not very. The command protocol we’re using is genericized, I don’t even think we would need an Emissary at all to make it work. The incompatibility with my shipjack is more about bandwidth than format, I think it would probably work just fine if it could handle the volume.”
Jesri and Anja exchanged a look. “If format doesn’t matter,” Jesri said slowly, “there may be another option.”
David gave them a quizzical look before realization dawned on his face. “Oh, shit,” he mumbled. “I didn’t think about that.” He shook his head emphatically. “That sounds like a really bad idea.”
“What?”, Rhuar asked irritably. “Guys, I don’t have a video feed-”
“They want to use their embedded links to connect to the Gestalt,” David said, his face sour.
There was a pause. “Oh,” Rhuar mused. “Hmm. Well, yeah, that could work. They’re certainly a lot more advanced than my shipjack.”
“That’s beside the point!”, David retorted. “You saw how bad it was when Eleanor messed with a link. They’re a lot more than just an interface, exposing one to the Gestalt could leave its owner brain-dead or worse.”
“And if the Gestalt shoots us we’ll be dead-dead,” Jesri said dryly. “Which is a risk everyone will be running regardless. As one of the parties at risk I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility so lightly. If we can mitigate its ability to respond to our physical attacks it justifies exposing ourselves to a bit of extra danger.”
Rhuar coughed awkwardly. “Well, ah,” he muttered, “David has a point. The worst case here isn’t ‘one of you dies,’ it’s ‘one of you is totally mentally compromised, reveals all of our plans to the Gestalt and then murders everyone on the ship.’”
“Not to mention,” David said, “we’d have to enable the blocked network functions for whoever was connected to the pedestal. That means Eleanor’s code, or at least something like it.”
“I already have the patch,” Anja said grimly. “That part is taken care of.”
David shook his head. “You got Eleanor’s patch for other Valkyries, a limited alteration to place you under her control,” he said. “You would need the code Eleanor applied to herself for this to work. I read through the Elpis team’s notes on it, her alterations to herself were much farther-reaching. More unlocked capability, more activated neural connections,” he explained, his eyes flicking between the two sisters. “More potential for instability.”
“We should still explore the idea,” Jesri said stubbornly. “If we were willing to entertain the concept of building an Emissary brain in a cargo bay, we can at least see if the disadvantages of Ellie’s code can be mitigated enough to make it a viable option.”
“...Agreed,” David said reluctantly, “Although I still don’t like the idea.”
“Neither do we,” Anja shrugged. “I certainly have no desire to dabble further in link modification.” She leaned forward, fixing David with a stare. “It is irrelevant what we want. We must win, or nothing else matters. Everything is on the table. If you see an option that will secure an advantage at the cost of our lives or our sanity you will give it consideration regardless,” she said flatly. “Am I understood?”
He nodded. “Quite.”
There was a silence that stretched out uncomfortably, broken by Rhuar coughing. “Ah, so,” he said, “Are we doing the link thing or building a fake Emissary?”
“Let’s give both options a look,” Jesri replied. “If we can get the same effect without fucking with our heads, so much the better.”
“Fair enough,” he replied. “David?”
“Yep,” David nodded. “We can run some of the numbers, it should let us rough out how a fake Emissary would stack up against your links. Once we know that we can better evaluate our options.”
“Thanks, guys,” Jesri said. “We’ll stop by to help as soon as we get word from Neryn that the shuttle landed safely.”
David nodded, then deactivated his feed. A barely audible click signaled Rhuar’s disconnection, and Jesri let her breath out in a puff.
“Mmhmm,” agreed Anja, resting her chin in her hands. “No rest for the wicked.”
Jesri snorted. “We both know that’s not true,” she said tiredly, stretching her back. “It’s just one of those things someone has to say, when the time is right to say it.” She tilted her head to look at Anja, who was still staring pensively ahead. “You look worried,” she observed.
“I am worried, sister,” Anja admitted. “If any situation calls for worry, this one is it. The thought of going up against the Gestalt is daunting enough without adding in the possibility of self-inflicted insanity. At least before we were only facing death.”
“Yeah,” Jesri agreed, “I’m not wild about it either, but it makes sense. David and Rhuar won’t be able to make an alternative that approaches us in capability.”
Anja frowned at her sister. “You suggested that they explore the option, though.”
Jesri smiled back slyly. “It’s better if they come to that conclusion on their own. If I told them to focus solely on the code they’d be distracted thinking of alternatives that would spare us. Don’t get me wrong, I hope there’s another option,” she said, her smile fading. “I just don’t see it coming out any other way. The pedestal is a neural interface link, it probably uses a lot of the same design tech as our embedded hardware. Hell, there’s a good chance it was designed with us in mind - why else was there an unlisted Valkyrie deployment on board?”
“The thought had occurred to me,” Anja mused. “We would be of little use otherwise, considering that the ship was meant to hide rather than fight. I wonder if Tessa and Hana knew the answers.”
“Yeah, I-”, Jesri said, blinking as a thought occurred to her. “Anja, maybe they still do. If Tessa and Hana were meant to use the pedestal…”
Anja perked up and looked back at Jesri. “They would have been patched,” she finished. “The code would still be in their links.”
“Shit, I should have seen that earlier,” Jesri groused. “I’ll go to the morgue and extract their links, we can see if they’re modified before we present our theory to David and Rhuar. If we have safe code it should go a long way towards smoothing over their objections.”
“And mine,” Anja said wryly, rising to her feet. “Let me extract the links. Ever since Nicnevin I find myself wanting to know more about them.” She hesitated, looking towards the bridge lift. “I doubt I could focus on anything else, regardless. It unsettles me to think about doing that to our sisters, but since it is necessary I will hold the knife.”
“I understand,” Jesri said, standing to give her sister a hug. “Let me know if there’s any problems, otherwise I’ll find you once I’ve heard from Neryn.”
Anja smiled back at her, pulling away to leave the room. Jesri noted a brief catch in her walk as she boarded the lift, then she was gone.
----------------------------------------
The console sounded gently, nevertheless startling Jesri out of her thoughts. She reached over to accept the transmission, leaning back as a Ysleli face blinked into view - although it was decidedly not Neryn.
“Hey, Tarl,” Jesri said, sitting up in her chair. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. Was there a problem with the last shuttle?”
Tarl shifted irritably. “No, save that it was full of more blackened refugees,” he grumbled. “They complain about everything, as though the state of the planet is not a hardship for us as well. A Ysleli may be weak or arrogant, but if he is both then he is simply dead. Things would be simpler if your society held the same values, as the troublemakers would not feel so bold; since you insist that we indulge their idiocy I’ve had to move the refugee housing to an entirely different section of the tunnels.”
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Jesri smirked. “We’ll have them off your hands soon enough, don’t worry,” she reassured him. “Or we’ll all be dead.”
“Either is acceptable,” Tarl hissed. “I will face the Gestalt with my claws alone rather than spend another week… administrating,” he spat.
She found herself unable to resist a laugh at his frustration, although she quickly stifled it as the irate warfather’s face darkened. “I’m sorry, Tarl, I don’t mean to laugh,” she giggled. “Here, actually - I have some good news for you. I was going to hold off until we researched a bit but I’ll loop you in early as an apology.”
Tarl muttered grumpily, then jerked his head to the side. “Go on,” he grumbled.
Jesri explained at length about their research into the pedestal, as well as the theory about its connection to their sisters. “...if we’re right,” Jesri concluded, “then we should be able to severely diminish the Gestalt’s response effectiveness during our initial attack.”
Tarl, who had long since emerged from his rotten mood, tapped his claws contemplatively against his cheek. “It sounds promising,” he allowed, his black eyes darting her way, “but also quite risky. If whoever tries this infiltration fails, we will be exposed and helpless. Likely, we will die.” He steepled his talons and leaned forward, baring his teeth. “I like this plan. It’s bold, daring. For an enemy like the Gestalt, we can afford nothing less.”
“I figured you’d enjoy it,” Jesri sighed. “It’s dangerous and ridiculous, but unfortunately it’s the best shot we’re likely to get. With the destruction of Elpis the Gestalt is beginning to act in earnest. We have the gate and a small fleet, but I have no confidence that we can keep both safe for long if the Emissaries start sniffing around.”
“Agreed,” Tarl rumbled. “Shield yourself with victory and even the strongest spear will turn aside.”
“Of course that’s a Ysleli proverb,” Jesri muttered. “But you’re right. There’s no value in delay, and the threat only ends when the Gestalt is neutralized. We must take refuge in audacity, to use the human phrasing.”
“Hah!”, Tarl barked. “Yes, I like it. We will befuddle the Gestalt and break it, then sweep the stars clean of its filth. Our names will be revered for eternity, the heroes who struck down an angry god.” He shrugged. “Or we will die, the last who fought against encroaching death at the end of all things. None will surpass us, for none will follow us.”
Jesri nodded. “It’s high stakes, to be sure,” she said.
Tarl gave her an odd look. “Hardly,” he said. “Either outcome would be acceptable.”
“I have a definite preference,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You can think about whatever will keep you sane in the face of refugee complaints, just don’t forget that when we head out we’re trying to win.”
“As you say,” Tarl acknowledged, inclining his head. A muffled screech echoed shrilly around the confines of the bunker from somewhere off-camera, causing a grimace to ripple over his face. Ysleli shouting was drowned out by rapid, high-pitched jabbering, rapidly growing louder as its source approached Tarl. “If you will excuse me,” he said unhappily, “it appears I have another visitor.”
“Think about death,” Jesri deadpanned. “Glorious death.”
“I do,” Tarl said darkly, his hand flickering out to terminate the transmission. Jesri rocked back in her seat, the grin she had been suppressing emerging to play on her lips before fading gently to an expression of mild worry.
She was still pensively gazing at the darkened screen when Anja returned, two small almond-shaped objects cradled in her cupped hand. Jesri turned her head, then sat up to take a closer look.
The two droplets of metal were dull silver flecked with blue inclusions that caught the light as Jesri moved her head. The tapered point split into thick filaments, which trailed and split once more into gossamer strands. She reached out and picked one of them up, noting its surprising weight.
“You know,” Jesri commented, “I’ve never actually seen one of these before.”
“Nor had I,” Anja said. “No reason we would have, really, but it still feels a bit strange.”
Jesri turned it over in her fingers, running her thumb over the smooth surface. She tried to envision the identical device in her own head, nestled in the dark folds of her brain, but her mind’s eye kept showing her images of Hana and Tessa laughing, running, asleep with Violet on a mound of pillows. These cold teardrops had been there, too, even then when none of them had truly understood.
She looked up and met Anja’s eyes, then nodded. “All right,” she said firmly. “Let’s get started.”
----------------------------------------
“You’re shitting me,” David sputtered, turning to pace back from the camera in exasperation. “You are absolutely pulling my leg right now.”
Jesri spread her hands in a shrug, smiling at the monitor. “Literally not capable of it,” she said sweetly.
“Fuck,” he sighed, massaging his temples. “I can’t believe this. I’ve spent most of my life trying to pick up the pieces MANTRA left behind - and all this time I missed that you two were wrapped up in it.”
“How do you think we feel?”, Anja snorted.
“I mean, these guys were trying to hide from the Gestalt,” Rhuar said thoughtfully. “It makes sense that their core plans would be kind of non-obvious.”
The others looked irritably in his direction. “That’s not the point,” David groused.
“You found out you were doing things the hard way and you feel dumb,” Rhuar scoffed. “Welcome to problem-solving! You guys want to keep exploring the idea that we’re all fucking morons or do you want to actually do something useful?”
Jesri blinked. “Ah, sure,” she said. “You feeling okay?”
“Oh, I’m good,” Rhuar muttered. “Just don’t want to hear any fucking moaning about ‘doing things the hard way’ from the people that replaced my entire professional field with a voice command.” He settled into a sitting position and looked at them expectantly. “Come on, let’s see this code.”
Anja’s lips quirked into a grin. “The code is an objective improvement over Ellie’s patch,” she said, moving to stand beside a display screen. Jesri punched in a few quick commands and the screen flickered to show a network diagram. “By comparison, the MANTRA patch makes much more precisely targeted changes while achieving a greater effect.”
“Interesting,” David mused, scrolling on his own display. “But not surprising, given that it was likely compiled by a team of experts with access to the source code and hardware. What impact will it have on overall stability?”
Jesri made a face. “Hard to say,” she admitted. “But they had it deployed to both Tessa and Hana even though they had several planned destinations prior to Apollyon. It’s guesswork, but that tells me they didn’t anticipate any short-term problems with it.”
“And long-term problems...?”, David asked.
“Are in the long-term,” Jesri replied brusquely.
“Like we discussed,” Anja said, “it is only a concern if it impacts the conflict with the Gestalt. If there are any side effects afterward we can address them.”
David looked up. “So we’re moving forward with this?”, he asked. “We’re isolating the patch and testing it on one of you?”
“We’re testing it on Jesri,” Rhuar said quietly, flipping through screens on his tablet. Both sisters turned to stare at him, and he held his exoskeletal arms up placatingly. “It’s the only way this is going to work,” he said. “Anja said it already: this patch is more precise, it modifies a smaller portion of the link. Even glancing at it I can tell it’s not going to fully overwrite what Eleanor did to her. I’m not sure what the effect of partially overwriting the earlier patch would be, but I don’t think anyone wants to find out during the fight with the Gestalt.”
“Fuck,” Anja growled, her face growing stony. “How certain is that?”
“We can confirm with some more detailed analysis,” David said, “but I think he’s probably right. I’m not even sure it would overwrite enough of the existing code to allow safe use of your network functions.”
Jesri reached over to squeeze Anja’s hand, smiling at her. “It’s all right,” she said. “If it has to be me, then that’s the way it is.” She fixed David and Rhuar with a stare. “This means no tolerance for error, though. One subject, one attempt.”
“You’re awfully sanguine about this,” David observed.
“It’s like I said before,” Jesri shrugged, “we’re all risking death. I had made my peace with the possibility of using Ellie’s code even though we knew that came with issues. Now that we’re using the MANTRA patch this is probably the least dangerous thing any of us are going to do this week.”
Rhuar gave her a sidelong look, then shook his head. “That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” he grumbled. “It just means you’re crazy.”
“And there’s a very good chance that we’re all going to die,” Jesri added helpfully.
“Yes,” David sighed. “And that.”
----------------------------------------
A cool draft flowed through the cargo bay, and Jesri ran her hand over the stubble on her scalp as the chill reached her skin. She normally wore her hair at a manageable chin-length cut, but after an initial positioning test they quickly found that the pedestal’s complex and sharp topography did not play nicely with longer hair. At least Anja had stopped laughing for long enough to cut her free, Jesri thought sullenly, even if she did start back up as soon as she saw her sister’s shaven locks.
“You ready?”, Rhuar asked nervously.
“Are you?”, she replied. “This is the first real test. I’m just going to lie there, you and David are doing all the heavy lifting.”
“I was about to say yes,” Rhuar muttered. “Lie down before you talk me out of this.”
Jesri settled onto the thin medical bed that they had jammed up beside the pedestal, carefully lowering her neck into the thin gap between the protruding metal fins. Thin shiny patches of skin stood out on her neck where Anja had patched minor cuts from earlier, and her sister stood ready with the dermal binder and a cheshire grin on her face. Jesri rolled her eyes as her head settled gently into the hollow at the center of the pedestal’s crown.
“You can stop hovering with that thing, I’ve managed to not cut my head off,” she said crossly.
Anja pocketed the binder, although her smile didn’t diminish. “Just scream if you feel particularly lacerated,” she replied. “A pity this thing does nothing for hair.”
“Ha ha,” Jesri said flatly, closing her eyes. “You’re running low on hair-related jokes if this is what it’s come to. Rhuar, can we start this up before I strangle my sister?”
“You want me to rush?”, Rhuar muttered. “Sit tight, I’m almost done.”
Jesri lay there, staring at the light filtering through her eyelids. They had applied the MANTRA patch less than an hour ago; although they had all spent days on an exhaustive analysis of its inner workings and found no obvious danger she couldn’t help but feel a nauseous thrill when she let her thoughts linger on her link. There was a sense of an abyss behind her, yawning wide with no bottom or far edge. Whether it was a consequence of the update or her own overactive imagination, she couldn’t say - but just out of sight she nevertheless felt a vast space stretching away.
“All right,” Rhuar said trepidatiously. “I’m ready when you are.”
She cracked an eye to look over at him. “Any advice, ace pilot? This is my first shipjack.”
He met her eye with a serious look. “Focus on one input at a time,” he said quietly. “I like to do spatial and tactile first, so it’s easier to know when you’re holding still.”
“Anything else?”, she asked, taken aback by the serious tone of his voice.
He paused, considering. “Hold still,” he advised.
“Great,” Jesri snarked. “I feel totally prepared. Start it up whenever you’re ready.” She felt Anja’s hand slip into hers, and she gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Three,” said Rhuar. “Two. One.”
For a moment, nothing happened. She opened her eyes in confusion just in time to see the razor-petals surrounding her head quiver and bend slightly inward-
A wave of light and texture crashed over her, drowning her in technicolor static. The impact jarred her mind like an unexpected fall, but she did not scream - she had no lungs, there was no air. There was only twisted, impossible color convulsing into patterns that flexed and blended until she heard them screaming jumbled roars of static, felt them stabbing through her in jagged waves of electric torment.
Hold still, she thought desperately, trying to tame the waves. Points of light swirled through her vision and she flung her attention towards the brightest, fixing it in her head with manic focus. It shuddered, but held steady. The other points of light clustered around it in a smooth gradient, curving and clutching until they occluded some of the unknowable chaos surging around her.
Contemplating the standing wave of light, she strained to make sense of it. There was a shift, and suddenly it was a sheet of pure sound raking at her ears, a twisted jumble of knotted spacetime swirling away-
Then, finally, it was the cool sensation of a surface against her back. The familiar, euclidian sensation of it felt so refreshingly right amid the maelstrom that she took a second to revel in its solidity, her rock in the storm. Slowly she collected other bits of what she now knew was the tactile stream, and along with it came drabs of the space surrounding her, knitting into a familiar three dimensions that held her like a cocoon.
She became aware of her body again, painfully so. Fire wracked her until she clamped down on it, stuffing the unexpected flood of proprioception away from her conscious mind. Smells, lights and sound began to filter into more familiar configurations as her brain learned the trick of it, the senses greedily latching on to their familiar fare.
Suddenly, it was quiet. She was once again lying on her back, her eyes closed and her hands folded across her stomach. Carefully, she opened her eyes and sat up, looking around. She was on the floor in a tidy apartment, tastefully appointed and looking out over a sprawling city at nighttime. She stood shakily, grabbing a nearby end table for support. It scraped across the floor, the noise echoing through her ears until she was able to focus and quiet it.
Footsteps approached from another room at the noise, and David burst through the doorway in breathless excitement. “Holy shit,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in Jesri’s ears. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”
She grimaced, releasing her grip on the end table. “Appreciate the confidence,” she mumbled, slurring her words. Her body felt like a stranger’s, the familiar basic motions laborious and alien until she tucked the stray bits of sensation into their proper place. She took a moment to organize her impressions before straightening fully and looking back at David, who had adopted a worried expression.
“I think I’m getting the hang of it,” Jesri said carefully. “Rhuar really undersold the first bit.”
“I heard that,” Rhuar’s voice crackled from beside her. She turned to look at a bank of monitors, one of which was showing her supine body lying on the bed, her head encased in the clustered petals of the pedestal. Anja still stood beside her, grasping her hand. Jesri flexed her fingers, but felt nothing.
“You had us worried for a second,” David said, grinning broadly and extending a hand. Jesri grabbed it, and they shook. She thought she saw the slight glistening of tears behind David’s glasses. “Welcome, Jesri Tam,” he said cheerfully, “to my little slice of the universe.”