Allison was packed up for her trip to LSR space. She ran her hand along the combination air intake and particle beam housing of Bit’s new black liquid metal skin. She reached up and let her fingers slide across what would be an aileron on a twenty first century plane. Of course, with liquid metal Bit didn’t need such things. The metal could be manipulated on the fly to create control surfaces.
“You ready Bit?”
“Always, Allison.”
“Just going to check the cargo compartments to make sure everything is secure. Get the main fusion reactor and graviton cores warmed up. We’ll leave the antimatter generator off, figure there is less chance we’ll piss someone off.”
Allison heard footsteps. She glanced in the direction of the new visitor to her personal hanger. She narrowed her eyes when she realized it was Maria’s personal black ops agent. She was dressed in a hard suit and had a helmet under her arm along with a duffel bag.
“What are you doing here?”
Olga glanced around.
“Oh me? I’m your bodyguard. It seems you have a habit of getting shot at, and my employer wants to make sure I get hit instead. You got the cargo bay open still, good, throw this in, would you?”
Olga tossed her duffel bag towards Allison who caught it with a groan. It was heavier than it looked. If she wasn’t in her armor and wasn’t a dhampir it probably would have knocked her over.
“What is in this thing? Lead weights? You can’t come because it will take forever to get there. Like at max light speed for you we’ll take like six days, for me it will take fifteen hours.”
Olga waved her hand at the starfighter and offered a card that had a string of numbers on it.
“Put those into your fancy calculations. I bet you’ll be surprised how fast I can go, let’s get on with it. The sooner we leave the sooner we get back and the sooner I’m done with you. Believe it or not spending fifteen hours with a teenage girl in a fighter cockpit isn’t exactly my idea of fun.”
Allison mumbled something offensive under her breath, she finished stowing the new cargo in another cargo bay to balance out the load. Not that it mattered much with the antigrav and thrust Bit could generate, but she’d have to take the new mass into consideration for her FTL calculations. A full conversion borg and her lead filled duffle bag meant a significant change in the fighter’s mass. Unlike a full-sized starship. She hopped into the cockpit. Once Olga joined her, she readjusted her initial calculations. She input the code for Olga’s max speed rating in FTL and was shocked to see it made no change in her ETA. It would seem Olga, whatever she truly was, was rated for unlimited FTL, max speed.
“Fine but if you annoy me, you’re finding your own way home.”
Allison let space control know she was about to launch. She’d already pre-scheduled her launch window and her FTL jump. The hanger roof split apart and she pulled Bit up through it, as they left the roof closed on its own. Allison put on an old recording from the twenty-first century. It was loud and it was metal, it involved throat singing. She angled the fighter for a ballistic climb. She didn’t go hypersonic until she hit eighty thousand feet. Once she hit the boundary for FTL she engaged her hyper-drive. Once the blue-white tunnel surrounded them she took her hands off the controls. She glanced back at Olga.
“If you’re going to throw up use this.”
Allison threw an empty food pouch at Olga.
“You’re funny. What makes you think I even have a stomach?”
“All that synth-flesh needs nutrients.”
Olga laughed.
“You aren’t half as dumb as I thought you were, are you?”
Allison took a deep breath and let it out slowly. To Aryna’s credit it seemed to work in centering herself. She realized she was going to need to use that technique a lot with Olga in her cockpit.
“You know. I should ask the President to make this a single seater. I’ll have less annoying passengers that way.”
Olga smirked.
“You’re so charming. The more I get to know you the more I realize you have to be Hazel’s sister because it’s like you two share a brain.”
Allison made a face. Olga leaned forward.
“So, tell me, crazy little girl, how did you get past the blockade at the edge of the sol system? I heard a lot of swearing, things like whoever was flying that cargo ship was out of their damn mind, you impressed my employer and that’s hard to do.”
Allison blushed.
“I just skipped the deceleration phase of the FTL jump.”
Olga interlaced her fingers and kept leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
“What does that mean?”
Allison motioned at the FTL corridor.
“An FTL jump has three phases. Acceleration, steady state and deceleration. It takes time to get up to near light speed. Coming out of a jump at anything but a dead stop is suicidal. You aren’t stopping at that kind of speed. I was going at a ten percent of light speed when we exited the jump. If anything had been directly in our path on exit whatever it was and us would be paste. It also meant that getting a hit on us was nearly impossible. I had no shields, no real armor, we wouldn’t have survived a blockade either. Somehow, they managed to clip us, they took out what was left of our antigravs and some of the heat shielding for atmospheric entry. Turned a fifty-fifty we’re going to crash into, were going to crash, maybe we’ll survive…”
Olga laughed.
“You have to be Enid’s daughter. That is exactly the kind of shit she would pull. Do you know she went to Tritan dome with a single fighter to pull a girl who was kidnapped out of it? She took on their entire defense forces and flew out with her.”
Allison glanced back at Olga.
“She was a goddess! Of course she could do that. I’m a normal teenage girl who got in over her head and had to do some really stupid things to save my life as I knew it. I was making it up as I went along. There is no way I’m her daughter or Hazel’s sister.”
Olga laughed.
“You think Enid planned everything out? She was the Queen of making shit up as she went. She blew out every blood vessel in her brain, saving us from a bomb she set. She was barely conscious, took out like six NRA terrorists herself. She had a butter knife, a fork and a sandwich. No powers, no vampire mojo, just a ninety percent dead five-foot girl who looked like she was fifteen at the best of times. She was unstoppable. And Hazel. She was kind-hearted, loved to laugh, loved to brawl. You could have a worse family kid. Ignore me though, I’m just talking out of my cybernetic ass.”
“Could you tell me more stories about the Dark Mother… I mean Enid?”
Olga smirked.
“Sure kid. Did you hear about her fight with a demon in Rome?”
Allison shook her head.
“Okay, so she and Hazel ended up in Rome during the great fire. They run into a fifteen-foot-tall demon with wings made of flames. Hazel said it was a fallen angel or some shit. Enid gets into it with the demon. He flies up. She flies up stabs a sword into him, uses it as a grip to hang on. They slammed into the ground hard enough that they caused a crater. Enid was on the top. Rips one of his wings off with her bare hands. He manages to claw her; Don’t know how she moves wickedly fast. She uses some of her mind powers to pull two swords through the demon, one through its heart while it was standing over her gloating.”
“Demon?”
Olga shrugged.
“Honestly the stuff I’ve seen since I’ve known the two of them… Hazel literally ripped an armored battle mech apart with her claws. That was fun to cover up… Until I met them, I thought everyone was human. Then I watched Enid form a ball of blue energy to save us all from a firebomb. If Hazel tells me she fought a demon with flaming wings, I’m going to believe her. Hell Maria has been around since before Julius Caeser. She was trained by a Spartan warrior. It’s enough for me to believe in almost anything. Look at you, you are half vampire.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Allison fell into silence. Olga leaned back in her seat.
“So, that Tyler kid, how are you and him doing?”
Allison sunk into her seat. Olga chuckled.
“That well?”
Allison shrugged.
“He shot at me; I stunned him. Now he’s in a coma. I’m pretty sure it’s not going well. I almost killed his father, got his sister and his father arrested, then thrown into an alien prison.”
Olga punched the back of Allison’s shoulder.
“Sounds like a relationship made in Russia, kid. Tell me about the almost killing his father thing? There has to be a story there.”
“He attacked me, the Silwrath were like, oh this should be fun, he’s actually fighting the all mighty battlelord? What an idiot. He slammed me around a lot. I vamped out bit him and it was messy. Took fifteen Silwrath to hold me down apparently.”
Olga laughed.
“Glad Maria didn’t send me after you. At least you wouldn’t get any blood out of me.”
Allison tapped her fingers on Bit’s control surface.
“So, like… time travel is real?”
Olga shrugged.
“It’s classified. Amee told me if I told anyone about it, I’d be killed. She was a scary woman. Not as scary as Enid. Which is why I think you are their daughter. Enid didn’t have friends, neither did Amee. They had people they loved and people they tolerated. In Enid’s case it was more like people she loved and people she didn’t want to kill. She was not the all-forgiving person that nutty religion says she was. You know why I met Hazel? Her mother slaughtered a hundred Soviet soldiers in a nuclear weapon launch facility. She used a banned weapon from the twenty-first century. To get one little drone back. The lady who recruited me was scared of her and this was from her in the sixties, before the whole time traveling thirty century tech. Keep in mind as Hazel tells it, at the time Enid was mortal, human. A hundred soldiers, herself, on foot. She was a born killer.”
Olga sighed.
“Yeah, time travel is real. Yes, I’m from the sixties, as in the nineteen sixties. I was born in the Soviet Union. Been here for going on twenty years.”
Allison glanced back. Olga was an apt judge of body language and answered before Allison could drop the question.
“Yes, I miss it sometimes. Especially my family. My parents and I were not on great terms I wish I could see them again. On the other hand, if I was back there, I’d be dead right now from cancer. I wouldn’t have a friend like Maria. I wouldn’t be travelling at thousands of times the speed of light towards an alien parliament. It’s like my father used to say, in Soviet Russia everything is complicated. It goes for life in general. There is good and bad.”
Allison moved her head from side to side. Olga leaned forward again.
“So, meet any new and interesting people at school? Any new partners in crime I’m going to have to cover up a corporate break in and ship theft with?”
Allison blushed.
“Well, I guess, there’s Hope. Another white girl. Those are in short supply on Eden Prime. She’s a bit odd though. I guess it must be a UK dome thing. Unfortunately, she was adopted by my CO and his wife. I feel bad for her. He’s kind of a hard-ass and now she’s got to wear sunscreen if she wants to go outside like for the rest of her life.”
Olga shrugged and leaned back.
“Maybe whatever was happening before she got to Eden Prime makes that look like an easy sacrifice.”
Allison tapped her fingers on the console again.
“I guess. She hasn’t talked about it too much and honestly, I’m too afraid to ask. Rumor has it that it was either a failed colony and her parents died, or she broke so many laws in the UK dome but was too young to punish so they sent her to Eden Prime for a fresh start. Oh, one of the new girls started a rumor she got pregnant, and another that was something called a dreg, whatever that is.”
Olga smirked.
“Dreg is a derogatory term for people who live in the service tunnels under the domes on Earth. Some do it because they refuse to be part of the corporate machinery that keeps the people down. Others have no choice. Others, because they refuse to be a number, have an ident chit. They aren’t bad people. Not how I’d want to live. I mean if I still ate organic food, I would not choose dome rat. The ones in New Amazon do not trust the government at all. The story is about three hundred years ago, some corpo security went down there with disintegrators and murdered hundreds of people looking for one girl. True or not, girl is a martyr to them. Maria has been trying to integrate them into society or get them to move to a colony since she took over. I’m her usual envoy. I’m not a diplomat, she could probably have chosen better. Whatever, they aren’t harming anyone but themselves anymore. Not since I weeded out the Christian terrorists.”
Allison frowned at the mention of Christian terrorists.
“Why did they even do any of that? What did it accomplish? Just a bunch of innocent people dead.”
Olga shrugged. She didn’t say anything about it, but she quirked her head to the side. There was something personal in Allison’s query.
“They felt repressed. I have no idea. You put a bunch of people together put someone charismatic in the lead and you get crazy crap. It’s not a Christian thing, I just cannot for the life of me remember what they called themselves. Christians from my time wouldn’t recognize the ones who call themselves that from this time. Its religion kid, it makes people do crazy things. It’s kind of why Stalin wanted to push it out of Mother Russia. Sort of. Now that I’m older I think he was just trying to squish out anything that would cause dissent.”
She paused briefly.
“I don’t get humans of this time. We have our own autonomous dome, but we’re repressed enough that we need to go to war? What the fuck is that?”
She continued.
“You are all genetically engineered, and no one cares. Well except the dregs. You know there hasn’t been a single reported case of naturally occurring cancer besides mine in a century? Of course those aren’t counting the dregs. You couldn’t even call you human anymore really. In my time people were lucky to make it to eighty and even then, you couldn’t call it living. Now you live to be what? Two hundred, two hundred fifty?”
Olga waved her hand.
“Just weird. If you told someone from my time, we’d have people living in the Andromeda galaxy in a thousand years they’d ask you when your book is coming out. Looking out the window of Pluto station and seeing a whole other planet? Nearly broke my mind. Now I’ve seen whole other star systems. A city full of dinosaur people and now I’m going to some dragon home world? Crazy.”
Allison glanced back.
“Well, it’s not my fault. I am fine. I’m a hero to them.”
“Well, Maria and Eyre did not agree. I don’t either after you told me the Silwrath stood by and watched you get attacked.”
Allison shrugged.
“After the ones I saw in their med-bay I have a feeling they won’t let me handle anything alone again. Apparently, I bit a few. The good news is I can drink Silwrath blood. Bad news is, they know it now.”
Olga chuckled. Bit spoke up.
“Allison, I am receiving a distress signal via the LSR hyperspace commlink you had installed for this trip. It is badly broken up, but I’ve managed to recover some of it, it appears to have been jammed and is at some distance. All I was able to make out was, a ship name, The Y’tyrk, and the words: attack, pirates, help.”
Allison frowned.
“Why is it I cannot have a single, easy trip somewhere?”
Olga spoke up.
“Ignore it, let LSR forces handle it.”
Allison motioned at the display that showed their progress.
“We’re near the edge of their space, I doubt they have anything that can respond in time. I don’t even know if we can get there in time. Its fifty light years away.”
She tapped her fingers on the control surface, she was seriously pondering not getting involved, she lacked a full weapons loadout, but she still had armed drones and her fixed weapons. Not that anything was truly fixed in the fighter, but the LSR didn’t know that. She hit her head against the back of her seat and brought up the control interface for the wormhole projector.
“Bit, power up the antimatter reactor.”
Bit showed an affirmation of Allison’s order on the holo-HUD but spoke up.
“Allison, you are aware that wormhole jumps to non-beacon locations are hazardous, and strictly against the rules laid out by the president? Also, we only have minimal armaments.”
Allison sighed while tapping in the coordinates from the message.
“Yes, I know, and if we sent out the call, we’d want someone to help. Besides, that’s blind wormhole jumps, we have coordinates, they’re near enough we have star charts from the LSR that they provided for the trip. Also, her exact words were only do it in a life-or-death situation.”
Olga leaned forward.
“Umm, don’t I get a say in this?”
Both Bit and Allison answered her with a firm: ‘no”. Bit spoke.
“Yes, our life-or-death.”
Allison continued plotting in the four-dimensional calculations she’d learned as part of her training for piloting capital ships equipped with wormhole projectors. She spoke as she tapped the holo-graphic controls.
“We cannot ignore a distress signal; It would be wrong. And these stupid calculations are so complicated, you know this should count as my math exam. Bleh.”
Bit sighed audibly.
“You seem set on this course of action. I have injected antimatter into the omega core it is cycling up. I’ve also started procedures for emergency deceleration. As soon as power is available, I will transfer it to the wormhole projector’s capacitors.”
Olga leaned forward.
“Maybe we should let the artificial intelligence do the wormhole math huh?”
Bit responded while Allison focused on her calculations.
“I cannot. I do not have the requisite skill set. I have not learned wormhole math, Allison has, it is required for qualification to pilot capital ships. While beacons are usually used blind navigation via wormhole is an emergency tactic. I assure you; It is better she does it. I am not fluent in four-dimensional navigation.”
Olga tapped her fingers on her legs.
“So, what is the worst thing that could happen?”
Allison spoke up.
“We could end up anywhere in time-space, or spaghettified at the edge of an accidental singularity. Or wormhole into a planet or star. Now please be quiet, this math is hard.”
The fighter caused a pulse of energy as it was ejected from the FTL tunnel. Bit had finished her emergency stop procedures. Thankfully there was no bug-infested rogue planet in the vicinity this time. The gauges for the omega antimatter generator were showing full and green across the board. The capacitor gauge for the wormhole projector turned green. Allison crossed her fingers.
“Here goes nothing.”
Olga groaned.
“I didn’t sign up for wormhole travel.”
Allison glanced back, her crossed fingers hovering over the wormhole launch button.
“How do you think you got to the Andromeda Galaxy?”
“I didn’t have to watch it happen.”
Allison hit the button. Four pylons extended out of the fighter from between the air intakes/particle beam cannon housing. Two at the rear, two in the front. They lit up with silver lightning and a pulse flowed over the fighter. A ball of silver energy launched forward. The trio watched as a hole in space-time was ripped open and a silver vortex formed. The space at the center would fit the fighter and not much else. Allison tapped the controls and started through the rift she’d created. As she piloted, she spoke.
“Bit, retract the pylons, use the extra power from the antimatter core to overload weapons systems capacitors and enhance shields. Activate stealth systems, but not the cloak, I want shields. We have no idea what we’re going to fly into here.”
Olga was white knuckling the back of the pilot’s seat as they transitioned from their side of the wormhole to the other.