Maria had cancelled all of her meetings. She did what she had never done before in her entire tenure as President of the System’s Alliance she took a day off. As a vampire she was never sick, she never slept and she never got tired. After speaking to the techs her Pluto Station commander had come up with, she realized they were utterly incapable of understanding what she was asking them to do. For the first time in over twenty years, she would need to stand at the console for Project Stargate and bring a family member home.
Over a hundred trillion credits had been poured into the money pit, as Amee had once called it. For Maria and Eyre, it could have cost ten times that and they would have still funded it. It was the one, last, best hope for the return of Enid. While Enid had managed to find her way home without it, it had been instrumental in their efforts in preventing the complete collapse of reality. It was the precursor to the wormholes that had built their budding intergalactic empire.
Unfortunately for all the things it was, it wasn’t precise. She could bring Allison back seconds after she went back in time, it could be thousands of years, or theoretically, though it had never happened, bring her back before she left which would really confuse her young niece because she’d be sitting in a sealed secure bay on Pluto Station with no means of escape. Though if that had happened the techs would have seen the fighter already.
It had other issues as well. The most challenging of them was that it was a prototype that was prone to capacitor destroying power surges. Once they had stabilized reality it served no purpose. While it could open a temporal wormhole to anywhere in time. It was actually literally anywhere in time or space. So, she could send someone through, and they could end up fourteen billion light years away at the edge of the visible universe two minutes before they left, or they could end up on Earth and have to fight off dinosaurs which is what happened the one time Hazel and Enid had used it for the express purpose of time travel, though Hazel had jumped through without permission. During that brief test to see if the temporal beacons that Maria had developed would let her target Enid in the past, for Maria fifteen minutes passed while she recycled the capacitors for another wormhole, for Enid and Hazel, almost twenty years passed. The beacons had worked but she had never quite forgiven herself for getting her niece lost hundreds of millions of years in the past for so long.
Maria was still paying for that mistake with the maintenance of Hazel’s pet velociraptor Daisy, BMC had kindly, in reparation for the fact they had stolen Enid’s DNA and cloned her, offered to keep the Earth’s only living dinosaur in stasis indefinitely and retrieve samples to clone an imprint if the raptor were to die in some catastrophic stasis incident. All for the low, low cost of ten million credits a year, with their generous discount.
Maria had commandeered an Athena class fighter for the trip to Pluto. Of course, it wasn’t much of a trip as a vampire, it would have taken seconds if it was just about the FTL transit. Her tinkering with the FTL tech she’d developed had pushed the boundaries and ten thousand light years an hour was easily obtainable, provided nothing living was on the ship in question.
Maria brought the fighter in for a gentle landing in a disused hanger bay. It had been assigned to Enid and Hazel for their fighters Apollo and Athena. The latter of which was the prototype for their newest class of starfighter, thus in honor of the AI’s contributions, Maria had named the class of starfighter after her. The new fighters had been in the making for twenty years. The tech had been ready two decades before but tooling and manufacturing deficiencies that caused flaws in the various versions produced had delayed full production and deployment. Even now they were having to refit older models. The Athena starfighter was a complex piece of engineering. The challenges it brought reminded Maria about the F-35 Lightning. A fighter Enid had despised.
Her sister was a fan of the F-18 Super hornet, though she had said if her F-22N refit had lasted for more than one dogfight she would have probably liked that one better. In fact, it was Enid that inspired her to create Apollo and Athena. Her sister’s love for flying jets was infectious. Maria still did not see the appeal, but the smile on Enid’s face when she’d seen Apollo for the first time had been priceless. Maria had been saving the starfighter for Enid’s three thousandth birthday, but Eyre and Hazel being kidnapped by BMC had pushed her schedule forward by several months.
Maria missed Apollo. Athena not so much, Amee was a quirky youth and sexually frustrated, and Athena had been Maria’s first attempt at utilizing a Synthlin AI. She was the resurrected AI that BMC had pulled from Amee and that had subsequently gotten out onto the internet, thus when the triumvirate had released the self-replicating nanites to stave off the impending attack by the Silwrath in the original timeline she had died. It had taken Maria centuries to reconstitute what she could. It had been hopelessly infected with stray code and data from all the systems it had touched, and her time with a very sexually frustrated teenage Amee. Athena ended up being a bit much. Maria learned her lesson and instead of trying to save the AI’s memories with the copy she made, she just kept the neural net, an infant brain. So, she ended up with Apollo.
Apollo was perfect. He was going to be the template for the Athena class fighter AIs, ship AIs, he was going to usher in a new class of ship with an AI co-first officer. A partner for each Special Forces Soldier. That all changed when Maria found out the horrific truth behind the Synthlin AIs. They were actually Synthlin that had been turned into AIs.
If they had all been volunteers, if they had freely chosen to be an AI and they were allowed to retain their self-identity, maybe, just maybe she could justify it to herself. That wasn’t the case. On the abandoned base, and through admission of Amee’s creator, they had discovered that the AI’s were initially soldiers who volunteered to serve as AIs. Later, it was criminals, even later still it was citizens who were taken against their will as the war with the Silwrath dragged on. The logic of their government was if they did not win the war, no Synthlin would survive anyway. To Maria who had for the entirety of her life seen ghosts, the souls of living creatures who passed on, that was what these AI’s were. Ghosts of living creatures. She had watched monsters, for that was what she believed they were bind human souls, ghosts, to objects to use them up. She’d watched the Black Son turn them into weapons, twisting them so all that remained was their screams. In her eyes, those were the same as the AI’s the Synthlin created. Horrific abominations. Shackled to serve for eternity.
She had discussed Bit’s wishes at length before allowing the AI to work with Allison. Bit was for the lack of a better term, an old soul. She was a relic from a war that never happened in this new timeline. She waited for a hundred thousand years for a pilot that would never return. Maria, with the help of her Synthlin ally from the original timeline, had been able to identify Bit’s original body. A Synthlin woman who had lost her mate and children in a Silwrath attack. Maria had revealed all of the records to the ancient AI. She gave the AI a choice, she could delete her, put her in a Synthlin computer core in cold storage or provide her with a robot body and an active role in the System’s Alliance as a full citizen. Bit chose the last option but wished to stay in her starfighter body. She reasoned that she had never had a bipedal body even as a Synthlin so one body was as good as another and as a starfighter she could feel useful.
Maria had given the AI the choice of any starfighter pilot in the Alliance as a partner. Bit had tried several different partners, but the partnership never worked for either the AI or the pilot. Then one day, Bit saw this sixteen-year-old piloting prodigy appear on the pilot list and demanded Maria assign her to the child. Whether it was maternal instinct, or Allison’s latent Synthlin bio-mechanical genes Maria would never know until Bit shared that information. The pair had been unstoppable in training. Even now, there seemed there was nothing they couldn’t do. Though Maria thought, perhaps the one thing they can’t do is avoid trouble. Maria was comforted to know that in whatever past hell Allison found herself in the AI would be there to guide and support her. How wrong she was on that last part…
Maria was like a bound ghost herself these days. Gone were the days when her time and schedule were her own. Now it was briefings, meetings and corporate whining. She felt it was penance for all the wrongs she had caused. Every day she added more blood to her ledger, though when you were instrumental in architecting an extinction level event ordering the death of a terrorist who was about to kill a lot of innocent people didn’t even cause her pause. The betrayal of her sister after Amee’s death, that still haunted her.
Enid had for two thousand years made it her life’s work to punish those that she believed had contributed to Maria’s death. They had sworn a blood oath to the Gods that they would never betray one another. She betrayed that oath by shutting Apollo’s systems down remotely, then drugging her sister who had been pregnant with twins at the time. Risking the children’s lives. She had justified her actions, after all Enid was, if nothing else, dogged and efficient at avenging her loved ones. She had put a price on Enid’s head, at the time the highest bounty ever offered. She was thankful no one had managed to collect it before she was able to disable Enid. Maria had been made president in Enid’s absence. She was still trying to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Christian terrorists things had seemed to be going well. Enid going on a rampage with a fighter armed with Antimatter weapons, likely starting with the dome that was the first of the Christian United States, would have been catastrophic to those negotiations.
Maria had made an error in judgment. She had acquiesced to their demands for independence. They pressed for more territory; She had ceded that to them. They had pressed for recognition of Christianity as the one and only true religion of the System’s Alliance, that humans were the only true creations of God, that all non-human sentients be cleansed to make the Universe pure for humanity or they would declare a holy war, a crusade. Maria was Catholic, she had been since she had woken up from her long sleep. She had no problem with Christians, but she refused to dictate what people should believe, nor was she willing to pledge to cleanse the universe of non-humans.
So, the CUS declared a holy war. It lasted for eight years. Open conflicts were limited and with Olga’s invaluable assistance Maria had managed to defeat most of their largest terror attacks. Most, the Mar’s Worker’s dome, which housed the largest cathedral dedicated to the Dark Mother had been her one tragic failure. In an act she still wasn’t right with, she finally gave into the Board and Vampire Councils demand to put an end to the conflict. Take back all the territory they had granted the CUS. She issued one final terse warning: Surrender all of your ships, all of your weapons, all of your territories and all active combatants or we will end this. The answer had come from the one they called the Prophet, their theocratic leader, burn in hellfire demon.
So, Maria issued her declaration that any colony, dome, ship, or corporation that aided, abetted, housed, or in any way assisted the CUS would be destroyed with no further warnings. Then she had ordered Amani Wanjala to retaliate directly. For the deaths of five hundred thousand innocent workers and priestesses, she had ordered the deaths of a hundred and fifty thousand most of whom were just innocent people.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
For the first fifteen years of her presidency, she had been considered moderate, forgiving even, possibly a pushover. So, when she first issued her declaration, it was laughed at. When she had all channels broadcast the coordinated obliteration of the CUS fleets and their colonies and their dome on Tritan it had a sobering effect. Crusader Tech shareholders, who behind the scenes had backed the corporation in supplying CUS in contravention of System’s Alliance embargos, threw the entire executive team out into the streets and made sure the System’s Alliance had enough evidence to execute the lot of them. Maria had authorized that execution.
It was the first in a purge that would rock the stock market, in fact, four years later it was still having an impact on the economy. No one wanted to touch anything to do with the CUS. There were holdouts, like Tyler’s father. In fact, even now being Christian was grounds for being fired from most corporations. The taint and Maria’s apparent ruthlessness concerning the religion had made it a poisoned well. She had in effect ruined her grand-nephew’s reputation.
Had she just let Enid do what Enid did she would have saved so many lives. Enid had told her when she left that last time that they were no longer sisters. That Maria had chosen power over family. That because she betrayed Enid, that the suffering would be magnified ten times. She had not listened to her. Enid had a temper, she always calmed down eventually. Had she only listened to Enid, her sister who could see the future, how many lives would have been saved.
Enid had told her in 2026 when they had an argument about something that was meaningless, even at the time, that she was stubborn and pig-headed. That she always had to be right. That her self-righteousness had killed Lucius, Maria’s biological brother, and Enid’s husband. Had killed their mother and had killed their father. Her sister, as always, had been right. At the time Maria didn’t really accept her sister’s judgment. In fact, it was not until she had seen Mar’s dome collapse that she realized Enid had been right. Maria was too self-righteous for her own good. It was her sister’s advice that day, after their argument that Maria had followed when she initiated her systematic and brutal purge of the CUS from the System’s Alliance. Enid had told her: Get the fuck off your high horse, fuck your morals, get down in the mud with the rest of us and do what fucking needs doing. Enid had a way with words…
Maria was in fact a ghost as she moved through Pluto station. One of the many powers she’d developed through her vampiric blood over the centuries had been the ability to make her presence unseen. Though she could be seen perfectly well, anyone looking at a recording of her, or just seeing her, ignored her. As if she didn’t exist. Their minds wouldn’t allow them to perceive her. Of course, older vampires, of which there were precious few, could perceive her, but she wasn’t worried about them. She was only concerned with being able to retrieve her niece unobserved and unhindered by the presidential guard.
Maria reached her first stop, deck two. Deck two of Pluto station was filled to the brim with massive antimatter reactors attached to a massive capacitor bank. Her first attempt at creating a stable wormhole had been inefficient. A challenge she overcame by dumping more power at it. Deck two could power every ship in the System’s Alliance fleet, every colony, every dome, and then ten times that many. Officially it was for testing antimatter generation and capacitor charging efficiency. Each antimatter generator was twenty-feet tall, and the capacitors were another twenty feet on top of that.
One by one she injected antimatter and flipped the switch to engage matter-antimatter annihilation that would power the capacitors that in an hour would power Project Stargate. These were first generation generators mostly manual in their operation. These were the ones she designed, the rest, save the omega class, Aurelius had fiddled with making them smaller, and more prone to bugs. Mostly, cheaper.
Instead of bothering to leave the generator room and take an elevator to deck one she climbed one of the many service ladders and used the service tunnels above the capacitors to reach the main control room. She pulled the plastic sheets off of the various archaic consoles. Project Stargate was nearly two hundred years old at this point and it was a prototype. Thankfully Maria only overcomplicated solutions to make them more resilient. So, she knew when she started powering the control systems on, they would still work even decades later.
The dark control room slowly lit up with lights and monitors. There were no holograms here. It was physical keyboards, mice and LCD displays. She walked past the four consoles and typed in the cryptic text into the command line that would launch a full diagnostic for each individual system.
The main monitor flickered to life. It was simple and blocky, but it told her everything she needed to know. It had green squares representing online antimatter generators, over half were fully engaged, the rest were nearing positive power production. There were buckets for each capacitor they were slowly filling with green. Her diagnostic request was now populating a long check list on the screen and one by one different systems were checked off green.
She saw a conference call coming in she frowned and stood up straight and hovered her finger over it ready to ignore it, but her sense of duty won out and she tapped the incoming call. Her chief of staff, her personal bodyguard and the commander of internal security were all on the screen. Monica looked like she was going to explode with anxiety.
“What is it?”
Monica seemed flustered.
“Ma’am, where are you, you’re off the grid, the council and board are asking questions.”
Maria didn’t look at Monica and kept her eyes focused on the Project Stargate main display.
“I told you; I am taking a sick day.”
Monica stammered a few times.
“You’re a vampire you’re dead, you don’t get sick.”
Maria noticed one of the diagnostics had failed so she leaned down and typed in another cryptic line of code and pressed the return key.
“I know, it is very strange.”
Her bodyguard tugged his collar.
“Ma’am, legally speaking you need to be under guard at all times and uh, we do not have eyes on you currently, could you please confirm your location so we can ensure your safety.”
Maria shook her head.
“I am unable to do that. I am in a secure location with limited access. It requires presidential sign off, and unfortunately none of the security teams are authorized. I can only say it is a highly secure System’s Alliance facility. Where I am receiving treatment for my very minor illness. Monica, this was not an emergency. Tell the directors to do their jobs, it’s what we pay them for.”
She swept the call away and hung up to focus on correcting the issues brought up by the diagnostics. All were software glitches she had seen before, so she just initiated the workarounds. She received another incoming call; This one was from Apiyo. She had no idea what to tell her and if Apiyo called her, that meant she called Eyre first and didn’t get an answer. So, Eyre would be calling soon. She answered the call while typing. Apiyo looked like she was caught between panic and righteous motherly anger.
“Where is my daughter?”
Maria decided to stall.
“I am sorry, Apiyo, all I can officially say is, she is in conference with the League High Council.”
“It has been over fourteen hours since she called me and told me she might be late. When are you going to send the military in to rescue her, they have obviously kept her hostage.”
Maria pressed enter again.
“She is not being held hostage by the League. I can assure you. She is safe and will be home before you know it.”
Apiyo wasn’t buying it.
“Then why is her Starfighter missing?”
Maria typed another line of code while she spoke.
“The refit to replace the airframe did not go as well as expected. There were issues that needed to be addressed before she could use it safely.”
Apiyo looked extremely frustrated now.
“None of the tracking on her devices is working. Tell me where my daughter is!”
Maria frowned. She wished she knew where and when Allison was herself, but she had no information beyond somewhere. Because if she’d hit the edge of that wormhole, she was everywhere all at once and not in a good way.
“Apiyo, all of it is highly classified. I cannot even discuss it with my presidential staff. Even knowing about what this involves would get you executed. Trust that I care about Allison as much as you do. My sister entrusted the both of us with her safety and if she was in any danger I would be doing everything in my substantial power as President of the System’s Alliance to rescue her. Even accessing technology that was deemed too dangerous for anyone to use, or even know of its existence.”
Apiyo blinked and stammered.
“Apiyo, Allison is safe. You will see her in a couple of hours. But if that was not the case, if she were trapped somewhere, I would do the same thing for her that I did for her mother. I never stopped searching for a way to bring back my sister, I never gave up once in a thousand years. I would do no less for your daughter. So please Apiyo, focus on the two children you do have with you, let me focus on Allison for now.”
Apiyo narrowed her eyes.
“Do you promise me, she will be in my arms in two hours?”
Maria wanted to make that promise.
“Give or take a few minutes. Please refer the school to my office if there is any trouble getting them to sign off on her absence.”
Apiyo seemed to decide this was a good time to address another burning concern.
“On the topic of school. Do you know she got a C in human history? You need to do something about all this military training she’s being pushed into it is impacting her marks.”
Maria almost laughed. There was a good chance Allison was getting a lesson in human history right at this moment. Though that actually bothered her because Allison had been writing an essay on a comparison between Roman and Egyptian civilizations and how they developed. She and Isis had both given interviews about them so they could be cited as sources. Maria had read the essay over, it was definitely at least a B, if she was being generous which she had encouraged teachers to be, an A. She knew these things because she actually wrote the education syllabus and marking guidelines for the System’s Alliance Department of Education.
“Apiyo, do you know what she got for a mark on her essay for that class by chance?”
Maria started typing in the code to accommodate the new temporal beacons she’d developed and implanted in Allison’s armor, holo-phone and starfighter. She had learned that lesson when Hazel smashed the handheld ones Maria had given Enid so Enid couldn’t send her back. Where children were concerned, even teenagers, it was better to just make them do something and apologize later than to depend on their common sense. Apiyo was searching through Allisons belongings and lifted the school tablet.
“C, wait, He said here that he would have given her an F because of her complete invention of facts, but he believed that just the writing alone was worth a C.”
Apiyo was looking furious.
“An F. How can she think she can just make things up and write an essay?”
Maria narrowed her eyes. Allison hadn’t said a word about the mark to anyone.
“That child is the most frustrating… Apiyo, she did not make anything up, she did research then interviewed Isis and I since we were actually alive at the time. If I was being strict, she would have gotten a B, but likely an A because we prefer teachers encourage students who show effort. Might I suggest that instead of worrying about Allison, you speak with the Headmistress of Allison’s school to discuss the matter of her history teacher’s inability to comprehend the subject they are teaching. I proofread that essay for her. Apparently, the person who wrote the guidelines for grading does not understand her own system.”
Maria was frustrated. She’d designed the whole system to reduce teacher favoritism. Yet somehow, they still found a way, even just outright ignoring guidelines. Everything was showing green and tracking on Allison’s three beacons showed up. They were separated. She would have to wait until they aligned so Allison did not inadvertently leave any advanced technology in the past. They were at the same time and near each other but not on top of each other. She wished it would tell her when Allison was all she could do now was wait.
“Apiyo, I need to go, I am sorry. Please, be patient, the council will be done with her soon.”
Maria added, I hope... to her statement. Apiyo was looking at the tablet with fury in her eyes. Maria did not envy that headmistress, but she was also pretty sure if the headmistress was doing her job, it wouldn’t have had to happen in the first place. Apiyo spoke.
“Thank you, Maria.”