Oz looked to the tactical screen to see internal explosions in the previously damaged battlecruiser, she was finished. The gunnery crew had moved on to focus on the nearest ship’s engines. “Frost, I told you to cease fire as soon as you disabled the furthest ship.”
“Just about done, son. Just a few hundred rounds and we’ll finish off this target’s engines. She’ll get dragged into the nearest planetoid’s gravity and pulled out of the picture.”
Oz’s attention was drawn to a group of fourteen fighters who broke from the main group and began accelerating towards the enemy battlecruisers. He checked the details and was alarmed at who was leading the strike. “What’s Dent doing?”
“I’m calling him back now, Commander.” Chief Vercelli announced.
The fighters each fired a pair of nuclear missiles and veered away. “Just lending the gunnery deck a hand.” Dent announced as the group of fighters moved to rejoin the assembled ships.
“That never happens again, understand?” Oz told him.
“Aye, aye.”
The high speed projectiles finished closing the distance to the lead destroyer and with a flash of light, the damage was done.
“The gunnery deck’s rounds are striking,” Agameg announced. “Taxing their shields.”
Oz watched the tactical screen as several of the small nuclear missiles were destroyed by defensive fire and the grit of the nebula cloud. At long last there was a white flash thousands of kilometres away. “Three detonations out of twenty eight launches. Major damage to the lead battlecruiser,” Agameg reported. “Their shields were already quite depleted thanks to the gunnery deck. Chief Frost is resuming fire.”
“Looks like they’re still coming, but they’ll be sensor blind for at least a few seconds,” Agameg declared. “We bore the shockwave well, shields down to seventy three percent ship wide.”
“We’ve got this round, Commander,” Frost reported enthusiastically. “Sure we don’t want to give this a real go? We might just take ‘em all on.”
Oz looked to Agameg, who shook his head slowly. “We’re taking too much damage and the three most fit battlecruisers are moving away from each other.”
What Oz saw on his command screen verified it. The battlecruisers were just beginning to open fire as a group, and the only reason why they weren’t taking severe damage in the ship’s central sections was because he was sacrificing the rest. The damage monitoring system was already reporting impending hull breaches in several outer compartments. “Sorry Frost, I’m counting the seconds until your guns get shut down.”
“All done, just watch the fireworks,” Frost said before all his teams’ rounds finished striking.
The battlecruiser listed to one side, the energy emissions from her engines dropped off drastically, followed by the rest of the ship. “Good work. Now let’s hope their friends don’t take it personally.”
Oz returned his attention to his command holograms and watched as the last four, smaller captured raider ships from Ossimi Ring launched. Using the Triton as cover, several Uriel fighters opened large wormholes, and the captured raider ships, filled with evacuees, escaped into compressed space. The fighters were next, following the larger ships, and before he knew it, the Triton was left alone.
The enemy vessels began to intensify their fire, sending volleys of particle pulses and sweeping their shields with energy beams, trying to break through.
“All posts secure weapons. Jason, signal our surrender."
Chapter 11
Gloria woke with a start. The darkness of Eve’s sleeping quarters was near absolute, and she had no idea how a normal person might turn the lights on. “Lights on, please!” she rasped. Her throat was dry, and as she rolled out of bed she caught sight of the adjacent bathroom. The soft, smooth covers, lavish furniture, spacious quarters, were all from the dream she’d been living for what felt like an eternity. “Oh God, it’s all real. That crazy bitch has been living in my body.”
She made it to the sink and found it already filling with warm water. Gloria splashed her face and looked in the mirror. She looked as horrified as she felt. Nothing seemed right, as though the world was somehow partially artificial, as though she wasn’t completely there.
A pressure built in the back of her mind and she watched in the mirror as her lips quivered, her eyes widened, and warm water was replaced with salty tears. Panic was turning to despair and she shouted; “What have they done to me? How do I stop her from coming back?”
The pressure built in throbbing waves, as though there was something in her head begging to be free. “What is it? What’s wrong with me?” It was an invasion, a foreign thing that had been walking around, living a life that wasn’t hers. The throbbing beat against the interior of her skull like a cacophony of percussionists, striking harder, faster.
The lights flickered, the water began to overflow in the basin, and a new wave of panic rose, driving her into a mad frenzy. “No, you’re not coming back. Not this time, bitch!” she raved, smashing her head into the reflective wall above the sink.
The first blow was more painful than she expected, but for an instant the pressure abated, the mad chorus disrupting Gloria’s being was nearly silent. Again she drove her head into the mirrored bulkhead. “I’ll kill you!” She could feel something behind her eyes, trying to force its way to the surface, watching. “You’re dead, you bitch!” Again she bashed her forehead against the wall, and the face in the mirror regarded her with a twisted grimace, blood, seeping from its forehead. With a desperate wail she drove her head against the unyielding bulkhead, pushing off the deck this time.
Eve rested on the wet bathroom floor, staring up at the ceiling. The sound of water dripping from the edge of the sink was like a tiny waterfall, something she’d never seen before. The framework augmentations built into her human body had repaired the physical damage that had been done. That didn’t put an end to Eve’s numb, confused state, however.
She was conscious for the whole thing but could do nothing to stop what was going on. Gloria Parker; that was the name of the woman who had original claim to the body she lived in. There was no evidence of her. Not in the digital backup systems inside the framework, not in the exterior Regent Galactic network, nowhere. They had made sure, there were no backups after what they called the Eve Brain, her mind, was placed inside the host. Gloria was gone.
There was no explaining what had just happened. It would have been possible if there was a hidden backup memory node inside the body she was using, but no such thing existed. After Jacob Valance, there was no framework or augmented human built with such a thing in place. That kind of system allowed a personality to entrench itself inside a host, and there was no reason to provide that option for any existing host.
She stood up slowly and forced the medical systems in the bathroom to perform a full series of scans. Eve read the raw data as it came in and saw no evidence of any hidden backups. Her mind sought solace in the sprawling digital world that stretched across the Regent Galactic Fleet, Pandem itself and beyond through hypertransmitters.
She ordered the tap to stop pouring; the floor drank the excess fluid and directed it to a recycling line, and washed the caked blood from her face and hair. All the while, she was watching people going about their business on the planet from observation satellites, crewmembers keeping watch in the halls, and software maintaining systems that did everything from manage the constant flow of operational data to keeping the fleet in orbit.
Balancing the perception of the physical world with that of the digital had come quickly to her, and she could sense that, without a limiter chip, it would be possible for other frameworks to do the same. Thoughts of those limiter chips, absent in many early frameworks, partially occupied her mind as she made her way to bed. The frameworks in service were stupid, basic, without creativity or personality. Basic programming kept them from tripping over each other, made them effective soldiers, guardians, basic technicians and servants, but they were little more than speaking animals. The combination of the memory programming and waking protocol along with a limiter chip made greater thought, improvisation and the construction of a personality possible. The new frameworks would be better than the old, and more importantly, they’d be better than any human. Unlike a human, their personalities formed around a purpose, and a modern, full featured framework like Baudric wouldn’t feel right unless he was working towards his purpose, following some order or greater directive. Much like Jacob Valance before the memories of Jonas Valent ruined the perfect balance Vindyne and Doctor Marcelles had created. If he had a limiter chip, it would have been different. He wouldn’t have been able to connect to the secret memory backup, and it would have remained dormant forever.