While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 25

  The team watched from the command room as their small ship approached the much larger station.  It was the same opaque black as every other kind of Bobbin ship seemed to be.  It’s shape was distinct from anything else they’d seen before, but as an octahedron double pyramid it fit with the design scheme they’d observed so far.  As they approached the facility to dock with it for a dock, Jaren stood at the large forward window and craned his neck upwards to see what he could of the station as Bill informed them that the entire station was constructed of the same shifting ‘shadow matter’ as their own vessel.

  “They really can’t detect that we’re here?” Jaren asked, more out of concern than disbelief.

  “No.  Even at this range the material of the hull is impervious to external scans friendly or otherwise.  In this situation the station relies on other vessels’ internal sensors.  We are transmitting false readings of an empty ship along this system.”

  “That bridge go both ways?”

  “Yes,” Bill said as he replaced the viewscreen’s now completely obstructed by the station with an enhanced internal layout of it.  There were purple triangles indicating the locations of enemy Bobbins, a single green square, and another single orange circle.

  “I count ten,” Kathryn said.

  “Agreed,” Bill affirmed, “but they’re not our biggest concern.”

  “What is?”

  “Tactical drones.  As soon as our incursion is detected we can expect swarms of them to be formed out of the hull’s shadow matter and attack us with weapons similar to the wands you were practicing with.  Wands can temporarily disable the matter, but more can always be made, much like the targets you practiced with.”

  “How do we avoid having to deal with that?”

  “That’s the other problem,” Bill said with purple-y mauve.  “All of the hostiles are permanently Linked.  As soon as any of them detect us, the whole ship will immediately be on high alert.  Even if we managed to incapacitate them before they had any conscious awareness of our presence, their sudden drop from The Link would alert the rest of the station that something was happening.”

  “Won’t those internal sensors detect our presence as soon as we step onto the station?” Jaren asked.

  “Ordinarily yes, which is why we’ll be wearing these.”  Bill reached into the shadow of the wall and withdrew small pendants with some sort of red ruby embedded in them and started passing them out to the boarding party.  Kathryn was pleased to discover that merely pressing it into her shirt kept it securely there.

  “Not really my colour,” Margaret remarked, but she was ignored as the rest of them pressed the gems to their chests.  

  “Ralph’s internal hardware has been programmed to generate the same field which these will,” Bill explained as he reached back into the wall for more devices and handed them out to the other Bobbins.  “These will make you invisible to the internal sensors of the station, but it offers no defence against being seen, by either hostiles or visual scanners which can be used if the system is alerted to a problem.  It is unlikely that your visual presence has already been catalogued as a threat.”

  “Think I’ve got all that,” Kathryn offered before looking back at the rest of her people who also nodded their understanding.

  “It’s a big station with only ten hostiles,” Bill reiterated.  “Having access to their internal scanners will allow us to avoid encountering them for some time, but avoiding detection is only one of our problems.”  He pointed a talon towards a purple triangle adjacent to the orange circle.  “This target is permanently stationed at the primary Link Hub access point which we need to reach.  We might try bubbling through the ship to the rear of the terminal and tapping into the station from behind the wall, but I suspect it would detect our activity on the screens it was monitoring.  I believe we will instead need to incapacitate him and access the console manually.  Were we to try to tap into the console from behind, there would also be the issue of needing to break the encryption, but if we take the target by surprise the console should already be unlocked.”

  “But you said that if we take it out that would automatically alert the ship,” Kathryn asked.

  “I did, yes,” Bill considered with some mauve.  “There is one other possibility, but it is risky.”

  “Well out with it then,” Margaret uttered in frustration over the cryptic non-suggestion.

  “It is theoretically possible that if we monitor the signals coming to and from that console for several minutes, we could sufficiently augment one of us to Link into their network and avert any alerts.  It comes with grave risk though.”

  “Go on,” Kathryn said.

  “For one, it might not work at all,” he explained.  “We might be visually detected before we could attempt it, or we could make the attempt and the simulation would be incomplete or take too long to establish and we would be detected either way.  Nothing like it has ever actually been attempted before.”

  “Can it work?” Jaren asked.

  Bill looked back at the large wall screen.  If he had a chin Kathryn could imagine him contemplatively stroking it.  “I believe it to be our best chance of success, I just believed you deserved to know the risks.”

  “Appreciated.  What else do we need to know?”

  While discussing the plan, Jaren had been establishing a bridge between his scroll and the enemy station through their ship.  He was following along for the most part, but more focused on looking up paths through the station and studying schematics on the tactical drones they were likely to encounter.

  “Prisoner…” he muttered quietly to himself as he looked over the schematics.  Kathryn wondered if he was referring to a Bobbin prisoner of interest Bill had noted on the diagrams.  Jaren zoomed the wall screen in on the green circle and it became two green circles each in adjacent rooms.  Kathryn couldn’t read the text identifying the icons, but recognized some of the schematics which came up in the data that scrolled across as the New Horizon’s computer core.

  Jaren turned and exclaimed: “She’s here!  That’s Maggie!  She’s the other green square there beside our core!”  He tapped at the controls on his scroll, and the wall screen switched to a live feed of the interior of the prisoner’s suite they’d rendered for her.

  There she was, lying on one of the beds made out of the same shadow matter material.  She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn when they’d captured her almost two weeks ago and clearly hadn’t had the opportunity to bathe.  She was unconscious and Kathryn could only hope she was only sleeping, but there she was, at least alive according to the readouts passing by the side of the screen.  She couldn’t understand the text, but the steady rhythm of two of the readings were unmistakably a heartbeat and breathing rate.

  “Oh my god…” Kathryn uttered, putting her mouth over her hand.  It really was her, and an unexpected opportunity.  They’d expected to just have to hope the Bobbins would honour their word and help them figure out where she was and how to rescue her after accessing their enemy’s link, but now they could do both in one shot.  It immeasurably complicated their current mission though, not just logistically, but now in their competing priorities.

  “That is… unfortunate,” Bill uttered with dismay in green and brown.

  Kathryn suppressed her anger at him saying so, but she understood what he meant, not that they were presented with this opportunity, but how it complicated their mission.  “Bill.”

  The alien sighed in purple and mauve.  “I understand your concern for your daughter Admiral, I really do, but the fate of my entire civilization hangs on the success of this mission as it.  I am bound to that being my primary concern.”

  “You get this through your weird alien insectoid brain there bucko,” Margaret said.  “We are not leaving without that little girl.  None of us are.”

  “I know,” Bill said with a purple-mauve intensity to his simulated voice.  “That, is why it is unfortunate.  This already near impossible mission just became an even greater challenge.”

  “Especially since our exit strategy included obliterating that station,” Margaret growled.  “Tell me you didn’t know.”

  “I assure you I did not.”  His mirror ball’s mauve and aquamarine spoke to his resignation to their new reality before he turned to his Bobbin shipmates and they conferred in their nauseating sub audible tones.

  He turned back to the human team.  “Given this new information I would not expect you to feel any differently,” Bill acknowledged, “but we need a new plan now.  If our accessing the central core is detected, it will be difficult enough merely escaping with our lives, let alone your daughter’s.”

  “We should prioritize the rescue,” Jaren instinctively suggested, “figure out some other way to infiltrate the enemy Link?”

  “We cannot deprioritize our mission any more than you can yours,” Bill firmly stated.

  “I have an idea,” Ralph said.  Everyone in the room looked at him, seeming to have forgotten he was even there.

  “Go on,” Bill encouraged him.

  “Your best option was to transfer the active link of the enemy at the computer core to one of your compatriots.”

  “Yes.”

  “This presents two problems.  First, the friendly Bobbin unavoidably has its own mind and it would be extremely challenging to fool the local Link in this way.  Two, to make your escape this link would need to be severed, leading to immediate detection and the impossibility of a secondary rescue objective.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Jaren asked.

  “I believe I can more effectively serve as the simulated Link node.”

  Kathryn was immediately nauseated by the flurry of communications at the idea between Bill and the other Bobbins.

  “What would that mean for you?” Jaren asked, presumably more curious than concerned for him.

  “As an artificial intelligence I am designed to simulate a consciousness.  By losing my own identity I can instead simulate an alternate mind, such as the one connected to the Link.  As Bill suggested earlier, by recording the signals to and from a target Bobbin for several minutes I could then simulate the node activity of that particular individual.  For how long this deception would be unnoticed would depend on how much time of signal activity I am able to record in advance.”

  “And what happens to you?” Margaret asked, more noticeably concerned for his wellbeing than Jaren.

  “I, as a conscious identity, would cease to exist.”

  “We can’t do that.” Margaret stated unambiguously.

  Kathryn looked at the simulant with curiosity for a moment before turning to the robot to ask: “How do you feel about that prospect, Ralph?”

  “Unknown,” it answered.  “I was created for one purpose, and having failed that purpose, I fulfilled my secondary objective.  Since then I have existed without a purpose.  I have been entertained in accompanying you, but the prospect of continuing to exist indefinitely without purpose, or ceasing to for that matter… neither seem particularly impactful.”

  “But Ralph,” Margaret insisted, bordering on uncharacteristic pleading, “you’re alive.  You think, you feel, that’s something worth cherishing.  You have your own body now, you could be ageless, like… me.”

  And then Kathryn understood.  As much as Margaret teased and derided this poor robot, she felt a kinship with it.  She’d been the last of her kind for centuries, the sole surviving simulant living amongst a human civilization.  Sure she got along with humans most of the time, but she knew in her heart or wherever stood in for it as a simulant that she was not one of them, that she was forever and irredeemably separate from human beings.  Ralph was the first being she’d sensed any kind of kinship with in over five hundred years.  His being so unconcerned with ending his existence not only frightened her at the sudden sense of loneliness she realized she’d feel, but being so casually dismissive of his existence cast an equally dismissive light on her own and it profoundly disturbed her.

  “It’s not his fault,” Bill gently offered with brown, having concluded conferring with his teammates.  “We constructed his intelligence to be at peace with its own demise.  Not to seek it, but also to be undisturbed by it.  The very nature of their mission required their ending their own existence when it became necessary.  Without this trait their existence would only bring them pain.  It does not seek its own end,” he explained as he rested his spindly hand on his frame, “but it is pleased to find a meaningful purpose in it.  Perhaps that is why it has been so happy to follow you along since being relieved of its purpose, to find a way such as this to bring a meaningful resolution to its existence.”

  Margaret slinked back and folded her arms without another word, leaning against a wall with an expression of hurt and bitterness which Kathryn wasn’t sure she’d ever seen from her before.

  “Whatever else may be,” Bill offered, “he’s right.  His suggestion gives us the best option to achieve both of our objectives.”

  “I understand,” Margaret said, and while she might understood, Kathryn couldn’t believe she accepted it.

  

☼   ☼   ☼

   

  With that the mission was set.  They would advance to the central core and use Ralph to hijack the Link and gain access to the node.  They would then copy all of the contents of the Link since the war began (all data previous earlier than that would all be the same as their own), and then make for Maggie on their way back to the ship.  Despite the interior of the station being variable, there were permanent corridors between relevant sections of the ship for emergency access in the event of a failure in the shape shifting systems.  The first thing they would do after accessing the central core was sabotage the shift system so at the first sign of trouble they could deactivate it.  The effect wouldn’t last long, but as long as it did they would be safe from the formation of tactical drones.

  They all geared up in their own ways.  The Bobbins seemed to generally ready themselves in similar ways but Kathryn noticed distinctions between them.  They all wore a kind of metallic armor which seemed more ceremonial than functional given the power of the weapons they faced.  She hoped that if they really were somehow an effective defence against the wand weapons they would have shared them with the humans.  It covered enough of them that if they faced in the right direction, they would be fully protected from incoming fire both on their torso up to their eyes and down their front facing legs.

  They also appeared to have smeared some sort of paint across the front of their armor which seemed to Kathryn unmistakably some sort of war paint appropriate to their culture.  Hundreds of thousands of years of culture, thousands of light years away, and here she was with aliens smearing war paint across their face before going into battle.  She considered that she may have seriously underestimated their sense of honour and tradition, or perhaps just how peaceful a people they were truly inclined to ordinarily be.

  They also varied in how they were armed.  Bill and another Bobbin seemed armed only with a wand on either side of their lower section between their front and rear legs, while also carrying what she figured to be some sort of ceremonial dagger in a sheath mounted to the front of their lower section.  Another Bobbin carried four wands mounted on its armor as though it fancied itself some sort of living tank, while another merely held a single wand in its hand, but with a much more dangerous looking pair of swords mounted in a cross behind its back, extending down along its legs nearly to the ground.

  Kathryn had figured some time ago that her ability to be surprised had been exhausted completely, but seeing these otherworldly creatures ready themselves for battle in ways both as eerily familiar as alien surprised her still, and she could only watch them speechless.

  As for Jaren and herself, they both had only the two wands each they’d been provided with handing from their belt on either side of their waist.  Ralph clutched a single wand in one hand, but Margaret was in a state Kathryn had never seen her before.  Seemingly taking a note from their hosts, she had dirtied her hair with what exactly Kathryn couldn’t imagine, but she’d also smeared dark paint across her exposed skin like the Bobbins.  She always wore dark clothes accented with her favourite dark scarlet and the elements together left her looking just as otherworldly as the Bobbins.  In context of the dull black walls of the shuttle she appeared ghostly, noticeably darkened to the point that she could indeed be missed if not looking directly at her.  Ther clothing’s dark scarlet accents glinted in the light as she moved, highlighting the dark, grim expression of determination which Kathryn had never seen in her before.

  The simulant had two meter long thin curved shadow matter swords in a cross across on her back, and thinking at first that she had drawn inspiration from the similarly armed Bobbin, it struck her that it was equally plausible the Bobbin had been the one inspired by the simulant.

  And then it was time.