While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 26
All seemed quiet when they drew down the solidity of the barrier between their ship and the corridor leading onto the station. Like in other Bobbin facilities, the walls were a dull black colour lit by a uniformly bright ceiling. It was bright enough to see well enough, but still dim enough to be eerie, and the combination of low light and quiet filled Kathryn’s primordial brain with a sense of eeriness.
They boarded the enemy vessel and cautiously made their way through the ship, alternating personnel. Bill went first followed by Kathryn, then another Bobbin, then Jaren and Ralph with a Bobbin between them, with Margaret taking up the rear behind another Bobbin as she’d insisted.
Their signal modulators seemed to be working given that they didn’t seem to have triggered any intruder alarms or defensive measures, meaning they should remain undetected until an enemy Bobbins spotted them visually. Kathryn hunkered down when Bill raised a talon to stop them and indicated that an enemy Bobbin was nearby. They held position until he signaled to them that they were clear to continue.
When they arrived at the central computer core area, they knelt down and waited. Staying still in this one place was one of the most dangerous part of their plan. If an enemy Bobbin happened by, they would see him coming on their scanners ahead of time but it would be tricky moving everyone out of its way without either it or the one stationed at the core noticing them. No such enemy Bobbin happened by. Luck was on their side so far.
For about five minutes Bill held his scanner up, carefully recording all the signals being transmitted between the Bobbin in question and the computer core. At this point he passed the device he’d been using back to Kathryn, who handed it off behind her in a chain until it reached Ralph. He put a metallic hand over the device and closed the cartoonish simulation of eyes he had on his head as he interfaced with it. A few minutes later the projected eyes opened again, and he informed them all that he was ready.
They all knew there was no way to know how long the effet would last if it worked at all, and that their lives were about to get at least very interesting and possibly very brief. When Bill nodded somberly at Bill, it was time. The projection of eyes on his head narrowed to simulate concentration, and then sharply opened again before he gave a nod indicating that it was working, successfully taking the place of the Bobbin in question in the local Link network seemingly without notice.
With a bony taloned finger Bill pointed towards the Bobbin between Jaren and ahead of Ralph in their formation, the one who had seen fit to strap three large black bladed swords to his back which were almost comically oversized for his body. It came forward, both impressing and unnerving Kathryn with the absence of sound it made as it drew out a sword in each hand and passed by her. She’d had comprehensive tactical training, but she’d never witnessed a human move that silently. In her experience even the quietest people there was always some slight sound which was easily overlooked if not listening for it, but detectable nonetheless in otherwise silent surroundings. She heard nothing of this Bobbin no matter how attentively she listened for any sounds from it.
The combat Bobbin advanced out of sight around a corner, leaving them in tense silene for what felt like an eternity but in reality couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes. It finally emerged from around the corridor corner again and signaled the all clear with a beckoning wave forward with a sword. Kathryn was stunned when she rounded the corner and saw a decapitated bobbin in a still expanding pool of red blood, her surprise soon shifting to curiosity at how exactly the same it looked as human blood. She hadn’t had any particular expectations to the contrary, it had just never occurred to her to speculate about it. It left her feeling less removed from the aliens, feeling them a little less alien than they had a minute earlier.
She looked over the body for some more moments as Bill and a different Bobbin from the sword wielder who now stood watch at the corridor intersection, excitedly interfaced with the computer terminal. It bothered her a little how utterly unphased they seemed by the decapitated they’d stepped over to access the terminal and the pool of blood they stood in while they worked at it. Yes they were enemies, yes they were engaged in a brutal total civil war, but it was still a fellow member of their species. Necessary as killing may be sometimes, anyone’s violent unnatural death was always a tragedy of some degree, worthy she felt, of noting at least.
The head laid less than a meter away from it’s former body. As she knelt down, careful to not touch anything other than the underside of her boot to the thickening blood, she inspected the body and found two massive gashes across the torso as well. It appeared the assailant had slashed with all three swords at once and opened it up in a gruesome way, leaving Kathryn to see more of their anatomy than she cared to in that moment.
Though a trained military officer, Kathryn had never fought a war. She’d never seen a violent death in person and it was affecting her more than she’d expected. She didn’t know if it was affecting her more or less to see it happen to an alien, if it would it have bothered her more to have seen the head of one of her own so casually cast aside or to know that alien life forms millions of years more advanced than humans still had it in them to be so casually violent when things got bad enough. She didn’t know.
Bill and his comrade finished working at the computer terminal. They had successfully downloaded all of the enemy Bobbin’s telemetry and were ready to leave, it was time to leave Ralph here and go after Maggie. Kathryn watched as Margaret reached up and gingerly put her hand on the side of his screen head. She didn’t say goodbye, she just held her hand there looking at him for a moment before walking away and leading the rest of them with a bitter scowl on her face. Kathryn didn’t understand how her feelings about him were changing from the mocking dismissiveness she’d originally regarded him with, but noted it as something to speculate about later.
There was no permanent corridor to Maggie’s suite as there had been to the computer core, so Bill accessed the ship’s internal matter manipulation system and a square section of wall in front of them recessed into a hallway and they started making their way through.
It took several minutes to reach the holding cells. One of the walls melted away and they found themselves in a room where they found Maggie asleep. Margaret and Jaren rushed over to her and did a hurried a rudimentary checking her over, ensuring at least that she was still breathing and that her heart was still beating. The data they’d gathered from the ship had told them as much, but their inability to wake her up deeply troubled them. Before long Bill urgently insisted that they could more thoroughly examine back on their ship but that right now they just had to get away. They had been so lucky so far and they just needed to get away now while they still could.
They understood, and Margaret took Jaren’s wand from him as he picked her up and carried her in his arms. Bill put a sensor dampener on her before leaving a different piece of hardware on the bed which would mimic her life signs to the ship’s internal sensors, which as he’d informed them during the mission briefing, mimicked her life signs to the internal sensors, but the video feed would still reveal her absence when someone checked it. As they stepped back into the corridor they’d created to reach the room, it closed off into a square room and they waited as they moved through the ship as Kathryn felt the oddly familiar feeling in such an alien situation of idly waiting for an elevator to reach her stop.
She looked down at her poor daughter’s face. It was dirty and clearly unwashed since they’d been separated. She gingerly tried to wipe some of the grime away with her thumb but met with little success other than a somewhat less dirty spot and a now dirty thumb. Her hair was matted in clumps, but looking her over Kathryn could detect no hint of blood on her or any kind of bruises or abrasions or any other kind of physical mistreatment, and she was able to take some comfort in that at least. Had she been captured by human bandits she’d be worried about sexual abuse, but it seemed safe to assume not with her having been captured by seemingly incompatibly aliens. There had been some discussion amongst the crew whether they’d met all males or all female Bobbins, or if they even had a sexually dimorphic species at all. Though the aliens didn’t wear any clothing given their fur, they sported no obvious sex organs and the humans so far had been too polite to ask about anything so personal to humans.
A wall of the room melted away into the corridor to which they’d entered the ship, and they hurried the short distance to the entrance to their ship. They piled into the control room, relieved and for Kathryn altogether fairly shocked that the mission had gone off so smoothly. Margaret drew a bed out of the wall and Jaren gently laid her down on it. One of the Bobbins who’d remained on the ship waiting for them began inspecting a screen which accompanied the bed where biometric readings were being displayed which were familiar in their content even if none of the language or icons meant anything to her. Kathryn wondered if the display was entirely for the benefit of the humans considering the data could have been streamed directly to the Bobbin via his link, but without an accompanying mirror ball she couldn’t ask it.
Kathryn spared a moment to look back at Margaret and assess how she was dealing with things, and she was immediately concerned for her. The simulant was shaking noticeably and stood just outside the still open doorway to the enemy ship with both matte black bladed swords drawn and angled away towards the floor in a ready stance as she scanned back and forth. She was something to see, for all appearances an old woman in her eighties brandishing otherworldly swords with youthful eyes crazed with bloodlust. She seemed nearly boiling over but Kathryn couldn’t figure why.
“I’m going back for him,” the simulated woman said in a gritty determined voice Kathryn had never heard from her before.
“What?” Kathryn asked in shock. “For who?”
“WHO!!?” Margaret turned and roared at her. “For RALPH!”
“What?” Kathryn balked. Why would she bother? They were so close to getting away cleanly. “But why? He’s just… just a-”
“Just a what Kathryn!?” she screamed at her, in an even greater height of rage that she’d never even seen glimpses of in her before. “A thing? Just a robot? Just a machine? Not even alive??”
And with that Kathryn understood all too painfully, and knew in that moment that she’d wounded their relationship in a way she could never fully repair even if she lived as long as Margaret. So consumed she’d been with her own flesh and blood, she’d failed to see that Ralph had become the closest Margaret had to the same, and that she was never going to allow them to abandon him here. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Bill becoming ever more agitated.
“Two hundred years they told me that my kind was less than yours,” Margaret turned and stood in the doorway like a wraith. “Not as important, not as valuable, two hundred years before I outlasted all of them and watched everything they valued turn to dust! He may have just been a robot before, but he’s more now, and I have to go back for him!”
Before Bill could solidify the portal between their ship and the enemy station she leapt through it and sprinted full speed down the corridor. Running after her to the doorway, Kathryn saw her turn a corner and smashed her hand so hard against the wall in frustrated anger at both Margaret and herself that she sprained her wrist, but was too upset to notice in the moment.
Because now she understood all too well. Yes Margaret was upset about the way her kind had been treated before the fall of Earth, and yes she had personally been a champion for simulant rights and their normalization as people in the before times. But she seemed to have made a kind of peace with that past and the centuries she’d spent looking after a small group of human survivors before she and Kathryn found each other and she learned that extrasolar colonies had survived and thrived.
She suddenly understood much better Kathryn’s unreserved assistance in the human’s renewed efforts at recreating the technology which created her in the first place. Kathryn had always foolishly mistook it simply as wishing to aid the humans redevelop to their former level however she could in gratitude for helping her find a fresh simulant body to migrate to after her own had wo woefully fallen apart over the centuries.
But no, there was so much more. Margaret had been so dreadfully lonely, a lone simulant in a human society, so starved for contact with her own kind, and Kathryn hated that she hadn’t been able to see that in her before. Her constant dismissive and snarky attitude, her dark sense of humour and chauvinism towards artificial life, all a front for how loathe she was to betray to the human aliens around her how deeply she suffered her loneliness. She could only let humans in so far, even Kathryn her best friend, knowing that there was such a hard limit to how close she could ever really be to any human. She was removed as an artificial life form. The most intimate realities of a mortal human existence, of aging and mortality, the day-to-day concerns of breathing, eating and excreting, forever kept her in a world apart from everyone around her.
Now in Ralph with the alien artificial intelligence installed in him, he was the closest thing to something kindred she’d found in over six hundred years, and now she was being told that he was disposable, that he needed to be abandoned, that it was better for him to sacrifice himself over any of the human or Bobbin crew merely because he was not like them, because he was artificial, and because being artificial made him lesser.
Kathryn and the rest of the humans had accepted Margaret as a human and welcomed her into their social circle but valued her more as a conduit to being able to replicate her kind than as a fellow life form. Their casual willingness to discard Ralph betrayed as much too clearly, and it was an injustice Kathryn could no longer tolerate. Margaret would rather lose her own ancient life trying to save him than let them throw his life away, and now that Kathryn understood she had to support her, loathing how hard it would be to convince her if they survived that it was because she loved her and not because she was too valuable a piece of technology to lose.
“Shame,” Bill said through the mirror ball before turning towards the ship controls, ready to take off and leave both of them on the station.
Kathryn grabbed his taloned hand to stop him, touching him for the first time and being surprised how bony the appendage was. “No.” she said. “We’re not leaving without them.” Before Bill could respond, a piercing siren blared around them. It was oddly low pitch for a warning klaxon, tuned no doubt to be shrill attention grabbing for Bobbins instead of humans. Bill’s mirror ball rapidly flashed purple, then blue before finally settling on a solid red as he silenced the alarm with a thought.
“We have been detected” he said as his ball shifted to a purple-mauve hue. “Tactical drones are being deployed.”
“Can they get onto this ship?”
“No.” he answered. “It’s ship specific. They can’t manipulate any matter once it’s within our ship’s manipulation field whether it’s ours or originally theirs.” He paused for a moment as he processed information received from the link. “They are now tracking your simulant.”
“She’s not mine, she’s her own. That’s the whole point.” She regretted saying as much out loud after realizing the point was only poignant to her in that moment but meaningless to anyone else.
“It doesn’t matter, we’re compromised,” Bill insisted with pink. “We must withdraw, warships are converging and will begin firing on us any moment now.”
“We are not, leaving, without them.” Kathryn stated with total resolve.
“Kathryn,” Jaren implored her. “Maggie! We have to get her out of here, otherwise what was this all for?”
“Margaret is family too, we have to help her,” Kathryn insisted, ignoring the disbelief in on his face and what it meant in favour of looking at the large screen which appeared in the wall which showed three small spherical ships glob out of the side of the enemy station and take up formation around their shuttle and begin firing on them with the same pillar of light weapons Ralph’s ship had fired at New Horizon II with. She could see how much more powerful the weapons were in both brightness and width of the beam. Kathryn guessed the entirety of the spherical ships were dedicated to generating that one powerful weapon which made their small ship shudder in a terrifying way, like it was being ripped apart at the atomic level.
Despite the blinding light and shuddering of the ship, the readings on the screen made it clear the beams were not penetrating the hull. “See?” Kathryn said. “They’re not even scratching us.”
“We can withstand their attacks for a time Kathryn,” Bill explained with forced patience, “but we are not impervious. The ship’s automated defences are feeding material into the blast sites to ablate away but the ship’s material will soon be too depleted to maintain an interior atmosphere. But it doesn’t matter because in less than four minutes the first warship will arrive and join in and finish us almost immediately.” He turned around to face her directly, his mirror ball turning a new colour of grey which Kathryn interpreted as pleading in context. “I don’t know what hold that simulant has over you, but we have achieved our primary objectives here and she has abandoned us for her own reasons. We both have what we came for but if we do not withdraw immediately, all will be lost for both of us! Ralph’s voluntary sacrifice will be for nothing if we stay and are destroyed. Isn’t that a worse outcome than just him sacrificing himself?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kathryn stated in solid defiance, ready to reach for her wand to stop him if he tried to leave anyways. “We find a way. Didn’t we bring those antimatter warheads with us for just this reason?”
“We have a limited supply,” he answered with a dark pink verging on red. “We need them for our retreat, not just to hold ground before we even try to escape. In a situation like this they’re more likely to detonate as we try to fire them and destroy us than accomplish anything else!”
“But not necessarily, if we fire all of them some will get through, right?”
“Too reckless!” His mirror ball pulsed a deep angry red. “The station has far more devastating weapons which can destroy us at range. We need the antimatter warheads to destroy those weapons as they retreat, we cannot stay here.”
“Look,” Kathryn pointed to another large screen which had appeared on the wall and was showing an internal iconized diagram of the interior of the station. “She’s already reached him, they’ll be back soon.”
Kathryn saw Bill take notice of her hand resting on the handle of her wand on her hip before looking up at her, back down at her hand on her weapon and then back up at her for a few moments before looking back at the screens. Purple-mauve spread across his mirror ball and he started barking low frequency orders at his compatriots.
☼ ☼ ☼
Halfway to the computer core where they had left Ralph, Margaret heard the low frequency alarm sound and was savvy enough to understand what it meant in context, and she was ready. At least now there was no reason for Ralph to remain where he was. The rouse was broken, his task complete.
She first encountered the tactical drones they’d been warned about, and as described they emerged out of the surfaces of the walls and floor. It was eerie the way the interior surfaces of the ship seemed to come alive against her. They had oddly blocky shaped and made out of the same dull black as everything else. They were blocky simplified homunculus’ of Bobbins, their legs and body made out of a series of simple rectangles. Instead of a typical central projection there was a simple hard edged cube, with something suspiciously reminiscent of the wand weapons mounted in place of their heads.
“A.I. solidarity?” she offered with a darkly mirthful smirk before the first shot a bolt of energy at her.
As originally constructed she’d have been destroyed, having been designed only to simulate genuine human abilities. She’d long ago lost patience with such pretenses to infirmity, and soon after finding herself in her new body she’d had all of her artificial limiters removed. It added to her sense of apartness from the humans, but was also what allowed her to be something more in this moment, something terrifying.
The instant she first perceived the first inklings of a flash of light from the tactical drone, she’d sprung up into the air, leapt over the blast, and landed behind the drone and cleaved it clear in half with a sword before the weapons had finished discharging. Her fascination with the way the two halves proceeded to melt back into the floor occupied a fraction of a second of interest for her before she in one motion turned and swiped with both swords to dispatch two more. Her satisfaction was short lived as even more began to emerge out of the surfaces around her and she bolted around the corner down the corridor.
She was already near Ralph when the alarms went off and she quickly cleared the remaining distance, dodging and dismembering as necessary. As she entered the room she sheathed her swords on her back and drew her two wands from where they hung at her waist and leapt towards the opposite side of the room. As she flew she fired repeatedly into the surface ahead of her and the ceiling above, creating short lived holes in the surfaces to better redirect her momentum with. Planting her foot against one of the holes in the wall, she launched herself up towards the ceiling spinning and taking out the dozen or so drones in the room, before launching herself off of the ceiling and landing beside Ralph, reattaching the wands to her belt before landing.
Without a word she roughly wrapped her left arm around Ralph and was about to leap back into the corridor with him when either a drone she’d missed caught her arm with a wand blast and blew it away above the elbow, causing her to release Ralph and fall to the floor.
Ralph pulled a wand off of her belt and dispatched the enemy drone and kept firing at the new ones continuously appearing out of surfaces around them.
After a few moments Margaret came to her senses and bolted to her feet, at first trying to push herself off of the ground in the heavier gravity with both arms before realizing she was missing one and just pushing harder with the other one.
“What are you doing here?” Ralph asked as he kept blasting away drones as they appeared. Margaret reached for the remaining wand with her remaining arm to assist. “Did you get left behind?” If not burning with simulated adrenaline rush, Margaret would have been touched at his clear concern for her wellbeing.
“Fucking better not have!” she exclaimed wildly with angry humour. “I had to come back for you. Come on, we’ve got to find a way back to the ship!”
“Came… back for me?” He stopped firing and turned to her with a dumb emoji of confusion on his face screen. “Why?”
Margaret just shook her head sharply. “I’ll explain later if we survive this. Come on, we’ll probably be destroyed trying to get past those drones anyways, but we’ve got to try. We’ll probably get destroyed trying to get past those drones, but we’ve got to try, they can’t wait for us forever. Any better ideas?” she asked, amped up by the thrill of battle and the ecstasy of unexpected success so far.
“Take my hand,” Ralph warmly offered as he held out his hand.
Margaret looked up at him for a brief moment before smiling back, replacing her wand on her belt and placing her remaining hand in his, having no other options left than to trust him. He led her over to another wall, looked at her for a moment, and then held her close and stepped into the wall.
Everything went black as they sunk into the material of the floor, and she panicked for a moment that she couldn’t breathe before she remembered that she didn’t need to. She gradually came to realize that instead of reconfiguring the ship to create bubbles of atmosphere for the organics to travel through, the two of them could simply slip through the material of the ship itself, leaving no space for any of the tactical drones to form and attack them. They sailed through the interior of the ship, leaving Margaret to wonder if Ralph could maintain his ability to control the ship’s material long enough to avoid them being entombed in the hull of the ship, and whether or not her would be friends cared enough about her to still be waiting for her to return.
☼ ☼ ☼
“We have to leave NOW!” Bill pleaded with such red Kathryn knew he was deadly serious. We could be destroyed any moment now, I can’t risk the survival of my people any longer!” She saw him and the other Bobbins start to reach for their wands and she and Jaren reflexively reaching for theirs, before anyone could pull them off of their belt, Margaret and Ralph spit out of a wall with enough momentum to be launched into the opposite wall and collapse into a heap on the ground.
All of the Bobbins’ mirror balls turned solid black and at once the entryway to the station disappeared, the Bobbins took their stations, and they began pulling away from the station at such high acceleration Kathryn had to steady herself against it even through the ship’s inertial dampeners and the lighted ceiling noticeably dimmed, presumably from so much power being diverted into the propulsion system.
The Bobbin’s mirror balls were all flashes of purple, mauve, and black as they coordinated their escape. The Bobbin commander worked with two other Bobbins at the forward controls and Kathryn was nauseated by the flurry of low frequency communication between them. She tried to focus on the large forward display showing their retreat for a moment before thinking to rush over to Margaret and Ralph, at first just relieved to have them back but quickly becoming alarmed over Margaret’s missing arm. When they assured her they were alright and both sat up in exhaustion and what Kathryn had to assume was surprise at their still being alive, Kathryn stood back up and surveyed the tactical display.
She was right about their absurd acceleration, but the screen also showed that they were taking a randomized evasive path to make it harder for the larger more powerful ships to successfully target them at range. It was obvious they were accelerating at a ridiculous rate, but the screen also showed that they were engaging in a randomized evasion course to make it harder for the larger and more powerful ships in pursuit to target them. They were still taking the occasional strike, but the ship could clearly withstand an unimaginable degree of punishment, even from these much more powerful ships. This must be why their war persisted for so long, Kathryn imagined. It was hard for them to do any significant damage to each other, which was why the anti-matter weapons were so coveted. They finally found a weapon with which they could decisively devastate each other.
The screen showed a dozen smaller objects engaging in equally randomized courses, but gradually working their way back towards the enemy targets. She saw a set of three torpedoes which had nearly reached the base they’d boarded, and when one finally struck the facility a bright flash blanked out the entire display for a few moments as the visual feed on the main screen momentarily lit up with blinding brilliance before it was filtered down to a tolerable level and the flash started dying down.
When it had dimmed enough for them to see the station again, it showed a clear large hemispherical bite taken out of the ship similar to the result they’d seen when they’d used a similar weapon against Ralph’s ship. Instead of being disabled though, they watched as the station reconfigured into its original shape, but noticeably smaller in size. It finally dawned on Kathryn that their war had now been reduced to a contest of shadow matter attrition, to who could secure the most antimatter and most successfully annihilate more of the enemy’s shadow matter material which was the fundamental constituent of each other’s war machines.
Then there were two more flashes in quick succession as two of the larger pursuing enemy ships were struck, and Kathryn did some quick math in her head to try to figure out the difference in light delay between what they were seeing at the station and the pursuing ships. She watched on the tactical display as three smaller vessels were struck and utterly devastated, leaving no trace of them when the subsequent flash of light receded.
The station and larger pursuing ships continued to target them but their fluttering path back towards the star prevented them from landing any solid strikes against them which their ship’s remaining shadow material couldn’t handle, until a devastatingly solid strike from one of the large enemy ships rocked their small shuttle so violently Kathryn feared they were being torn apart. She tried to interpret all of the warnings and alarms on the control screens around her. She could feel the steady feeling of acceleration abate, and the displays seemed to indicate they had started a multi axis tumble.
Best she could make out was that their engines or (at least their control systems) had been taken out, but that they were close enough to the rift and on course to sail right through if they were lucky enough to avoid another hit before they crossed the threshold. Kathryn noticed how much her jaw hurt from clenching it with the stress as everything tasted purple for a few moments as they crossed the threshold of the rift and passed through. She watched on the screen as the purple of the rift started turning yellow with the energy of a weapon blast coming through before a quick-thinking Bobbin sent a signal to abruptly cut power to the rift and it dissolved back into a tranquil giant purple crystal floating in orbit around the star.
She watched Bill turn and collapse against his control station, breathing heavily with his eyes closed, with Kathryn interpreted as a sign that they were out of danger, that by some miracle they had actually survived. Looking back up at the forward display which now only showed a wall of the roiling surface of a star, it occurred to her to hope there was enough ship left to prevent them all from being boiled and/or irradiated.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Reaching up she expected it to be Jaren’s but the skin was papery, that of an elderly woman and she found it was Margaret’s remaining hand as she looked over and saw Jaren tending to Maggie instead. It made sense. It was correct for him to be more concerned about her, but she still felt the sting of remembering a time when they were all that existed to each other, when their first thought would have been to make sure the other was okay.
She squeezed Margaret’s hand. They were safe. It was over.