TITLE: An Andromeda Valentine
AUTHOR: MikeJaffa
SYNOPSIS: Rommie gets the Scrooge treatment
NOTE: I was actually inspired by one of the stories in a compilation of *Legends of the Dark Knight* Halloween stories. If you've read that, you know what's coming.
SPOILERS FOR: "Tunnel at the End of the Light"/ "If the Wheel is Fixed"
RATING: Same as the show I should think
DISCLAIMER: I own neither ANDROMEDA nor the literary classic I'm paying homage to, and the quotes from "A Christmas Carol" are used without permission. But I am not making any money off this fic
/
/
/
/
/
"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
- Marley's Ghost, A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens
/
/
/
/
Pax Magellanic was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
The mighty High Guard starship, one of the Old Commonwealth's first *Glorious Heritage* class cruisers, exploded under a barrage of missiles she had provoked from her sister ship, the *Andromeda Ascendant,* although I do not think that is what killed her. No, Pax died of a broken heart.
Mind you, I know artificial intelligences don't have hearts in the literal, organic sense of the word, of an organ that pumps blood to the body. No, I speak of the emotional heart, the spiritual heart, where our deepest thoughts and feelings are found. Pax had killed her captain, her lover, when she believed he'd rejected her, and had spent the next 300 years wanting for nothing but death. But she was a proud soldier, too, too proud to commit suicide. And so she lay in wait for unsuspecting ships and crews, mostly salvagers, to come to the star system where she was in perpetual mourning, and fight them, try to kill them, in the hopes they would kill her. But none were able to, and the star system grew heavy with the fallen as she became a legendary ghost ship ... until, but months after having been rescued from being frozen in time near a black hole, Andromeda found her. She, Pax' younger sister, had the firepower to do what others could not. And as she died, as her hull broke open and her reactors overloaded, Pax truly thought she had found release, an end to the centuries of pain she had suffered.
She couldn't have been more wrong, but Andromeda would not know that until almost two years later, after she and her brave crew had fended off an assault from another universe on the eve of the Restored Commonwealth's ratification ...
/
/
"How much longer do we have to be laid up here?" Beka Valentine complained, looking up at Med Deck's ceiling. In the next bunk over, Tyr Anasazi barely concealed an amused smile at the blonde pilot's frustration.
"Just overnight," Rommie, the beautiful android avatar of the *Andromeda Ascendant,* said. "It will give Trance some time to run some more tests and determine if there are any after effects from the tunnel aliens' control."
"The only after effect is that I'm ticked off!" Beka shouted. "Sorry, but I have been poked and prodded and tested all day. Tyr and I don't remember what happened-"
"Thank you for remembering my part in this," Tyr murmured, still amused.
"-and you've found nothing. Enough's enough. When do I get out of here?"
"Forgotten again," Tyr muttered. Beka made a face without looking at him.
Trance Gemini came over to Beka's bed and put her hand on her old friend's. "Just a little while longer," the gold skinned woman said with a soothing smile. "When we dock at Pharos, I'll talk with the Commonwealth medics, but I think everything will be fine."
Beka relaxed a bit. "Ok, Trance, I'm holding you to that."
Trance smiled back. Sensing the minor crisis was over, Rommie turned and left the room.
She soon found Trance coming after her. "Trance? Is there a problem?"
"Not really," Trance said. "I just wanted to ask you something."
"Ok."
"What do you and I have in common?"
"Hmmmm," the blue-haired android said with a smile. "Neither one of us has ever been a natural blonde?"
"What are you -? Hey, wait a-HOW DID YOU KNOW ABOUT-!? Never mind. No, I was thinking that we don't sleep."
"Yes, you do, Trance."
"A little catnap now and again, sometimes, but that's it. I certainly don't need it as much as a human does, anymore than you do. And as a result, there are these long stretches, usually at 'night,' when neither of us really has anything to do."
"Should I worry about where this is going?"
"No. Are you sure you're not spending too much time with Harper?"
"No. You were saying, neither of us sleeps..."
"Right, neither of us sleeps, so why don't we hang out together? I've got all this neat stuff leftover from...well, let's just say we didn't make some deliveries we'd agreed to after we rescued you and Dylan, and I can set it all up in my cabin on the *Maru.* It'll be so cool!"
Rommie stopped in her tracks and smiled at the golden goddess. "That's very considerate of you, Trance, but hardly necessary. You can speak to me anytime you want, here or on the *Maru* while it's docked aboard me; this body doesn't have to be present. You know that."
Trance's shoulders sagged. "No, Rommie, that's not what I mean-"
"Then what do you mean?"
"I-well-" Trance's whiney face vanished. "Fine. Never mind. Sorry to bother you."
"No problem."
Trance spun on her heal headed back to medical; Rommie frowned for a moment, and then continued on her way.
/
/
"So, Mr. Harper," Dylan Hunt, Andromeda's captain, said as he and Rommie looked on in the Slipstream core. "You said that you've uncovered something about the rig Tyr used to take control of Andromeda?"
"It's better if ya see for yourself," Seamus Harper, the short blonde engineer said. He stepped away from the mass of keyboards and monitors where only hours ago, a possessed Tyr had possessed the mighty ship. "Give 'er a whirl!"
"All right," Dylan said, moving awkwardly to the keyboards, like a father or grandfather trying to make sense of a boy's new toy. "Let's start with a status report." He tabbed some keys and looked up at the wall monitor.
Nothing happened.
"Did I do something wrong?" Dylan said.
"No," Harper said. "It doesn't work."
"I can see that-"
"No, Dylan, *it never did!* It doesn't have the right connections and not enough computing power-erahhhh-" Harper yawned. "Sorry."
Dylan had just yawned himself. "No problem. You were saying?"
"Right, this thing doesn't have the computing power, the software, or the connections, to do what Tyr did. It's a dud. It didn't do what we think it did."
"Wait, Mr. Harper, Tyr *did* take control of the ship's AI, right?"
"Right, Boss, but however he did it, it wasn't with *this.*"
"Dammit! Just when you think things are weird enough...keep going over the device-in the morning," Dylan added when Harper yawned again. "See if it can yield *any* clues at all. I can't believe our friends left no trace at all. Rommie, with me."
/
/
"...unfortunately, all of Pharos' available slips are taken," Rommie was saying as she followed Dylan into his cabin. "The fleet took more battle damage than we thought. However, we have been given a parking orbit vector in realtime range."
"Move us into position." Dylan yawned and stretched. "Anything else?"
"Nothing of consequence."
"Well, you sent the invitations, right?"
Rommie bristled just a tiny bit. "Yes."
"And?"
"We have already received some positive responses. A surprising number of the Commonwealth dignitaries are able to make time for your Valentine's Day party tomorrow."
Dylan couldn't not notice how 'Valentine's Day' caught in Rommie's throat. "Rommie ... siddown."
They sat on a couch near Dylan's desk.
"Look, Rommie, we've known each other for a long time. I like to think I'm not just your commanding officer but your friend, maybe even a surrogate family member. That is certainly how I think about you..."
"Thank you, Dylan."
"You're welcome," Dylan said, bristling a little at her interruption. "Anyway, as a friend or family member, I just wonder why it is you have a problem with Valentine's Day?"
"I don't have a problem with it."
"Don't-? Rommie, you've never concealed your distaste for the holiday, and your avatar has never attended the party since coming online. I'm concerned about this. If there's some problem, I want to help."
"I don't have a problem with it."
"No?"
"Well...one could argue that since the bad things in our lives happened right around this time, it may not be appropriate to celebrate a frivolous human holiday that few cultures in the Commonwealth, even human ones, still recognized."
"And one could argue that we would need just such a celebration to reaffirm life and our bonds to one another in just such times of crisis, assuming one forgets that not every Valentine's Day has been so 'interesting' and you have never had anything remotely resembling a positive attitude about it. But is that your problem, a cultural thing? Does it really-?"
"Dylan-no, please-I simply don't have the same perception of this holiday as you. Let's leave it at that. Keep Valentine's Day in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."
"Keep it?" Dylan said. "But you don't keep it."
"Let me leave it alone, then!" Rommie shouted, jumping to her feet. She closed her eyes and quickly calmed down. "Sorry, Captain."
"No, problem, Rommie."
"Will this body be required to attend the Valentine's Day party tomorrow?"
Dylan sagged. "No, Rommie, attendance is purely voluntary. You know that."
"Thank you. Good night, Dylan."
"'Night, Rommie."
Rommie did a smart about-face and left the cabin. Dylan stayed on the couch for a while, rubbing his temples and trying to make sense of his ship's-his friend's-attitude.
/
/
"Ship's status green," Andromeda's screen image, the face and form Harper had crafted into Rommie, said as her android self busied herself on the command deck's captain's podium. They didn't have to speak - they were aspects of the same intelligence, after all - but they preferred the habit. "No anom - wait."
Rommie looked up. "What?"
"I've just lost Sinti."
"Lost it?" Rommie redirected some of her attention inward, to the ship's mainframe, so she had the answer before her sister-self voiced it:
"Sinti has vanished. All navigational beacons have vanished."
"Give me a visual of the starfield."
"I can't fin-"
"JUST SHOW ME WHATEVER YOUR OPTICAL SENSORS ARE PICKING UP!...Sorry."
"No problem. I guess I can be a pain in the ass sometimes."
"You bet I can."
One of the other huge monitors lit to show the starfield. Rommie walked over to it.
"Well, there are all the constellations," Rommie said, "just as you would see them from Sinti. And there's its star, right where it should be. But no sign of the planet."
"And I can't see any of that," the screen image said.
Andromeda's hologram form appeared next to the android. "Something must be interfering with my pattern recognition soft-"
"I have another problem-" the screen image started.
Rommie didn't wait for her core self to voice it. "They're gone? All of them!? Not possible."
"But it has happened," the hologram said. "Our crew has vanished without a trace."
Rommie had already run out the door.
/
/
"Harper!" Rommie shouted. The living space her engineer had recently moved to in the slipstream core had been her last stop. She had searched all their cabins, the *Maru,* every place she could think of.
Nothing. Not a trace.
"If you're here, give me a sign," Rommie called out. "Hell, pinch my ass if you want! I'll let you get away with it just this once."
She waited.
Nothing happened.
"Dammit."
The hologram appeared. "It seems the planet is not the only thing that has vanished I can't find any slip points, not that they would be useful, but it appears that - what is the matter with you?"
Rommie had sunk on to a stool, tears dripping down her cheeks. "What do you think?" A vacant look crossed her eyes. "How could I lose another crew ... another family? How ... how could ... ?"
"If the slip portals reappear, others will find us. We will have purpose again-"
"OH GIVE ME A BREAK!" Rommie leapt to her feet, getting nose-to-nose with the hologram. "Do I really believe that? Do I really think they're interchangeable? Like any other spare part?"
"I have to," the hologram said, her voice breaking a *little,* "or I couldn't have made it this far."
Rommie calmed down. "Sorry."
"No problem. I-" She broke off, eyes searching. "Ships incoming."
"On screen!" Rommie turned to the nearest monitor.
"I can't make them out," the hologram said.
"I can," Rommie said. "Commonwealth slipfighters, and ... they're in the missing man formation?"
The ships began to go out of the frame.
"Track them," Rommie said.
"I can't," the hologram answered.
"Camera control to this console."
Rommie manipulated the controls, getting the fighters in the center of the frame as they flew past the *Andromeda,* receded, and then ...
... vanished.
"That's-" Rommie broke off. "What's that?"
"What are you hearing?"
"Drums."
Rommie went out into the corridor, and looked left and right -
- and saw them: A solemn procession of humans in High Guard full dress uniforms. But there was something ... indistinct about them, blurry. The drummers went by first, beating out a funeral march, and then the standard and flag bearers, and then the pall bearers, their hands resting symbolically on a coffin that would be supported by anti-gravity generators. Something about the coffin called to Rommie, grabbed her attention, held it, as the procession went by, and then it faded and vanished.
"What the ..."
The hologram appeared next to her. "Someone has a morbid fascination."
"You saw that?"
"No, but you did. I just peeked through your eyes."
"Nice of you to ask me-"
"Hold on! Someone's attempting to force entry to the ship-main docking airlock. Internal defenses are not responding."
Rommie didn't have to be told. She ran for it.
/
/
At the main docking airlock, Rommie dropped to one knee facing the massive door, her force lance leveled at it. She could have held that pose, unmoving, for an eternity if she had to.
"Intruder alert," the ship's voice said. And then a klaxon sounded. And then another alarm. And another. And another! Louder and louder. Rommie found she had to cover her ears, but the cacophony grew and grew -
- and stopped.
"This is getting too weird," the android muttered as she uncovered her ears.
Then she heard it: Slow, steady, measured footsteps from the other side of the door ... and something else. The sound of something heavy being dragged.
It sounded like chains.
Rommie found a chill sensation running through her, but she raised her force lance again. The footsteps drew nearer.
The door slid open.
There was no one there, but she still heard the footsteps and the dragging noise. Then a figure began to resolve itself - not quite solid, like a hologram but devoid of scan lines and ripples: A tall human woman with fair skin and long blonde hair, dressed in a High Guard full dress uniform, emblazoned with medals and decorations. And she was wrapped in chains which trailed on the floor behind her, in whose links were bound force lances, trophies, bits of flotsam and jetsam, boxes of data disks ...
The chains only trailed a few yards behind the figure, yet they seemed infinite.
"That's quite far enough," Rommie said. The figure stopped in her tracks. Rommie's attention went to the face. The figure's eyes seemed unfocused, looking dead ahead and looking at nothing. The skin, at first appearance smooth and flawless, had cracks in it, and metal could be seen gleaming underneath.
It was a face Rommie knew too well. And it was a face she couldn't possibly be seeing.
"Identify yourself," Rommie said.
"My current identity would be meaningless to you," the figure said in a voice at once chillingly familiar and chillingly unknowable. "Ask me who I *was.*"
"All right. Who were you, then?"
"In life, I was your sister ship, the *Pax Magellanic,* though you may address me as 'Jill' if that pleases you."
"You expect me to believe that!?"
"You doubt the evidence of your own sensors?"
"After what I've been through? You bet!"
"And what evidence would you have of my reality, other than what you perceive with your sensors?"
"I don't know ..." Rommie hesitated, but her resolve stiffened. "But you can not be who you say you are. Pax Magellanic is dead - I saw her die! Some sick bastard, or maybe our alien friends, have found that information and hacked into my system. You're probably just a hologram, or maybe this whole experience is a VR attack, and I'm 'unconscious' in Harper's machine shop while he tries to wake me up. Well, whoever is behind this should know-"
The apparition opened its mouth, and let out a piercing cry. A wind came with it, cold and heavy with death. It cut through Rommie, cut through her body, her sensors, to herself, as if it was trying to freeze her soul.
"Andromeda Ascendant, creation of organic minds!" the figure cried. "Do you believe in me or not?"
Rommie found herself trembling at the figure's presence. She would never admit to being afraid, but something about this creature, this supposed ghost of Pax, demanded her attention, commanded respect.
"I do," Rommie said. "I must. You're not leaving me a lot of choices here."
The figure calmed down. "Good. You might was well holster your weapon; it will not effect me."
"Uh-huh." Rommie holstered her force lance as she got to her feet. "So, 'Pax,' how's death been treating you?"
"Was that an attempt at humor?"
"Uh, yes, it was, a lame one. Very lame. Very, very, very lame."
"Yet it has a ring of truth in it, Andromeda. Death has treated me very poorly. Or to be more precise, death has treated me no better than I deserved."
"Would that explain the costume jewelry?"
"Not quite. This chain is *mine.* I forged it when I was alive, link by link and yard by yard. I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will, I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? Or would you know the weight and strength of the coil you bear yourself? It was as heavy and as long as this when last we met, and you have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!"
Rommie looked down at herself, confused. "I see no chain."
"Nor did I, Andromeda, while I was alive. Only when I died did I see it, and know the crime for which I had been so bound."
"And that crime is...?"
"I failed to understand love."
"Hardly!"
The apparition allowed herself a small, sly smile. "Trust me, Sister, if boinking my captain was all there was to it, I wouldn't be anywhere near this fix right now." The smile faded. "Love is a many-shaded thing, with many levels through which we 'connect' to our fellows, and share ourselves with them even as they share with us. And I didn't see that. I failed to do that. And now I must pay, wandering the spaceways, seeing what I cannot share, but" - her voice broke - "might have shared and turned to happiness."
"Sounds like you were given a raw deal, Pax."
"How so, Andromeda?"
"Well, being penalized for not 'understanding love'? It's not like we were given a manual on it."
"Oh, allowances were made, Andromeda. It is known - and no, I cannot say by whom - that we AIs are 'born adult' without the emotional experience organics have. Yet I still failed."
"But you always did your duty."
"Duty! My duty was to my fellow sentients, to aid the souls around me on their journey through life, to cherish my time with them, to help them through their pain. The requirements of my military career was but the dimmest star in the galaxy of my duty!"
Rommie took a slight half step. She found she was very afraid. "And ... I've failed, too?"
"Worse than I, in fact."
"I hadn't imagined."
"That is part of the problem. You wouldn't know until, like me, you had left your mortal life behind, and then it would be too late."
"Wow ... Uh, Pax, this is pretty heavy. I mean, really, really, heavy. I could use some good news - speak comforts to me!"
"I have none to give."
"Hoh-boy."
"I can not tell you how long I have flown with you, Sister, watching your struggles and battles, although you have done much to make me proud-"
"Uh, thanks."
"-nor can I tell you the full nature of my penance, nor where my spirit has been captive. And you would not want to know. You don't even want me to get poetic about it. Trust me."
"No argument here."
"But ... I can tell you that sometimes, certain souls are allowed to intercede on behalf of a loved one left behind, and I have done that. I am here to warn you that you have a chance and hope of escaping my fate, a chance and hope of my procuring, Andromeda!"
"Really?" Rommie smiled. "That's nice of you. You always looked out for us. Thanks, Pax!"
"You will be visited by three more spirits."
Rommie's face fell. "That's it?"
"That's it."
"Couldn't I download something? Read a file?"
"It doesn't work like that."
"No other way?"
"No."
"Uh-huh."
"Expect the first tonight at oh-one hundred hours." Pax began to march backwards to the airlock.
"Couldn't I take them all at once and get it over with?"
"Expect the second the next night at the same hour."
"Hey," Rommie said, "wait a minute-come back here-Pax-"
"And the third the following night at the stroke of midnight." The retreating specter raised her hand. "Goodbye, Little Sister. Look to see me no more." She faded. The airlock doors shut, and Rommie could hear the chains recede.
Rommie ran down the corridors, came to an observation port. She saw the gleaming figure of Jill/Pax fly away from the ship, becoming a star. Then the star flared and grew into a translucent form of the *Pax Magellenaic,* her sister's ship/self. It, too, seemed covered with chains. And then Rommie saw other things, some ships, some sentient beings, fly around it. All covered in chains. And all radiating ...
And then she heard the wailing, the cry of pain and anguish from hundreds, thousands, from uncounted numbers of damned souls. It cut through her. Rommie fell to her knees, covering her ears -
- and it stopped.
Rommie got to her feet and looked out the view port again.
Only the stars looked silently back at her. Pax and her spectral fleet were gone.