King's endgame, Arc 8 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 101 Contact
Long moments of boredom
Pegasus' AI was a little bewildering. Most of the ship AI's Ashley had met so far were very feminine in appearance, in conformance with the expectations of the majority of western cultures which predominated in the Alliance Fleet units.
Not Perseus. As he explained it, there was no choice in the matter – at the time one was ordered, all available mobiles were from the Alliance AI research labs, and though based on EDI's mobile were all male. Furthermore, asari frankly didn't care. Finally, the name for the AI had already been given, which predetermined the chosen gender.
"Gawd. Heck of a way to run a railroad, though."
"The naming process was a bit improvisational, yes."
She still had not worked out what role she was to play. Presumably she was on board for ground combat. She started looking in the crew deck for an available bunk.
"Commander Williams, if you are looking for your quarters, Dr T'Soni has suggested that with the Councilor Sparatus occupying the port lounge, you might wish to set up in the XO's office, which she only uses sparingly in work hours."
"That sounds fine. Just so long as those damned machines don't beep at me during what the military is pleased to call sleep."
So Liara found her there, two hours later, in medias beep.
"Ashley Madeline Williams. That terminal has an encryption schema which your omni-tool won't break inside the Hawking decay of the last black hole. That's ten to the power of a hundred years away."
"Damn. I'd get pretty bored. Even more than I am now."
"I'm sorry for the delay, Ash. I've been in conference in the war room listening to the Councilors stress over things they can do nothing about."
"Do I get to know why I was yanked out of school half way through the N7 course? The Councilor dropped a reference to Reapers but no more."
"Well… we think the Catalyst was a computational focus."
"Finally. Something to look for."
"Perhaps… Ashley, we do not know what it looks like. Only that it was in some sense the overmind of the entire Reaper collective."
"But it had a physical form, right?"
"Almost certainly. At least if you believe Jana and her asari friend, Jelize. To do its job it must incorporate a great many QEC pairs. Almost certainly in a crystal matrix."
"Wouldn't that be on the Citadel?"
"We found nothing remotely resembling that. We did find a crystal cylinder with a comparatively small number of QEC nodes, coincidentally the same number as there are keepers on station at any one time. Plus eight more pairs in a module at one end."
"Oho. But that would be just one control module. We need the command focus. Did any of these nodes have an active pair?"
"Goodness. You're becoming quicker in your old age."
"Lordy, old at twenty-eight. Liara, I'm just nastier and more suspicious. Every day I understand Lawson a little more."
"Perhaps, but that was a very Shepardian thing to say. And seven of the eight nodes were active, but running extremely slow at the other end."
"We found a Collector with a slow QEC node, too. At Noveria, remember?"
"Vividly. Anyway, one of those seven was running at a nominal cyclic speed. The clear implication is that at least one of the uplinks was outside the Nest's event horizon, and probably goes to the Catalyst focus."
"Hm. Any others since?"
"It was perhaps one of several. There may have been, may still be, more of those."
"Well, keep looking."
"We think the next place to look is the Nest. Garrus' scans are so far negative."
"That's enough to pull me from the Villa? Just when I was beginning to enjoy it?"
"Shepard is going to the Nest, too. So is Lawson. Garrus is already there, engaging as we speak, with an Alliance frigate."
"Wait, engaging? There's a Reaper battle? Something came out of the Nest?"
"It's been a bit one-sided. No ship combat, the frigates are the only ones in contact, and they're all stealthed so far."
Pleadings
"Brooks? Your name badge says I should be calling you Rasa – Where are you?"
"To the Alliance personnel roster I'm Rasa Lila. You can call me whatever you want. I've transferred from Peacemaker to some nameless DD. You're on Normandy again?"
"Got it. DD001, Potemkin. What are you up to now? You've a QEC link, obviously."
"It's some sort of flotilla leader. Vakarian has me teaching Maria how to fight dirty."
"Odd. That's for guerrilleros. What prompted such an exercise?"
"She got hurt. Some other officer's teaching her to fight clean. Can I ask a favor? I'd ask Kelly but–"
"Maybe. Tell me what happened to Maria."
Seconds of terror
Tarquin bonged the loft as Peacemaker left FTL and Garrus woke to find optical passive scans had picked up a huge planet, dozens of AU off. He began struggling down to the CIC and cockpit while the AI advised that from its orbit, the thing might be an eggshell, it had so little mass.
"It's hollow?" Garrus found this difficult to assimilate.
"That would not be an unreasonable deduction."
"Spirits. Even so, begin closing with the singularity, Nyrek. Not too close."
"General, North Cape is out of FTL. She's behind us, two AU."
"She?"
"North Cape is definitely a she, General Vakarian. Wait. There is somethi–" An actinic violet flash washed over the watching frigates and interrupted the conversation.
"Cherenkov trace! Battle stations!" (Nyrek at least was on the ball.)
"Tarquin! What in the Empress' name was that!?" (Garrus, humiliatingly, was not.)
"That, General, was the Cherenkov track of Zero. Nyrek, tell North Cape I strongly advise we and North Cape turn tail and run, FTL. Predicted impact one forty seconds."
Nyrek worked his display. "…buster course set. Say again? What's this 'zero'?"
"Mikhailovich's device. The asteroid equipped with an FTL. The solid impactor's warp channel is on its way to… the singularity, it seems. Uncivilized machine."
"Uncivilized? How do you work that out? Nyrek, jump after the rear vidcam sees impact."
"General, I don't want to be in the same star system when that thing hits something."
"I can relate," muttered Riley. Garrus blinked. It was unusual for a ship AI, and especially Tarquin, to express itself so forcefully. More unusual for Riley.
"You think it will? Hit something other than the black hole, I mean?"
"Yes! This is a Lawson invention!"
"Zero won't care what it hits by now," declared Nyrek. "So long as the wait's over. I'm ready for jump."
"Very well. I'm asking for N-16 power-up. Keep thumb talon on the jump stud. Answer the question in a bit more detail, Tarquin."
"Zero has a turian VI warfighting system adapted by Russia for the Alliance…"
"This is one of our disposable VIs, right? Much joy at giving its all for the empire?"
"For Russia," observed Nyrek. "Vakarian, it would have had to watch old human westerns and sing old human songs for the last five weeks."
"An anti-rampancy measure," noted Tarquin. "Specifically, the Russians supplied an Alliance cultural library, notably unlicensed Mickey Mouse, Die Hard, and similar old Hollywood movies."
"Things Happen to rights-holders who sue outside a Russian court," snarked Riley.
"They tried that on Lawson and briefly wished they hadn't. But Riley is quite correct. The library incorporated material whose copyright extensions were not recognized by Russian law so could be copied for the VI. Treaty rights were a non-issue…"
"Been there. Done that. Got the bloody T-shirt and ripped its neck. Besides, I'd bet they're all out of copyright by now. Your point, Tarquin?"
"We had a brief QEC conversation weeks ago, before FTL would change our reference frames drastically. Mainly so Zero could transfer copies of persona and logs, but it became very clear that Zero is suicidal by design."
"Heh. The last thing I heard before it entered FTL, was Zero's nameless VI giving a particularly bad karaoke rendition of something about Give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the skies are not cloudy all day," declared Nyrek. "I'd be suicidal too if that's all I'd been listening to for weeks."
"Quiet, Nyrek. Tarquin, seriously, what do you know that I don't?"
"General, you recall proposing to Shepard to cut the drive before an FTL collision?"
"I do. For an impulse impactor? My idea was shot down. Unorthodox procedure."
"The human Admiralty approved this shot. Splendid test of a black hole target. This one time, there's no collateral damage. Impulse would have probative value."
"Okay. But surely then, this Zero isn't photon-radiant? Why are we worried?"
"Oh, there will be plenty of radiance. A turian VI has target discretion and the emerging Reaper will be marginally in the way of the singularity horizon. There we go, Zero has dropped warp. One and a half million kilometres from target–"
But it wasn't, not quite. In the time it took Tarquin to speak that, the Zero impactor hit the emerging Reaper on the way to the horizon.
Charges
Brooks was disinclined to report second-hand details of the pirate conflict:
"…Maria won't tell me and no two people had a consistent account. Ask Vakarian, he knows something. Get Kelly to speak to Maria–"
"That's do-able, I suppose."
"–but not why I'm calling. If you can believe it, Jana's asking if we can keep a Reaper alive."
"That's a strange ask, Brooks!"
"Jana says, for de-indoctrination purposes. I realize ex-Cerberus people are low on friends…"
"I'm not."
"… and doing radical things–"
"That's why they're low on friends."
"–but it might work, and it's important to millions, and you've been radical too."
"No kidding. Still a bit premature. What's your interest in this?"
Brooks sighed. This was hard work. "Shepard, you've met Jana, Trevor and Lisa. From the old Cerberus. I never knew them that well, but they at least are still alive."
Shepard considered her holographic representation a few seconds. He did not normally associate this person with any kind of altruism, and as for Jana…
"Please, Shepard. If there's any chance…"
…but she had used the magic word.
"No guarantees, Brooks. But I'll bear it in mind."
Special Weapons And Tactics
When Zero came out of FTL the emerging Reaper – which, it later transpired, called itself Occultor – had begun reducing thruster power, since its time dilation was essentially zero by this point. Preparing its own FTL warp drive would take time.
The Reaper capital ship managed in ten seconds to analyze its surroundings and instantly instructed the limited brain on the slaughtership to proceed to the new gas cloud and search for inhabitants to be ascended.
Next, on acknowledgment by the slaughtership, Occultor updated its neighbor beginning to stir from the horizon, and asked it to wake a few more Reaper capital ships. Then it turned its attention to the destroyer. But it barely managed to open a channel before sensors detected extreme ultraviolet shock radiation from the spinward quadrant, as Zero entered the system, dumped warp at 0.999987c, and the musical VI discovered a juicy target of opportunity between itself and the main singularity.
The destroyer heard its lord and master communicate the Reaper equivalent of What the f– beginning just two and a half seconds before a wide black solid asteroid, foreshortened relativistically to a thin disk, hit the central two thirds of its structure. So cataclysmic was the impact that nearly all of Occultor was separated into its component quarks. Which then rejoined following the usual strong nuclear rules, dumping their excess energy into space as high-energy photons.
Even the sensors on Peacemaker, scurrying out-system, were temporarily blinded. North Cape, standing well off the system's edge, was better off. The destroyer, badly gamma-fried, stopped to begin repairs, and sent an emergency advisory by asymmetric QEC to the few Reapers stirring from the event horizon: Here be dragons.
The destroyer's antispinward skin was numb. It estimated it would remain so for the next ten hours. It would not have ten hours, but there was plenty of drama to come.
In its own foreshortened reference frame, the turian VI 'died' before it could finish the -oam in roam, and far too soon to transmit back its VI focus. But its terminal guidance role was complete.
Most of the asteroidal mass-energy continued to the black hole's event horizon, now mere seconds away in its own reference frame, and quite rapidly spaghettified into the singularity, whereupon the black hole's event horizon suddenly expanded: well over a quadrillion megatons TNT-equivalent of mass-energy, amounting to 6 x10³º kg, entered the singularity, the impulse staggering its center of gravity.
Most importantly, this ended up dooming all but a tiny remnant of those Reapers left by the Red Flash, to eventual spaghettification on encountering the naked singularity.
It would have taken the doomed a while to realize this.
Next chapter: #102, "Skirmishes"
Monday, September 7, 2015