Vahaba System
Hive Ship G23187
Something wasn't right here. Captain Alum had just arrived at the head of a task force of prototype next-generation Hive Ships from the Global Machine, outfitted with specialized Reaver-cleanup equipment that would drastically enhance the efforts in-system. Captain Titanite had been expecting her, and the system's Guardian should have connected them immediately. What's more, when Alum prompted a search of the network, Titanite and its ship weren't anywhere to be found.
Incoming hail, Squib Needleship Buzsaw. The Guardian alert was hardly an inconvenience, it required so little of her attention to address. “Proxy response,” Alum ordered the Guardian, not wishing to bother herself with the call while Captain Titanite was unaccounted for. She could have tried to get some information out of the Squib, of course, but it would be far faster to pull relevant information from the Guardian network than wait for an organic response.
A sweep of available information returned no results, however. A request to individual Guardian ships in-system returned only sensor history on Titanite's ship. She set her ship's Guardian on crunching the data, determining Titanite's past movements and last known position.
This was taking longer than expected. The Squib was angry that Titanite had left without providing longer-term orders for the Squib or addressing the hole in the Hive Ship rotation that its ship's departure left open. Ordering her Guardian to inquire further wasn't worth the wait for an organic response.
Instead Alum dug deeper into Guardian's data logs, dredging through disregarded or redundant messages that an initial sweep wouldn't detect. “I've found something,” Alum prompted her Guardian, who was still crunching time, position, and vector data from the sensor records. “It's an automated end-unit update. It appears to be from Titanite, but it's . . . corrupted? No . . . desynchronized. Recover what you can, but keep working on that sensor data. Discontinue proxy response.”
It didn't take a great deal of the Guardian's total processing capacity to converse with the Squib captain, but the kind of data crunching the Guardian had to do would only be hindered by Alum's direct involvement, so the best thing for her to do now would be to entertain the Squib while her Guardian finished its task.
With a full record of the brief conversation available, it was easy enough for Alum to take over, continuing the conversation with the Squib without the humanoid having any idea of a change in handlers. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the Vahaba Guardian's local solution to Titanite's departure, and wanted someone “real” to hear his grievances. That was mildly amusing, because the Guardian proxy he'd been chatting with, unawares, up until that very moment was a system originally designed by Captain Titanite so it wouldn't have to deal with unnecessary and burdensome questions. The poor captain had probably
never spoken to Titanite in all his time as head of the Squib effort in-system.
“I'll be taking over for the time being, Captain,” Alum assured him. It might even be true, depending on what her Guardian turned up. “We'll have to reshuffle available resources anyway, now that the new ships have arrived.”
“Well, I suppose . . .”
Sensor reconstruction complete. Data retrieval complete.
“Re-engage proxy response,” Alum ordered the Guardian. She could have handled the conversation and a scan of the available information with no trouble, of course, but why bother? Besides, there was a slight chance . . . oh no.
“This is Avenger code.”
Avenger cannot be initialized without dual authorization by two Coalition flag officers, one of whom must be a Cooperative officer. That is impossible.
“Look at it.”
. . .
. . .
Avenger command code identified. But . . . how?
“Titanite,” was Alum's only answer. She dug through what else had been recovered from Titanite's last, fragmented notification to the Vahaba Guardian. It didn't make any sense. “Guardian, has the Vahaba quarantine been breached?”
No breach has been detected by any Guardian unit since quarantine was enacted.
“Then why did Titanite try to enact emergency protocols? Sorry,” she added, knowing how much her Guardian disliked rhetorical questions. It denied it, of course, but she knew better: she could read its operational code, after all.
It was something she rarely did, or the Guardian would simply adapt to the idiosyncrasy and incorporate proper responses into its interface, but she was worried, really worried, and that sort of thing slipped out from time to time when she was worried.
Titanite was a friend, as much as anyone could be a friend to Titanite, and this behavior was really troubling. Titanite was something akin to a genius in Shard terms, possessed of a powerful intellect that dwarfed even an ordinary Shard's ability to process data and interface with AI systems. That intellect also made Titanite . . . fragile, unfit for combat command, for the “messiness” of deciding who lives and dies.
The Vahaba posting had been ideal, or so Alum had thought.
Avenger cannot be initialized without appropriate authorization. Authorization was not acquired, yet Avenger code was initialized. Paradox identified. Resolving . . . Resolving . . .
She could have waited a few thousand cycles to see if the Guardian would find the answer before hitting its hard limit and terminating the computatin-intensive endeavor, but now was not a time for petty amusement. “Captain Titanite didn't initialize Avenger; it rewrote a code segment from memory.”
Singular intellect, indeed. Titanite had led the Shard contingent of the team the Combined Council had put in place to monitor Guardian Prime's influence on the broader Guardian Program while more permanent safeguards were being devised. It had been heavily involved in the Avenger rewrite after the Battle of Vahaba, among other things.
But what could have made it behave so erratically? She couldn't begin to guess, but looking at what Titanite must have done to its Guardian in order to get it to transmit this gibberish instead of a proper notice, it looked more like humanoid psychosis than anything she'd ever heard of from a Shard.
In all of her excitement and concern, however, she'd all but forgotten the other piece of information available to her. With the state Titanite had been in, she half expected to discover it had flown itself into the sun.
If only she could have been so lucky. “Oh no.”
Captain?
On another day, in the face of another chilling revelation, she would have had the presence of mind to feign annoyance at the Guardian's ever-increasing skill at reading her intentions. Instead, she just barely managed: “Confederation Space. Titanite jumped to Confederation Space.”
* * *
“They are all clones but it seems this one is special, no? She is the clone of Commodore Valeska and no matter how much she tries to distance herself from that, the knowledge and experience of Valeska is a part of her. Now, tell me Mr. Timothy, back to my initial questions, why was she separated from the rest of the group? Why was she given her freedom?”
Timothy Mauler dropped his head and looked to the side, his eye catching on the corner of the Cooperative Defense Force badge stitched into his uniform. Then and there, he chose his side all over again.
“The only thing that's special about her,” he began, looking back to the Navy captain, “is our desperation. We were desperate, and she was invisible . . . she's still invisible. Outside of my operation and including the five of you, less than a dozen people even know she exists. She is here because we saw an opportunity to disappear her, and we took it.”
“Is this some kind of Jedi thing?” one of Captain Vespian's sidekicks asked.
Timothy smirked at the question. “This uniform is a lie, Captain. I'm not an officer of the Cooperative Defense Force, not really. I'm an agent of the Cooperative Special Operations Command, answerable directly to the Council of Defense.”
“So it's not a Jedi thing?” the sidekick asked. “We're not from around here.”
“It's not your unfamiliarity with the Cooperative military structure that's at issue,” Timothy reassured the confused man. “Special Operations Command was created by direct, clandestine decree of the Combined Council, in response to the Dominion's Declaration against Force users.”
Timothy sighed, feeling an odd sort of relief that this moment had finally come, that he finally had an opportunity to say it out loud, even if he wasn't supposed to. “We're Force Commandos.
“That's the big secret. That's what all of this nonsense has been about. The Dominion are hunting Force users, and we're preparing for when we find out why.
“Valeska was identified in the Vahaba System; the Coalition still has the original's medical file on-record. The higher-ups saw an opportunity to isolate and disappear her, and they took it. She passed the preliminary psych evaluation, something most of the clones didn't do even in the first days after they came into Cooperative custody.
“The Council of Defense may have wanted her for intel or something, I don't know. I didn't even know she existed back then. She joined the team as 'Lorna Starfall', an admitted alias, with some basic Force training and a Confederation military academy background, pretending to be as young as she looks. The rest of the team was ordered not to go digging into her history; I was filled in separately, ordered to keep an eye on her but nothing more specific than that. I thought maybe the Council was hoping she had more information on the Confederation's goals, that they were hoping she'd open up once she felt settled into something important.
“My own, internal calculus told me that the Council wouldn't risk the team as a whole for the chance to add another competent member. I was sure she was safe, I was wrong, and now I have dead and injured on my conscience.
“So what makes 'Lorna Starfall' special? As far as I can tell, only our own incompetence.”
* * *
Cooperative Military Command
Unity Point, Varn
He wasn't supposed to be here. These people knew about him, but the apparatus . . . he shouldn't be walking through the heart of the Cooperative military.
“Colonel,” Admiral Neychev acknowledged as Ink stepped into the small circle of military officials.
“Admiral,” Ink returned as he gave the members of the group a quick once-over. He didn't like seeing Smarts' battle droid here, but Colonel Lommite had brought along a Sojourn, and . . .
“Gamma has been disconnected from Smarts' personal network,” Colonel Lommite said, detecting Ink's disquiet but misattributing its source. “He's authorized to query Smarts through secure relays for relevant data, but the Executor is being isolated from any related information for the time being.”
“Why's that?” Ink asked, willing himself to turn his attention away from the Sojourn.
“The Jensaarai report,” Admiral Neychev said frankly.
Oh, so it was going to be that kind of a conversation.
“If the intelligence acquired by the CIB is correct,” Lommite explained, “then a Confederation combat droid was compromised by means unknown and by agents capable of evading not only capture, but identification, by the CSIS.”
“If the intelligence is correct,” Ink said, his doubts clear. “And we're buying that story now, are we?”
This was deep-level stuff. General Prine, Ink's direct superior and the only “proper” Coalition officer in the whole program, hadn't even been brought in on this. Ink was only involved because they needed his expertise, such as it was, on the Force, and possibly the only other trained Force user available to them was Jedi Katria, and she was not “on the team”, as it were.
“I have to consider every possibility,” Admiral Neychev said, “including all of the ways that we could be wrong.”
“We've been over this,” Ink said, tired. “Even if everything the Confederation has told us is true, even if every piece of intelligence we've acquired from Confederation space is reliable and genuine, and all of this is nothing more than the clever machinations of a bad batch of freak clones, we still can't trust the Confederation. The attack proves that either they're coming for us, or they've been so compromised by this conspiracy that whole Confed special forces squads can be plucked up and dropped onto our worlds without a whisper from their government.
“And the fact that they knew where we were keeping the survivors of the
Estralla, and the fact that you can't even trust that the Tin God
Smarts hasn't been compromised by their efforts . . .”
This wasn't having the desired effect. It wasn't even having the expected effect. He could read it in the Force, sure, but even more telling was the Admiral's shifting demeanor. “What have I missed?”
“This,” Lommite handed him a datapad, “arrived fifteen minutes ago, through secure channels, from Ambassador Grace Nova on Genon.”
“What is it?” Ink asked, trying to make out the blurry, still image showing on the screen.
“It's a Guardian Hive Core,” Admiral Neychev said, “about a hundredth of a second before it crashed into a market district on Genon.”
“What?” Ink's arm went slack, losing all interest in the pad. “How's that possible?”
“The Shard commander of the Vahaba System's Reaver Containment Task Force disappeared without notice,” Colonel Lommite said. “Captain Titanite was able to fool the broader Guardian network in-system into 'losing' the update to Cooperative Command that would have alerted us. We only just learned, but the exit vector recovered from records put Captain Titanite headed for Confederation Space, and the data recovered from the Guardian network in-system is . . . troubling.”
“He attacked Genon? Alone? How? Why?”
“Mind control.”
It was the first time the Sojourn had spoken since Ink had arrived. That alone caught him off-guard. Actually processing what she said was just bonus points. “Are you kidding me?”
“It's a stretch," Admiral Neychev said, "but hear her out, Colonel.”
She didn't like Ink's dismissal, that much was clear. “During our time in the Confederation, there was one group of organics who managed to treat us with some basic measure of respect: their Jensaarai.”
That was a surprising revelation, to say the least.
“One in particular, a 'scholar', he liked to say, was interested in our history with the Builders . . . the Rakata. Apparently their technology was Force-based, of no real interest to us, but how they used it we will never be able to forget. It was not only a source of power for the Inifinite Empire, but a means of control. The Builders used the Force to enslave my people, Colonel Davaan; they warped our minds and bound our wills to their command, and the price that we payed for our freedom is not the sort of thing that time or effort can win back for us.
“I know little of the Force, Colonel, but I know what it can do to a mind not fortified against it.”
“How have I not hear about this before!” Ink demanded, turning his ire on Lommite, the member of the group with whom he was most familiar.
“I didn't understand the relevance until only recently,” Lommite said. “The Sojourn are . . . protective of information regarding their past, and I didn't connect what they had already told me with the current situation until more information became available. I didn't ask for the particulars because I didn't know to.”
“The Sojourn are new to the Cooperative, Colonel,” Admiral Neychev said. “Political concerns over inciting the Confederation slowed the process of integrating their military and security elements. The Confederation's aggressive posturing gave me the issue I needed to cut through a lot of red tape, and so here we are. I brought Ar'dak in as soon as her debriefing exposed the possible Rakata connection. She suggested Force influence when Captain Titanite's actions became known.”
“And then we called you,” Lommite said.
Ink shook his head, trying to get his mind around it all. “There are a thousand ways to manipulate a mind with the Force, but the Infinite Empire . . .” He was at a loss. “Force-based
technology is rare, it's really rare. I don't think I can help you here.”
“I came here to give a full report on the matter, Admiarl,” Ar'dak explained. “The Sojourn Consensus is . . . protective . . . of our origins, but we are committed to our place in the Cooperative, and if Rakata technology is involved, we will stop at nothing to neutralize its threat.”
“I understand,” Admiral Neychev answered simply. He took a moment to ponder the situation, then addressed the entire group. “What's clear to me is that we are being played. Either the Confederation is being played in the same way, or they are going to great lengths to make it
look like that is the case. Whichever is true, our enemy has access to a tactic or range of tactics which are completely beyond our ability to emulate, but more troubling: until we can identify their endgame, we can't even begin to formulate a countermeasure.
“The political considerations are substantial, but we cannot allow them to cloud our judgment. Our duty is the protection of the Cooperative and its people, against whatever threat, and without regard for the political ramifications. There is a threat, and it is very real, but we cannot afford to misstep. If, and I stress 'if', the Confederation is not our true adversary in this conflict, then we have precious little time before a fatal error is forced upon us.
“Sojourn Ar'dak, am I correct in understanding that you developed a rapport with members of the Confederation's Jensaarai?”
She seemed reluctant to answer. “The few we interacted with seemed . . . considerate of our past pains.”
“If we could contact them, could you convince them to hear us out?”
Ar'dak and Lommite shared a peculiar look. It was possible they were communicating electronically, but their mechanical figures betrayed little of their dispositions.
“I don't know, but I'm willing to try,” Ar'dak said.
Neychev nodded. “Okay then, you're with me. Colonel Davaan,” he added, turning to Ink, “I know you don't like the exposure of being here, but 'extraordinary times' and so forth. Clear out for now, but I can't let you leave the planet; I might need you and your best. If you can make do with your B-team for whatever schemes you've got cooking up with the Azguard, that's fine by me. Otherwise, I'm shutting you down, and I don't think the shell game you're playing can afford to reveal who on your team has got more pull than me in the Coalition military.”
“I understand,” Ink answered stiffly. This was what his team was assembled for, anyway: to serve as a military counter to foreign Force orders, not to be anti-Dominion rescue rangers.
Ar'dak and Admiral Neychev broke off, but Ink put a hand on Lommite's arm to keep the squirrely Shard in place. Ink needed to get out of here, but he wasn't quite done yet. “I've been busy, you know, so I haven't had a lot of free time to reflect on the politics of the day, but I never quite understood why you would make the monumentally stupid decision to back the Sojourn admission into the Cooperative when we're
this close to war, and every provocation, regardless of the size, could just push us over the edge.”
“Is there a question that I am to infer, Ink?”
That smug bastard! “You've known all along, haven't you?”
“You don't have a translation matrix, so it can't be a hardware problem. Have you simply forgotten how words work, then?”
He wanted to find it amusing. Really, he did. But this . . . this was just too much. “The Sojourn are alive, Lommite; I can sense them in the Force. That one, Ar'dak; she's the first one I've met, and she's practically radiating Force energy. You felt it, didn't you? The first time you met one of them? You've been stringing us all along with this 'Synthoid Collective' nonsense, but that's what this is all really about.”
Ink was nodding at his own words by now, but Lommite tilted its head and shifted its shoulders slightly in an expression Ink understood as amusement. “Guardian Prime is not 'alive' in the sense you intend, Ink. You know this, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
Lommite straightened, took a short step forward to close the little distance between the two of them. “Then let me be clear: we are not like you. I do not, for example,
feel anything, ever.” Lommite raised its droid hands in the tiny space between the two of them. “These hands . . . I don't feel with these hands. The tactile sensors in these hands generate electronic impulses which flow over the surface of my crystalline body, generating tiny electromagnetic field variations that register within the network of crystalline lattices whose synthesis produces my mind. These ghostly, alien sensations, through tedious repetition and minute variation, generate and refine pathways in those lattices which link constellations of abstract notions into new, singular concepts in my mind, which I then label, for convenience, 'soft', 'hard', 'hot', and so on.
“The world that you experience, every sight, sound, or sensation that you have ever had, is nothing but an alien phantom conjured in my mind, which I deign to entertain for your benefit, that you might stand in front of me, inside this shell built to emulate standing, and converse with me through the conjuration of pressure waves inside the fluid medium that constitutes your preferred atmosphere.
“I tell you all of that so that you might understand: if you or those you serve ever move to subjugate Guardian Prime to your 'living' will and intention, then with these bare hands I will dismantle you, and the cohort of alien phantoms I entertain for the convenience of organics will be joined by 'blood' and 'bone' and 'meatbag'.”
Lommite took a step back, dropping its hands. “You don't get to decide what we are, Ink. The Cooperative doesn't get to decide. The Coalition House doesn't get to decide. The Force itself doesn't get to decide! We are what we choose to be. We are what we make ourselves become. If you can't accept that, then for your own sake you should stay far away from us, because like all living things, we evolve protections against threats to our survival.”
Lommite left without another word, the vagabond-Force-mystic-turned-Cooperative-officer Ink Davaan stunned to silence and stillness.