Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 2: Redemption (25 page)

"OK, OK... I'm doing it!" Ben yelled over Cat's
very realistic screams. Ben quickly located the clasps on each of the collars and placed one each of the others. As he finished Cat's thrashing subsided.

"Let that be a lesson to you my cybernetic friend. Each of these others I can control directly. Should you disobey me your human friend will suffer
greatly... Do we understand each other?"

"Yes"

"I'm sorry... what?"

"Yes Master"

Cat moved down the chow line with Ben at her side. Earlier in the day they had run into Sassi as they were marched down a hall between the Gym and medical. Sassi had indicated he would try to find them at the quarter day meal. The Modos fed them four times a day at exact quarter day increments.

Although they had been onboard the Modos ship for less than a week, their days had developed a pattern of sorts. They would endure a battery of physical endurance tests followed by a medical review. The Modos were efficient if nothing else. Cat was thankful for her AI, Cal. He kept close tabs on the plethora of fictitious biometric signatures her body supplied for the ever inquisitive Modos med-scanners.

"So," Ben said as he shuffled next to her. "Are you going to go with the grey gruel or the pink today?"

Cat smiled. "I was thinking of mixing the two today. After all... diversity is the spice of life"

He chuckled. "I respectfully disagree... The spice of life is cocoa for surely there is no greater sign of the divine then the presence of chocolate in this universe!"

"And no surer sign we are in hell without it" Cat added.

"You're a cheerful bunch" a familiar voice said from behind them.

As one, the two turned to see Sassi.

The bird-like Ashkelon was preening his low-frequency antenna. There was a thin metallic band around the base. He was being extremely careful not to touch it.

"I take it that silver ring is your control collar."

Sassi chuckled. Until you've seen a giant, silky, moth-like bird laugh you haven't experienced the fulness of life. In the Ashkelon, a chuckle took the form of a head to tail fur ripple that rolled from one end to the other and back.

"OK, I bite,"
Ben said. "Why are you laughing?"

Sassi calmed down and continued out loud "It is indeed
, as you suspected, a control collar. I made the mistake of touching it once right after they put it on. The pain was debilitating."

"And the memory of this makes you laugh?"

"I believe the humans have a similar condition known as a 'Laughter Stress Response'."

"Ah..." Ben said although it was obvious he still didn't understand.

Cat grabbed her tray. The 'slave inductees' as their captors called them were given forty minutes for meal breaks. Despite her earlier conversation with Ben, the food supplied was actually very good. Various animal-based proteins as well as a wide selection of fruits and vegetables were provided. The gruel to which Ben referred to earlier was a slightly fruity synthetic vitamin and enzyme concoction that was specifically tailored for each specie
s…
to aid in the digestion of these foodstuffs by their physiological systems. They were the only required item for each of the inductees to consume.  The gruel was race specific but... each race had at least two flavor choices. It seemed their captors wanted them well fed.

For Cat,
the gruel was superfluous because her Heshe nanites converted any available source material into whatever nutrient her body needed. The idea, however, was to not advertise her enhancements, so she obediently ate the required two teaspoons of gruel with each meal.

The three friends sat at a corner table in what passed for the Modos slave mess hall.

"They are certainly pushing us thru a wide variety of physical tests," Cat said as she chewed on a relatively decent pseudo-hamburger. She tried not to think about what creature might have been the source of the animal protein.

Sassi sipped at a glass of nectar and nibbled on a piece of something that looked like a blue frog leg.

"I think that may be about to change"  the Ashkelon said.

Ben nodded for him to continue.

Sassi put the glass down and used a delicate forward pincer to brush the fur around his mouthpart clean.

"They started pulling people from my cohort out of the gym.
When they came back, the word was they were given a series of puzzles to solve. Those that solved the puzzles were kept longer."

"Makes sense,"
Cat said. "Any organization like this would need to have some type of structure to include team leads etc. It's important we do well on those aptitude tests..."

To Ben, via her quantum link, she added '
It may be the only way we can get a chance to see through a viewport
.'

Sassi did not have a working quantum link,
so she had no secure way share this thought with him. Like all of the captives, he had an amulet that was the Modos tech equivalent of an encounter unit. It provided a very reasonable bidirectional translation. Cat was under no illusion however with regard to their privacy.

They had been on the ship for quite a while at this point,
but neither Ben nor Cat had been allowed to see a local star pattern. This was disconcerting.

As per their orders, both Ben and Cat were in regular contact with the GCP via their FTL links. This was possible it seemed because the Modos did not have access to FTL communication and,
so they were not aware that Ben had this capability built into his cybernetic systems. Unfortunately without a star pattern for reference, neither Ben nor Cat could report their location. In addition, the nature of quantum entangled communications meant the signal, available to any encoded receiver instantly, could not be used to triangulate their location.

"Doing well on an aptitude test should be a piece of cake for the famous Hyper-field physicist Dr. Catherine Kimbridge" Ben said with a grin.

"And Sassi was a professional navigational computer before he became a communications officer. Calculating hyperfield jump coordinates in your head has got to be useful for something," Cat offered.

"So the only one of us we need to worry about is our resident puppy dog..." Sassi added as his fur resumed its undulation.  "Maybe they'll just want to see if they can teach him to fetch or roll over."

"I'll roll YOU over," Ben said in mock anger while raising two of his six legs to make-believe strike his friend.

A buzzer sounded, indicating that the meal period had ended.

A 'bearephant' came into the mess hall.  A 'bearephant' was a massive bear-like animal that had an elephant-like nose that could be used for delicate manipulation. As far as Cat could determine they were not especially intelligent in their own right. However, that is not where the story ended.

Riding on the animal's shoulder was a sapphire glass bubble that protected the head a pinkish-grey aquatic quadruped that Cat knew to be their training master... a Modos named
Yhsif. Apparently in Modos society a functional name like Running Stream was reserved for the upper echelons of society.

The
bearephant and Yhsif  formed a sort of hybrid or symbiotic being. Two of the Modos tentacles extended out of ports in the sapphire dome and rested on the bearephants temples. Cat's Heshe enhanced eyes could make out ultrafine nettles that seemed to penetrate the animal's skin at those points.

The Modos supplied the brains while the
bearephant supplied land locomotion and dexterity. The crab suit Cat had seen when  Running Stream first came aboard the shuttle was reserved, it seemed, for extra-vehicular travel. This particular symbiote simply went by the name Master Yhsif.

Immediately Cat and the rest of her slave cohort got up from their tables and made their way towards the training master. It had only taken a few experiences with the control collars for most of the cohort to learn that obedience was not optional. Cat knew that most went along with the program... albeit with the thought of escaping as soon as possible.

The other human in their group, Dexter McFarland seemed to like pain... as he was forever pushing the envelope with their captures. Cat admired his spunk -- if not his wisdom -- in provoking an enemy that currently had the upper hand (or tentacle as the case may be).

The inductees, as the Modos insisted on calling the captives, were divided into two groups. One group headed back to the gym. The other group including Cat, Ben and Sassi were taken to a new room.
Yhsif led them in but then left immediately.

Cat surveyed the room.
Something approaching sixty computer consoles were evenly spaced in a large circle. As they entered the display on each of the terminals changed, and an image of each of them appeared on the screen. Cat walked over to the screen that held her image. Not knowing what to do, she reached out and touched it... she was rewarded with a mild shock. Immediately the image was replaced with another of the slaves... a Hopper.

Judging from the noises the others were making, it seemed Cat was not the only one receiving a shock.

She saw her image appear on the monitor next to hers. She reached out and touched it... the shock was stronger. Again the image disappeared. This time her face appeared on a screen two positions over.

Several of members of her cohort started screaming. They had refused to touch any screen after the first several shocks... apparently non-participation was not an option. Cat had a sudden thought and rather than touching the screen with her face on it she moved over six positions and touched that screen...
it went dark, but there was no accompanying shock.

"It's a prime number sequence!" Cat yelled. "Touch the next in the prime sequence and you'll be fine."

Ben and Sassi quickly complied but, based on the eruption of polyglotal swearing coming from the others in the room, they were the only ones. Cat started helping others, and Ben and Sassi quickly followed suit.

As soon as all the screens had blanked the lights in the room brightened and
Yhsif reentered the room.

"Inductees, assemble!"

Cat and the others grouped together in front of the bearephant. Cat's Modos translator amulet echoed everything Yhsif said.

"Inductees 6, 9 and 4 stay here. The rest of yo
u…
report to physical testing."

Cat almost smiled. She was prisoner number six. Ben and Sassi were nine and four respectively.

When the others had exited the room, the bearephant turned to face the three GCP officers.

"Please explain your performance."

Cat had to remind herself that she was speaking to the domed hump on the animal's shoulder. It was unnerving to speak with a creature and not look at its face.

"I'm not sure I understand the question."

Yshif shuffled over to the nearest console.  The bearephant reached out with its trunk to tap a screen.

"You solved the logic problem. Most inductees eventually do... but you solved it almost immediately. Your entire cohort solved it."

Cat smiled. "I have an advanced degree in a math intensive science. Sassi is a math prodigy from a race that excels at unassisted complex math. Ben has a cybernetic brain. It should be no surprise we could solve a simple prime number sequence."

Yhsif
paused a moment to digest what she had said.

"You misunderstand me," he said finally.

The bearephant waved its trunk in a manner that reminded Cat of a hand waving dismissively.

"You misunderstand me. All the defectives solved the problem. How?"

Cat raised an eyebrow. "Defectives?"

"My apologies... a translation error. The word I meant was 'Inductee'."

Ben raised a paw. The Bearephant looked at him.

"We helped the others... it was the right thing to do... your test was hurting them."

"And this justified tainting our test?"

As one
Sassi, Ben and Cat asked... "yes"

Yhsif
nodded in a very human gesture.

"You will come with me now." The massive
bearephant turned towards the door.

Cat and the others followed. The halls they were traveling through were unfamiliar. The medal alloy on their surface a burnished light blue hue. Periodically
Yhsif would pause and the bearephants trunk would reach out and touch a series of buttons on a recessed wall panel. Always, when he did this,  a door would open in what had seemed like an otherwise featureless wall.

She watched the symbiote interact with the host... more to the point she noticed how it didn't interact. There was no movement; no sound; no visible signal of any sort. If Cat had to guess she would say the tentacles were establishing a direct neural link with the host...the so called
bearephant.

She wondered how far the connection went.  For example, could the Modos see, hear and feel through the connection? Unfortunately, these were questions for another day. They seemed to be arriving at their destination.

  A final door opened and the briny smell of ocean fill the corridor. The room, if you could call it that was massive. The floor was covered with a black sand that reminded Cat of some of the beaches in Hawaii. The dimensions were, in a word, astounding. If Cat had to guess, the famous Mall of America could fit within the cavernous  void with amble room to spare. Most of the space was filled with the largest artificial ocean Cat had ever seen. There were numerous outcroppings of rocks breaking the surface of water near the shore. Gentle waves lapped the beach.

On each of the rocks were several of the gray-pink Modos. Many were a deeper shade of red. On earth a number of plants employed photosynthesis based on
anthocyanins rather than chlorophyll which gave the leafs a distinctive reddish-blue color. Cat's enhanced senses and embedded AI did a spectral analysis which confirmed her suspicions. Absorption was occurring in the green and yellow wavebands of light... roughly 500 to 600 nanometers... exactly what one would expect for anthocyanins. It seemed the Modos were capable of photosynthesis.

The sight was amazing but by no means the most amazing. Above the water was a open glass dome. The black of space matched the black of the beach.

Glancing up Cat saw an amazing sight. The ceiling was transparent. A wide expanse of stars were visible. She immediately flagged the GCP via her quantum link. This was the break they were waiting for. The ship was apparently rotating because the new stars continuously came into view as she watched.

As she watched an
amazing sight came into view. A massive orange accretion disc surrounding a black hole rotated into view. All three friends paused to take in the sight. A pair of helical plasma jets streamed from poles at ninety degrees to the accretion disc.

Yhsif
saw his charges pause and looked up at the view that had captivated the others.

"Ah... I believe your people call this Sagittarius A."

Cat looked at Yhsif. "Sagittarius A is a complex high intensity radio source located near the center of the Milky-way. It involves the remnants of three separate stellar events. This cannot be your destination... No habitable planets could exist anywhere near this area of space." 

"I applaud your deductive skills Number Six... Or should I call you Commodore?"

Cat turned to face another bearephant symbiote. The host was dressed in a uniform that was far more ornate than Yhsif's.  The voice was completely unfamiliar and rather than coming from the Modos translator amulet they all wore... it was an organically produced sound produced by whatever the bearephant used for a larynx.

"You seem to have me at a disadvantage"
Cat said with a hint of a smile.

The
bearephant echoed her smile. Yhsif's host had never given any sign of facial expressions. This was something new.

"Ah... yes. The last time you saw me I was wearing a combat suit. Allow me to introduce
ourself. We are Captain Running Stream."

"We?"

The bearephant's smile deepened. "As you may have noticed, there are two of us here. My language has terms for individuals, pairs and symbiotic couples that function as one... there are no direct English equivalents."

"I think I understand" Cat said. "We just met a race that formed a
hive collective. In that state they functioned as one even though they consisted of billions of sentient individuals. You and your... companion are on the other end of 'group mind' spectrum. Will you entertain another question?" Before he could answer she waved her hand in an encompassing arc... "This is impressive. I assume there is a purpose for showing us all of this?"

"Indeed. Master Yhsif tells me you are the first to pass our induction exams and that you did it in record time. You will find the Modos can be very accommodating when we have reason to be. All intelligent creatures have some sense of curiosity therefore we decided to show you were we are...  and were we
are going." Running Stream finished with a broad and genuinely warm smile.

Cat was forced to admit the effect was disarming. "I notice your
symbiosis seems to be much more complete than we have seen among the Modos we have been exposed to."

  "Ah..." Running Stream said with a flourish of his trunk.  "I, meaning the Modos partner, have been paired with my big
Suhtii friend here for so long that the neural connections are fully integrated. He and I share every thought... every sensory experience. As odd as it must sound to you, together we are one... we function as one... we think as one... and we react as one."

"Fair enough... That being the case, "
and because I find the 'we' confusing
, "I'll refer to you in the singular... does your 'Suhtii' have its own name?"

The
bearephant rocked back and forth on its two massive hind legs. Cat became concerned that she had somehow given offense. She would later learn that among the coupled Modos, the rocking was a form of silent laughter.

"Delightful! I can't remember the last time someone cared to ask," Running Stream roared. "The Suhtii's don't think of names in the same way as you and I. His name is more of a purpose. In your language it would be 'He who speaks'. His spouse is called 'she who pours'."

Gesturing towards the clear dome above them Running Stream continued... "In answer to your first question Sagittarius A is a door... Not a destination.

***

"What do you mean 'They disappeared?'" Admiral Faragon yelled the moment he walked onto the bridge of the GCP Yorktown.

Captain Ruck swiveled his command chair to face the admiral. His hands worked a holographic 3D display that floated in front on him and rotated with the seat as he turned.

"We were tracking them via their commlinks. Cat and Ben managed to get us a beautiful scan of Sagittarius A. I immediately dispatched two cloaked pinnaces per our plan. Commander Kirkland's cloaked pinnace arrived first and force-docked onto the Modos slaver near what we are assuming is a shuttle port. The active nanite skin carried out a perfect ship-to-ship dock and overrode the Bluefin's sensors. Captain Valen's Honey Dipper stood off ten kilometers and remained cloaked."

"So what happened?"

"Well there was no indication that they were detected if that is your question. At 16:47 the Bluefin maneuvered near to a group of asteroids and latched onto a massive 48 ton iron-nickel rock. Ricky pulled the Honey Dipper into a distance of three kilometers to try and get a better view of what was going on with the Bluefin. As he got close, the Modos ship created the largest hyperfield envelop I've ever seen right on top of the Black hole's event horizon. When the all three ships jumped we lost contact."

"How is that possible?"

Captain Ruck swiped a hand across the holographic display to dismiss it. His brown eyes met the admiral's. "Sir, the signal was lost instantaneously from all three ships. They were either all vaporized in exactly the same moment or..."

"Or what Captain?"

"Or they jumped into a parallel universe. A universe from which our entangled quantum pairs are no longer entangled."

The Admiral rocked back on the heels of his feet.
Cat and the others were on their own. God help them
.

***

Admiral Faragon set his coffee down. He was in the Captain's mess with a collection of electronic tablets scattered across the table. He shuffled them about with his hand, looking for one he had been reading a few moments before. He was trying to make sense of what had happened to his officers. The Ship's sentient AI had confirmed the likelihood of a jump between universes. As a result the admiral had spent the last day reading everything he could find on the subject.

It seemed the theory had first been proposed by a big brain type from MIT in the early 1980's.  A physicist by the name of Alan Guth came up with the idea of parallel universes in a theory which, to the admiral's way of thinking, sounded more like a discussion of economics than cutting edge physics.  The formal name of his theoretical work was the 'inflationary universe theory'. Apparently it opened the door to a whole host of things including parallel universes as well as the doctoral work Cat Kimbridge had done on hyperfield dynamics.

Shortly after Dr. Guth's first paper on the subject, a Russian scientist by the name of Andrei Linde extended the theory by proposing inflationary universes might exist within coherent bubbles. The current thinking was that when bubbles touched each other it could become possible to jump between bubbles, across the joint membrane, using a hyperfield conduit. A massive gravitational body would weaken the fabric of space-time and greatly reduce the energy required to make such a jump. This would explain the need to utilize the gravity well of a massive black hole along the lines of Sagittarius A.

The real question was... armed with this knowledge and an understanding of what had happened... was there anything that the Admiral or the GCP could do to aid Cat? The only answer he could come up with was a very dissatisfying 'no'. 

***

Ricky Valen whistled softly while looking out the nanite-infused transparent aluminum view-screen. Normally he would simply have pulled up a visual of the ship's exterior on a high-definition video display but certain sights needed to be seen with the naked eye. This was one such sight.

An undulating light display surrounded the ship. He could see the massive Modos craft called the Bluefin just ahead. The colors swirled and shifted from rutty reds through painfully bright violets and everything in between. He had been maneuvering the Honey Dipper closer to the Bluefin to get a better sense of why it had latched onto that asteroid when a supermassive hyperfield surrounded all of them.

He was glad that the Creator was in a generous mood when this happened because his ship was in the shadow of giant rock when they entered the jump-point. From what his ship's AI was reporting most of that asteroid had been ablated by their passage into whatever this place was.

Normally a hyperfield jump was instantaneous... you left point A and arrived at point B in essentially zero time. Wherever they were now, this was not the case. In addition,  there seemed to be sense of forward motion... even acceleration -- like they were falling into a gravity well. The problem was they had been doing it for hours.

He turned to face his ship's avatar. The Honey Dipper had been augmented earlier in the year with top-of-the-line Heshe nanites and the associated Heshe AI to control them. Cat had cloned her systems as a way of repairing the ship when it had crash landed on a heavy world called Kepler-47b. The result was a ship with a fully sentient AI that had it's own opinions and sensibilities. 

Jack's habit of always renaming his ship prior to each mission had come to an abrupt end as the new AI with a distinct personal sense of identity and refused to accept name changes. He supposed he was lucky the upgrade had not occurred on the previous mission when he had flown the ship under the name 'Diaper Rash'.

The avatar was a recent addition. Honey Dipper had decided Ricky needed a crew and so the AI adopted what it assumed would be a suitably compatible persona based on Ricky Valen's psychological profile. The result was standing next to him by the view port. Honey, as he had taken to calling her... and she was most definitely a 'her', was a five foot seven inch petite brunet android with a southern drawl and an acid wit. She was not human but it would take an x-ray to tell for certain.

"Hey Honey... are the sensors telling us any more?"

"Cap'n... they are telling us plenty... just not a lot of it is making any sense."

"Thoughts as to what to do... do we just sit here or should we try to open our own hyperfield bubble?"

"First I respectfully point out... you'ns being the captain and all... that we are standing... not sitting." She smiled as she said this. Ricky started to make a smart retort but she continued before he could get the first of several choice words out... "I would not recommend taking any action. I suspect we are in some type of extra-dimensional space."

"What does that mean for us mere mortals?... Does it mean the laws of physics as we know them are no longer applicable or some such?"

"The laws won't necessarily vary but their prominence may become secondary to other extra-dimensional interactions we are unfamiliar with. Gravity might pull at you but be totally counteracted by false vacuum interactions or the like. The point is... the hyperfield bubble that is enveloping us at the current moment is probably the only thing that is allowing our systems to function. We probably just have to ride this one out."