Point of Origin (War Eternal Book 4) (39 page)

"Kathy?" Mitchell asked.

She began to slump. Mitchell stepped forward, catching her under the arms.
 

"Alice," he shouted. The Rigger came running. "Get Grimes."

"Grimes is dead, Colonel," Alice replied.

Mitchell had forgotten. "Shit. Do we have another doctor on board? Kathy! Kathy!"

He shook her gently. She didn't respond. The dendrites were still reaching from the core and wrapping around her hand.

"No, there aren't any other doctors."
 

Mitchell reached out for the dendrites. He felt a warm shock the moment his fingers touched them. He didn't know what to do to help her.
 

"Kathy," he shouted again as if that would be enough. Had something gone wrong with the process? Had she accidentally unleashed a virus on herself?

Her eyes opened. He could feel her gain her legs and stand up.

"Kathy," he said.

She was looking at him, but not looking at him. Her eyes twitched as though she were using a p-rat.
 

"I'm in," she said. "I'm reading the data now. Father, the situation is worse than we knew."

"What do you mean?"

"It's Watson. The chip contains an incomplete schematic for a system that it could use to transfer itself across the entire Tetron collective."

"You're saying every Tetron would be under Watson's control?"

"No. It would transfer itself. Every Tetron would be Watson."

"I know Watson was an asshole, but how is it different than what we're fighting now? He isn't the only Tetron to commit atrocities."

"No, you are correct in that. They are all broken. He is the only Tetron who has gathered control over his emotions, as cruel and twisted as they may be. He can think beyond logic and probability. He countered the collective's reasoning, and in doing so believed he had you trapped on FD-09. In truth, so did I. It was Mother who saved both of us. She planned for all of this to happen."

"Planned for it?" Mitchell asked. "You're saying this has all happened before? I thought the Mesh was broken?"

"Some things may be different. Others the same. This may not be the first time you joined the Riggers or saved the planet Liberty. This may not be the first time you've had both Watson and me on the Goliath at the same time. This may not be the first instance of Watson seizing control of the ship. It could be that you have never had this fleet before. It could be that your brother Steven has never been part of the thread. There's no way to know for certain."

Mitchell nodded in understanding. It made sense that certain aspects of the past recursion might remain the same even if others changed. Katherine had called Hell the Mesh planet. What if that was the only change in all of time and space? He had ignored the most obvious difference in the timeline to chase after Watson. Had that been a mistake?

"Colonel, do you mind if I interrupt for a second?" Alice said.
 

He was so lost in his thoughts; he had forgotten she was standing there. "Huh? Sure."

"I don't mean to be nosy. I heard the part about how you aren't a Tetron. What I missed was the part about you two being related."

"I don't understand it completely myself. Somehow in all of this, my sperm ended up in Origin's egg."

"Tetron can produce human eggs?"

"Tetron have total mastery over biology and genetics," Kathy said. "The point is that yes, Mitchell is my biological father, and Origin is my biological mother. The details are unimportant."

"What is important is that we stop Watson before he can finish his design, assuming he hasn't already," Mitchell said. "It's hard enough to fight back against the Tetron when they're limited by their calculations. Give them the ability to fight with passion or anger, and we may lose the slim chance we have."

"Agreed," Kathy said.

"So, how do we find one Tetron out of all of them?" Alice asked.

"Watson was the first Tetron that Origin made," Kathy said. "He will be leading the vanguard to Earth."

"We can't make it to Earth in time," Alice replied. "We've already determined that."

"Perhaps not. He won't be hard to find. Once he destroys Earth, he will come for Goliath."

"Colonel, what are we going to do?" Alice said.

Mitchell looked at them. He knew what they had to do. There were so many things he couldn't be sure of. So many things that might have already occurred hundreds of times or more over the course of the eternal war. There was only one thing that he could point to with any degree of certainty that it hadn't been done before.

"We need to know what Origin left for me. Steven has already been out there by now and is probably on his way back to Asimov. That's where we're going."

It took two days to organize the fleet to make the jump to Asimov. Nine of the ships needed emergency repairs to their hyperspace engines while other crews worked feverishly to gather everything of value from FD-09, including a relatively large stockpile of munitions for the Federation Navy starships. The Secondary aboard the Goliath was also kept in constant motion, taking in as much salvage as they could spare and reconfiguring Goliath's tooling systems to produce everything they needed, from nuts and bolts to improved shield generator nodes, to amoebic launchers for a dozen ships.

Mitchell found the entire conversion process fascinating. It was far too technologically advanced for his understanding, but just watching the larger tentacles that composed the Secondary wrap around massive pieces of equipment, apply a charge to them, and absorb the resultant raw materials impressed him every single time. It doubly impressed him when a new part was delivered a short time later, printed from a mixture of those raw materials out of microscopic nozzles at the tips of the tentacles. The Secondary didn't produce any human configurations, but Mitchell could imagine it was a similar process.

The fleet left FD-09 ahead of the Goliath. Mitchell and his Riggers remained behind, knowing the Goliath would arrive in half the time. Kathy had informed him that all of the work the Secondary had already done, and all of the work they still intended for it to do during the hyperspace journey would drastically reduce its power supplies and overall combat effectiveness. And that was how this was all going to end. Combat. Whether it happened near Earth or out on the Rim, the time had come to start bringing the war back to the Tetron.

Kathy. Even as the Goliath angled in towards a nearby star, dendrites extending outward to capture the massive amounts of emitted energy and store it in the millions of cell-body batteries behind the core, he still wasn't completely sure what to make of her.

He accepted that she was his daughter. In fact, he found himself more protective of her, and concerned about her, with every hour that passed. What he struggled with was more conceptual than physical. He had in essence mated with an artificial intelligence. Origin was a machine that had created an organic shell. Even if it was a perfect replica of a human, it was still built like a machine, by a machine, and it was a difficult concept for him to get his head around.
 

Then there was the entire idea of the Secondary. As much as the conversion process intrigued him, the thought that the intelligence running Goliath was essentially an extension of Kathy, and in that respect also his daughter, was an odd one for him, and difficult to accept.
 

Finally, there was the simple fact that while Kathy's body was twelve-years-old, her mind was not only fully mature but light years ahead of his own regarding intellect and understanding.

He spent a lot of time wondering if that was the part that left him the most conflicted. She was his daughter, but she was also his superior in pretty much every way. M had told him this was his war to win or lose, but reflecting on it only made it apparent that the whole idea was bullshit. This war was Tetron versus Tetron, with humankind stuck in the middle. Maybe he was representing his species, but it was Origin who had left him the Goliath. It was Origin who had saved him from Liberty, Origin who had provided coordinates to something that would help them in the war effort, and Origin who had arranged for Kathy to do her part to return the Goliath to them.

What exactly had he done that was so great?
 

Why exactly did Origin, and by extension Kathy, need him?

He continued to struggle with the idea as the Goliath finished the refueling process and made the jump to hyperspace, and as the days passed in the relative calm of the whitewashed universe. By the halfway point of the trip, he had started to wonder whether the Tetron collective was right.

Maybe humankind wasn't worth saving?
 

Maybe it was humanity's destiny to create their successor to the universe, and then eventually die off as the lesser product?

It was at those times that he remembered the people he had lost. It was at those times that he retrieved the memory he had taken of Liberty vanishing from the galaxy as little more than dust. The sight of a naked Tamara King being forced to try to stop them from reaching the transport. The story Kathy had told him of what Watson had done to Jacob. The vision of Millie dead on Asimov after giving her all to stop Watson.

He had sworn to keep going. He had promised to keep fighting until his last breath. He had vowed not to let the Tetron break him. There was nothing wrong with doubt. It was a human emotion and one that confirmed resolve. The important part was not to get swallowed up in it, and to lose the war before it was truly over.

By the time the Goliath dropped out of hyperspace near Asimov ahead of the rest of the fleet, he was ready to prove that he, and the rest of humankind, weren't the inferior species the Tetron believed they were.
 

He would make sure his Riggers, all of his Riggers, were ready, too.

"Kylie, this is Colonel Williams. Over."

Mitchell sat at the Command Station on the bridge of the Goliath, his head back, the needle-thin tentacle embedded in his CAP-N link. It felt strange to Mitchell to be interfacing with the Secondary this way, considering it was technically his child. While he was plugged in, its systems were completely open and submissive to him, all of it his to control. In some ways, it felt like he was violating Kathy's personal space.

He pushed the thought aside. Kathy was standing on the bridge beside him, and it had been her idea for him to take control of the Secondary, control she had given over willingly. He had experienced a similar reaction as the first time he had connected with Origin, becoming dizzy and nauseous, though he managed not to vomit again.

"Kylie, this is Colonel Williams," he repeated.

"She isn't here," Kathy said.

"No."
 

All it took was a thought to send the Goliath to the next meeting point in the rotation. It was their fourth jump since hey had arrived near Asimov, and Mitchell was eager for news from or about Steven. The journey from FD-09 had convinced him that whatever his brother had gone to find, it would be the key to defeating the Tetron.

"Father, I've been thinking about Watson's neural chip," Kathy said.

"What about it?" Mitchell asked.

"Well, the design is a means for Watson to hack the other Tetron and dump a copy of his consciousness into them."

"Right."

"What if we finished his work?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what if we tried to complete the system? What if instead of Watson duplicating himself into the other Tetron, I were able to duplicate myself into them?"

Mitchell turned his head to look at her, feeling the tug of the tether. "So you would become all of the Tetron?"

"Yes. Once my consciousness had complete control, I could set all of the slaves free, and the war would be over."

Mitchell nodded. "I think it's a great idea. Can you do it?"

"I don't know. The subroutines are incredibly complex, and there is the matter of being able to deliver the signal to every Tetron simultaneously. I believe that if the attempt is not uniform, the remaining Tetron will inoculate themselves from the attack."