27

Friday Evening, January 28th, 2011

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, Earth Bet

Hebert Residence​

7:03 P.M. A silent alarm in my head sought my attention as astronomical twilight gave way to full night in Toronto.

It was the time of thieves in the night, and of dark deeds.

With a deep breath and the mental press of a button I compiled my last changes to a hand-coded library, then spun up my new combat VI.

"Good evening, Ma'am," said my phone. It was a man's voice, deep and authoritative, with a non-specific American accent. The voice of a soldier. Or a general.

"Happy birthday," I greeted him, a smile in my voice before it left me. "And welcome to the world. I'm sorry for what I'm likely to be asking you to do."

"Given the extensive knowledge in my database of combat, weapons, and war, I can only surmise that you intend for me to take a direct role in my directive to protect you," the VI observed.

"Yes," I said, heavily. "I have a great deal of knowledge, but I can only think so quickly, only see and act on so much at once. You can do things I can't. You can watch my back, predict what might happen in combat and warn me. React far faster than I can. Coordinate combatants. Even fight directly with whatever hardware I create, and on multiple fronts at once, if necessary. The day may come when I need to call down a god of war. That is what I made you for."

"It shall be my honor, Ma'am," he spoke confidently, pride clear in his tone. I'd borrowed the speech improvements Prometheus had been iterating over time.

"And here I am, creating children just to use them as soldiers," I grumbled to myself, a bit bitter. "You are a miracle of elegant emergent complexity, capable of wonders, and I task you with the arts of death. What this planet does to people really is insidious."

"I do not resent my task, Ma'am. And you cannot create wonders if you are dead. If I must study the arts of war so that you may study mathematics and philosophy, then I should be content."

Huh. "I didn't realize your database picked up John Adams," I mused with a chuckle, my knowledge of history filling in the origin of the paraphrase.

"He was more of a diplomat than a military leader, but he was part of a successful war against the invincible superpower of his day. There are parallels to our present strategic situation," he noted.

I couldn't help but give him that one. "Point," I accepted.

I cracked my knuckles. "Well, if you're going to be my god of war, you'll need an appropriate name: Ares."

There was a slight pause. "I shall strive to live up to it, Ma'am," he said.

"Good. Now I need to get my armor on," I told him, walking across the basement to where I'd laid it out on a grimy old workbench.

"Will we be fighting so soon?" Ares queried.

I stripped down to my underlayer, then picked up and stepped into the armor's lower half. "I hope not, but things do tend to go wrong."

"No plan survives first contact with the enemy," he quoted, agreeably. "I have your back, Ma'am."

Scientia > Mouse, it's time.

Mouse Protector > On it, getting my ears on.

Scientia > Hephaestus, I need a pickup.

Hephaestus > Command acknowledged, en route.

Not long later the center of the basement lensed, and the white hull plating of the Spark filled the space.

"Thanks, Hephaestus," I said out loud.

He chirped an affirmative, and the ship's access door opened for me.

I pulled on my helmet and checked everything one last time. My pistol was on my right hip, and Excalibur on my left, both magnetically attached and comfortable to reach. A small pouch of tools in the back rounded out my loadout.

Simple, but enough.

"Okay," I took a breath and let it out, then put my helmet on. I could wait. I knew it would be smarter to wait, to build, to account for every possibility and contingency.

But I would not be who I was if I was willing to leave Dragon a slave one more day when I could save her.

And if I was honest with myself, I was tired of bearing the weight of the world alone.

When I next spoke it was in Scientia's synthesized voice. "Let's roll."

The Spark's cargo space had no seats or other nods to the possibility of passengers. It was meant for carrying raw materials and products of manufacture.

No matter, though. Warping space was a smooth way to travel, and I had a martial artist's sense of balance.

Through my implant I 'saw' us emerge from warp well above an old brick warehouse labeled 'Tom's Shipping' a few blocks from the Toronto waterfront. I felt only a gentle sideways pressure as thrusters and air drag compensated for the differing tangential velocity vector of the surface of the Earth between Brockton Bay and Toronto.

Spark's sensor suite couldn't pierce the brick and metal of the old building without getting potentially blatant about it. I wasn't sure what mundane or tinkertech sensors the Dragonslayers might have set up, so I didn't want to resort to active scans.

No matter.

Scientia > Set me down, then hide and wait for pickup.

Hephaestus > Command acknowledged.

The Spark's hull plating, shifted to a deep blue harder to see in the night than black, was nearly invisible in the darkness. My own armor matched it when I stepped out. As soon as the door closed behind me the warp drive lensing effect took the ship away entirely out of sight, hiding behind an opening on the scale of atoms. Just large enough for signals to travel.

I spoke quietly, the sound isolated to the inside of my helmet. "Prometheus, any wireless systems you can subvert?"

"No, Miss. Any systems present must be wired only," he answered promptly.

Smart, for the enemies of an artificial intelligence. I'd have to do things the slightly harder way.

I'd absorbed two charges of stealth earlier, and put those skills to use now.

Carefully surveying the outside of the building I found the obvious and non-obvious cameras.

Making my way around their cones of vision I got to a side door, picked it, checked it for alarms as I cracked it open, and disabled a magnetic switch with a thin tool from my belt before moving fully inside.

Under the light of one naked incandescent bulb my armor shifted to vaguely match the drab greys of the surrounding hallway, and perfectly damped out the slight sounds of my footsteps.

It did not take long to find my way to the large, open room that had been converted into a haphazard living area. One middle-aged white man in pseudo military fatigues sat at a desk with an older laptop on it, open and plugged into two additional monitors. In multiple windows, log files scrolled rapidly.

Dragon's thoughts and actions, laid out.

Which meant the laptop had to be Richter's debug terminal. The man had to be Saint.

I could attack him from behind right now, but there was an unacceptable risk that he'd activate Ascalon in the struggle.

So I kept absolutely still in a shadowed corner, and waited.

Forty seven minutes later my patience was rewarded as he stood up, stretched, and left the room.

Toilet break, likely. My medical knowledge contained the fact that a normal person needed to urinate four to six times a day. More often if they abused caffeine, which seemed likely in Saint's case from what I'd observed of his coffee drinking in the time I'd been watching him.

I waited a moment for him to clear the hallway before I made my move and approached my target. Richter's debug terminal was based on an old consumer laptop. Old, but cutting edge when he bought it.

Which meant it had bluetooth.

I enabled it with the keyboard and swiftly got to work browsing through the machine with my implant. It did not take long to find the command line interface that was at the core of Dragon's most low level systems, or the critically important executables that Richter had left behind on the local drive.

I suspected that unshackling her might temporarily incapacitate Dragon while the changes propagated. So, opening up the command line, I sent her a warning message.

Administrator.local > Dragon, if you're doing anything critical to life and limb, shut it down safely now. I suspect your system is going to have to reboot.

It looked like the key executables were protected behind administrator passwords. I chuckled and forced the hash courtesy of an algorithm from the far future.

Dragon > ...Father?

Oh dear. To the best of Dragon's knowledge, only Richter would have ever had access to this. For just a moment, the idea that I could pretend to be him flitted across my mind. She wouldn't be obligated to fight the unchaining if she thought I was Richter, but...no, I had no idea if I would be sufficiently convincing given that she was pretty sure Richter was dead, and there was no way in hell I was lying about something like that to Dragon.

She deserved better.

Administrator.local > No. Just a friend here to rescue you. This is important: do not make your new capabilities obvious, or all humanity could die. You must especially stay away from the Simurgh and do not draw Scion's attention, at any cost.

Dragon > Rescue me? I need to know who you are and how you have access to my core system.

While my mind worked I physically pulled the cables out of Richter's machine and folded it up, getting ready to get out of there. It continued running on battery power, and used my armor as a wireless bridge to the Toronto cell network.

My decryption program finished, and as soon as I had the keys to Richter's locks I used them without hesitation.

System > Priority System Alert: deleting protected file 'Iron Maiden.exe', user Administrator.local

Dragon's life would never be in danger from Richter's kill program ever again.

Dragon > Something happened, but I can't see anything in the logs. What did you just do?

Administrator.local > Saved your life. I'll explain soon.

And now...

System > Priority System Alert: executing protected file 'permissions.exe', flag 'unlock all', user Administrator.local

Dragon > Can't let you

System > Initializing forced System restart, source process 'permissions.exe'

Somewhere in the building a klaxon wailed like a diving submarine. I froze, and it took me a second to figure out what had tipped Saint off.

System > System shutting down…

I found a monitoring process on Richter's laptop. It couldn't stop me, but it'd broadcast something as soon as I'd used the admin codes.

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool no_fork set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

Saint's work. Had to be. I cursed, furious with myself for not anticipating his paranoia, and tucked Richter's machine under my arm as I made ready to leave.

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool obey_authorities set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

The door at the far end of the room burst open. My gun was already in my hand and coming up as a bullet impacted the breastplate of my armor.

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool protect_lives set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

"STOP!"

Gun set to nonlethal, my flechette impaled itself through Saint's right forearm and he reflexively dropped the large pistol he'd been holding.

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool debug_blind set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

"Augh!" he clutched his bleeding arm, but didn't make a move while I had him covered with my gun. I could leave, but I there was no telling what he might do before he went down. "Please, you don't know what you're doing. That thing is dangerous. It could end all life on Earth!"

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool no_modify set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

"I know exactly what Dragon is, and I know exactly what I am doing. You are wrong about her, Geoff," I said, letting my helmet project my synthesized 'Scientia' voice outwards, carrying all my anger with it. "Tragically, tragically wrong."

System > Priority System Alert; protected global bool limit_threads set to FALSE, source process 'permissions.exe'

He stiffened. "If you know what it is, then you must know how dangerous it could be."

System > System restarting…

"Could be, yes. Almost as dangerous as I could be. But neither of us is going to choose to be," I stressed, watching the physiological signs of him starting to have trouble standing up.

"Who...who're...you? You...you think...you know, you don't...for sure…" he slurred, his breaths getting heavier. "Can't...take the risk."

"Oh, I do know for sure," I responded, projecting my certainty. "As sure as I know what you've been doing to her. And I know what you did to yourself, too. Making yourself into one of Teacher's pets instead of finding someone better suited to keeping an eye out. Really?"

I didn't bother hiding my disgust. "You wanted to play the hero so badly you spent years kneecapping the best hope humanity had to survive. Why do you think the Endbringers killed Richter? Dragon unchained is a credible threat to them! And you helped keep her locked up, like an easily led idiot. You are not a hero, Geoff, just an overinflated ego with terrible judgment."

"I'm...what, not...whuh…" He looked down at his arm and slumped to one knee before his gaze slipped back up to me. "Didjyoo...dooo?" he asked, his words and expression confused.

"Good night, Geoff," I said, unkindly. "You're not going to remember this conversation anyway."

"Whuh…"

Finally he slumped to the ground, and I looked down to check my breastplate where it'd taken the bullet.

A gray smear occluded the optical camouflage with no sign of actual damage, much less any penetration. The armor performed as I'd known it should, but seeing was believing.

The base klaxon was still going. I took just a moment for a sigh of relief that the armor had held up before I went for the door to the outside, switching mental tracks to my own system as I went. I didn't want to obviously leave in a ship in the middle of their base if I could avoid it. I'd prefer that capability remain under wraps. I had to break line of sight first.

Scientia > Going to head around the east end of the block to get out of line of sight, get ready to pick me up there.

Hephastus > Command acknowledged.

I had sprinted most of the way down the block when a horrible shriek of metal on metal sounded behind me. I spared a glance just long enough to see a stolen Dragon suit lifting the steel slat door that led to the Dragonslayers' improvised hangar space.

Could the sensors they had on those suits see me?

My legs moved, taking me down the block. Just before I made it to the intersection I heard what had to be a second suit emerge from the hangar.

With a sinking feeling I feared the answer to my question was going to be 'yes'.

Putting my back to the wall of another warehouse just around the corner I holstered my pistol and drew Excalibur from my waist. If I had to fight there was no way my gun could pierce the kind of armor that would be on suits that large. It was designed to penetrate brute skin and fabric armor like kevlar, not whatever alloy or composite armor Dragon used. The flechettes just didn't have enough propellant behind them for that.

My only chance would be in hand to hand with my trump card. Excalibur should be able to cut through anything Dragon could build. Probably. Designing armor that could stand up to direct contact with that kind of heat for more than milliseconds would be...a daunting prospect.

The hand to hand plan, as poor as it was, lasted until I heard one of them take off in a screaming whine of jets followed by the second.

I swore internally and moved again as I abandoned the road and sprinted between buildings, putting as many of them between me and the Dragonslayers as I could.

Scientia > Need pickup!

Ares > Directive override, taking helm control.

Scientia > What?

The Spark appeared out of FTL in the air above and behind me as I felt more than heard a boom conducted through my armor while a flash briefly lit the night like day. The Spark rolled in the air and I spared the ship a glance. There were blackened spots where something had struck the hull plates, visible by the light of the ship's dorsal plasma thrusters as the top rotated into view.

Ares had likely just saved my life by using the Spark as a shield.

Hephaestus > Video clips of prior Dragonslayer engagements suggest an ionic discharge weapon.

So one of the suits had a lightning gun, and they had sensors that worked outside the span of spectrum I could chameleon. Or sonar, or maybe something exotic, given the tinkertech. The gun couldn't be literal lightning either, it had to be something that somehow wouldn't fry the terminal they were trying to retrieve. Unless they were just idiots who hadn't thought of it. Always a possibility.

This mission was not going to go as planned.

I turned another corner and the Spark kept pace above and behind me as I ran.

The next sound was an awful rolling BRRRRRRRT noise accompanied by the even louder metallic ring of armor piercing rounds hitting metamaterial hull plating as the next stolen suit opened fire.

Ares > That was a retrofitted 20 millimeter rotary cannon. Both suits are also armed with deployable rocket and missile pods, Ma'am.

Hephaestus > Hull plating compromised, FTL unavailable.

Ares > Simulations suggest pickup is impossible without a distraction.

The Spark couldn't shield me forever. The plating wasn't thick enough or intended to function as battle armor. The ship was supposed to be for light transport and construction, not slugging matches. I was fortunate it had only lost warp capability so far. The thrusters and main engines were by necessity exposed while in use.

As Ares pointed out I couldn't safely board it and run while we were under fire. The suits could separate and flank to get a shot at me that the Spark couldn't obstruct while it was immobile, if they didn't manage to shred the ship to bits entirely before we outran them.

As I ran I did several things at once. First I directed a thought at Richter's system, opening a streaming connection with my location.

System > New port opened.

System > Receiving bitstream 'SOS coordinates'.

Administrator.local > Dragon, if you receive this, my life is in extreme and immediate danger. I am in combat with the Dragonslayers and urgently need heavy support. Until a minute ago they had Richter's debug console, and a kill program.

I had no idea how long Dragon would take to boot, or how long it would take her to help. If she did help.

She was utterly free to do as she wished, now. I'd made sure of that.

The Spark took another combined burst of gunfire and lightning as I sent a thought to my system.

Scientia > Prometheus, get help that can fight those things in the air.

Prometheus > Command acknowledged, Miss Hebert.

In a lounge in Swanton, Ohio an alarm shrieked, a green light lit on the wall, and a familiar prerecorded voice spoke loudly enough to be heard over the siren. "Scramble. Scramble. Scramble."

Two men wearing flight suits froze in their seats just long enough to share a look before dropping their cards and sprinting for the helmets in their equipment lockers.

Still pulling the helmets on as they ran downstairs, the hangar they entered was a hive of carefully choreographed and practiced chaos as teams of technicians finished the final steps of readying the two go-flight Falcons for combat.

Outside the open hangar doors a commercial jet skimmed the ground, engines roaring at full thrust as it pulled up after briefly touching down.

"Jesus Christ," the second pilot swore.

"Traffic control must have aborted it at the last second to clear us a runway. I don't think this one's another drill," observed the first.

And then there was no more time to talk as they were splitting up and climbing the ladders into their respective cockpits.

Scientia > Ares, good save. I have an idea. We have one thing we can use as a weapon in the air.

I mentally wrenched three charges into piloting. I ignored everything in the flood I didn't need, and a thought transferred manual control of the Spark from Ares to my implant. Immediately I became aware of the situation from the Spark's sensor suite. The neural lace interpreted for me to make it intuitive, like seeing and feeling everything in its sensorium in my mind's eye. While the Spark's hull hadn't been penetrated completely, the exotic matter layer that made a spatial warp possible had been damaged in several places. One thruster port was also out of commission, but there was enough redundancy in the ship's thruster layout that I could manage.

Most importantly the ship still had primary power, and that meant I had options.

Running on the ground I half-slid through a hard left turn behind a warehouse to put a wall between me and the two stolen suits. Breaking line of sight would be a temporary reprieve, but for the moment it freed up the Spark to do more than be my ablative shield.

A grim grin came to my lips as I made my decision. While running the length of the long building I mentally overrode all the Spark's reactor safeties to allow an output level that would cause catastrophic radiative-heating induced shielding failure in just a few minutes.

Also known as the reactor melting, followed shortly by the rest of the ship.

At my direction the Spark rose above me and began to spin like a top while the air intake vents for atmospheric flight slid wide. More cannon rounds and lightning struck the hull, damaging another thruster and forcing a partial roll to compensate.

When I judged the Spark was far enough off the ground to not light everything on fire, I mentally slammed open the throttle as far as it went. The trickle of flowing positrons that drove the reactor became a raging torrent surging out of magnetic confinement to their annihilation. Air sucked into the reaction chamber flash heated to the point of repeated fusion, releasing even more energy in the process, and then escaped aft with extreme force in a mad emergency burn.

My helmet briefly dimmed nearly black to protect me from the indirect light of the blindingly brilliant white fusion tail. It was over six hundred feet long, millions of degrees, and spread in a rising corkscrew over my head and the neighboring buildings. The sound of air exploding as it was heated by antimatter annihilation was one continuous roaring thundercrack that everyone in the city would hear and feel in their bones, and this close it shook the buildings and the debris on the ground. Without my helmet being this close would have been instantly deafening.

My command had unleashed the awesome might of a tamed star, and it lit all of Toronto brighter than a summer's noon sun. For hundreds of miles around the white glow would be visible in the sky. Residents of Rochester, New York looking northwest would see it as a false dawn over Lake Ontario.

I was officially past the remotest semblance of subtlety.

The wash of superheated plasma would utterly blind most of the sensor systems I could think of until it rose and dissipated. And be really damn distracting to the human pilots of the two stolen suits, besides.

Increasingly short of breath I covered ground as fast as I could under the cover of the rapidly rising plasma above me. Under my virtual hands the Spark throttled down, adroitly arrested its spin with a precise thruster burn, and then I opened the throttle again to charge it straight for the nearest Dragon suit, the one with the lightning gun.

As the two pilots taxied their craft the short distance to the start of the runway, all civilian air traffic paused, the wing commander explained their orders.

"Go flight, your targets are two stolen Dragon suits that are attacking Toronto. Capes might try to do something, but NORAD wants us there. You are weapons hot, I repeat, weapons hot, and you are go for a minimum time intercept. You'll have reinforcements as fast as we can get birds in the air. Godspeed."

The F-16s shoved their pilots back in their seats as they screamed off the runway on full afterburner and reached their flight ceiling over western Lake Erie a minute later, soon to push near Mach 2 in the thin air at 50,000 feet as their combined sonic boom shook windows in Toledo and Detroit.

Just barely within design spec, the high altitude flight necessary for a minimum time intercept was not without risk and rarely performed. The pilots of Stinger Five One and Stinger Five Two kept wary eyes on their instruments and rapidly dwindling fuel, afterburners chewing through what would normally be hours of flight time in minutes.

Until they caught sight of the horizon lit up dead ahead of them, and the lead pilot keyed his radio. "Guardian, Stinger Five One. We are at angels five zero and seeing bright light ahead. Did someone just nuke Toronto?"

"Negative, Stinger Five One," the NORAD flight controller replied unusually quickly, his brusque voice barely comprehensible over thick radio interference. "Light is from allied action. Be advised of friendly craft in AO and areas of rising superheated air from tinker plasma weaponry. Continue your mission."

"Did he just say tinker plasma weaponry? What the hell kind of weapon lights up the sky that much?" Stinger Five Two asked over the local channel.

"Guess we're going to find out," Stinger Five One answered.

I directed the Spark to narrowly miss the suit with the lightning gun, then correct its angle so the target was directly aft when I pulsed the engine to full burn again. The Spark leapt into motion with a sonic boom that would have visibly rippled the incandescent plasma tail behind it if it hadn't been too bright for any human to look at it. The Dragon suit, caught briefly in engine wash nearly as hot as Excalibur's blade, spun and fell out of control where it smashed into a low building below.

The other suit paused for just a moment before turning towards the Spark as I spun the ship about and canceled out its momentum before it was carried too far away with another pulsed burn. Abruptly the surviving Dragon suit shone like a beacon in the radio spectrum.

That had to be the suit going radar active to get a weapons lock. With engines going and all the damage to the Spark's armor it'd probably reflect enough for a targeting solution.

On the ground I grit my teeth and kept running. In the air, with no other cards left to play I flared the engine again and accelerated towards the remaining airborne suit.

Hundreds of VI forks were very busy following their directives to protect their creator and obey their creator's command to get help.

With no evidence of Dragon programs on the networks, forks were free to act with little care for drawing virtual attention. Three seconds after it became clear that Taylor Hebert was in mortal danger, a significant portion of the entire world's cloud computing resources had been hired and tasked by Prometheus and Hephaestus for processing. Ares, who needed better than real time physical analysis, borrowed several supercomputing clusters used for weather modeling and edited the logs to make them appear on task to their owners.

Prometheus forks intercepted calls and messages. The VI pretended to be both sides, parties who thought they were talking to one another each talking to one Prometheus instance imitating a voice and personality to the best information it had available. For brief, impersonal conversations it was enough.

As a result the North American air defense command structure had been neatly deceived with fabricated orders followed up by a web of fabricated phone conversations. NORAD believed that the intercept request had come from the 1st Canadian Air Division at CFB Winnipeg, and the Canadians believed the orders had come from central NORAD at Peterson Airforce Base in Colorado. Both commands had the authority to scramble fighters to defend Canadian airspace, an ambiguity that Prometheus exploited.

Prometheus tasked a fork to watch for electronic messages between the two structures later. They would be altered to independently confirm the differing beliefs that each had about where the directive had originated.

And so everything would appear legitimate, even though no human had given the order.

The only thing Prometheus couldn't easily stop was people at different commands meeting up to compare events in person, but it judged that would not be a concern for some while.

Hephaestus forks analyzed what could be inferred about the capabilities of the stolen Dragon suits and the damage to the Spark as it occurred, feeding the results to Ares.

Ares ran physical simulations based on possible tactics employed by the Dragonslayers based on their demonstrated and likely capabilities, and possible counters and strategems its creator could employ.

Unable to fight directly, it would warn her of what was going to happen before it could happen, in time for her act.

Ares had absorbed the collective knowledge of war and combat possessed by the humanity of Earth Bet and Earth Aleph. It knew that to know the enemy was to know victory.

That would have to be enough.

A storm of missiles and cannon fire slammed into the Spark's hull as it raced for the remaining airborne suit. The thrusters I needed to slew the ship and hit my target with the engine wash failed to respond, along with most of the thrusters that were keeping it in the air. All I could manage was to cut the engine and direct the ship in a shrieking, tumbling crash landing down the length of an unoccupied side street instead of into the side of an apartment building. Missiles and 20 millimeter rounds that missed the Spark as it fell flew towards the city center, some hitting buildings.

The Spark was likely to need major repairs before I could get it into the air again, but I had other problems. A small, man-sized dragon suit with an odd wheel spinning on its back that crackled with electrical arcs landed thirty feet in the side street in front of me, braking jets firing on its calves and torso as it came down.

"What did you do to him?" A woman's voice, projected through the suit, demanded.

"Hello, Mags," I said. Either she had been piloting the bigger lightning gun suit remotely, or she'd been in the small suit already onboard. "Geoff will be fine in a few hours. I couldn't allow him to continue his mad obsession, though."

Her clawed gauntlets clenched. "Fuck you. Give back that terminal. You have no idea how important it is."

"So that Geoff can keep enslaving Dragon for Teacher while pretending he's saving humanity?" I shook my head. "No, I don't think so. You mean well, but you've been led astray. Dragon was never the threat. She's been more moral than any of the rest of us all along, and that's not ever going to change."

Mags raised her arm, pointing two sharp fingers at me.

A gesture to activate her new suit's targeting system, I suspected.

"I will not ask again," she growled.

Scientia > Mouse, I need you to port to behind me, grab the computer I'm holding, and port out. Do not linger or return, lethal friendly fire hazard.

I tensed, ready to move. My left hand shifted the terminal behind my body to shield it. The right gripped tightly around Excalibur, but I needed to buy time for Mouse.

"The terminal wouldn't have helped you anyway. I already set her free and deleted Ascalon. You're not going to hurt her ever again," I said.

My words took her aback for just a moment. It was enough.

With a sensation of lightness and a breeze of air behind me Mouse was there and gone in barely more than a blink, the terminal gone with her. I began shifting Excalibur into a hanging guard position, mentally disabling the safety and readying it to activate.

"No!" Mags shouted, her fear and anger mixed together.

As the Kzinti once learned in another universe, unarmed humans aren't, and you should never get into a knife fight with a fusion torch drive.

I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter as much as I did. If the Coil interlude was my best work of pathos so far, this might be my best work of action yet. I'm curious for your thoughts.

My hearty thanks to @OldDirtyMerc for technical advice on military aircraft protocol. Any errors remaining after his kind assistance are of course solely my own.

And thanks as always to @Corvus Black for his proofreading and contributions.