Ranma was in the command room late that evening, doing what sailors do when they have a break: get wasted. “To fallen comrades! May their memories be preserved for all time and their honour always be remembered.” He held his glass of whisky up in a drunken acknowledgement to his own toast and then downed the glass in one gulp.
Nabiki’s face smirked on one of the screens, the other souls each occupying others so that the full crew were present. “Here, here. Though I’m sure this isn’t exactly what you mean when you say ‘memories be preserved for all time’, is it, Ranma-kun?” Nabiki’s young face smirked.
Ranma’s wrinkling mug looked up at her image and frowned. “No. No, it isn’t.” He studied her for a while in silence. “How much of you is still there, Nabiki? That Kroker guy said that they were only imprints of the people that originally had those chips.”
Nabiki’s face remained smiling, as if amused at the honest question. “I would say about twenty percent of who Nabiki Tendo was is now me. I have her decision making preferences, her short term and working memory, her self-image, and most of her personality. What I don’t have is her creativity, long term memory or body. I will turn left if she would have turned left, but I don’t know if that’s because of some old superstition, a phobia against left turns, or just a random decision. Also, don’t ask to share old anecdotes. I know I like to call you Ranma-kun, and that it drives you up the wall to hear it, but I have no idea why.” Her grin became rather catty as she added, “Honestly, I don’t care, either. It’s fun.”
“So you’re each about twenty percent of who you were?” Ranma looked at the others, lingering on Ransom for a moment trying to recall more of the pilot.
Sinclair spoke up. “Actually, I’d say we’re about fifteen percent. Miss Tendo’s chip was more effective at storing data from her death as technology has advanced, but the neural interface hardware has not developed any significant amount in the last twenty years.”
Ranma stared at the well-spoken British soldier for a few seconds. “Meaning?”
“’Meaning’ that more of her brain was downloaded before she was completely brain-dead but not much more,” Sinclair finished.
Ranma nodded. “So are you really Nabiki, or are you someone new?”
The image of Nabiki frowned at him. “Think of me as her with amnesia if you have to. I’m as much her as I can be and you’ll just have to live with it.”
Ranma nodded again, this time looking rather sombre. Kroker spoke up at his left, “You’re a depressing drunk, aren’t you?”
“I just sent an old friend to a watery tomb; how should I feel?” Ranma snapped back.
“I would say just as depressed as you sound, Captain.”
Ranma turned to the external communications console at the sound of the unwanted voice. “So, Church, is Walker there with you?”
“Right here, Saotome,” came Walker’s voice. “There’s something we need to discuss.”
“Just as long as it’s clear that I’m in charge of this ship. Nabiki made me in charge before she…”
”We’re not arguing that, Captain,” Church interrupted. “What we want to do is talk about what you’ll be doing next. Are you aware of what those missiles Captain Tendo redirected did to the islands that they hit?”
“Can’t say I am or that I’ve cared,” Ranma replied. “I’ve been a little busy conducting funeral rites.”
“Well take a look at this,” Walker said. On one of the war room’s table, an image appeared of the designated island zero. “The missiles Captain Tendo fired struck in three locations here. One at the high point near where the generator was, one further north where the derricks were and one more to the south where the doors that blocked Antaeus were located.”
“Is that all? She just made a bunch of craters?”
Church’s voice came alive, “Not entirely. There have been people swarming over the damage at the location of the generator. Apparently that was a rather important base of operations for the Cabal.”
Ranma nodded, a look of loathing on his face. “Good. They need to hurt.”
Church continued, “The worrying thing is what happened at the other island. It appeared to simply be a standard military construction site, having a variation of those hybridized units you encountered near the silos, but after the missiles hit, something truly disturbing happened.”
“The island has disappeared.” Walker put in.
“What, you mean it’s cloaked or it was blown up?” Ranma asked with a devil may care expression on his face.
Church answered, “Neither. Far as we can tell, something is eating at the buildings, the concrete, even the very rock of the island. It’s almost as if the island was dissolving. We would like you to send a Pegasus over the island with a Scavenger equipped Scarab unit. The analysis beam of the Scarab should be able to identify what it is that is changing the island so rapidly.”
“What do you mean, they’ve escaped?” a large African man asked a soldier. “We kept them sedated, locked up, immobile and completely dependent on us.”
A little figure to his side shook its head. It was maybe two feet on its own but, perched atop the three foot staff, managed to come up to the man’s neck. Cologne sighed at the stupidity of some of her allies, especially the more petty leaders. “We’ve created them as adaptable weapons, capable of thinking and fighting their way through the best that the old governments could have come up with, and you think that simple holding tanks would keep them? Their physiology would adapt far too quickly for that if we let up even a little. The missiles that hit us yesterday just happened to provide such an opportunity.”
“So where are they then, crone?” The man demanded. He was promptly swatted on the top of his head with the stick.
“Mind your manners. I joined you to reacquire the control over my lands that were stripped by the O.N.E. Those barbarians came in and took everything from us.” She was fuming. The memory of the arrival of the Chinese assisted forces of this new world order were burned into her mind.
“For a warrior culture, you sure are sore losers,” he pointed out, mockingly. “‘Three thousand years of Amazon tradition’ and you couldn’t last more than a week before they showed you how outdated you were. It was practically a militia that attacked you, peasants given guns, and they met you casualty for casualty against your warrior stock. Congratulations, a lifetime of toil devoted to learning the warrior arts is equal to putting a gun in the hands of an untrained nobody.”
Cologne shook with rage. She had witnessed it. She had seen it as farmers from neighbouring towns that the Amazons had lorded over, given that kind of weaponry, were able to overthrow her sisters that had protected them and kept them safe from outside influences for so long. They had kept away the contamination of European thinking, Japanese influence, and the decrees of pretending emperors for all this time to be shot in the back. Well, she wouldn’t have it.
“Seethe all you want, old woman, but you’re the same as the rest of us; we each had what was ours taken from us and we aren’t going to sit back and let them have it. It simply wounds your pride that your outdated ways aren’t capable of matching a properly armed and armoured force.”
Cologne then turned a feral look at the man. “Ah, but that’s where those three were to come in; they are a personal touch, perfection of form, purpose and ability, capable of making weapons that will drive fear into the populous.” She looked at the three smashed containment tubes in the sealed room that she and her companion were standing outside. “Those three beauties will be found again, and we will unleash them on our enemies. We will either break their wills or destroy them until there is nothing left. I won’t let what was once mine and my peoples’ fall into the hands of outsiders.”
The man nodded. “Now, that I can agree with.”
Church looked at the results of the scan taken earlier that day. They horrified her.
It was only five days since the missiles had stopped. Five days since the Antaeus prototype had destroyed the guidance arrays of the silos. Five days since the most devastating weapon on earth was unleashed. The atomic bomb, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of deaths and the end of and in the aftermath of the second great war of the twentieth century, took second place to this.
The island that the sample had been taken from was gone. There was just sediment floating on the top of the ocean. Sonar scans of the sea bed revealed nothing indicating the island was there. In fact, it appeared that a recent underwater volcano had opened up, swallowing the entire area of the ocean’s floor in brief magma as if the crust itself had been fractured. That sediment, however, had the answers.
Assemblers. The same kind used in the carrier’s creation engine. These were powerful little devices, being one of the great products of nanotechnology. They could make anything at an atomic level, given enough resources and time. Additionally, they were so small that as long as they were coordinated, adding more would speed up production linearly for all practical purposes. Creation engines on the streets allowed each citizen to access food, clothing and other necessities of life at will. The much larger engine on the adaptive cruiser allowed for combat vehicles the size of houses to be ready in mere moments after the command was given.
These assemblers were different, though. They had only one purpose, to rip everything they come upon apart at the elemental level. They were disassemblers.
If whatever had these disassemblers had been used on a city, then all the buildings, all the people, everything, would have been turned into dust and gases. Since the disassemblers were still working after five days, as the scanner had shown, any rescue attempts would have been in vain as anyone who came in contact with even one disassembler would have eventually been destroyed one atom at a time. It would be painful, deadly, and nearly unstoppable. Only massive EMP therapy would work, and assemblers had been made resistant to electromagnetic interference to deal with random photons and radiation given off by whatever substance they may be handling. It would be a plague that would destroy the very fabric of the land until they reached the mantle and molten rock erupted, destroying the disassemblers with the extreme heat.
The thing that made this worse was that the only one they could count on to battle this threat had a grudge against them. He was a turncoat from the other side. He had no loyalty or love for their civilization, and had no reason to save it other than letting so many people die wasn’t right. Church had a hard time accepting that; too often she had seen people shed their morality for their own goals and needs. She believed in their society, but not in the people that made it up save a very few who had weathered the temptations of power.
Now, all their lives rested in the hands of Ranma Saotome since they had no way of making him heel. Church feared for the tomorrow of this wonderful world she had made.
(Posted Fri, 07 May 2010 03:58)
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