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chapter twenty-four

Transdimensional Dreadnought Phoenix

H17B, 2181 CE


“We’re not actually surrendering,” Rose asked Xenophon, “are we?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m letting the Admin captain see what he wants to see. Did you catch how he called Phoenix a ‘bunker’? He doesn’t know, and we can use that to our advantage.”

“By letting their ground forces inside?”

“By using them to stall for time while we appear to cooperate. The Admin may be a brutal, militaristic regime, but even they will balk at the thought of nuking their own troops. That hesitancy will buy us the breathing room we need. Speaking of which, how much time do we need?”

“One moment.”

Rose summoned a chart over her hand. She wore a beige business suit that covered most of her avatar’s pale green skin, contrasted by the vivid red of her short hair. A clockwork flower ticked the seconds away in her lapel.

The bridge they stood in was abstract as well—a circular, functional chamber similar to those found on TTVs, complete with a central command table. No one in the Institute required physical living quarters or workstations, and so Rose had omitted such amenities when she’d adapted Phoenix’s original SysPol designs.

Rose’s full name was Rosor of Orosor, forming an extended palindrome Xenophon assumed someone considered witty. She was one of the Institute’s original twelve members, now eleven after he’d deleted Ijiraq. That’s all it had taken to get this far. Eleven believers, each infused with the will to see their shared vision made manifest.

Xenophon credited himself with radicalizing Rose. She had once been a student of his, and he’d used that connection to sour her views on the Admin, though the ground had already been fertile when he’d first reached out to her. That had been a lucky break.

In many ways, her status as a former SysPol officer made her the Institute’s most important member. Her service record spanned both the Arete First Responders and the Hephaestus R&D division, and she’d used her network of contacts to swipe Peng’s contingency plan and several highly restricted patterns.

It was safe to say Phoenix wouldn’t exist without her. Not in its current form, at least.

“We’ve got minor to moderate damage throughout the ship,” Rose reported. “Those shock waves were nasty, but the armor absorbed the worst of it. We lost one of our capital lasers during the third hit, and there’s heavy structural damage around the impact point. However, the worst problem is the impeller. It’s off-line.”

“How soon can you have it back up?” Xenophon asked.

“Not long. Less than half an hour. It’s an alignment issue, not a problem with the spike itself. I’ve tasked half of our repair swarms and drones to making the necessary adjustments. The rest I’m spreading across the ship to take care of the hundred or so other issues.”

“Very good.”

Xenophon rested his fingertips on the command table. Two small red icons detached from the Hammerheads and began their descent while another six larger icons phased in beside the Admin time machines.

Gordian TTVs, he thought grimly. So, Elifritz wasn’t lying about our losses after all. No matter. Our TTVs were always expendable, though I never expected them to perform that badly!

It had seemed like a good idea at the time to sortie their remaining TTVs when they’d picked up the Gordian squadron. After all, the approach vector and force strength all but assured the Gordian Division knew where they were hiding, so Xenophon had dispatched their remaining TTV force to thin the enemy’s ranks while Phoenix prepped for departure.

That decision had been a costly one, and the unexpected appearance of nuclear-armed chronoports had only worsened the situation.

In a perfect multiverse, they would have deployed Phoenix the moment H17’s splinter universe had caught up with the True Present. That had been the original plan, but Ijiraq’s sabotage changed everything. She’d played along until mere days before their scheduled launch, and the seeds of her sabotage had sprouted into ugly, vile weeds throughout Phoenix’s control systems.

She’d died in the attempt; Xenophon had deleted her personally, but the damage had been done.

They’d needed more time to prepare.

He’d made the difficult call to refurbish Reality Flux and send it back to SysGov, but it seemed Ijiraq had anticipated that move as well. One of her viruses had wormed its way into the vessel’s self-repair systems, and the resulting explosion had alerted their enemies, even if SysPol lacked the full picture.

Worse still, news of this fresh disaster had taken days to reach him! His connectome copies on Scaffold Delta couldn’t leave their posts, nor could they transmit a telegraph for all to hear. It was only thanks to the scouts he’d insisted they send to both SysGov and the Admin that they knew of the failure at all!

And the reports from the Admin were hardly better, because it seemed someone over there had developed fucking clairvoyance! How else could they have known to horde the bulk of their fleet around T2’s outer wall?

More chronoports on guard meant further alterations to their plan.

More upgrades to Phoenix.

More and more delays.

Xenophon had kept up their scouting efforts, but then one of their TTVs failed to report in, followed by two Gordian ships snooping around the H17 binary. Fortunately, the Institute’s presence on Luna had eluded them.

Or so it had seemed at the time.

Nothing we can do about it now but press forward, Xenophon thought. What’s that old axiom? “No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy.” I knew we’d have to adapt on the fly, but this is just ridiculous! Our most pessimistic simulations didn’t even come close to predicting this mess!

He eyed the approaching transports once more.

“What do we have in way of a ‘welcoming party’?”

“Construction synthoids, mostly,” Rose said. “I’ve reactivated all of their programs. They’re grabbing weapons now. We also have our microbot swarms and repair drones, though I doubt they’d fare well against Admin STANDs. The Red Knights, however . . . ”

She gave him a sly smile. She’d printed out the assault mechs to help deal with the drones Ijiraq had corrupted and had never sent them to reclamation.

Finally, a bit of luck, Xenophon thought. He expanded a map of Phoenix, which took the form of a large, transparent sphere equipped with a single, massive spike.

“Position the synthoids here, here, and here.” He highlighted compartments near the breach. “Hold the Red Knights in reserve. I don’t want to scare off our guests too soon.”

“It’ll be bad if any STANDs slip into the interior. Our internal defenses aren’t as robust as the ‘real thing.’”

“Then let’s adjust the odds in our favor. What’s an armed drone we can produce in the least amount of time?”

“That would be the Skull. They’re not much more than floating guns. Simple and disposable. There’s some subassembly required for the graviton thrusters, but it’s nothing our printers can’t handle.”

She pulled up the pattern schematic, which showed a gun barrel mated with a camera and graviton thruster. The arrangement of the three components, when viewed from the front, gave the vague impression of its namesake.

“Switch all available printers over to Skull production,” Xenophon ordered.

Rose nodded and worked her virtual screens. “Done. The first one should come out in about thirty-five minutes, with a lot more soon after.”

* * *

The transport’s external cameras superimposed their feeds over the interior, affording Susan a clear view of their descent into the nuclear crater. The first two nukes had performed most of the “digging,” ejecting a great deal of matter clear of the blast zone. The outer walls slanted inward at something close to forty-five degrees, their surfaces scoured clean by the third and final detonation, which had barely penetrated the bunker’s armor.

Those events had cleared the landing zone of loose debris and liquefied rock, leaving the scorched, metallic swell of the bunker at the bottom. The armor had failed beneath the blast epicenter, and whatever resided beneath it had been vaporized, but Susan could already make out what appeared to be internal armor barriers. Those would be positioned to mitigate the damage should the outer armor be breached, turning a catastrophic hit into merely a horrendous one.

Susan placed a hand on Noxon’s shoulder and opened a closed-circuit chat.

“They weren’t messing around when they built this place.”

“No, they weren’t,” Noxon replied.

“But doesn’t all this armor seem odd to you?”

“How so?”

“Why bother when you’ve already got hundreds of meters of rock over your head? It strikes me as overkill.”

“I wish I knew.”

STANDs and drones crowded the hold, all with variskin coatings. The active camouflage made each combatant difficult to see, though the technology fell short of the invisibility possible with SysGov metamaterial. Short-range infostructure kept her up to date on ally positions, highlighting each friendly with a blue border.

Their Cutlass slowed to a hover above the armor breach, and the rear hatch split open.

“Go!” Noxon ordered.

Two rows of STANDs and drones charged out of the transport, leaping clear in the low gravity. Susan followed a pace behind the STAND in front of her and fired her shoulder boosters the moment she cleared the exit, rocketing her down through the breach. Another twelve STANDs dropped from the second Cutlass. She cut her shoulder boosters, flipped them down, then fired her shoulder and leg boosters at the last moment.

She settled into a low crouch and swept her surroundings with her heavy rail-rifle. Other STANDs landed around and behind her in a textbook defensive formation, Noxon to her left. Quadrupedal Wolverines and Raptors equipped with vacuum maneuvering packs took up formation with the STAND combat frames while Scarab recon drones darted into the unknown.

The two Cutlasses pulled up and away from the drop site to commence their combat space patrol, staying close by in case the STANDs needed support or emergency extraction.

Susan took in her surroundings, such as they were. She was at the bottom of a wide, five-story chamber, but whatever had once occupied the space was gone. The armor above formed a wide, rounded orifice, partially contracted over the chamber with its self-repair program suspended. Some shapes around her suggested the former presence of equipment, wall, and floors, but it was difficult to make sense of it all.

Three recessed shapes might have once been blast doors, and the data feeds from Scarab drones and her fellow combat frames confirmed the existence of adjacent chambers beyond them.

Noxon tagged each with a nav beacon.

“Squad Two, split into fireteams and recon the area. Report anything suspicious. Squad One, with me. We’re heading straight for the main objective.”

Susan hustled toward the door for Squad One, and two STANDs with vibro-saws began cutting through. Noxon posted up to one side, and Susan took up position opposite him. The rest of the squad formed up around them for a total of twelve STANDs, four Raptors, and four Wolverines.

“Almost through, sir.”

“Crack it open,” Noxon said. “Raptors forward.”

The STAND switched off his vibro-saw, raised his rifle, and bashed the door inward with a series of kicks. Four Raptors zipped through the gap, their cameras feeding data back into Susan’s virtual senses to build a wire-frame representation of their surroundings. It was a long corridor that branched at the far end, though the floor was slanted oddly.

“No contacts in the next chamber, sir.”

“Squad One, advance.”

The lead STAND gave the door one last heavy kick, busting it aside, then advanced with his rifle held high. Susan checked the corner then followed close behind with Noxon by her side. They hurried down the corridor, then took a left, traveling toward the infostructure access point identified by the Institute.

The squad traversed deeper into the bunker, around corners and across its curiously sloped floors.

No, not sloped, Susan realized. More like they’re curved to match the arc of the bunker’s roof. But why build a bunker like this? What would be the point?

The squad pressed on, the bunker’s odd angles itching at Susan’s mind. They came to a junction that branched to either side around a massive cylindrical shaft. A metallic, egg-shaped pod took up almost the entire shaft.

Susan stopped at the junction and looked upward.

She could see naked prog-steel armor many stories above them.

“Sir, something’s wrong.”

Noxon brought the squad to a halt with a quick signal.

“What is it, Cantrell?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but this place is just wrong in so many ways. The angled floor doesn’t make any sense, and now this.” She indicated the enormous gunmetal egg. “Sir, I think the floor isn’t really the floor, and I think this is a weapon pod. A big one, too.”

“But how could it be a weapon? We’re too deep under the surface.”

“I know, but look!” She pointed toward the ceiling. “The shaft grants access to the outer armor. Why not use all that space, unless this pod really is a submerged weapon system?”

“But a system like that would mean . . . ”

“That this isn’t a bunker at all.”

Noxon stared at the huge egg for long, uncomfortable seconds, then—

“Squad One to Hammerhead-Seven.”

A trail of Scarab drones relayed the message back to the drop site for transmission with the chronoport.

“Elifritz here. Go ahead, Agent.”

“Sir, we’ve come across something we can’t easily explain.”

* * *

“They’re getting curious,” Rose said, watching the Admin ground team near Capital Laser Three. Admin variskin made details all but impossible to pick out, but the group was large enough—and the optical flaws common enough—to track their movements with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Xenophon said. “The impeller?”

“Realigned and ready.”

“Excellent.”

Xenophon studied the positions of their construction synthoids and Red Knights near the three groups of Admin soldiers. Each group was almost completely surrounded and didn’t even know it.

“Well, then. I suppose we’ve let these rats slink in far enough. Time to close the snare.”

* * *

“A capital weapon of some kind?” Elifritz asked. “Is it something they were trying to mount to a TTV?”

“No, sir,” Noxon replied. “It appears to be built into the bunker.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. What purpose would it serve underground?”

“That’s precisely my point, sir,” Susan cut in. “A weapon like this would only be useful if the bunker could move.”

“But that would take . . . it would need an impeller to phase its way free of Luna.”

“We’ve already seen the Institute pull that trick when it sortied those TTVs,” Susan said. “Why not perform the same technique, but on a much larger scale?”

“Are you suggesting the entire bunker is, in fact, a time machine?”

“Sir, that is exactly what I’m suggesting.”

“Dear God.” Elifritz let out an audible exhale before continuing. “Agent Noxon, your thoughts on the situation.”

“I don’t know if Cantrell’s right, but there’s a chance she is, and that’s enough for me. There’s too much about this bunker that doesn’t make sense. Unless you look at it like we’re inside a warship.”

“Very well. Then we should assume the worst.” The captain paused once more. “Here are your new orders, Agent. Divert all available resources to finding and then disabling any chronometric drive systems.”

“What about the Institute members?”

“Forget them for now. Your sole priority is to—”

Their link with Hammerhead-Seven cut out.

“What happened?” Noxon demanded.

“Contact lost with Scarab-22, which broke the signal chain back to the ship. Cause unknown.”

“Then find out why. Redirect the closest drone to investigate.”

“Yes, sir. Routing Wolverine-3 to Scarab-22’s last known location.”

“Cantrell, update the ship via telegraph.”

“Yes, sir.” Susan activated the chronometric telegraph in her kit and typed in a quick message into the virtual interface. There was no need to select a destination, since the signal was omnidirectional and omni-temporal.

Radio contact lost, she sent. Cause unknown. Investigating now.

The response came quickly: Message received. Whatever caused the outage must be groundside. There are no issues up here. Keep us updated.

“I was able to get through to the ship, sir. They say the problem’s on our end.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Noxon growled.

“Contact with Wolverine-3 lost!” reported the drone controller.

“Did you catch what took it out?”

“No, sir. The feed just blinked out.”

“Defensive positions!” Noxon barked. “Give me a beacon on Wolverine-3’s last position!”

“Beacon up, sir!”

The white diamond of a nav beacon appeared in Susan’s abstract vision roughly a hundred meters back the way they came. She crouched behind one corner of the T-junction, placing the huge weapon shaft to her back. She couldn’t see far because the corridor banked to the left.

The STANDs around her tensed for combat, weapons armed and boosters primed.

“Send another Wolverine to investigate,” Noxon ordered.

“Yes, sir. Wolverine-4 heading out.”

The drone galloped down the corridor.

“The rest of you, don’t lose sight of our flanks. Trouble can come at us from anywhere.”

Susan glanced back around the corner, unsurprised to find two STANDs already guarding against approaches from that angle. One had shaped his arm’s malmetal plates into a door shield to provide some semblance of cover in the open curve around the weapon shaft. Two more STANDs stood guard in the opposite direction, while another checked up and down the shaft.

The corridor flashed with the brief sparks of metal against metal.

“Wolverine down! Multiple synthoids incoming!”

An image opened in Susan’s periphery, showing a brief, blurred glimpse of their enemy: SysGov-style synthoids, their heavy endoskeletons and fibrous artificial muscles denuded of any cosmetic layers, all armed with rifles and grenade launchers.

“Get ready,” Noxon said, his voice now almost a whisper. “Here they come.”

A flurry of Institute guided grenades rounded the corner, and the STANDs greeted them with a hail of grenade counterfire. Explosions wracked the corridor, damaging or destroying most of the incoming projectiles, but some shot through to detonate ahead of the STAND ranks. A pressure wave shoved Susan back, and a piece of shrapnel zinged off her shoulder.

Institute synthoids rounded the corner, and the STANDs baptized them with rifle fire. Susan’s first shot blew the leg off one, and it toppled forward before mag darts from another STAND ripped through its torso.

Another flurry of grenades shot in, and several exploded amongst the STANDs, damaging armor and weapons. A second group of synthoids charged into the corridor, and the STANDs cut them down.

“Contact to the right!”

Susan glanced to the right, spotting a second group of synthoids advancing on their position.

“They’re coming from the left, too!”

Detonations rattled off to Susan’s left, and she swung her weaponry around. One of the STANDs guarding the left approach lay sprawled across the ground, limbs missing and chest cracked open. He would never get up again. The other held his ground, hunkering down behind his shield.

Susan deployed her own shield and slammed it down beside his, forming a two-person phalanx. Together they sprayed the approaching synthoids with rifle fire, but more enemies poured in behind the fallen, stepping over their broken corpses.

A grenade exploded against Susan’s shield, and it buckled inward, throwing her back. She tried to reform the shield, but the malmetal plates juddered against each other, slow to realign.

More explosions cracked around them, and damage signals across the squad flared red in her virtual sight.

“We’ll get torn to pieces if we stay here!” Susan shouted.

“Agreed!” Noxon backpedaled to the shaft. “Down the shaft, everyone! We still have a mission to complete!”

“I’ll take point!”

Susan managed to retract her shield, then hauled herself over the edge and dropped into the shaft. She fired her boosters and landed heavily near the center of a wide, circular chamber, which might have been a maintenance bay for the weapon pod. Robotic arms and large pieces of equipment lined the walls.

Another STAND dropped down beside her, followed by Noxon.

Her radar picked up movement behind her, and she snapped her aim around.

A heavy door eased aside to reveal the hovering bulk of a SysPol Red Knight, armor gleaming, its arms and shoulders laden with heavy weapons.

“Behind us!” Susan snapped, rocketing to the side.

The Red Knight’s first shot missed her by scant centimeters and struck the STAND beside her. The armor-penetrating explosive smart-shell bored through the STAND’s back armor and detonated within the chest cavity, blowing it to bits.

Susan showered the Red Knight with grenades and rifle fire, all while boosting along the room’s circumference. Explosions flashed against the huge mech, and mag darts ricocheted off its thick armor. The Red Knight swung one of its arms toward her, unfazed by her attack.

Damn, Susan thought with bitter determination. This is going to be a tough one.

* * *

“Chronometric field detected!” Benjamin said. “A powerful one, too. It’s expanding to encompass the bunker.”

“Is it powerful enough to initiate phase-out?” Raibert asked.

“Absolutely, and there’s more. I had Kleio analyze the visuals on that suspected weapon system. It’s almost a one-to-one match for a SysPol capital laser pattern. The kind we put on Directive-class heavy cruisers.”

“Then the bunker really is a warship.”

“Not just any warship. It is a Directive-class, with modifications for transdimensional flight.”

“Are you sure about this, Doc?”

“Pretty close.” Benjamin summoned an incomplete diagram of the bunker. “If we assume the entire bunker is a sphere and extrapolate the overall shape, I come up with a diameter of nine hundred meters. That’s the same hull profile as a Directive.”

“Damn.” Raibert faced the Hammerhead-Seven comm window. “Captain, have you been able to reestablish contact with your ground teams?”

“Only one of them,” Elifritz replied, “and only via sporadic telegraphs. They’re under heavy attack.”

“We don’t have much time before they phase out,” Benjamin warned. “If we’re going to act, we need to do so now. They’ve reenergized their armor, and the aperture over the drop site is closing. Conventional weapons aren’t going to do much against a Directive’s hull. We need to hit that thing with nukes while it’s still vulnerable.”

Isaac stiffened beside Benjamin, almost rising out of his seat. He appeared to be on the edge of words, but he didn’t speak, didn’t voice any protests. Just settled back into his chair, every muscle tense.

I wouldn’t blame him for a second if he argued against this, Raibert thought. His partner is down there fighting for her life, and we have no way of knowing if the rest of the STANDs are alive or dead. Hell, what we’re about to do may be what kills them!

“Captain,” Raibert began, his tone solemn. “We need to hit that warship with everything we’ve got.”

“You understand what you’re asking,” Elifritz replied. It was more a statement than a question.

“I do.”

Raibert knew he and Benjamin were approaching the situation with a degree of detachment. He only knew one of the STANDs down there personally, and not very well at that, but from what he’d seen, he judged Susan the kind of person who’d call a nuke down on her own head if she thought it’d save lives in the end.

The same couldn’t be said for Elifritz. These were all his people. He was the one who’d sent them into this viper’s nest, and now a foreigner was asking him to rain nuclear fire atop their positions.

But it has to be done, Raibert thought. That’s no ordinary TTV; it’s a transdimensional warship the likes of which no one has ever seen. We can’t let it reach the Admin.

“Capt—”

“Launch Missile-Four!” Elifritz snapped, his voice firm and devoid of doubt, even if Raibert suspected it was a facade.

The missile blasted clear of Hammerhead-Seven and rocketed toward the surface, dispensing decoys along the way. No defensive fire responded; whatever weaponry the bunker possessed must have been buried under lunar rock.

The missile shot into the crater carved by its brethren, hurtling toward the closing gap in the bunker’s armor. But before it could strike—mere tens of meters from its destination—the entire bunker phased out, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

Thermonuclear fury bloomed within the vast, spherical cavern where the bunker had once been.

To no avail.

They’d missed their best chance to stop the Institute.

The Phoenix bunker—or rather, the TTV Phoenix—was now underway.



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