Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4) Read online

  4

  Admirals weren’t supposed to fly their own shuttles. They had people for that, or so Thomas had been told more than once. He smiled in spite of the dire circumstances they faced. He’d been flying ships through space since he was a teenager. One plus to his father being who he was. Lord knew there were enough downsides, the rank weighing on his shoulders just the latest addition to the pile.

  He hit his shuttle’s thrusters gently, sending the craft into a slow spin as it arced past the Intrepid. Damned if she wasn’t the most gorgeous ship he’d ever seen. That was humanity’s best hope floating out there. Once completed she would be able to soar across the entire solar system in almost no time at all. If the drive worked like it was supposed to, anyway.

  The ship was also their ticket to other solar systems. That ship out by Neptune had arrived by the same sort of drive. With the Intrepid they could take the fight out into space, and deal with these aliens on a more equal footing. Once she was finished. There had been so many problems with the construction of this one ship, though! She’d been plagued with one thing after another. It was her unique design, so crucial to the working of the Albucierre drive, that was screwing with construction. This wasn’t a stock ship, but a wholly new conception.

  The Intrepid drifted away behind him, the lights still sparkling off her hull as swarms of workers scrambled to finish their work. A month, Thomas had been told. That would be far better than any of the previous estimates if it were true. He couldn’t count on the Intrepid being ready in time to solve their alien problems. As frustrated as it made him, their best hope probably lay not with their best ship, but with an older one.

  He tapped the controls again and the shuttle spun on its axis, facing a new direction and bringing the Hermes into view. This ship wasn’t new. She was battle-scarred, the places where her hull armor had been repaired visible even at this range. The Hermes was his choice for their mission to Neptune. She’d just been refit with the fastest drive they had, her armor upgraded at the same time. And she had a berth for a thirty-fighter wing. They weren’t making carriers that large anymore. Too much chance that one blow could demolish too large a percentage of their fighting force. The Hermes was a leftover from the end of the war between Earth and Mars when everyone was still convinced that bigger meant better.

  Thomas sent his shuttle into an approach vector. It was a good old ship. She would survive the journey. Whether the people crewing it would be able to hold up their end of the deal, he didn’t know. There was the problem. He was used to dealing with military personnel. People who had volunteered to serve in order to help the rest of humanity. Well-trained and experienced men and women who were dedicated to a common cause.

  None of those people were going on this trip. Instead, the ship would be crewed by whatever ghosts of the past Knauf could dredge up out of a virtual world video game. Their best hope lay in some very shaky hands.

  “Not that I started out as a military man myself,” Thomas muttered to himself. He’d managed, in the end. It had been hard to rise to the challenges he’d faced, but he’d made the transition. With luck maybe these people could as well.

  The shuttle clanged into the docking port. Thomas unbuckled himself and pushed off toward the door. There was no gravity here, not even a spin-induced micro-gravity. The Hermes was being stripped of all non-essential equipment. That was easier to do in microgravity, and there was a lot of stuff to remove.

  The airlock opened with a hiss. Still air on board the ship, then. That wouldn’t last. The entire life-support system was being removed. The crew wouldn’t need air, after all. It was a hazard they could safely remove. Along with crew berths, kitchens, heads, and everything else a breathing crew might require. All being hauled away. They would replace every scrap they could with more missile tubes, automated repair systems, and anything else the geniuses over at design thought might give the Hermes a little better chance in her mission.

  Knauf was waiting outside the airlock, floating in place near a wall while absentmindedly flipping through pages of something on his handheld tablet. Thomas coughed to get his attention.

  “Sir, glad you could come!” Knauf said. “The ship is getting a real makeover. She’ll be ready within the next few days.”

  “I’m not thrilled by having to rip out everything that makes her habitable by people, you know,” Thomas said.

  “Yes, but it will give the ship a better chance out there, having all this stuff instead,” Knauf replied.

  Thomas waved the thought away with a hand. “I know. I approved the changes. I don’t have to like turning one of my best ships into a robot drone though.”

  “Don’t think about it as a drone then, sir. It will just have a special kind of crew,” Knauf said.

  Thomas started forward toward the bridge. He wanted to see how things were going himself. A quick tour of the ship wouldn’t hurt. Knauf trailed along behind him.

  “How many of these uploaded minds did you get to sign up?” Thomas asked.

  “Not sure yet, sir. I’m going back in to find out tomorrow. I think we’ll get a good number though. It’s a fair offer.”

  “Fair? I suppose. My father had to burn enough political capital to ruin any other career to get the measure past the UN. They still haven’t voted to approve it yet,” Thomas said.

  “But they will?” Knauf asked.

  He sounded worried. Thomas turned back to flash him a reassuring smile. “They will. If Dad is anything, it’s stubborn. He doesn’t lose when it counts.”

  Nothing counted more than this. The news of the alien ship hadn’t yet hit the civilian population, but it would. Once it did there would be panic, calls to cooperate with the invaders, invective to blast them out of space, and myriad other confused calls for action. It would be a mess, and the politicians didn’t move quickly enough for Thomas’s mind when things went to hell. That was one place where the military tended to operate better. More smoothly, anyway.

  One mind in charge of everything; that’s what the aliens had demanded from humanity. Thomas could see the appeal sometimes. Having one being call all the shots would be a boon in a crisis. It would enable society to swiftly react to any new threat. But it also left society incredibly vulnerable to some of the worst sorts of things humans had ever done to one another. Slavery, genocide, war - those sprang from the same seeds.

  He wondered what sort of society the aliens had. Were they like humans had been during the worst authoritarian times? Or had they figured out a way to work together in harmony with one being in complete command of all the others?

  Thomas shook his head. Not his problem to worry about just then. He had to discover whether the aliens really were a threat - and then stop them if they were.

  “What will happen to them afterward, sir?” Knauf asked.

  “After?” Thomas stopped himself in the hall, catching hold of a stanchion.

  “Once we’ve won. Assuming we win,” Knauf said. “What happens to the people who saved us? Those uploaded minds?”

  “That’s…a good question,” Thomas said. He wondered if his father had already thought that far ahead. He’d have to ask. All Thomas did was see what needed doing and then took steps to make it happen. His Dad tended to do more forethought than that. He might have a better eye toward what the consequences of those necessary actions might be.

  They would be citizens with rights, even though they were virtual beings. How would society react to that? Would they be accepted or outcast? Would they find ways to make a living for themselves? And what might they become in the future?

  Was he generating an even more significant threat to humanity than the aliens, in the long run? Thomas didn’t know. He’d learned many years before not to second-guess the future. He worked to deal with the present, making the best decisions he could in the now.

  “Maybe they’ll stay on in the UN Navy, sir,” Knauf said.

  It wasn’t a bad idea. They could be as useful in the future as they were in thi
s event. The military tended to care a lot less about who you were and more about what you could do to keep the person next to you alive, too. Those virtual personae might find themselves more welcome in the armed forces than just about anyplace else.

  “Maybe they will. It’s certainly one option that could be made open for them,” Thomas said. “But they’ll be free to choose as they wish, whatever that might be.”

  “They’ll have to be put into military rank for the mission, right?” Knauf asked.

  “Yes. I’ve already set up the orders involved. It was interesting, writing that stuff.”

  “Just for the duration of the emergency?” Knauf pressed.

  He was pushing, too. Why was he so interested in the outcome of life for these people? Thomas was willing to accept them as sentient beings. He’d read all the reports - an uploaded mind was a near perfect replica of the original. It was definitely capable of independent thought. The whole thing still felt strange to him, though. He couldn’t imagine wanting to live without his body around him. Or understand the desire to live on in an imaginary world after he’d finished his life in the real one. But Knauf seemed intent on pressing for more information.

  “Why are you so interested in outcomes for people who may die out there?” Thomas asked. Would probably die, if the projections he was seeing were accurate. They would be outgunned to such a degree that none of the analysts thought this Hail Mary pass was going to work. But it might delay construction of the ring long enough for the Intrepid to get out there and finish the job.

  “I just want to be able to present the best possible information to them tomorrow,” Knauf said. “I’m trying to predict what their questions might be so I can be better prepared.”

  Which made sense, but something about how the words spilled off Knauf’s lips sounded a little too glib to Thomas. Did he imagine it, or did Knauf have some sort of personal stake in those people in Valhalla Online? He’d have to get someone to look into Knauf’s background to see if there were any connections.

  “Makes sense,” Thomas said. He’d keep his other concerns private, for now. “Let’s go see how things are progressing on the bridge, shall we?”

  5

  Harald sat on the edge of the cliff staring down. He wasn’t tempted to topple off. There was no point, after all. He would just respawn again. That was the mixed blessing he’d signed up for when he allowed them to upload his consciousness into this place. If he’d thought about it all those years ago, back in the hospital room where he lay dying, maybe he would have realized that an afterlife could be heaven or hell - whether it was an artificial afterlife or not.

  He couldn’t blame the man who’d talked him into signing up. This was a hell of his own making, after all. No one forced him to kill the last vestiges of the woman he loved most in the world. That Cassie was already dead didn’t matter to him. That her consciousness had been torn in two was irrelevant. What remained was still her. Right up until the moment he erased her from existence, anyway.

  The hands he held in front of his face were familiar enough to him now, but they still felt alien and wrong. His body wasn’t his own anymore. He was a thing of living stone, crafted into a weapon. A tool that had turned on its wielder, betraying her and himself in the process. He was a damned thing now, unfit for the company of others. Too tall to even enter most halls of men, too ugly for others to stare at for long, too lost in his misery to care.

  The sound of wingbeats broke Harald from his reverie. For the first time in a while, an emotion besides regret and despair broke through his feelings. The burning ember of anger woke inside him. He knew who that had to be. Only one drake rider would dare approach this place. The storms which had once kept all away were gone, but his presence scared all would-be curiosity seekers away soon enough. No, there was only one person who would dare come to see him and she had sworn to never bother him again. He was in enough pain without Samantha’s presence reminding him of everything he’d lost.

  The drake settled onto the flat ground not far behind him. Harald didn’t acknowledge her presence, not even after she dismounted and walked toward him. He would just ignore her. If Harald was still as the stone he was crafted from, eventually she would remember her oath and go away. All he needed to do was remain lost in his own thoughts for a short while, and then he would be alone with his pain again.

  “Harald?” Sam’s soft voice called out to him.

  His resolve crumbled in an instant at the sound of her voice. He couldn’t ignore her. That was why he’d asked her to leave him be in the first place, wasn’t it?

  “Why have you come here, Sam?” he asked. His gravelly voice sounded exhausted to his ears.

  “I’ve had contact from my…sister,” Sam said.

  Her physical body, she meant. Harald knew the entire story. He’d been there to watch most of it unfold. Samantha had been copied from a living being, uploaded here as a tool to stir the pot and make things happen. The being who’d inspired all that was destroyed now, but that changed little for her. It was interesting that her physical double made contact with her again, though. He would have thought seeing herself that way would be hard on both of them. Curiosity joined anger as the facade of stoicism he’d maintained for so long continued to crumble.

  “The real Sam, you mean,” Harald said. Cruel words? Perhaps, but they were also correct. All of the people in Valhalla were mere copies of the people they had once been. They were ghosts. Leftover remnants of who they’d been. The real people had been who they’d been before they were uploaded.

  “I’m as real as she is,” Sam growled at him.

  It had been a point of disagreement between them before. He heard Sam inhale sharply and then slowly let the breath out. Harald allowed himself the thinnest of smiles. She’d learned to better control her temper, which was a good thing. It had gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion. She was too smart to fall into that trap.

  “Why did she reach out to you?” Harald asked, the curiosity still waking up inside him.

  “She came with a man. Military, I think. They have an offer, but it’s dangerous as hell.”

  “What sort of offer?” Harald asked.

  “There’s an alien ship in orbit at Neptune. Real aliens. Outer space sort. They’re building something that will be very bad for Earth. No human can get that far in the time we have left,” Sam said.

  “Why? Oh, acceleration. But we don’t have bodies, so they want us to go where they can’t?” Harald asked.

  “Pretty much, yeah. The up side - we’d be back in the military.”

  “You don’t ever stop being a Marine,” Harald said. It was a rote response, more habit than anything else. He shook his head. Had the person he was now ever actually been a Marine in the first place, or did he just have the memories of the person who had? Was there any difference?

  “You’d be back officially on active duty, though. You’d be able to serve again. Full rights as a sentient citizen of the United Nations, and whatever nation wanted to take us in as well,” Samantha said.

  “You said that’s the up side. What’s the down side?” Harald asked.

  She’d gone and done it, he realized. He hadn’t meant to engage with her at all. Failing that he’d hoped to keep their conversation to the barest minimum. Perfunctory greetings, then a sad farewell and back to his solitary pondering. But here he was asking question after question. The anger at her presence had already faded. His interest was growing despite his best efforts to quell it.

  “We would have copy protection code added to each of us before they took us out of Valhalla. That means no respawns. If the object containing our data is destroyed, we’d be gone,” Sam said. “It means mortality again. But we’d have a chance to make a difference again, too. A real difference, Harald. Not this ghost of a life we live in now.”

  Sam walked around and sat down next to him. He looked over at her, staring up at his face. To her credit, Sam never blinked or blanched when she saw him. She�
��d seen what he looked like often enough in the past to be used to it, he supposed. She hadn’t changed at all, at least not in her face. He thought he could see the echoes of her hard-won experience deep inside her eyes, though.

  “You are worth more than this, Harald. Come with me. Serve again. Make a difference,” she said.

  He looked away from her. “I am not worth anything. I am a betrayer and murderer.”

  There was a long pause in the conversation, like Samantha was trying to figure out what to say. Maybe she would just stop asking. She’d be gone after this, he realized. Off to fight in a war out in the real world. There would be no one to bother him here ever again. Nobody would come to this place offering him another chance. Part of him reveled in the idea. The other half reviled it.

  “Then maybe this is your chance at redemption,” Sam said.

  He glanced her way again but didn’t speak.

  “You were an honorable man, Harald. If you’re telling me that you have done horrible things - whether I disagree or not doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel about your actions,” Sam said. “So take this chance. Redeem your past wrongs by standing up for those who cannot fight for themselves. Be a Marine again. Be a real warrior again.”

  She stood up and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I could use your help out there. I have too few people I can trust as it is. But don’t do this for me. Do it for yourself.”

  “Do it for Cassie,” she added, her voice almost a whisper. “She would want you to.”

  Harald lurched to his feet. The anger which had faded away flashed back with full force. He raised both of his mighty fists, intending to smash the woman in front of him into the stone beneath their feet. How dare she say that name! Using her knowledge of him in such a way! He opened his mouth to roar his fury at her and looked down. He would see her face as he crushed her body.