The Long Road to Gaia (16 page)

I left them there, and stood behind Jon's
chair.

If something unwanted happened, I'd be
there to do something.

The beginning of the fight was already
choreographed, and ten seconds before expected arrival, Jon gave the order to
fire.

All hell broke loose.

While the enemy was still down jumping, I
slowed time to see what was happening better. I immediately became aware that
Jon was also seeing a slowed down view.

"Good thinking Thirteen," said
Twelve. "He can use the perspective of slow time to good effect."

I brought us back to normal time, and the
battle continued.

We prevailed. And yes, I was so much a part
of this battle, I included myself in the feeling of relief for surviving it.
For the first time ever, I'd wished I had actually been fighting it.

Jon began checking survivors, and giving
orders.

And suddenly, we were heading back to the
station to help with boarders.

Alison was calling for help, and Jane did
an override on the airlock and decompressed the entire deck.

We raced to find Alison, Jon gunning down
four men with his sniper rifle on the way.

When we found her, her suit was shredding,
her wounds starting to freeze.

Jon attempted to control what remained of
her belt, but it was beyond working, as it continued to shred.

I reached out to both their belts, and
merged them together, using Jon's to cover Alison as well.

He rushed her to a med capsule which was
coming to meet them. As she slid inside it, I reversed what I’d done with their
suits.

Jon continued on to the CCC, and followed
along behind Jane.

I could feel his fatigue.

I detached completely from him, and
returned to the Pure Land.

One said nothing. She simply hugged me.

The second battle of Avon caught us all by
surprise. As did Jon flying a station sized Battleship as if it was a fighter.

There was dead silence when the battle
ended.

"Fuck me!" said Twelve.
"Have we created a monster?"

"No," answered One. "He's
exactly what we need."

I think it was Sixteen, wearing a young
attractive female body, who sidled up to Twelve and whispered something in his
ear. He went bright red. But I noticed they both disappeared pretty soon after.

There was after all, advantages to wearing
human bodies.

* *
*

The third battle of Avon was a slam dunk.
Jon's new Pocket Battleships hit the Midgard forces so hard, they didn’t get
off an offensive shot.

We did high fives all round.

"How come the
Keerah
never developed someone like Jon?" I asked One.

"Different mind set," she
replied. "For plain battle sense, no-one beats them. Even technically,
they're ahead of most. But for all their battle-smarts, they don’t have either
the subtlety or lateral thinking of Humans."

"All other things being equal, who
would win between Humans and
Keerah?" asked
Twelve.

"If we used credits, I'd put mine on
the Humans."

One's answer surprised me. She must have
seen it on my face.

"Don’t forget though, they would never
meet on otherwise equal terms. The Keerah have been making war longer than
Humans have existed."

"Be interesting all the same,"
added Twelve.

I nodded. It would indeed, especially if a
more experienced and better equipped Jon was leading the Humans.

* *
*

"Celebration or not, remind Jon to
tool up before he leaves."

One hadn't bothered to materialize this
time.

I did so. Jon wasn’t aware these whispers
were not his own thoughts. No-one ever did, when something attached to them.
You had to be looking for them, to find attachments. Jon was open to higher
entities, but he still had no idea something like me was whispering to him.

On his way out of the ship, Jon was shot
twice. By a Pulse rifle, and then a Meson Blaster. One materialized next to me,
standing over where he lay on the deck. More bruises for him I suspected.

"Make him angry Thirteen," said
One. "This has to be taken up a level."

I looked at her.

"Got to be done Thirteen."

I made him very angry.

He hobbled out, changed one of his guns to
lasers, yelled at one of the security cams, and shot both men in the head.

I looked at One in amazement.

"You wanted this?"

"Necessary. Stay close to him, it gets
worse."

She vanished.

* *
*

"So you’re the one," said a
voice.

Jon looked up, into the face of the old man
who'd been staring at him a short while earlier.

I whispered to Jon to stand up and face him
properly.

"Have we met?" Jon asked him.

"No, we've not met. But I know you.
You’re the one who killed my older sons, put my granddaughter in prison, and
today killed my younger son. Now it's your turn."

He placed the end of his walking stick
exactly where the Meson Blaster had hit Jon earlier, and pulled a semi-hidden
trigger.

There was a loud bang, and Jon went flying
backwards, where he lay still.

His heart stopped for twenty seconds, but
started again before I could do anything.

I looked at the old man. BA took a step in his
direction, and I leapt onto her, attaching fully. Within a minute, the man was
dead. Breaking the nose, hitting it again, and pushing it up into the brain,
wasn’t always fatal, but BA, boosted by my anger, had done the job properly.
The man was dead well before he hit the floor.

I let BA calm down, waited by Jon, and
followed him to the hospital.

"I told you it gets worse," said
One.

* *
*

We all watched the battles which took place
across the Atlantis system. Me from behind Jon's chair, and the rest from the
Pure Land meeting place.

Part of me was in both places, so I knew
what was going on. Multitasking isn’t difficult at our level.

Each battle started to close the gap, as
far as results were concerned. Each battle was testing Jon's ability to lead.

I watched One. She seemed unconcerned, even
when Jon botched the formation choice for the jump into Cobol, which almost
ended in disaster. She nodded to me.

It was good training for Jon. And it wasn’t
going to his head at all.

I wondered how long it would be before I
had to take an active role in the battles myself.

* *
*

The battle at Cobol could only be a
slugfest. Two large fleets at long range. We fired off our missiles and
torpedoes, they fired off their missiles.

As they began to cross, I stopped time so I
could look at things from above.

I'd seen a lot of battles over the eons,
but nothing like this. On the left, our formation of ships. On the right, the
Midgard formation. Less than half way to the middle on both sides was what
looked like two solid walls of missiles.

Once again, Jon was aware of time stopping.
So I started it moving slowly so we could see the various barrages moving,
before returning time to normal.

I pondered if Jon was getting the time
effects from me due to proximity, or if One had bound us somehow and not told
me about it.

It would be just the sort of thing she
would do.

* *
*

The Dropships went down to Cobol, looking
for why no-one had answered com attempts. We found a ruined city, all signs of
technology destroyed.

Over the other side of a small range of
hills, we found a compound containing enemy ships.

A few minutes missile spamming by two
Cruisers and too many Talons, and all three Dropships died.

"Oh Shit!" I echoed Jon, as the
missile which killed him lazily came at us.

Wreckage fell from the sky, as I struggled
to cope with the unexpected tragedy.

I got a grip, and stopped time.

Twelve appeared next to me.

"That went well," he said with a
grin.

I hit him again.

Maybe two shiners instead of one would stop
him making stupid comments. For a moment I pondered why he'd still be sporting
a shiner, given we had total control over how we looked, but then, Twelve was
spending a lot of time in Human form as well, and maybe the more we spent in a
corporeal form, the more the laws of that form applied to us. On the other
hand, Twelve was perverse enough to think the shiner made him look more cool to
the rest of us. On the gripping hand…

I was getting very sick of Twelve. We
normally had very little to do with each other. While six hundred years was
nothing to us, spending it with Twelve was still long enough for him to start
getting on my nerves. Especially since Humans had very intense nerves, and I
was spending way too much time Human.

I pulled myself back on track. Twelve was
gone, which was at least one good thing.

One hadn't put in an appearance yet, which
was a second good thing.

What to do about this mess.

Obviously, I needed to wind back time to
some point, and take Jon back with me. I allowed things to rewind to just
before the missile killed him. I reached out to connect to him, and stopped.

There were two other connections already in
place. I followed them to the twins, who were in combat suits below.

I tugged gently on Jon, and both of them moved
as well.

"Wait," said One as she finally
put in an appearance.

"Did you attach these connections to
Jon?" I asked her before she could say anything else.

"No. But it's obvious that anything
you do with Jon, will need to include them as well."

"I gathered that," I said
sarcastically.

"You need to take them back to before
they left."

"Duh!"

She actually smiled at the twins'
impersonation.

"Where is the question though."

She waved up what a Human would call a
hollo screen, rewound time to the point where the fleet arrived at Cobol Orbital,
and let it play forward.

"There," she said, pointing to
Jon sitting in his Ready Room.

"How's he going to react to
this?" I asked her. "You know he's aware of it every time I mess with
time."

"It's nothing to do with your
proximity."

"How then?"

"I'm not sure. I can guess, but
there's no point in voicing it without some evidence."

"Figures. It's not you then?"

"Of course not. How could I give a
Human awareness of time and the ability to think outside of it?"

"Who could?"

"Those above us could."

"Oh."

"Stop prevaricating and get on with
this."

I gathered the connections to Jon and the
twins.

"Wait."

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"It's not enough."

"Why not?"

"This time he needs something tangible
to tell him he did see the future."

"Why?"

"Because he needs to know it wasn’t
just a dream."

"Again, why?"

"It's part of his training. He needs
to know how badly he screwed up."

I stared at her for a good while, but she
said nothing more, just returning my stare.

"How?" I finally asked.

"Take the three Dropships back as
well."

I opened my mouth to say something
sarcastic, but nothing came out. I closed my mouth.

It required thought. I'd need to wind back
time slowly to grab the other two Dropships in the moment before destruction,
then jump back to the moment we'd selected, reintegrating all six displaced
objects with their state before going back.

I'd never done something this complicated
before. Moving myself through time was easy. I'd even moved objects a few
times. But three corporeals, and their vehicles, minus the other corporeals?

I very carefully attached myself to all six
objects.

And shifted. At the same time, I edited the
logs of the Dropships, and the memories of the three people. They needed to
remember what happened, but not the events which would now be done over. I'm
not sure Humans could cope with having two memories of the same time period.

It was almost perfect. The three Dropships
interposed over their previous selves without a hitch. The two girls jerked
like they'd fallen asleep for a few seconds unexpectedly.

But Jon reacted violently enough to propel
him off his chair to hit the floor.

I idly wondered why he always hit the floor
on his left side.

"Well done Thirteen," said One,
now hidden by several hours of time.

Unseen, I sank into an unused lounge chair.
The effort had drained me and I needed to rest for a while.

* *
*

A few hours later, I did most of it again.
Jon had gone down in Excalibur, and again a missile had taken him out. Or was
about to.

Before it hit, I yanked hard on Jon, pulling
him out of that timeline, and putting him back into himself, back in the Dining
Room when they were discussing how to do the job better this time.

I forgot about the twins in the urgency of
the moment, and they came with him.

The integrations were fine, but having done
it without preparation this time, Jon was hurled backwards into a wall, and the
twins were both dumped onto the floor.

"Easy on Thirteen," said One.
"He doesn’t need you hurting him as well."

"Oops."

* *
*

Third time was the charm, and the ground
assault on Cobol went off without any further problems.

One dropped in on us while Jon was patting
his cat, after.

"You should probably see this,
Thirteen."

"Which this is that?" I asked,
using Jon's favourite comeback.

"Come."