As she absorbed the situation she became very aware of how her attention was struggling to cope with the six aspects now on deck thirty-three that were linked up into one personality. It wasn’t that the images from six different pairs of eyes, and other more extensive senses, were confusing. It was rather that she couldn’t quite process all her aspects’ thoughts in unity. Her brain simply wasn’t wired for it, despite the corpus routines doing their best to smooth the perception and thoughts into one.
‘I think Immanueel and the others modified the neural structure in those biophysical bodies of theirs,’ she said out loud. ‘This is going to give me a headache despite all the filtering I’m applying.’
‘Hang on in there,’ her Ainsley android aspect replied. The other four aspects signalled their support and sympathy, reducing their own input to the common personality to help.
She was starting to worry just how she’d cope if the Morgan did liberate itself from the time flows and hundreds of aspects joined her personality.
There are worse things.
And she wasn’t quite sure where that thought originated – her organic brain or the multi-aspect personality that she had elaborated up to.
I’ll take it, though. Because it is mine.
A countdown in her optik told her there were ninety seconds left. She accessed the hull cameras just in time to see the negative energy conduits rising up out of their recesses in the Morgan’s shiny copper fuselage. As she looked at the lean curve and menacing point of the spurs, all she could think of were the ears of the morox that had attacked Del after the flyer crash back on Juloss. The shape triggered way too many nerves.
There were twenty seconds left on the count, with the aspects loading the pattern format into local management routines, when awareness burgeoned into her mind, deriving from the plural personality – a gentle mental nudge to a weak biological brain. It wasn’t just the spurs on their section of the fuselage that were rising. The cameras were showing them standing proud across all of the Morgan.
‘Saints,’ she gasped. ‘It worked. I worked.’ The countdown reached zero. A tremor ran through the deck, and her optik was deluged by icons detailing node status and recovery routines going active. Her personality aspects expanded at a phenomenal rate as the network reintegrated, elaborating her to seventeen hundred aspects. Corpus level! She was scattered throughout the ship: in cabins, engineering bays, hangars, the dark spaces between tanks, wedged into machinery modules, airless interzones pressed against the fuselage, clinging to structural beams. All of her aspects interfaced with arrays and power systems, supervising the conduit patterns, scanning the nebula, arming weapons. Alarmingly, she could see the power drain from the conduits was absorbing almost all of the Morgan’s generating capacity to repel the time flows. They’d have to operate at redline limits just to accelerate, and as for beam weapons . . . She had to order them to power down. They couldn’t fight – not if they wanted to stay clear of the time flows.
Thirty-seven hers were tending to ancient tactical personnel who had endured decades of miserable imprisonment in their isolated decks, while another fifteen were trying to calm squad tacticians who’d been in normal time flows or slow ones and who hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong yet.
Operationally, the Morgan was running at about seventy per cent capacity, with machinery that hadn’t been powered up for decades taking time to get back online, while some equipment was so worn it would need replacing entirely. But it was a warship, designed to keep functioning and fighting when it was damaged.
‘Armada status!’ Yirella demanded. The main tactical display refreshed as the network reacquired the full sensor suite. For some reason she could analyse it calmly, no longer the Yirella who used to quail at the thought of taking an active part in advising the FinalStrike itself. Probably because only one aspect suffers hormonal stress, while the other seventeen hundred are pure analytics. That’s what I call a decent balance.
The armada was besieged by photonic disfigurements, every ship the centre of a shimmering cyclone of flickering microstars. ‘The squads,’ she gasped in relief as she saw the troop carriers were in plain sight, still holding position a thousand kilometres out from the Morgan. None of them were being accosted by twinkles. Too insignificant. The thought angered her. Just you wait.
Her comms were receiving calls from every squad leader – including Dellian. All of them were desperate to know what was happening. She talked to all of them simultaneously, ordering them back to the Morgan, where they’d be safer inside its hull, protected from errant time flows.
At the same time she was also monitoring a squadron of eighty Resolution ships picking off the armada ships quickly and easily. More Resolution ships were flooding through the gateway behind them, accelerating towards the armada to add to the carnage. Nothing could fight back; the corpus warships were paralysed by the different time flows twisting through their structure. They were being struck by graviton pulses and nuclear missiles and energy beams, detonating into vivid swirls of incandescent vapour that expanded out like a distorted cluster of weird tumours as their destruction times varied.
While her android aspects handled tactical, her original body opened Dellian’s icon. ‘Hey, you. How are you doing?’
‘Yirella! Saints! What’s happening? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. The Olyix hit us with a weird time weapon. That’s why you’ve been ordered back to the Morgan. You’ll be safer inside.’
‘Right. Yeah. Listen, Ellici and
