Prologue
Distant explosions dotted incessantly across the screen of stars, each light momentarily altering the surrounding constellations. Wave upon wave of humanoid samurai-doh launched from the platforms of the Musashi, rushing across the void toward the Hades IV, only to be challenged halfway by the extra-humanoid itai of the Cerberan soldiers.
A 2-D screen floated inside of Tomi's Spherical, monitoring the deep-space no-man's land between Greatships. The lights of the stars and the destroyed clone bodies shone like fields of shimmering tears. Her fit of weeping had finally abated, replaced now by a state of numb emptiness. Tomi looked beyond the layers of her Spherical at the rooms of their apartment, saw some of Nez's things left carelessly out-of-place, awaiting his return. She closed her eyes, which were still numb from the attack.
Nez was among the legions of Tokugawa Samurai at the military compound outside of Musashi's capital city, all neural-logged into their itai consoles. Each samurai remotely controlled an itai clone body, wielding it through its launch across the deep-space combat zone. The samurai lived these bodies' brief, surrogate lives until their inevitable, violent deaths ejected the conscious host minds back into their bodies. No true death would ever touch a soldier riding in an itai doh, only destruction of the mindless clones they temporarily inhabited.
She suddenly became aware of a comm. window initializing within her Spherical. It was not a secretary--but the Shogun Ryogi himself on the screen, ordering her to accept his call.
She activated the screen but said nothing.
Ryogi spoke immediately, "Tomi, your subordinate combat programmers have informed me that you've become unresponsive, and that your programming activities have ceased?" She said nothing. "Dammit, this is a critical moment in the campaign. Matahachi is swamped, doing his job and yours. We need you! What has happened?"
"I hijacked Nez into one of the Cerberan itai, before it could even launch out of the Hades IV," she said softly. "He managed to sneak the pirated body deep into secure areas of the Greatship and plug himself directly into the hardware that houses Hades' internal, isolated network. Not the shell systems that I can hack from here, mind you; he physically connected the itai into the hardware that manages vital ship function applications, completely unreachable via standard data channels, public or secure."
Ryogi's face lit up with hope and questions, but she continued.
"It seemed a great victory, yes. I was about to send a barrage of severe strikes into their ship's core through the bridge Nez had spliced with the hijacked itai, when the Cerberans struck back at us. I'd forgotten that President Sterling was personally running the Hades' combat programming defense. He ... his routines and their shells were too quick for me. We traded and parried attacks for a few minutes, until Sterling burrowed a 2.92Flashbomb into my own Spherical that temporarily blinded me. While I was incapacitated, he reached through the itai bridge and sent deadly signals directly into Nez's cerebrum, via his console link. I couldn't ... I lost him." A fresh wave of tears spilled from her new eyes. "Nez is dead."
Tomi shut down the screen before she could see Ryogi's reaction.
...And noticed an anomaly in the code on her Spherical's seventh layer. "It couldn't be," she murmured. It couldn't be. Had William Sterling somehow accidentally left one thread open on the bridge between Nez's body's console on Musashi and his abandoned itai somewhere aboard the Hades IV? Such a mistake was far beneath a programmer as skilled as Sterling, Tomi thought ... Was it a trap?
She sent a small, slightly visible probe through the channel. It reached the Hades' core unmolested and undetected. Amazed that it hadn't been immediately erased, she used the program's scanner routine to check on William's status. He was indeed still coding in his Spherical over there, but his attention was diverted elsewhere.
Tomi shook her head with disbelief. President William Sterling, the most proficient coder she'd ever faced, had made a critical error in his ship's defense matrix. She knew that her open channel to their core might be detected at any moment; she needed to act; she'd never hold such power over the enemy vessel again.
Dozens of 2-D screens appeared inside of her Spherical, each showing data reports outlining the vulnerabilities of the Greatship's many critical systems. She hastily considered every report, murmuring to herself. Would she simply send a command to withhold the Greatship's interior oxygen until William surrendered? Or maybe cut all power and leave the Hades an impotent, dead vessel. She could even shut down all systems pertaining to their defenses, allowing the Tokugawan itai freedom to engage and enter through the defenseless ship's hull.
Tomi's eyes glanced across the picture she and Nez had taken last month and hung here above their living room couch. A feeling as of a sharp blow struck her inside. "Your death will not have been in vain, my love," she spoke. "No. Here and now, the void of space will burn."
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