The Catherine Kimbridge Omnibus Collection I Read online

“19 percent it is. As fast as you can maneuver us into position, attempt to improve their orbit.”

  The deck shook wildly as the two craft touched. Acceleration became negligible and Cat began to float away from the flooring deck.

  “Ben, report! Are we making a difference?”

  “Affirmative, Commander. The alien craft seems to be 43 percent the anticipated mass. There is now a 72 percent chance we will have sufficient fuel for their vessel to achieve a stable orbit.”

  “Wonderful… What about us?”

  “The Arizona is considerably heavier than the alien vessel. We will not achieve a stable orbit. Calculations indicate we will impact near Olympus Mons in thirty-six minutes.”

  Cat listened to Ben’s cold and analytical assessment of their pending demise. In some ways, she envied his detachment. But death was not an option she was willing to entertain.

  “If we ejected the LFTR power cores and VASIMR drive unit, would our mass be sufficiently reduced to achieve orbit?”

  “Yes, however, the nanite mesh that repaired the port reserve tank failed during the engagement with the aggressive alien. Fuel reserves are now at 43 percent. There is no longer sufficient fuel to save both the remaining alien and this vessel.”

  “Nuts…” Cat said under her breath. “Ben, new orders. Continuously calculate the orbital status of the vessel we are assisting. The moment it is in a likely stable orbit, disengage thrust and attempt a controlled reentry into Mars. Eject the cores and main drive now.”

  “Orders accepted. Please note the Arizona in its current configuration is not aerodynamic.”

  “That’s OK, we are not going to glide. I want you to time our reentry so we gently kiss the trailing slope of Olympus Mons. With any luck, we can dissipate our excess reentry energy in a controlled slide down the slope of Mons.”

  “Shall I calculate the odds of success?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  * * *

  Yarin’s consciousness came back online at 4352. It noted eye stalk seven was missing and instructed construction nanites to replace it at the earliest opportunity. To be honest, Yarin was amazed it was still alive. The collision with the D’lralu had resulted in massive system failures. It was unlikely the repair systems within its craft would have sufficient time to effect repairs prior to impact with the planet they were orbiting.

  Once the Heshe’s external sensors and their associated system log came online, Yarin had its answer. The human had sacrificed herself to save the Heshe!

  Remarkable. Yarin could not remember a time in recent memory when a non-Heshe had saved a Heshe’s life. Certainly not while forfeiting the creator’s gift of one’s own life. For all practical purposes this forced Yarin’s hand. For the first time in dozens of millennia, a Heshe would repay a life debt!

  * * *

  “Ben, give me all you have on reverse thrusters. We’re about to hit, and we are coming in way too hot.”

  “I’m sorry, Commander. Fuel reserves are depleted. Impact in 2.4 seconds.”

  “It’s been an honor, Ben…” Cat began. Before she could finish, the ESX Arizona impacted with the north wall of Olympus Mons at 643 miles per hour. It was December 7th, 2067. It would be the first time Lt. Commander Catherine Kimbridge would die… but certainly not the last.

  Chapter Two – The Awakening…

  Hesitant eyes opened. Light filtered in. “In where” was the question. The room was stark white and sterile. It could be a hospital but for the fact that nothing was right. The walls were too short, and the light seemed to emanate from everywhere. The air, while fresh, was… ‘wrong.’

  Sitting up on an oddly warm metal table she looked down at her hands. She was a ‘she.’ She knew that, but precious little else. Who was she? Why was she here? Why didn’t she remember anything? She had a feeling she should, but her existence prior to this room seemed just out of reach.

  She was alone and yet she was not. There seemed to be another within her. It was confusing.

  * * *

  The Yarin Prime construct watched the human construct awaken. The human this construct had been based on had been irreparably damaged fifty-three of her years ago. Yarin Prime’s progenitor had created a Yarin Prime construct in order to fulfill a life debt. It had taken Yarin Prime two Earth years to create a new shell for this human and the balance of the time to learn how to exactly transfer her progenitor’s intellect. An exact synapse-by-synapse parallel was created, and the electrochemical potentials between those synapses duplicated exactly between the broken body in stasis and this new and improved doppelgänger.

  Her new body was infused with both repair and construction nanites that would continuously analyze her environment and adjust her physiology accordingly. All that remained was to transfer her previous memories into her new synaptic matrix.

  * * *

  With a sudden realization, Catherine Kimbridge felt her memories rush back like a floodgate had opened. The feeling was overpowering, and she shuddered. She had been in a crash. She remembered most of her lower torso being crushed and the brief but intense fire that had rushed through the ravaged bridge of the Arizona. Why was she alive? Looking down at her legs she saw no sign of any injury – nor did she see any sign of clothing. With a sudden start, she realized she was naked.

  A slight movement of air which raised the soft hairs on her arms was the first indication that she was not alone. Turning quickly, while using her arms to cover her exposed privates as best she could, she was startled to see what looked to be some type of land-based cephalopod with eight ridged legs and matching eyestalks. The legs appeared capable of working both for locomotion and manipulation. One of them held what appeared to be a soft white ball.

  “Greetings, beloved of the creator.”

  “Where am I?”

  The ball undulated colors wildly. Just as quickly the alien’s entire body began to shift colors in an equally wild pattern. The ball in turn… spoke.

  “You are here.”

  “Not especially helpful. Wait! You speak English?” Cat gasped in an utterly astonished voice.

  “Technically this is not correct. My race, the Heshe, do not have a spoken language. We can perceive sounds, but we have no apparatus to produce complex sounds.”

  “So you can understand me, but you need to use that glowing ball in order to answer.”

  “Again, technically not correct. My brain is, in your parlance, wired to perceive complex color patterns and process them for communication. While I perceive sounds, my ability to interpret them in any meaningful sense is quite limited. That said, my technology is able to bridge the communication gap my biology cannot.”

  Cat watched the incredible light display played out between the Heshe, as it called itself, and the glowing ball that it carried. Suddenly she remembered that she was naked.

  “I seem to be missing my clothes.”

  “Yes, regrettably your synthetic coverings were destroyed with your previous body.”

  Cat blinked as she digested that comment. “I promise you, I’m going to want to come back to that one. In the meantime, is there anything we can do about getting me some clothes?”

  The alien moved forward with astonishing speed and touched the glowing ball to Cat’s skin. As Cat backed away in alarm, the ball quickly dissolved into her arm where it had touched. “What the hell!”

  “My apologies. It was necessary for me to manually program your encounter unit. It has been incorporated into your nanite systems. You will now be able to understand me directly.”

  “How is this possible?” Cat asked. “I see your color flashes, but I’m hearing you as if you are speaking.”

  “If you will follow me, I will show you to your quarters where artificial coverings are available. On the way, I will attempt to explain the events that have occurred since your death.”

  “Now see, there you go again,” Cat said with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “I most certainly don’t feel dead.”

  “I should hope not,” the Heshe named Yarin Prime responded.

  * * *

  Lt. Commander Catherine Kimbridge straightened her dress uniform. Technically it was a replica of her uniform created by her alien benefactor, a member of an octopedal race called the Heshe. Sometime over the last nine months she had taken to calling the alien “Cal” (short for Calamari) because it resembled a large ‘land-walking’ octopus.

  When Cat had first woken up in the alien’s medical bay she had no idea who she was. Over the intervening months she had fully recovered her memories, and so much more.

  Cal was a nanite-enhanced clone of a Heshe that the original Catherine Kimbridge had saved from certain death. That Heshe, along with the rest of its entire race, had fled this galaxy for reasons not fully shared with Cat.

  In her effort to save the alien, Cat had lost her own life. Fortunately, for the highly advanced technology of the Heshe, the definition of death had become a somewhat nebulous term. In saving the life of a Heshe at the cost of her own, the Heshe in question had become honor-bound to repay the “Life debt,” whatever the cost.

  Cat’s body had been recreated and her memories fully transferred to her new shell. Every appreciable nuance of her intellect, including how her mind would evolve over time, had been painstakingly duplicated by her benefactor. In order to accommodate unknown variables and because the Heshe had never fully examined a fully functional human being, the decision was made to augment Cat’s organic systems with a fully functional set of Heshe repair and construction nanites. These would allow her body to adapt to virtually any environment she found herself in.

  Because the Heshe had never attempted a human project of this magnitude, the process took well in excess of fifty years. For the essentially immortal Heshe, this timescale was a trivial matter. For Catherine Kimbridge it was a real concern and a significant factor in her current unease.

  She had spent the last three-quarters of a year in a hidden Heshe facility on Mars learning how to fully control her nanite systems from her Heshe instructor. In addition, she had spent as much of her time as possible reviewing the major events of the last fifty-four years of human history. Today was the day she would reemerge into human society and she had no idea how that society would welcome her.

  She had been startled when Cal had said that the Heshe would be leaving soon and that it was time for her to return to her people. She had assumed that the alien would be with her when she returned to humanity. Absent Cal, and the instant credibility the Heshe’s presence would represent, she was not altogether sure how believable her incredible tale would be.

  * * *

  Ricky Valen rubbed the stubble of his three-day beard. He looked at the calm and seemingly sincere woman sitting in the rear compartment of his quarry shuttle. The last thing he had expected when he started drilling for rare earth metals today was to hit a buried chamber with a human occupant.

  “Mars II, this is Prospector 49. Request permission to dock at first available gate. Over.”

  “49, you are cleared for Gate 3. Do you have any cargo to declare?”

  “You might say that. We have one passenger.”

  “Roger that, 49, one passenger. What nationality?”

  “Deimos base, your guess is as good as mine. She claims she’s Catherine Kimbridge, THE Catherine Kimbridge… As in the ‘Lt. Commander’ variety.”

  “49, you know the penalty for drinking when flying.”

  “Trust me, Deimos base, you’re going to want to share that drink when you see who this is.”

  * * *

  Rigel Kentaurus, a ternary star system roughly four light years from Sol, was the host to over a dozen large planetary masses. Only three of these masses contained the right conditions for life. The D’lralu named Third of Nine scanned each of the three for signs of intelligent competing life forms.

  Two had proto-viruses and primitive single-celled microbes. One was totally barren. None were the source of the radio transmissions detected by the D’lralu home defense network. The warrior scout would continue his search and destroy mission in the next star system; a yellow midlife star some 4.2 light years away. He began the calculations. It would take his massive onboard computers less than two weeks to make the necessary computations.

  * * *

  “Enough… You have poked me and prodded me for two weeks. I have answered every question you have asked. I’ve taken more written tests in the last two weeks than during my entire doctorate program at Notre Dame!” Catherine Kimbridge was not a happy camper. She was dressed in the plain coveralls United Space Command had insisted she wear when they confiscated her United States Air Force uniform.

  Admiral Faragon steepled his hands. “Lady, I don’t know who, or even what you are, but you most certainly are not who you say you are. Lt. Commander Catherine Kimbridge has been dead since I was a ten-year-old boy. I went to a high school named after her. She published exactly two papers in her brief career and they are still considered seminal works in hyper-field dynamics. You are most certainly not her. So just answer my questions honestly and we can all go home!”

  “Admiral, what can I say to convince you I am who I say?”

  “Frankly, dear, not a damn thing.”

  “Then, Admiral, why am I even here?” Cat stood up and leaned over the table to face down a man for whom she was rapidly losing respect and patience. Her face was red with barely controlled rage.

  Admiral Faragon simply said dryly, “Sit down, Lt. Commander.”

  “Lt. Commander? In two weeks that’s the first time you have acknowledged my rank.”

  The Admiral looked at one of the recording cameras positioned in the corners of the interview room. She swore she saw him briefly smile as he said “Bring it in.”

  Before Cat could ask what ‘it’ was, the solitary door to their room opened and a familiar-looking man who seemed to be a forty-year-old version of Dr. Robert Kimbridge – her father – entered the room. Only after taking a close look at him did Cat realize this was a robotic android and not an actual human being. The level of detail and the sophistication on the animatronics was outstanding… if somewhat disturbing.

  “Lt. Commander Catherine Kimbridge, allow me to introduce your father… Or rather, what is left of him.”

  “Hello, Cat,” the mechanism said. “I am Bob.” Seeing her eyebrows rise and her lips twitch the robot anticipated her question and added, “The essence of your father’s memories have been placed in this shell.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re my father? You are able to transfer your consciousness into an AI now?”

  “Regrettably, no,” Bob responded. “I am at best a crude simulation of your father. I have a significant portion of his memories and handcrafted logic algorithms that act on that data to provide a rough approximation of the response the real Robert Kimbridge would have made. Like any AI we can currently construct, I lack the ability to fully intuit creative solutions. This is where I think you and I differ.”

  Cat looked confused. “Why go to all the effort? If a total transfer was not possible, then what was the reason for making what is at best a personality emulator?”

  Bob answered quite simply… “You. A chance for your father to say goodbye to you. He could never, in his heart, accept that you were gone.”

  The Admiral leaned forward and put his elbows on the small round table that separated the three of them. “Your father, Robert Kimbridge, and his team were working on a very important project when he suffered a massive heart attack…”

  “About ten years ago. I read the reports on the Times Daily News archives a few months back. How does any of this have anything to do with you suddenly believing I’m Catherine Kimbridge?”

  The Admiral stood and walked over to her side of the table. “You have to admit your story is a fantastic one. You encounter a pair of alien spacecraft on the maiden voyage of the famous ESX Arizona. They destroy each other after disabling your ship. You save one at the cost of your own life and in turn they give you a new, seemingly enhanced body. You have to admit… If I were writing fiction I’d be hard pressed to come up with a wilder story.”

  “You believe me now, but an hour ago you weren’t sure. Why?”

  Bob answered her first. “There are two reasons. First, you did something I can’t do. You got angry. I can feign anger, but for the same reason an actor who cannot internalize a role is rarely believable, strong emotions elude me. Second…”

  “We have one of the vessels that attacked you. Or significant pieces of it, anyway,” Faragon added with a wink and a smile.

  “So let me get this straight,” Catherine continued. “You believe my story now because I got angry?”

  “We always believed you,” the Admiral said. “The real question was really one of ‘what’ you were, not ‘who’ you were. To be honest, I’m still not sure how to answer that question but my medics tell me you are biologically human. Your cognitive function tests correlate very closely with what we know of the original Catherine Kimbridge. Your aptitude tests are off the scales; but then, so were hers. And you respond outside the bounds of simulated personalities like our friend Bob here.” He paused to look more closely at her. “I can’t fully answer what you are, especially in light of the alien nanotechnology in your system, but I am satisfied that you are close enough in every measurable way to the Lt. Commander, that you are in all practicality her.”

  “Does that mean I get my uniform back?” Catherine asked with a grin.

  Chapter Three – The USC Bowman…

  The door to the shuttle closed and Cat, along with about a dozen fellow passengers, sat back in her white leather seat as the craft readied itself for the trip from Houston, Texas to USC Orbital One, as the massive 60,000-person city in space was called. Normally one of the four international space elevators would be used to travel into space, but when time was of the essence, nothing beat the speed of a direct shuttle.

  Orbital One was a command center for the United Space Command and a massive research center and shipyard in space. Earth’s first truly interstellar spaceships were currently under construction within the massive orbiting facility.