"As I say: nothing concrete," said Colonel Vashti. "However, if you don't mind, I have to leave now. There are other things I need to attend to. I also believe that there's a great deal of new information that you and your space fleet need to analyse."
The colonel strode unhurriedly out of the luxury villa in which she'd imprisoned Beatrice. It was true that Vashti also needed to digest the data she'd assimilated in the past hour. The most significant fact was that Sirius had no better explanation for the Anomaly than Proxima Centauri, but Vashti was intrigued by their assessment that the Anomaly was too much of an unknown threat for its continued existence to be tolerated. She wondered whether a similar analysis by her nanobot civilisation wouldn't have resulted in a similarly hostile response. Was it possible, given the history of biological life-forms in this spacetime continuum, that it was actually Sirius who was acting in the most rational manner?
Vashti walked by Paul's villa and resisted the temptation to pay him a visit. At that moment he was languidly lying on his bed with a naked woman that he thought was Beatrice, but who was actually just another manifestation of Vashti's nanobot community.
Paul's marriage had improved dramatically since Colonel Vashti took over control of the Intrepid. The copy of the android that Paul so enjoyed making love with was just as passionate and skilled at lovemaking as the original—which was to be expected—but unlike the real Beatrice this was a Beatrice who had all the time in the world to spend with her husband. Previously, she'd been too preoccupied with other sexual and romantic liaisons, not to mention the effective management of a huge space ship. Paul was probably the only human who'd noticed any significant difference since Vashti had taken control of the space ship, although he naively attributed the improved relationship with his wife to the strength of her love for him.
Vashti also resisted the temptation to visit the captain: again in her guise as Beatrice. Captain Kerensky would be no more aware than anyone else on the ship how perilously close she'd been to instant annihilation. During the time in which the incident took place the captain was as blissfully unaware as she was of the true nature of the woman who she imagined to be Beatrice.
Vashti relished all these ironies.
The deer and sheep that grazed in the green pastures of the penultimate level were as ignorant of the real state of affairs as the human occupants. There was an interesting hierarchy of knowledge and ignorance. The animals on the ship imagined that the world they inhabited was boundless and natural. The humans on the ship believed that the mission on which they were embarked was being controlled by Mission Control on the Moon under the captaincy of Nadezhda Kerensky. The captain believed that the mission had been hijacked by androids. All these perspectives were flawed but ever closer approximations of the truth. The colonel wondered whether her own perspective was really as clear-sighted as she believed it to be.
Colonel Vashti strolled out of the verdant fields where the ship's passengers lived in comfort and luxury and into the military quarters where she supposedly lived. The soldiers who saluted her and who she saluted in return had no reason to believe that the colonel wasn't the woman they'd always believed her to be. This illusion was one the colonel was eager to maintain. Vashti still had duties to perform as a military officer, but she spawned copies of herself when required so that nobody ever needed to suspect that she was concurrently also spending time elsewhere. These copies also ensured that she didn't neglect her lovers amongst the military staff. They wouldn't notice the difference between the woman who fucked them and the woman who was now striding down the corridor.
She paused by the door to her modest quarters and studied the holographic image embedded into the corridor wall. It was displaying the empty space outside the space ship. If such real-time images weren't scattered about the ship would anyone on board even be aware that they were in deep space? How conscious were they that they were further out in space than even the solar winds? The nearest physical objects were scattered sparsely about the Oort Cloud that circled the sun at such a distance that not a single one had completed its solar orbit since humanity first ventured into space. What the screens didn't display, of course, was the fleet of Proxima Centauri space craft that human technology wasn't able to detect. Neither, of course, would there have been evidence of the battle for the Intrepid that had just taken place.
The one most significant object in the vicinity, the Anomaly, was still a long way away. It was so distant in the outermost regions of the Oort Cloud and the gravitational influence of the sun so weak that it was no surprise that the Anomaly hadn't completed even one orbit of the sun in the one and half thousand years since it first appeared. This was strange in itself. How could something so large have no mass? How could it not interact in some way with the gravitational force of the distant sun?
Vashti had complete access to the research on the Anomaly carried out by the many scientists and theorists on board the Intrepid. She'd studied it in far greater detail than it was possible for humans or their machines. The accumulated evidence was far better at describing what the Anomaly was not than what it was. There was no agreement even as to what it was composed of. In a sense it was an absence of anything, but it was not actually a vacuum. Matter and energy was not disturbed by its presence. The only measurable effect it had was to cause any particle that entered it to never return. The only apparent perturbation associated with it was a greater incidence of the strange Apparitions that were otherwise scattered thinly throughout the Solar System. And what it most resembled was a huge rip in the fabric of space and time. The scientists hoped that more would be revealed when the Intrepid was in orbit around the Anomaly. But how could that possibly reveal more than was revealed by the unmanned probes?
Vashti knew that left to humans the mission would most likely result in yet another inconclusive question mark. How could human technology possibly do any better than that used by the machine civilisations that had been orbiting the Anomaly for over a century?
There was really no choice but to steer the Intrepid directly into the Anomaly.
Of course she wasn't going to inform the Proxima Centauri space fleet of her intention. In any case, they'd probably already arrived at the same conclusion. If the human occupants of the space ship knew that they would soon be transported into a zone of information annihilation there would be a mutiny which would be somewhat of a nuisance to suppress. The human scientists believed that their research was just a further increment in human understanding of the properties and purpose of an exotic object in deep space. They weren't expecting to be plunged into an abyss from which nothing had yet re-emerged. It was unlikely that they would welcome almost certain death and the complete destruction of their precious research. Scientists didn't normally expect to make the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of knowledge and experimental research.
Death didn't bother Vashti. The community of nanobots of which she was composed was essentially immortal. It would continue to exist whatever happened to the manifestations of Colonel Vashti. However, she was aware that humans and even the robots of Proxima Centauri were rather attached to the idea of staying alive. Captain Kerensky, in particular, would never authorise a suicide mission, so it was necessary for Vashti to assume control of the ship before it encountered the Anomaly.
Colonel Vashti pushed open the door to enter the privacy of her room. Now that she'd classified the considerable volume of data she'd assimilated from the Sirius space fleet, she needed to identify any data regarding the Anomaly unknown to both the human and Proxima Centauri civilisations whose significance had eluded the analysis of Sirius's sophisticated computers. Unfortunately, Vashti's only real enlightenment concerned the stealth and weapons technology which she could usefully donate to the Proxima Centauri space fleet if there was any possibility of renewed assault. However, that was unlikely. The only Sirius space ships still orbiting the Anomaly had no significant military capability and could easily be neutralised.
The colonel was a formidable force. She had travelled from one universe to another. She had taken control of the most expensive and well-resourced scientific mission in human history. She had singlehandedly neutralised the firepower of two advanced robotic civilisations. Her mission was proceeding exactly as planned.
How could the Anomaly offer any effective resistance?
