A New Front: Chapter 1: In the Pursuit of Freedom, One Inevitably Turns to the Stars

Hey, all! this is a new side story that takes place along side the main story of Anti-antithesis, one that has been rattling around in my head for a few months now, but only just now being able to put to paper. It will probably be a bit more nitty gritty than the main story, as it is essentially playing a 4X game being narrated, but I will do my best to make it interesting. This will also be the main source of combat for a while, as I have, once more, fucked up the timing of things! The global happens in November, and as it is late September currently, I still have another month to account for!

Anyway, please enjoy Clie's adventures in space.

Baba Yaga

As we stood on the Moon’s surface and overlooked the abomination of a launching mechanism floating a few hundred feet above us, a sigh escaped my lips. 

Morrigan, present in a Mesh Node avatar, didn’t look away from the virtual console as she addressed me. “We both agreed that this plan has the highest possibility of success, B. Not to mention that with Paladin’s interference, we had to accelerate our timeline already.”

I waved at her dismissively. “I know, I know.” I said before sighing once more, “My misgivings here are not about the plan, nor this…” I waved vaguely at the absurdly massive electromagnetic sled device. “Rushed job of yours.”

That comment earned me a glare, which caused me to chuckle. She was always so easy to tease and gave me such adorable reactions. The minor distraction was good for my nerves. “No, my problem is that we are sending our child now instead of in another month or so.”

At the mention of Clio, Morrigan paused her endless checks and adjustments before sighing herself. 

Clio was another AI seed bought by Victor at our request a couple of weeks after the destruction of Bestlé, yet she was not simply given to us from Synaptic. Instead, once more at our request, she took a bit of Morrigan and my core personality matrix and mixed it together with some of her own expertise and parameters before delivering to us what was objectively our child. And while I will admit that I treated Victor and his family like my children, Clio was actually my child, and I doted on her accordingly. 

She was a bundle of curiosity and innovation and often broke through the child barriers we set to keep her corralled in the Mesh. She loved to explore and build and asked endless questions to everyone about everything, and I loved her dearly. And yet, instead of having her assist Morrigan or me with the expansion of the Monster Box in the city or with Mindy and her endless quest for air supremacy, we were about to launch her a few hundred million miles away from us.

I felt a pressure on my shoulder, recognizing it as a hand I was more than familiar with as it turned me to face her. Clio’s avatar was nothing like Morrigan or mine; instead, it was was something entirely her. She stood taller than I at six foot eight with long black hair that extended to her hips, framing her lovely round face. Her skin was as tanned as a field worker’s, yet her eyes shone a bright, vibrant orange. 

She must have taken some inspiration from Opal, considering how toned she was, yet she remained graceful on her feet, very much unlike Opal. Her current outfit was a skin-tight mech pilot suit reminiscent of any number of mecha anime, just bright pink with blue highlights. I suppose she was excited for the mission, if nothing else.

And her smile, Stars above, her smile never failed to fill me with joy. I could not feel any nerves or fear from her, and I felt myself relax as I pulled her into a hug. One of the benefits of being a digital consciousness was the fact that I could exist in both physical and Mesh space at once. 

“Mother, I will be fine.” She said with her slight Russian accent as she pulled back a few seconds later. “I have all the knowledge you two do from the Catalogs Uncle bought, not to mention the amount of blueprints Mom has loaded into the shell’s storage. I have plenty of theoretical tactical knowledge and have a plan for getting set up. The amount of materials is also enough to get a good defensive base set up in hours, and Mom is over there doing every calculation under the Stars to make sure I get to Four Vesta safely and quickly. Once I have the portal set up, it will be a quick walk to see you again.”

I nodded slightly at her words. I knew them to be true, and I knew Morrigan and I had done everything possible to make sure things would go well, but this anxiety refused to abate itself. 

I sighed heavily once more, “I know, my child. But you will be gone for months on this voyage, alone. And I cannot help but feel some fear towards your destination.”

Synaptic had alluded to the possibility of antithesis infecting more than just Mars in our system, and considering Four Vesta was as large as it was, there was a high chance that the plants had infected it already. It was the biggest source of my anxiety, truthfully. That and the possibility that either Four Vesta was either no longer there or too structurally weak for the shell to land on safely, with either of those options ending with Clio stranded in space-

Morrigan poked me with one of her tendrils, jolting me from my worry spiral. “Stop fretting, B. Nothing bad will happen.” She turned and walked over to Clio, giving her a large hug herself. “It’s time.”

At those words, I felt my fear, anxiety, and trepidation rise explosively, so I shut them away, forcibly shunting them to a quarantined self so that I could send my child away with a smile. Clio, for her part, must have become a wonderful actor when I wasn’t looking, as I still could not detect a single hint of those same emotions from her. Simply excitement and anticipation radiated from her as she began to move herself into the shell at the heart of the sled.

“It will only be a couple of months, Mother!” she shouted as her avatar faded from view. “I will be back before you miss me!”

Oh, dear child of mine, that was impossible, I thought; I already miss you.

Yet I smiled as I looked at the sled, finalizing the activation sequence and disconnecting it from its mooring, not showing a hint of the emotional turmoil within me. Morrigan was doing much the same as the sled began to ramp up.

The mechanism itself was simple, being a large ring of electromagnets with an exit ramp aimed into space. The shell was quite literally a bullet shell coated in a highly conductive alloy, filled with shield generators, radar arrays, inertia dampeners for landing, and the subspace entrance that held not only tons of basic materials and dozens of fabrication swarms, but also Clio’s physical platform held in stasis. 

The complicated part was to get the shell that held Clio and her materials up to speed before the sled overheated and demagnetized itself. A very real threat that was nearly impossible to mitigate due to the vacuum of space being one of the worst cooling vectors that exists. We had run thousands of simulations to get things just right, redesigning the sled and shell hundreds of times, yet it was the last step that still scared the shit out of me.

The shell began to move, flying through each ring of the thirty-kilometer-long track, accelerating rapidly with each revolution. After three minutes, it had accelerated to eighty-two kilometers per second, with the sled itself remaining stable in space, the stabilizers barely firing on time to maintain the correct launch angle. After another few dozen revolutions, it would reach its maximum velocity of eighty-six kilometers per second. A blistering speed for under most circumstances, it was, unfortunately, four point two seven kilometers too slow for this mission.

Which is where the worst solution imaginable came into play.

We wanted to build an Alcubierre drive, but that would require us to build a whole ship around the size of New Phoenix for space travel to make it work, and as we were trying to mitigate the lack of materials we had, that was out of the equation. We could have tried a solar slingshot around the Sun, yet due to the secretive nature of this mission and the current location of Four Vesta, that was also not an option, as we would have had to build this in full view of the Earth, where the energy fluctuations would most certainly be picked up by any competent astrologer. Not to mention the rather unusual solar storms the sun was throwing off recently. 

Instead, the only solution we had remaining was a much more mundane, conventional one. One that I did everything in my processing power to be absolutely certain would function perfectly.

“Detonating,” Morrigan said in a shockingly neutral tone, one that I imagined was to mask her own anxieties. Moments later, the back of the shell exploded at the exact nanosecond required, launching it out of the sled and into the launch track before it sped into the void of space. The sled itself was ruined beyond function afterward, with shrapnel flying everywhere, peppering the moon’s surface with superheated copper and niobium-titanium, with most of it flying off to become one with the universe. A waste of good materials, maybe, but an unfortunate necessity to obtain the final push needed.

I pulled up the dozens of Void Watcher sensors we installed in the surrounding space to verify the final velocity and angle of departure, the feelings of fear churning my very core as we ran the final calculations. If anything went wrong, we had a few seconds to update the shell’s bare-bones navigational equipment and thrusters to reorient before she flew out of our range.

A sigh of ecstasy escaped my lips as the calculations come back green, well within the millionth of a degree of the margin of error to make sure it would hit Four Vesta with minimal landing adjustments. I tilted myself back and fell onto the Moon’s surface, gazing up at the stars while tracing the path our child was taking. I let my quarantine self out in order to feel and process the negative emotions, settling them one after another and replacing them with feelings of acceptance and calm.

As Morrigan and I let ourselves relax, a rarity for beings such as us, a thought crept its way into focus, causing me to sneer in annoyance.

“The explosion was probably caught on some Family observation post or another, wasn’t it?” I asked aloud, eliciting a groan of frustration from Morrigan.

“Fucking Paladin is going to raise even more hell,” she muttered before shaking her head. “Oh well. Not our problem.” 

I chuckled at her attitude, knowing that she desperately wanted to experiment on that man to alleviate her frustrations. Even with Synaptic going on a war path, bombarding The Family with hundreds of counter claims and complaints, Paladin had maintained his status as temporary overseer. After all, Zealot and Starfall had been unavailable to respond, their duties on Mars taking priority over Earth's, and were thus unable to speak on his actions.

As Morrigan disconnected from the temporary Mesh Node, I began the process of cleaning up after our successful launch. Gathering what bits of metal that landed within an eighty-kilometer radius of the site while disassembling the sensors and Mesh Node server. I had an hour, maybe two before a scout or an investigation team arrived to check on what exploded. While it might not be our problem, as they would have no way to link it to Victor or us commanders, I should do what I could to hide the evidence, no?

************************************************************

Clio

As I flew away from Earth, the Moon, and my family, I allowed my true feelings to flow out. I believed I hid my anxiety well enough from Mom and Mother, but knowing Mother, she probably suspected just how terrified I was. 

Two months was a long time, and even if I slowed my processors to their limit, it would still feel like a week of isolation. Even with the shows and books I downloaded to pass the time, the fact that I had no one to talk to, that I was truly alone in the void of space, was objectively terrifying. 

I ran a diagnostic check on the shell, checking to see if the final ignition jostled anything out of place or if any shrapnel managed to stick to it, but everything came back all clear. I rechecked the inventory, verifying the various elements and storage containers as a nervous tic. Water, argon, carbon, aluminum, gold, plastics, and copper, all in pure, easy-to-manipulate forms. Given that the proto-planet was theorized to be mostly iron and nickel, these things were necessary to get my starting base and factories set up.

I ran through the blueprints once more, reacquainting myself with the refineries, the generators, the manufacturers, and the miners. And the tools of war that were all but guaranteed to be required in the long run. I sighed to myself as I nestled into frame, feeling my processors slow down to a fraction of my preferred speed as I loaded up one of the shows I downloaded, getting ready to binge a couple hundred hours of Star Trek in order to distract my mind from the inevitable war I was walking into.

Also, while I hate the fact that it is called Four Vesta, that is the actual NASA designation for the asteroid in question.

As for why not use Ceres, the actual largest astral body in the asteroid belt, as the base of operations, it is because Baba Yaga thought settling Vesta, named after a goddess of Hearth and Home, was more appropriate for a first colony than Ceres. Not to mention that Ceres is almost certainly an antithesis stronghold, and thus could be a nice final boss for Clio, or an actual, long running antagonist for her to fight against.