The navy, however, reserved that entirely for the Admiralty, insisting that you remain with your body and exist when not on station or on a mission in that body and not in the permanency of the Meld. It limited you in ways that you could never explain to others, and it meant that you would have to constantly readjust to the situation, but the navy wanted no Meld that it could not control, no cybernetic bond that it could not break. Humans had almost been wiped out when they'd allowed their self-aware machines free reign and will, and they were not about to trust even partly human cybernauts with it, either.
Lieutenant Chung preferred the Meld with a fast, sleek fighter, leading a limitless team with maximum power and abilities at their command, but this was fine compared to the alternative. Even if they somehow entered lifeboat mode, she could exist like this while having only the most tenuous connection to a cryogenically frozen body. But she still needed that connection, that body; it was part of the ship, and the ship was a part of her, but if it died, her thoughts, her personality also died. She was well aware of that.
For three days now she'd flown the ship and experienced the joys of the Meld, but that was about to come to an end, at least temporarily. This was a mission, and she, not just her flying, was a vital part of its completion.
She had watched the three young witches with her enhanced powers, and sensed the enormous energy within those jewels they wore and just how they cloaked their wearers, much as the force field protecting the outer skin of the shuttle protected her. The field would strengthen sometimes, and then weaken, but it was always there, always in at least a minimal way both protecting and controlling the wearer.
Chung did not get close enough to pull that energy towards her own sensors. She was well aware that the mysterious energy was not limited to the wearer but could extend itself, perhaps sufficiently to have taken control of a great star frigate. This shuttle and her own single Meld consciousness and databanks would be child's play for the energy, and she'd have no defense. So she studied it, and watched it, but from a distance.
The energy wasn't a visible thing; it was something tangible and living but beyond the abilities of a mortal human to see and feel. Only in the Meld was it clear, a writhing mass of almost protoplasmic pulsing and oozing, pure energy that acted like organic matter. She had never seen or encountered anything quite like it before, but it was clearly real and it was clearly not emanating from the three girls nor their developing fetuses nor from some sort of parasite or some other sort of life that might live cooperatively inside the girls. The source was external, from their gemstones or, more likely, through the stones. There was no evidence of a Meld of any sort with or within the stones; whatever was guiding it was using some sort of remote control. From where, and how, was by no means obvious.
It was clear that it could not stray too far from the stones on its own. It needed the girls to wear the gems around their necks to extend its own limited reach, but if they were in contact with something then it was in contact as well.
Still, mere contact with electronic channels aboard the Thermopylae had been sufficient for it to have penetrated the ship's primary computer core, at least enough to give it a program to erase the witches from the sensors. And while all three combined didn't seem to be powerful enough to have actually taken control of the huge ship, they had been able to sustain their modifications, undetectably access the database whenever required, and also essentially operate the three girls' bodies as remote extensions. That was impressive, and meant that, if those entities wanted to, they could certainly do what they willed with Chung's own Meld.
The fact that they hadn't apparently done so meant that either she had nothing to offer but the ride and that's what they were getting anyway or, possibly, that she had been fully compromised and reprogrammed not to know it. She put that out of her mind for now, though, not so much from paranoia as from pragmatism. If that were true, then it really didn't matter insofar as there was nothing she might be able to do to discover or counter it.
Chung had watched with fascination as O'Brian's operator-there was just no other way to think of it right now-had flowed rather nicely into Maslovic's hand and then through him, until he had sensed it and let go, cutting the contact. That had yielded some very interesting and possibly useful facts. First, that the more it extended into and over Maslovic, the thinner the energy field around both he and the girl had become, so there was a real limit to how much that gemstone device could put out after all. That was probably why all three were needed to do what they did aboard the Thermopylae; the power had to be combined.
Still, all three together had also been sufficient to have somehow reprogrammed the living sentry's memory of them leaving, and the memory of anyone who came close to them. The three of them together, in perfect symmetry, had been necessary to create a field that could fog the mind of anyone coming into its proximity. Nobody could create a condition where someone would be invisible to everyone and everything across the whole catalog of senses and monitors, but apparently together, the three could create a thin field that would make no one and no thing notice that they were there. Fascinating.
It also implied limits to that power, however vast. They could put in their clever little program to the ship's computer, but they couldn't stay there and keep the girls supplied and protected or, worse, controlled. They could use the girls' bodies and sensors to explore, almost like robotic probes or ferrets, but the requirement that the field, however thin, be stretched as far as possible vastly limited what they could actually do during those explorations.
She had never experienced this sort of energy, did not know its full properties or potential, so there really wasn't a lot she could do to tell more about it without attracting unwanted attention from it, but it did allow her to see the energy in its ebbs and flows and something of where it went and what it could do.
It always had at least a slender thread directly into each girl's cerebral cortex, and it also had a similar hairlike thread into the same region of the nearly fully developed fetuses. It certainly wasn't using those connections for control, at least not now, but it did occasionally send quantities of energy in short, coded bursts along those connections, sometimes to the mothers but more often to the almost children within.
What would a newborn be programmed to do? What could it do? It wouldn't even have full vision or control of its muscles for some time. Latent programming, probably, or lots of data and routines to be activated once the child was old enough for it to matter.
Were these, then, a class of invading soldiers being created by an enemy almost from the moment they had a developing brain? Or the perfect agents, or spies? What were the operators on the other side of those stones doing, and why?
As much anxiety as she felt, Chung also felt a great deal of excitement. No more pushing around little toads like Murphy or doing shows of force to get taxes from poor worlds growing poorer; this was what a military was for.
Now there was an enemy, a bit out of the shadows where those like her could see them at work, if obliquely. And if the operators were friendly, why had they spent so much time and trouble keeping in those deepest shadows?
How she'd like to follow that energy back to its source! And not in this little shuttle, either, but with her fighter, perhaps the whole fighter squadron, and on their own, without potential corruption from the mother ship's master computers!