"We could start hitting it with different types of radiation," Another man said. "See what happens. There has to be some sort of trigger."

"Good idea, we'll put that in the maybe pile. But you're right, there had to have been something letting them know to do their jobs. Nanobots aren't very smart. They have one, maybe two instructions each. When connected in this fashion they're sort of like a hive mind, each member has a few pieces of information which is useless by itself, but when it combined with information from other nanobots it can do complex things, like form in to the shape of data disk. Let's think, what could that trigger have been?"

"When did it fall apart?" Chief McFerren asked.

"Before the battle for Regal. According to the timestamp on the recordings it happened a few moments before Arwen left Wormhole space."

"There was an offal lot of communications going on then," The Chief replied. "Anyone of them could have set it off."

"We have the recordings from all the transmissions, right?" Juliet asked. She liked where this was going. "Could we recreated the actual transmissions, not the messages but the signals and concentrate them into this room?"

"Might take some time but yeah, I don't see why not."

Juliet smiled. "Chief, you're the best. Get that information ready and send it to the hologram room, I'd like to take a look after the meeting."

He nodded and walked out all ready giving orders to his crew.

The more Juliet thought about it the more it made sense. The second time the Arwen went crazy was when they Handler's attacked the fleet. It was another place dense with communication traffic, anyone of them could have been the trigger to set the nanobots off.

"Anyone else have any other ideas?" The room fell silent, each member lost in their own thoughts. "If you think of something don't hesitate to let me or the Captain know. You never know when inspiration might strike. Dismissed."

Four security guards stayed in the room as the rest of the team walked out. Juliet stayed and looked at the disk carefully. You never know when inspiration might strike, that's what Professor Ricter would say to her when he was working on a problem he couldn't fix right away. Those times of inspiration fascinated and infuriated her. She didn't mind when inspiration struck while they were sleeping, she hated it when they struck while they were out on a date, or when she drug him to visit her family, or the night of their wedding. Even the honeymoon was filled with inspiration strikes. She marveled at how long she put up with it before leaving him.

She found it ironic that at the moment, when she was thinking of the Professor and inspiration that she got inspired. She ran out and toward the hologram room. She was deep in her thoughts when she burst into the room she instinctively said, "Arwen, I need your help."

The room remained dark. Arwen wasn't around anymore. Juliet walked over to the control panel and was just ready to turn it on when a small blue green light caught her attention. It came from the middle of the room, a place where Arwen would normally form. She walked over to it and could make out the wavering shape of a human. It was as if a ghost was trying to leave its specter reality. It looked like a girl of about fifteen. Arwen liked her girly image; she liked looking like a child yet having the power and intelligence of a thousand men. The dichotomy of the image made her laugh.

"Arwen?" Juliet asked. It didn't seem real. Juliet had killed Arwen, she tore her brain out. She killed the closest thing she's ever had to a sister, to a real friend. She accepted that the Arwen was nothing more than lines of code running billions of processes per second. Yet, seeing this image, hoping it was the Arwen was too much to ask for. Juliet didn't deserve it.

The head of the shape nodded. From the speakers came a sound, a loud hum that modulated up and down. Juliet's stomach turned into a knot of guilt and tears formed in small puddles under her eyes. She's not dead, she's going to return. Juliet whispered while holding back the sobs. "I'm sorry, I had no choice."

The sound from the speakers, while still distorted, was easy for Juliet to understand. "I understand."

Juliet sobbed and laughed at the same time. If she could she would have hugged the blue green, unformed phantom of the Arwen. "Can you help me?"

The lights in the room turned on and the hologram equipment hummed to life. "It's going to be good working with you again."

Arwen, her form barely visible in the bright room, smiled a deformed smile.

"Okay, so here is what I'm looking for. I think the nanobots that infected you were triggered by some sort of signal from the Handlers fleet. I want to pinpoint where that signal came from. So, what I need from you is a representation of the Arwen and I want all the communication signals we received represented as line, can you do that?"

The imaged flickered for a moment as Arwen diverted its processing power to creating the hologram. After a few minutes an image of the Arwen appeared over Juliet's head. Thousands of lines protruded from the surface. Each line represented a communication sent to the Arwen directly or one she picked up from the fleet.

"Okay, can you remove all the Corps communication? I don't think they would have triggered it."

A significant number of lines were removed and all she could see were those from the Handler's. "Okay," Juliet said. "The signal would have to last more than a few minutes. In fact, I bet it was focused on the Arwen the entire time. Can you remove all the communications that lasted less than a minute?"

Even more line were removed leaving only about a dozen left. What other critera could she use? "Can you put a timestamp on these and remove all the ones that came after you got the order to fly into the wormhole?"

Three more lines were gone. "Great, now the ones before the timestamp on the recording."

All but two lines were gone now. Juliet smiled, "Excellent. Let's follow the lines to their source; do you have enough information for that?"

The Arwen image nodded and the hologram moved along the line until it reached its source. The source came from the Hal, which surprised her a great deal. "I thought you removed all the Corps sources."

She shrugged and in a tiny voice replied, "I did. This came from inside the Hal."

She raised her eyebrow in surprise. "How is that possible? Where is the second line going?"

The hologram shot back to the Arwen then followed the second line to a ship unlike a Corps or a Handler ship. It was all but invisible inside a cocoon of Handler slabs, not unlike the one that had surrounded Captain Cook's shuttle. "Who are they?" Juliet asked.

Arwen shrugged. "Not enough information."

"Right, it's buried too deep inside the slab sphere. I bet they were communicating with the Hal, whoever it was on the Hal was monitoring the Arwen to see if she was infected. Or, maybe it was the other way around. I guess it doesn't matter. I'll take this to the Captain; let her decide what to do next. In the meantime, let me get you up and running again."

"None of this makes any sense," Captain Cook said looking over the reports. "Two signals, one from the Hal, one from the same kind of sphere that protected me? This leaves more questions than it answered."

"And it didn't really answer any questions," Juliet said. "Perhaps we should leave Alpha space and see what your clone wanted. It could be a trap, but I don't think either of us believe that."

"No, I don't. I do think we're being manipulated somehow I'm just not sure to what end."

"Only one way to find out," Juliet replied. "Let's give the order and get out of here."

Captain Cook nodded and, just as she stood from her desk someone knocked on her door. "Yes?"

"Captain, Chief McFerren, can I come in, it's important."

Captain Cook sat back down and said, "Come in."

The Chief hurried into the room. He held in his hand a small container which seemed to hold some sort of gray powder. He sat down and placed it onto the table. "We did all we could, but in the end we had to destroy the nanobots. We hit them with several transmissions but I guess we stumbled on some sort of command to attack cause that's what it did. Luckily it never made it through the force field but we did have to take them down, couldn't find another command to stop them."

"That's fine," Captain Cook said. "I had little hope we'd be able to get them to cooperate. Did you find anything interesting about them?"

"Oh yeah, I sure did." He pulled out a small data pad and placed it on the table. The image on it had three Nanobots, two looked exactly alike, the other was different. "The one that's different is an image from the one's we recovered from your blood Captain. The ones that look alike we got from Juliet and the Professor's blood."

"But the Alien Cabal gave us ours," Juliet said.

"And I was infected by the Handlers," Captain Cook grabbed the data pad and looked at it carefully. The evidence was too much to simply ignore. A betrayal like that would change things completely when she got back to Earth. "The Alien Cabal is behind this? They're the ones that infected the Arwen?"

"I can't say what they're behind," Chief McFerren said. "All I know is they're the ones who made those nanobots."

"Thank you, Chief. Get back to engineering; we're getting ready to leave Wormhole alpha space. I have an appointment with a clone I can't miss. Maybe we can get some answers."

Chapter fifty.

The snow piled on the west side of the force field and within moments Professor Ricter was unable to see. He was thankful for the protection as the wind was howling at over 400 miles per hour. He was also thankful for the enhanced suit he wore, something the engineers had come up with when he told them he was heading down to the Ice planet. The last time a Corps ship had encountered a water planet the extra gravity nearly killed the crew. Gravity was still strong and it was still effecting him but the suit, which was enhancing his strength just enough to allow him to move without much extra effort, was helping him work.

The air inside the dome was cold, just a bit above freezing, and devoid of any oxygen. The professor and his team wore their own personal force fields with small oxygen generators on their belts. They had a good fourteen hours of oxygen and if they ran out the shuttle would provide shelter if needed.

Professor Ricter knelt down and peered through the smoky ice hoping to see the glow of the Beta Wormhole. He saw nothing. They would have to drill, maybe get a good core sample to see if any of the ribbon life was still there.

He called his team over. All fifteen members stood over him as he knelt making him feel like a quarterback in the middle of a huddle. "Okay, we need to find a way to get to that Wormhole. I think we can drill down far enough to get some sort of readings. I want to start getting core samples as well."

"This ice is dense," one if his team members said. "Could take us a few days to get the samples we need."

"We have the time," Professor Ricter replied. "But not much so, let's get started."

"Leaving wormhole Alpha space in three minutes," Commander Monrow said.

"Go to red alert," Captain Cook replied. "We don't know what we're going to see when we get out there."

The tension on the bridge seemed to permeate the walls. This was a stressful time for the crew. Captain Cook wanted nothing more than to leave this dangerous section of space and head back to Earth to recover. This was too important, duty and honor were at stake. The entire war hinged on what she could discover and what information she could return to Earth.

The wormhole grew bright and large on her screens. Moments later the Arwen passed through into real space. It took a moment for the electronics to catch up and for a brief thirty seconds or so the Arwen was completely blind.

When the screens blinked back into existence the site that greeted Captain Cook forced her to recoil. In front of her was a wall of black slabs forming a barrier the Arwen would have no hope of penetrating. Captain Cook felt herself on the edge of panic. She waited a moment before giving any order wondering what the slabs were going to do. They simply floated in front of ship menacingly.

"Arwen, can you give me anything yet?"

The Arwen was still crippled and unable to talk through the speakers. The easiest way for her to communicate now was through text messages on the Captain's main screen. She said: I still can't use my sensors however judging from what I can see I don't think they're more than a deterrent. They don't want us to leave like we did before.

"I agree. Communication, broadcast the message I recorded."

The communication officer nodded and pressed an icon on his screen and they waited.

It didn't take long before he turned and said, "Captain, I'm getting a reply."

From the speakers came a young voice, the same one that had greeted her a day before. "Captain Cook, it's good to see you've returned."

"You shouldn't have kidnapped me," Captain Cook replied bitterly. "We could have talked it out and now, because of that, we've wasted time we don't have."

"We're sorry," The voice said. "We didn't think you'd come if we asked."

"That point is moot now, isn't it? I'm here with my crew and my ship. If you want to talk to me you'll have to come over here where I'll feel safe. Is that understood?"

"Yes, of course."

"Good, and I expect for you to have some answers for us, is that understood?"

"That's why I was born," she replied.

"And you have to come alone."

There was a not so unexpected pause on the other end. Captain Cook waited, wondering if she should just cut the communication now and run. She felt the order rising up in her mind when the clone finally replied, "Captain, I insist that I bring someone along. I don't think you'll say no when I tell you it's a Handler, one who wants to barter a peace between our races."

That was unexpected. She had assumed the Handler story Ann had told her was false, that the Alien Cobol had told her that to get her into the Captain's good graces. To find out that it was true, that they were in contact with the Handler's, was something she hadn't prepared for.

A message appeared on her screen, it was from Juliet. "This could be a chance we can't pass up. We can put him and the clone under heavy guard. We won't make the same mistake we made the last time."

Captain Cook looked down at her and nodded, they were on the same page. "The Handler can come, unarmed, and only with you. Is that understood? If I think there's anything going one I will have my crew kill you both."

"Of course. We will be on our way in a few minutes."

"Here is how that will work. You're shuttle, or whatever you're going to use, will meet one of my shuttles and you will board that. My shuttle will be heavily armed and all its weapons will be locked on yours. Also, I'll have all the Arwen's weapons trained on you as well. Again, if you give me any reason to shoot I will."

"You have nothing to fear, Captain. We're on the same side."

"I doubt it. I'll see you on board. Captain Cook out." She motioned for the communication to end and the signal was terminated.

"God," Captain Cook said looking down from the same booth she used to look at Ann. "I don't think I'll ever get used to looking at a copy of myself. It disturbs me. Where is the Handler?"

"In another cell." Juliet said. "I thought it would be helpful if you talked to her first, see what she's all about then talk to the Handler. But, I gotta tell ya, the Handler is very agitated."

"Don't blame, um, him or her." Captain Cook replied. They had enough information on the Handlers to tell the difference between male and female but the difference was so subtle Captain Cook could never really tell.

"It's male," Juliet said. "I think."

"We'll find out soon enough. I'm heading down to see this clone, watch her carefully."

"We have our teams on high alert."

Captain Cook walked out of the room and a few moments later walked through the door into the room. The clone stood to greet her.

They had decided to make her change her cloths while she was on the shuttle but they didn't have the replacement clothes for the 10 year old child so they simply gave her a uniform for a small person. It still hung from her body comically. The sleeves had been rolled up to her elbows and her pants hemmed to above her ankles. There was nothing they could do to help her fill the rest of the uniform out.

She did not look happy. It was strange to see such anger in her own face. Captain Cook was always a happy child, she had some drama and some hardships but for the most part her memories from that age were happy. She always had a smile on her face, always had something to laugh at. This child looked as if she had never laughed, never had a nice moment. "Captain Cook, I demand that my Handler be in here with me."

"You're in no place to demand anything," Captain Cook replied calmly. She walked past the table and sat down, she pointed to the chair, an invitation for the clone to sit as well. "We won't harm him, unless he gives us a reason too. Sit, please, I want to talk."

"Do I need to remind you that you're in no position to demand anything? You're thousands of light-years from home, in enemy territory and the only thing keeping the other's from finding you is the fact that we're here?"

"I didn't realize that you were protecting us."

"We wouldn't have needed to if you and your ship had cooperated. We didn't want to stop here, this is a very dangerous place."