Landres was in her living room, watching the news, when for the briefest moment an emergency broadcast cut in and blared noise before suddenly halting. Hackles raising, she was standing up from her chair when a thin red laser cut through the entire middle of center of the room, through the entire building. Green fumes licked noxiously at the gaps as it began to encroach on more of the room, and behaved as though it was actively fighting against the building’s attempts to reconstruct the damage to itself. Being heavily trained on disaster situations, even on maternity leave, Landres made for the closest pressurized door she could.
Having second thoughts, however, made a very good impression of an about-face away from that door to head upstairs as fast as she could manage. On the same wall, further away and on the opposite side of her chair, was the stairs upwards. She closed it behind her as she continued up and then around a bend at the top, before realizing the laser reached up here- because of course it did. The noxious fumes filled the opposite end of the corridor, so instead of heading to her room, she headed to her husbands.
For once, his eating habits are beneficial.
Suddenly, she felt a pang of worry towards where he could be, or what state they were in, but didn’t let that slow her on route to the other corridor, on the other side of the stairwell. Sure enough, the fumes filled the other end of this corridor as well, but his room was much closer, putting it on the right side of the building from the suspicious gas. Slightly light of breath, she pulled the door open and slammed it shut as fast as she could manage. Stepping through, she opened the safe room door and walked inside.
Thank Donav that we had a second one installed.
In each room was a set of suits rated to work in the vacuum of space and even active combat. Particularly, they were incredibly good at guarding the wearer from acidic gasses. Ones she strongly suspected were being used here- not that she had any intention of testing it. They were prohibitively expensive and top of the line, but their line of work let them afford it. Slipping it on over her body, she took a brief glance at the home security system inside. A glance later, and her heart sank.
They had a floor near the peak of a Spacescraper in the heart of the city, middling in height but still reasonably prestigious. Taller, more populated buildings looked like swiss cheese, and what looked like a mall nearby was now a pile of molten goo that she failed to compare to any lava she had ever seen. It wasn’t merely the moving pile of pudding she had seen on the intranet; even in the cold atmosphere of Luna, it burned extremely hot and bright, outright disintegrating buildings in it’s path.
Landres lacked a point of view that allowed her to see the lab far, far outside the city that her husband was currently in however. She scrolled through news outlet after news outlet, mainframe access after mainframe access, and within minutes exhausted every form of communication she had except Planetside, and that was next to useless in the here and now. Still, she made the time to send out an SOS contact nonetheless.
Landres saw a few shuttles, both interplanetary and emergency, fire at various speeds. The “slow” ones moving at the pace of a planetary jet were shot out of the sky, typically in great swathes of destruction that left her gaping. A good sign, though, was that the blurs left in the sky- supersonic cannon-type emergency rooms- were almost entirely ignored in favor of the easier targets. She had one of those. Without waiting for the green fumes to eat their way in here or a stray laser to hit her, she pulled the lever that would begin the process.
Or she would, if her hand hadn’t begun to idle over the handle, dripping sweat, and, perhaps even a tear or two. She grimaced, wondering whether to leave, to wait for him, to go to him…
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Desperate feelings warred with her better sensibilities as she decided where to go. But, ultimately, she knew that her husband was in perhaps the safest place he could be in this situation. Mobius Station, just outside the city. It was where she was supposed to be, but on leave…
She pulled the lever.
“Set a course for the closest landing spot on the northern continent.” She said as the safe room’s computers silently processed her order. “One moment please. Offsite mainframe is currently disconnected. Quantum connection: offline. Making calculations with available hardware…” One minute, then two, passed, each spent furtively double checking every mediat source available to Landre, but eventually it concluded. A beep and the hatch in the side released, where a tube about the size of the average person lay. She stepped in, and let various restraints slip over her, tightening as safely as possible. A small, cold hardscreen resistant to high speeds flickered to life in front of her, controlled with blinks and strongly focused thoughts. She now had a view of the outside, currently dark as the Tyngines whirred to life.
That changed rapidly as the count silently ended on the screen before her, quickly replaced by the view of grey expanses blurring past. In seconds they cleared the skyline, leaving her with a dark expanse.
It was then that she saw it. The cameras didn’t even need to be asked, her inner turmoil enough for the basic ai inside the machine to understand what she needed to see. Coldly, it granted her that, and what she saw was worse than her deepest fears could have ever touched prior.
Mobius Station- along with what had to be almost every coworker of hers- was gone. Reduced to less than ashes. A hole where a building so complex in dimension that it gives headaches to onlookers should be. A hole where she had spent a vast majority of her waking life.
A hole where her husband had, unmistakably, irrefutably been. A hole she felt already.
A sickeningly loud impact detonated against the shuttle, and everything lurched as the shuttle fought to arrest and divert the momentum of it’s passenger to it’s systems. The cameras fixated on- something, someone, who had grabbed ahold of the shuttle. Scarred and scoured flesh clad on top of burnt and slagged metal greeted her, and more stunning was the grief on their face. Moisture lingered in the air as tears floating in the vacuum. Chrome turned to gold, and it donned on her what it was.
That is-!
Their grip tightened suddenly as they clutched their head, and half a beat later, she felt a lurch far greater than the steady launch had offered, being sent soaring back towards the planet. Only, in the wrong trajectory. The flight computer was struggling to adjust for that, as limited in scope as it was, when someone appeared in her head.
“Perhaps I can solve that for you.” It offered in a sullen voice. For the second time that day, she felt her worldview come apart at the seams as she recognized it to be, unmistakably, unquestionably, that of her own god; Donavan, God of Measurement.
The same god that had just forsaken her.