She had always tried to live up to her name, always tried to make the world a better place, but looking at the world below her ship, visible on the viewscreen that took up one entire wall, she wondered why she sometimes even bothered.
The planet was covered with storms of ash and fire, the vast forests that had once covered the central Pangaea continent replaced by blacked rock and pools of lava with rivers of magma flowing from them into the vast basins that had once held warm oceans full of fish.
There was nothing but junk in orbit, the moon cratered and disfigured by the murder of the lunar facilities that had once been there. The system was full of junk and smashed ruins. The asteroid belt was nothing but bare rock and wreckage, the gas giants had only dust to mark where once refineries and extraction sites orbited.
The planet was just a single icon of the entire destroyed system.
Dead. Destroyed.
Tnvaru had been murdered.
"What happened?" Dreams asked.
The black mantid sitting next to her paused in cleaning his sensitive antenna.
"Precursor attack," Speaks said softly. "Spaceship debris is largely Lanaktallan. It looks like the Precursors jumped the system a month or so ago, wiped out the Unified Military Forces, and destroyed the habitable planets."
Dreams sighed softly. "How many planets had the Tnvaru colonized? Where's their nearest colony?"
Fights tapped her bladearms on a hard-light boulder in front of her. "One. That's the rub. Their colony was attacked by the Precursor that Daxin the Immortal engaged and warned us of, bringing us into all of this."
Speaks tapped his front right knee. "They had all of one colony, and it got destroyed by a Precursor, who then finds their world and wipes them out? So the Tnvaru in our medical bay, in stasis, is one of the few left?"
Fights nodded. "They took an extinction event, right to the face."
"And the trail of why this was done goes cold," Speaks said softly. "We took the risk of following the rivers of time, of destiny, and found nothing but death."
The door hissed open and all of the three mantid turned to face the doorway, spotting the opalescent mantid Sees That Which May or May Not Be as she staggered in, her legs stiff, her bladearms and arms hanging down limply, her antenna thrashing wildly even as she jerked and bobbed her way in.
"BEWARE! TO TURN ASIDE AND RETURN TO THE GLASS MADE LIVING SHALL CAUSE ALL TO CRUMBLE AND FALL! THE PATH TWISTS AND TURNS BUT ALWAYS ANOTHER PATH LEADS FROM EACH GLAD! CHOOSE WISELY WHICH FOOTPAD STEPS FORTH, SHARPEN THE BLADEARM OF THE MIND, AND REACH DEEP WITHIN OR ALL SHALL BE LOST!" Sees cried out.
Even Rack and Pinion just stared. Even Mr. Rings goggled at the seer as she stepped forward again, climbing up on top of a rock. She held her bladearms up and clasped her hands together.
"The wrath of immortals revealed, the end of the fallen Empire, the brightest flame runs the risk of going dark and bringing the stars down with it, beyond the edge of the broken bladearm to the intact sword lies that which has no beginning and end," she stated.
Everyone in the room winced as her datalink suddenly spouted a burst of gibberish that lasted nearly two seconds.
Pinion managed to catch her as she wobbled and fell from the side of the hard-light rock, before she landed in the stream.
There was silence for a long time until it was broken by Mr. Rings going back to banging a Pacific Northwest Wooly Snail against a branch. While it had been a little interesting to watch, Mr. Rings was more interested in the scrumptious snack awaiting him.
"Well, that was... exciting," Dreams said, watching as Pinion carried Sees back to her quarters.
"A mobility capable trance is rare, to say the least," Speaks mused. "What was that end."
117 flashed an icon for wait, his black warsteel datalink's tiny pinprick LED's red, solid without any flickering, showing that he was hard at work and communicating with others of his own kind as well as accessing the ship's datacore.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
Dreams could see the available bandwidth in her quarters drop as the AeVR flickered slightly and went to lower textures on bark and the water became more regular instead of the natural swirling that it had been.
Speaks looked at Dreams and Fights both, flicking his antenna to show interest.
After almost three full minutes 117 waved a bladearm, dismissing all of the hard light holograms in the middle of the room, stripping Rack and Pinion of their disguises, leaving behind only the branches that Mr. Rings was swinging from and hiding in.
He brought up a long burst of code shot through with static, then began flashing computations and complex mathematical equations on either side, each time taking out a single dot of static.
Dreams started to ask what was going on when Speaks raised his bladearm to cut her off.
Several more green mantis came in, some still wearing their engineering armor or their shipboard uniforms, until a cluster of nearly two dozen green mantids was gathered up in the middle of the room, all altering the hologram which kept increasing in complexity even as parts were pulled out from it to be moved around. Twice Fights added input to the conversation, providing complex genome sequence information for the green mantids to compare to the data they were removing from the burst of static and code.
One of the green mantids moved over to where Sees had collapsed and brought back up the hard-light boulder, pulling it apart and beginning to pull code out. Speaks and three other black mantids were examining the data, adding their viewpoints on intelligence gathering and sorting to the massive undertaking.
"I think I may need to move out of my room," Dreams said softly.
"You may want to," Fights whispered, pointing at where one green mantid was going over the deck plating with a energy resonance detector and finding swirls and patterns in the electron valence patterns of the various atoms, tracing how electrons and subatomic particles had moved through the deck plating and adding the patterns and data to the mass of data hovering in the room.
Dreams clicked her tongue and Mr. Rings dropped from the branches and into her arms.
"Mommy's going to take you to a new place to live, yes she is, yes she is," Dreams crooned to her pet. Behind her Rack picked up the ceramic nesting tree, moving it carefully.
"The words weren't important. Well, they were, but that datasqueal," Fights mused, tapping her bladearms together thoughtfully. She glanced at it again as she left the room with Dreams, noting the way even more green mantids had arrived so that the entire hologram was circled by greenies, so that no viewpoint went unnoticed.
"We can't return to Terra," Dreams said, heading toward the visiting VIP quarters. "I'm loathe to even return to Confederate Space, to be honest."
Fights shook her head. "I don't think we're heading to Confed Space, to be honest," she stopped and tapped her bladearm against the warsteel wall of the modified heavy cruiser. "The fact that the Precursors struck this deep into Unified Council Space concerns me."
"The message torpedo should reach Confederate Space in two weeks, the Telkan System in four days," Dreams added. "That will let them know that Tnvaru is gone."
"Do you think there's enough left to keep their species going?" Fights said sadly.
"I hope so," Dreams answered, petting Mr. Rings to soothe the ache that the thought of an entire species having been wiped out caused in her soul.
"Maybe the Terrans can help. They've pulled other races out of the maw of entropy," Fights said.
Dreams nodded, making a sound of bitter amusement. "Even enemies. Terrans seem to hate death almost as much as those in your profession."
The two mantids moved to one of the vacant VIP suites, opening the door and stepping aside for Pinion and Rack to situate Mr. Ring's bole nest. Once it was done Dreams sighed and used a local copy of her contemplation glade from a datacube in her purse rather than pull the one from ship's memory when she saw that there was an engineering lockout on her shipboard version.
"They'll pull apart the veining on the leaves," Fights chuckled as she watched a greenie peek in, look at the newly restored glade, and duck back apart.
"Do you ever wonder what it is like for them?" Dreams asked. "To see the world as a whirling and churning mass of theorems, formula, and proofs?"
"No. I believe it is like what I see when I look at people. I'm exquisitely aware of everything from their pupil reflex time to their heartrate to their aspiration uptake," Fights said, signalling amusement.
Dream's implant pinged and she held up a bladearm to stop Fights. "Ambassador Dreams here."
"This is Captain Awgwark, my navigator just received an astrogation file from your diplomatic team's engineer. My navigator says it's doable, but I want confirmation that's your intended next stop," the Captain said.
"Yes. You may receive some strange requests," Dreams started.
"Like shutting down the temporal stabilizers in Sees That Which May or May Not Be's room?" the Captain asked.
"Yes, Captain," Dreams said.
"Very well, madame ambassador. We'll follow the astrogration instructions. We'll be putting the data into a message torpedo and launching it, while in hyperspace, to Terra. Do you want to add anything to it?" The Captain asked.
Dreams thought a moment. "No. Only put in the message buffer what 117 authorizes. No other data."
"Yes, ma'am. Captain out," the datalink pinged as the officer signed off.
"She sounds upset," Fights observed.
"117 is messing with her ship. She has good reason to be," Dreams chuckled.
"Where do you think we're going?" Fights asked.
Dreams thought for a long moment. She didn't know why the quote surged up in her mind, but it did and she blurted it out rather than go over and dissect it.
"Someplace terrible, I'm sure."
The small flotilla of ships, the ambassadorial vessel and its military escorts, fired up their engines, using the profiles passed on by their engineers, and began heading toward the Oort Cloud.
Behind them, Tnvaru sullenly burned.