Silver sipped his coffee and waited for the shit to hit the fan. If he had played it correctly then his Director had all the ammunition he needed to blow off the weirdos that were stalling his next assignment. Pity he couldn’t tell his manager anything about it officially. He shrugged internally. The Director was a political appointment but his Project Manager was in this for her full career. There was no need to piss on her prospects by raining shit from that high up. She was smart, she’d probably figured some of it out by now.
His comms punched up with an alert. Guess who. He nodded to himself, yep, she had figured out at least some of it. He picked up and drank down his coffee. “Hi Boss, are we all good?”
The voice carried the coldness of space in it as she answered, “Was Tolin a part of this shitstorm or was he an independent shower of his own?”
He checked his comms security. “Can we go off the record? There might be a little info I can give you…unofficially.”
Hannah sat back. That was not a small thing, her staff were never off the record. Ever. Her rules, her play-pen. Well, things change… “Make it quick. I’ll blame it on your shitty attitude and send you a write-up.” She meant it too but his record alert turned off and went to standby.
He flinched a little, he had thought she was a bit more clued in. Whatever he had all the cover he needed. “Boss, I was brought in to do an analysis of the Alterations and the Arboreals keep coming up weird. Too much money, too centralised, too much shit hidden in the details. Too clever for what they said they wanted to do. I was seconded from Fleet and posted to their last colony and it turned out to be a very different place than they were advertising." He decided to take a chance and reveal the whole mess and the risks it posed to humanity's greatest experiment.
"They were restricting access to their planets, banning whole areas of tech, running weird little self-appointed council governments and refusing integration. I was sent to confirm it and give the Director a valid reason to intervene. You were needed as a clean pair of hands and I’m a political nobody, so they have no useful targets. Tolin was just a random dickhead. I assume he’s back in his cupboard on Mars by now.”
In her office, Hannah chewed quickly through the information. It was an excellent new filter to view her work and career. The Director had promoted her because otherwise Silver wouldn’t have said a word. It wasn’t the type of promotion that appeared on paper or came with a raise. It came with power. Personal and immediate power. Then his last sentence sank in, “Wait. Tolin never made it home, I have a report that the collection failed, he wasn’t where you told me to find him. Don’t tell me he’s going to fuck this up for us, typical as it would be for the man.”
Silver poured himself a new coffee and thought about it, “Well, I can’t swear that the Director didn’t send him along to take out another target of opportunity but I certainly wasn’t briefed on it. I doubt it, given the stakes here. It might be better if he was recovered and sent home under his own little thunderstorm. Check with the Station and check the last ships that landed, my guess is one of his friends picked him up and that he’s sulking.”
There was a pause. “I’ll call you back.”
He was feeling quite smug until he was immediately shot through the chest and got to watch his intestines fall towards the floor before blood loss took away his mind. Then he found his mind had simply…moved. His augments, with their unlikely armour, had maintained the connection between him and the ship. They didn’t know what to do with it and it might slow down his dying for a minute or two but it wasn’t a miracle, just a lifebelt. Right now a lifebelt felt great, even as he watched his body bleed out across the bridge.
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The Wisp wasn’t particularly clever but its designers had been. A sudden fusillade that blew out the shields, half-killed the Captain and sent it spiralling into the atmosphere had been the subject of many ancient meetings, many long lunches and dreary Monday meetings. The final spec was issued, reviewed, updated and entirely forgotten save for a senior engineer or two that would stroke their beards and nod, “Written in blood.” they would say and strike out the suggested radical changes by some younger, more ‘realistic’ engineer. Until they lost a ship and began to grow a beard themselves.
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/Unexpected Event/Log/Hostile Environment/ Shields Damaged/Crew Unresponsive/Executing ELV/089/ Comms Unsuccessful/Local Assets Identified/ Unexpected Atmospheric Landing Imminent/
The ship slammed closed all the remaining hatches and ports, and the crew chairs reached out and latched onto the body and moulded themselves to his dying form. They plugged themselves in and followed every protocol to keep him alive even as it turned its mangled form into the wind and sought out help. Unnoticed by Silver and ignored by the ship were the creeping specks of gold trapped in the silver augments, squirming, trying to break free until they ultimately surrendered to the more powerful mind that was currently inhabiting it, even as it lay broken on the floor.
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Rowan looked up at the normally peaceful night sky, looking for nothing in particular. Then she saw the lights begin, like sparks in the dark. They were pretty, a glimmer in the cold. But they continued to fall, growing brighter, growing closer. She was now squinting at them and trying to figure out what they could possibly be?
Then it became clearer as the lights grew closer and began to fall on the forest. It started slowly, a mere hint of brightness far in the distance but then it grew. Then she felt the wind swirl and begin to turn. Fire. Her world was on fire.
Afterwards, she couldn't say how long she stood there. Stood until the screaming of the burning trees drove her to scream herself.
They found her amongst the children, trying to stamp out the floating embers carried by the wind, trying to put out the flames with her tears.
______
The Wisp was dying. Pierced by a thousand cuts, with failing systems and now laid broken in the only clearing it could find, it waited for its Captain to do what humans had always done and make it whole again.
Silver lay buried beneath the rudimentary life support created by his seat, his mind now pricked and prodded, blurred by the end-of-life drugs the system had deemed the last courtesy it could offer. His chest cavity was exposed, his blood staining his clothes. Something had cut his right arm to the bone and shattered it into an unrepairable mess. The list was too long, the damage too great. It was only a matter of moments before the end.
The creeping stain of gold began to grow in his augmentations, threading through the silver and into his flesh. It wasn't a mindless thing and it sought to protect the mind it now obeyed. It summoned help.
Around the ship, thousands of glimmers stopped their hunger and poured through the holes in the ship, a flood of glittering machines now bent to a new purpose.
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The Glimmers had a strategy, a purpose. They had no interest in mindless vegetation, seeking out only the beautiful patterns to be found in animal life. Survival techniques, instincts and adaptations that would serve the Mind. All animals ran from fire, so they set fires and waited for the prey to come to them.
The finest camouflage would not serve against fire and new things would be learned. New technology could be developed from entire ecosystems, carefully mapped from deep in the soil to the heights of the upper atmosphere. They sought no metals, no elements freely available as they travelled through space. Only relentless and time-tested evolution would generate the required data.
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Silver felt his heartbeat slow, felt his mind dim as hypoxia began to kick in. His damaged lungs couldn’t supply his diminished blood any further, surrendering to the massive injuries. He knew that his brain was flooding his systems with endorphins, bringing peace to the end but he didn’t care anymore. He had failed, missed some subtle clue and had allowed this world to be attacked. He felt true rage, the rage that someone would burn a world under his charge and he wasn’t going to fucking die! Adrenaline flowed back into his system, a berserker response from the darkest parts of human history.
The spill of gold flooded between the broken layers of protection offered by the improvised life-support and filled his chest cavity and flowed into his heart and began pumping. It read the map of his body with ease, just another animal and a very well-understood science and began filling in the missing links. They felt the Mind instruct the body to go to war and followed the instructions provided.
Silver was twisted and bent as he was repaired and then improved. The golden fluid took every lesson it had learned in the millions of years scavenging the universe and applied them as requested. It melded Silver with the ship systems, its organic form deemed insufficient for the actions demanded. It scoured its history to bring the best of its lessons to bear on him.