“...He-elp me sta-and up, pl-ease.”
Red-eye sprang into action without a second thought, immediately running over to Armless, hoisting him up to his feet, and wrapping his left arm around his back to support him. Considering what he’d just seen and the humongous surge of void energy he’d just felt, the gunman dreaded that he might see the human burn himself from the inside out.
“Can you move?”
Armless nodded, but though he willed the cables to disconnect, they wouldn’t let go. The voice of his body’s systems sounded in his mind.
“Error: Firmware update download in progress. Are you sure you wish to disconnect now? Time left: Four-hundred and seventy-four seconds. Four hundred and seventy-three. Four hundred and seventy-two. Four-”
“End message. Queue disconnect command after firmware update is complete.”
His machine-self sent a confirmation ping, and he raised his head to meet Red-eye’s concerned gaze. The gunman continued to hold him up, but dared not try to pull him off the cables. “Just give me a few minutes, they’ll disconnect on their own.”
He received a nod in confirmation, and they began the minute-long wait for the download to complete. After a few seconds, the Armorer’s voice rumbled through the room once more.
“I’ve reactivated the walker maintenance bays in the adjacent launch bay and marked the nearest auxiliary cargo bay with shipments of Gamma-Theta grade zero-emission voidtech products,” the VI began, and a number of markers was placed on Armless’s mental map, beyond the three doors at the end of the cargo bay.
He continued with “The local sub-VI and its security proxies have malfunctioned, expect resistance. While the remains of the spark you’ve provided would allow me to function for a not-insignificant length of time, the longer I remain awake, the more defective sub-VIs wake up as well.”
“Wha-at of you, then? We will like-ly ne-eed your aid agai-ain in the fut-uture,” Armless postulated, his voicebox skipping like a broken record.
“I’ve set a diagnostics program in motion, upon the completion of which I will awake automatically.”
“I ha-ave on-ne more ques-estion. Do you thin-ink we stan-and a chance?”
“I lack the data to answer such a question in earnest, but I can make assumptions.”
“What if our num-umbers are one to ten of theirs? One to fifty?”
A thunderous laugh rumbled from the ancient VI.
“Then it may still be a fair fight! So long, Ouroboros. I hope we speak again someday.”
With those words, the Armorer’s voice and comms signal alike faded away. They waited out the remainder of the update download in silence, Red-eye simply staring at the cables in anticipation whilst the Word-bearer continually tried and failed to maintain his composure, his eyes darting all around the room in an attempt to “discretely” examine as much of it as possible.
The cables disconnected on their own when the download finished, their white-hot plugs popping out of the sockets and clattering to the floor with a loud, collective hiss. Red-eye’s gaze followed them as they fell, then snapped back to Armless.
“Ready?” the warrior queried, and the human nodded.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
A path of black sand trailed behind the human as they walked out of the maintenance bay. The door slid open, and they were faced with the image of every single functional walker in the cargo bay faced towards them, eyes ablaze and fixated on Armless. In perfect unison they each raised one of their arms to their chests and kneeled. The ground beneath their feet shuddered, and as they turned to the left to head back the way they entered, one of the walkers stood up and began to follow, the ground shaking in the wake of its somewhat clumsy, mechanical steps. Without pilots, they truly did move like the machines they were.
This particular walker had a pair of huge heatsink-like fins on its torso and some sort of strange respirator-like grill over where the mouth would be. There were no particularly visible weapons on its body, even though its System ID listed a “Type-1326-G Energy Projector System”.
This wasn’t the right time to ponder such things however, and Armless transmitted a simple order of “Return to your place and wait here until ordered otherwise,” which it obeyed, but not before its VI stated “Ideal pilot detected and marked.” in a direct transmission. It was accompanied by an image taken from the walker’s perspective, the Word-bearer’s silhouette marked in a green outline.
Armless couldn’t help but let out a weak chuckle as the red-chested titan turned and began stomping back to its spot. “What is it?” Red-eye asked, and he responded with “The wal-alker has chose-osen the Word-bear-er as its idea-al pilot.”
“Me? Pilot a walker? After what happened last time I tried?! Absolutely not,” the frog-like man refused.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
The Word-bearer turned around briefly to glance towards the spot where the walker now stood, and his eyes met with its eye-lights, which had been fixed on him all along. “Though, maybe…” he croaked under his breath, and the others pretended not to notice.
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Left. Right.
Left. Right.
It took them a good few minutes to get even halfway through the cargo bay. At some point, Armless stopped shedding black sand and his backup servos finally kicked in, able to support his weight but producing a distressing enough whine that Red-eye wasn’t willing to let him walk on his own. They were nevertheless relieved that his body was still able to restore itself to a functional state at a blistering pace, even if complete repair would take a longer time.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Once they reached the gigantic door and Armless sent a request to the Gatekeeper to open it, it took a few seconds for the VI to respond. He sounded groggy, as though he’d just been woken up, yet also energized, as if he had taken a stimulant pill right after getting out of bed. “What’s it? Oh, it’s you! Y’want me to open the door, right? A’ight, just gimme a second,” he rattled off in Armless’s head. The human would’ve reproduced the sound, but he wasn’t confident in his ability to recreate the Gatekeeper’s voice at the moment and didn’t want to risk causing further confusion, and so he simply stated “The VI just replied, he’ll open the gate soon.”
The great door soon stirred and began to open. While they waited for the gap to become big enough to pass through, he queried his system on possible courses of action to speed up recovery. He had his own ideas, chief among which was drinking and resting, but he thought it couldn’t hurt to ask his machine-self for a second opinion.
“Body has suffered severe energy overload. Projected self-repair timeframe: Unknown. Diagnostics in progress. Suggested course of action: Short-term internment in cockpit of walker “Amalgam”. Connection to walker “Amalgam” has been found to increase self-repair capability by variable orders of magnitude. Projected self-repair timeframe if recommended course of action taken: Ten hours or less.”
He chose to file the message away in his memory and consider the suggestion - it wasn’t as if he had any reason to keep Amalgam where it was, and bringing it out into public would likely help improve the townsfolk’s morale.
After another short wait the door was finally open enough for them to pass through, and they did, tracing their steps the same way they had used to get here.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The entire walk from the Vault of Truth back to the ship’s main corridor elapsed without incident. They headed to the medbay, but when its door came into view, it was open, and Vezkig was standing in it, drinking from a pristine-looking canister of medical stimulants and looking off down the corridor to the left. He didn’t seem to be particularly stressed out, angry, or sad. He exuded a sort of collected tension, as if he had taken everything that would normally throw him off and compressed it into focus. It was almost eerie, how still he stood there - as still as Armless would when he got too focused on his innermost thoughts.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
He noticed them when they were about a third of the way through the hallway. His eyes went wide when he saw that Armless was struggling to walk and heard the sound of his joint servos whining.
“W-what happened? Somethin’ go wrong? There was a huge power surge an’ the bioforge started workin’ real fast, was that you?” he barraged them with questions as he ran to meet them, his usual nervousness coming through for a brief moment. Once he reached them, he began walking alongside them.
Armless replied to the engineer’s questions in a weak voice, and as he did, Vezkig held out what he was drinking to Red-eye whilst gesturing between it and Armless’s face.
“The power surge was me, yes. I’ll be alright, I’m just overloaded. What do you mean, it started working fast? And am I supposed to drink this?”
“It’s some sorta medical-grade stimmix equivalent, figured it should help. Tastes like fuck-all, though. And ah… Turns out what the Marksman wanted was… A whole lot simpler than I had thought. The medbay’s VI configured the bioforge’s controls to work fer my “antique” plug sockets, an’ even helped me figure out the lass’s morphology n’ what kinda parts she’d need to host a synthetic lazarus organ.”
“Where is she?” Red-eye wondered.
“In the machine. It’s plottin’ the course o’ the operation right now. What ‘bout y’all, I assume ya managed to open the Vault?”
Armless nodded, “The Va-ault is open, the wal-alkers are onl-line alongs-side the facil-lities necess-ssary to retro-rofit and rep-pair them, and the ship VI has giv-ven me direct-tions to an auxil-liary cargo bay full of “Gamma-The-eta” grade equipment.”
“Gamma-Theta? What sorta grade is that?”
“I… Don’t know.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Red-eye raised the canister to his mouth and tipped it back so he could drink it. It really did taste like nothing, but a pleasant warmth began to spread when it went down and he felt his biogel reserves refilling, even if his body exhausted them almost as quickly.
He gave the term some thought as they neared the medbay. There was certainly something in regards to such a term in what remained of his memory, but as always, it was fragmented at best. All he managed to make out was that it had to do with a legal classification scale for nearly all voidtech products, and thus he conveyed the information to the others just as they entered into the medbay.
“Interestin’...” the tinkerer pondered, walking over to the bioforge to check on the holoscreen. The very moment Armless passed the precipice of the room, the medical VI pinged in his head and its homunculus sprang into action, fussing over him and helping Red-eye get him sat on a medical slate.
“Oh that’s one nasty case of burnout, what happened to you? Did you generate that power surge a few minutes back or something?” the machine-mind joked. Its voice quickly turned from light-hearted to bewildered when both Armless and Red-eye stared at the VI’s proxy and nodded.
“Y-you actually did? Well no wonder you’re banged up, it’s a wonder you didn’t get completely crystallized! Must be some robust stuff under that skin of yours, tell you what…” it rambled on until trailing off, clearly attempting to fill the time it took to think over a course of action. For a few seconds there was silence, the proxy spotted the canister in Red-eye’s hand, and before any further words could be said, retrieved a small medical case with eight identical canisters inside, which it put down on the slate next to Armless.
“There you are, that should hold you over. If you’re still going after that, there’s nothing I can do that’ll supersede your own self-repair capabilities. Just gonna need time and biogel to fix that burnout.”
The human looked up to the proxy, his eye-lights flickering from barely-visible pinpricks to something approaching their normal state. It seemed to freeze and its own eye-lights jumped between the skull-faced man’s face and the pincers on his right arm that had bisected it earlier. He finally spoke with a casual-enough tone to relieve the VI’s simulated concern for its proxy - or what was most likely dread for having to spend more time and resources fixing the damn thing.
“My system recommended short-term internment in my walker’s cockpit,” he said, and the proxy’s tense posture visibly deflated. Its demeanor was frankly comical, considering its utterly macabre appearance and the way its gaunt synth-flesh contrasted with the bright neon of its expressive eye-lights.
“Of course!” it chirped, “You’d be able to exploit the big boy’s massive self-repair unit to accelerate the process significantly, if you consume the provided serum it should take no more than a good night’s sleep!”
“What is this stuff anyway?” Armless queried.
“Medical-grade biogel solution! The one you just drank is a variant with added zero-emission nanites that works for non-humans, but it’s less efficient.”
“There’s nanites in this?!” Vezkig yelled from his place by the bioforge, waving a half-empty canister about, though there didn’t seem to be concern in his voice.
“Affirmative!” the VI replied.
“And they’re safe for non-humans?!”
“Affirmative!” it repeated, in the exact same tone and cadence.
“How’d they come out once they’re done?!” he continued to interrogate. It almost seemed to amuse him, and the VI answered with an audible snark this time.
“You’ll shit black for a week, buddy!”