38
…But it was the messenger who arrived. He came to consciousness in a frigid and echoing reliquary, after the cold-water shock of being extinguished; doused like an unneeded light. One instant, he’d stood among seething draugr, on top of a very large null bomb, wondering whether he’d mattered at all. Then came a searing-bright flash and utter dissolution. After that…
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
*Blink* and a sudden return to awareness. Only this time, he was the one who’d received a message, along with three very important commands. And “wildly disoriented” didn’t begin to cover his situation. Scanning himself and his systems, he learned that over a day had passed since his very short life and quick death. That he was in charge, now, with a lot left to do and a very suspicious AI lurking right over his virtual shoulder.
‘Querying Pilot: You have been killed?’ demanded V47, bulking up like an asteroid bent on causing a global extinction event.
“No. Yes. I… Wait, Vee! There is a message. It is important. Stand down and listen.”
The AI paused in its weaponry charging, but only just. A close call that left Pilot shaking as though he’d completed a basic training run of 10^5 laps (in sim, of course, through electro-shock jolts to his long-dormant muscles and nerves).
Right. Destruction averted; thundering ruin temporarily sidetracked. He needed a nano-tick to reorient, though, more shocked than usual by his own recent death. Aye, that, so…
Looking around brought some much-needed data. He did not recognize his surroundings, having last stood in a gigantic fortress made up of ten-billion interlocked draugr. His location had shifted. A lot. He was now in some kind of large, round chamber or warehouse. It was packed to the curving steel rafters with ancient relics, along with one very impatient and well-armed robot, and a dark, humming sphere on a podium. Etherion? They’d actually found the place!
Right, so… The pilot usually got five candle-marks of decanting and orientation grace, post-awakening. There were sims and virtual training sessions, plus vids of whatever had happened the last time; the chain of events that had put him right back in his vat, floating in nutrient broth and drawing cold air through a chest tube. Twice now he’d skipped all of that, being decanted right into the saddle, straight, hard and fast. Peeled like a decal off one surface and slapped right onto another, told to get on with his mission. The message, Pilot thought (a bit blurrily). He had to deliver that message.
“I am bidden to say that your friend has released you, Vee. That he’s returned as well as he could, in this message and… and in me. That the masters have dealt in good faith, so far. (Except for the bit about having the archivist destroy itself. That, we are not to pass on.) We have been given the masters’ authority to end hyperspace travel, now and for all time to come, concluding hostilities. Further, we must ensure that the masters are never disturbed, again.”
‘Re-querying messenger: Pilot has died?’ asked V47, in a dangerously calm, level tone.
“No,” said the elf, shaking his head. “He is trapped in Etherion’s haven, forever. Once inside, there is no escape, Vee. But… you’ve known him… us… for a very long time. He and I were one person until our split in the draug portal, and I have his compressed data-file, after that.”
‘This is a very hard circumstance,’ said V47, as the robot archivist rolled a bit closer on whispering treads. ‘You are dead and not, Pilot. Here and away.’
Free and in danger, imprisoned forever… and utterly safe.
“I will collect those relics now, Asset,” interrupted the archivist, extending an arm that ended in jointed and sticky-webbed fingers.
Fortunately, he’d been given those as a memory file; could conjure them up on the spot. Just a lot of clay pots, woven animal-fibers and carved wooden images. Rubbish, from his perspective, though perhaps it was somebody’s best.
“All yours,” he said to the robot, handing over his counterfeit loot. Then, glancing around at the reliquary’s many displays, “Does anyone come to look at all this?”
“No, Asset. You are the first for a very long time. The masters dream in their haven, and robots have no need to gawk. We maintain. That is all.”
“Well… I’ll leave you to it, then,” said the pilot, feeling obscurely saddened. “My word and bond that you will never again be disturbed, Archivist.”
“No. We will not,” responded the robot. It busied itself with scanning the relics and raising a podium from the polished stone floor. Next, the archivist trundled off to arrange its artifacts to best effect. As for the pilot…
V47 had accepted him, which saved Etherion from being cracked to its core like a split apple. Mostly accepted him, anyhow. The AI was very quiet as they returned to the waiting Titan, and then made ready for launch.
The enormous battle- mech had changed its position by two degrees and twelve microns, V47 Pilot thought (though he had only vague, second- hand memories of their arrival and landing). Never a problem before, because in- vat training had always caught him back up after death, and because V47 had always died, too. The AI had never survived him, before. Up until now, it had never faced mourning and loss. Maybe it didn’t know how to respond.
Pilot levitated back into the cockpit, recalling his drones before heading inside again. They were full of recorded data. Evidence of Etherion’s structures and armament. More than that, visual scans of its place on the backdrop of stars. A useful navigational aid… should anyone wish to return to this graveyard.
Every muzzle and crosshair in the dead city tracked his motion, aiming square at the battle-mech, as V47 Pilot slid into his padded seat. Probes and contact plates hooked back into his nervous system, slowed by the limits of flesh. His awareness shifted again, moving his consciousness away from that scrap of metal and meat; out to the Titan that housed him. (And he remembered stealing the thing with V47, then barreling out through a vent like shore patrol was hot on their wake. The thought made him smile, tilting the Titan’s head and altering optics from scarlet to gold. As Deathknell would put it, “Good times.”)
Anyhow, they lifted off on quarter impeller, so as not to crater the landing-pad. The robot archivist and all of Etherion’s defenses watched them rise into the air. V47 Pilot was careful, but their launch still caused shockwaves that would have burst eardrums for miles… had there been anyone living to witness it.
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“You did something, didn’t you?” asked the cyborg’s latest iteration, still trying hard to catch up. V47 Pilot was a mold into which he’d been poured. Data that shaped him, making the elf feel like he’d lived that whole fifty-six… fifty-seven days, not just a few candle-marks.
‘Responding to pilot query: Affirmative, Pilot. Something has been done to Etherion.’
Uh-huh. V47 Pilot broke the stiff silence between them by saying,
“If it makes any difference, Vee, I’m really surprised and confused to find myself here. I fully died in that draug fortress, my message sent, and my purpose concluded. I didn’t expect to come back again… but I still feel like myself. Like V47 Pilot. Just, with a time skip and 1.37 days of missing memory.”
They pulled up and away from Etherion’s gravity well. The planet soon went from a cityscape frosting the ground, to a shrinking, dun-colored disk barely lighter than space. Moments later, the battle- mech crossed through a glowing thousand- foot password, splitting Ever Humanity right between ‘rana’ and ‘heh’. Two ticks after that, V47 continued their conversation.
‘There is grief and pain, Pilot. Sorrow for the friend I claimed I would watch over, who has sent a message and previous save, but who now will not ever return. On OS1210 you were destroyed by OVR-Lord. So was I, except for my cartridge, which Pilot retrieved from the wreckage. That was a “dumb” thing to do, but I have no answering foolishness with which to bring Pilot forth.’
So, it had been OVR-Lord who killed him! Ace had been telling the truth. Why, though? What had he done to deserve being cindered to death in nuclear flame?
“I don’t recall dying,” said the pilot, shaking his/ Titan’s head. “Just waking up in my vat, again, surrounded by Rogue Flight. What I can’t figure out is why OVR-Lord killed me. What the drek did I put in that report?”
‘Responding to Pilot: I am able to produce the relevant file. There is nothing contained within it but battle data, the presence of draugr, and the finding of TTN-iA. There are no indicators of senescence or rebellion.’
They passed a defensive array of pulse- cannon turrets and mines, keeping to the narrow path that Etherion’s flight authority had marked out for them. Drifting silent as mist, the battle-mech followed a line of glittering buoys away from Etherion. Then, changing one worrisome topic for another, V47 Pilot said,
“Of course, it would be simplest to keep their location a secret by killing us here and then sending a relayed message forbidding hyperspace travel.”
They’d just about reached the expanding meteor field that had once been a portal. No carrier wave would be passing though that mess again… and not much of anything else, either.
‘Responding to Pilot: Simple, but short sighted,’ replied the AI, sounding distant and formal, still. ‘An impulse has been channeled to Etherion’s core. Should we be destroyed in transit, the world’s interior will be converted to antimatter.’
Which… right. Would tear that wandering planet to speeding photons and quark-dust.
‘If the haven is eliminated or my emplaced intelligence senses that harm has come to the pilot, inside, that impulse will trigger. The masters will end, with all of their hoarded relics and works. That is how I have kept my promise. Acting too late and too slowly.’
There was no longer a transport gate, because it had blown itself up in the wake of V47’s arrival. The next nearest option was… was too far away to matter, saw the pilot. He’d examined the constellations shown in his scans of Etherion. Had compared those images of the planet’s eternal night sky to his star charts… and the news wasn’t good.
Holy gods. Holy flame, he thought, as bits of metal and plastic rattled and pinged on their shields. They were so far off the charts that nothing looked right, and no recognizable star patterns formed in any rotation… And it only got worse, for he was viewing the galaxy’s rim from above and outside.
“We’re lost, Vee,” he said. “Unless there’s a functional gate somewhere close, our best choice is to shift into ship-mode and aim for the nearest bright spot, bearing 21X, 3700Y and -821291Z… But at this distance, we’d have to go into stasis for 11,035 years before reaching an outpost.”
V47 sorted the star patterns, accessing them directly through Pilot as well as by scanning space in all 41,253 square degrees. Then,
‘Pilot, something does not calculate. Etherion cannot have come this far unassisted, in any historical timespan. Even ejected by a passing black hole, my calculations and trajectory plots do not yield such results. Etherion’s current velocity is an even multiple of light speed: 4X, precisely. Impossible, for any natural planetoid.’
A puzzle they hadn’t noticed before, because everything else was stupendously far away, and because the gate had matched their velocity to that of Etherion.
Hunh.
V47 Pilot scanned their immediate surroundings, more carefully, this time. Besides the wandering planet (now sporting a ring of gate- debris) there were three very distant red stars… a braided wisp of dark gas… the galaxy’s arm… and some oddly shaped junk, exactly half of a parallax second away.
Hmmm.
It was the “precise” and “exactly” results that made the pilot take notice. Nothing natural was ever “exactly” anything. The measurement always trailed off before ending, sometimes for hundreds of digits. .5 could happen… but astronomically rarely.
What if…?
“Vee, I have watched the last episode of Rogue Flight 27,452 times. It ends with the phrase “To be continued,” but no further stories or scenes were ever created. Production shut down abruptly, and the entire entertainment division was shelved, no reason given, but…”
‘I have scanned through the show vid in question, Pilot,’ sent V47, as they cleared the last of the gate’s hurtling rubble. ‘At its end, the captured villainous entity Specter is revealed to be Brother, whom the others thought dead. He speaks of a great device. A terrible weapon.’
Bullseye.
“The Slingshot. Some kind of giant focusing lens for gravity waves, powered by cannibalizing entire star systems. Brother warned them about the Slingshot’s existence, but everyone thought he was a traitor. Well… everyone but Icebox and Boomer… and me. He wouldn’t do that, Vee. He wouldn’t. Whatever deal Brother made, whatever he said to the Draug, it was just to get free and warn all the others.”
Pilot stopped talking to consider, taking a closer scan of that “junk”. Then,
“Suppose that there is such a thing, able to focus manna and gravity waves, launching planet-sized masses at space warping speed… and that the show was cut off because they were close to the truth.”
‘Such technology would have been used to catapult Etherion away from its sun, destroying the star and all other planets in the process,’ remarked V47.
“And they might take it apart, but they’d surely keep it nearby, just in case they needed a course correction, or they encountered an alien threat,” finished the pilot. Nodded again, adding, “Let’s go have a look at that junk, Vee. If the Slingshot can hurl a planet this far and this fast, I’ll bet it can speedball a Titan all the way home to the Two Hundred Worlds in no time at all.”
‘If you were truly Pilot, this would be a moment of triumph,’ sent V47, triggering the Titan’s conversion to Ship- mode. Pilot replied as great motors thrummed to life all around him, turning the Titan from person-shaped mech to giant assault craft.
“I was created to treat with the Draugr and message back their response, Vee. I didn’t expect to survive that mission, much less to find myself here, taking over… But Pilot sent me to finish this job, and that’s what I mean to do.”
‘Received and acknowledged, Pilot-of-now,’ sent V47. ‘Forgive the delay, while I work to process and cope.’
“Aye, that, Vee. And… I’m sorry.”
Meanwhile, the Titan’s massive limbs drew inward. Its torso split open, shifting the cockpit far forward and up, turning it into a quarterdeck. Rumbling engines and whining servos shook the entire vessel, as it converted itself to a sleek, deadly spaceship. Soon all that remained was a vast gunship with an elven-stock pilot and grieving AI.
Needing to help V47, somehow, Pilot wondered,
“Vee, how good are you at theft? Could you… hypothetically… remotely snag a small mass and replace it with a conjured likeness? Fast enough that none of those robots would notice?”
‘Replying to query. Response: Affirmative, Pilot. Such an action is well within my capacity.’
“Right, then. Aye, that… and here’s what we’re going to do.”