31

He entered Etherion’s coordinates, then crossed through that shimmering Mark VII portal. That was his last quiet moment, because Pilot’s action triggered immediate response, and lots of it. First, the industrial gate behind him exploded, converted in Mili-ticks to searing red light and expanding gas. Second, V47 Pilot felt himself combed through by a defense system aggressively searching for Draugr.

…A system that did not pick him up as alien, or even as quite alive. Just an intrusive, unsummoned asset. Had he been Draug, it would have vaporized him. As an elven pilot spoofing a simple errand, he made it on through. (Had to conceal all but his basic data and point of origin, though.) As for his cargo… “relics” suggested itself, thanks to the junk he’d been given in place of his energy-blade. And double-wrecked if it didn’t work.

Then he was out the other side, barely clearing the second gate before it erupted in V47’s thundering wake. Sensible. In the event of invasion, only one enemy unit would have made it through to Etherion, and one they could easily deal with.

Light flared, causing his optics to darken reflexively. Ionized gases and molten slag hurtled past, striking his shields, draining power and manna like ale from a broken flask. There would be no retreat and no reinforcement. But he was too busy to dwell on that, because his arrival had triggered a violent drek-storm of passive defenses. Almost a solid wall of antimatter-tipped mines went suddenly live, filling his cockpit and skull with screeching alarms. Two nearly struck him; microns close to ending a very short life.

The Titan was meant to take and hold planets, though. It was shielded like nothing else in the Two Hundred Worlds… and “microns close” didn’t cut it. Not when he had to get through, find the masters, and make some kind of a bargain.

There was a wandering planet there somewhere, behind that curtain of glittering death. Reaching it, though… that was the problem, and his day just kept getting better.

‘Pilot,’ sent V47. ‘There are orbital turrets amid the mines. They have locked onto our signal. Querying Pilot: Response?’

Right. He saw them now, too. Shifted his scans to filter out large, rotating constructs. The size of small moons and armed with plasma cannons, those turrets surrounded Etherion, forming another line of defense. Focused for 25,370 years on open space, they now turned their aim upon V47.

“I see them, Vee. Shield. Not us, them. Draw power from the mine-wall, then divert it to wrapping those turrets up in a force field.”

‘Command received. Command enacted,’ sent V47.

The antimatter charges were seething with tiny explosions, as random particles struck them and annihilated. The eruptions were relatively feeble, but easy to harvest, if you cast a wide enough net. And scraped together, that was a drek-load of power. All of it went into V47, then outward, creating an army of force bubbles that clamped onto the nearest eight-hundred turrets. Bottled them up.

The turrets fired, anyhow, not having a choice. Blew themselves up in a light show like eight-hundred suns all dawning at once. V47 reaped that power, too. Then,

There may be a handshake or password contained in the data packet, Pilot. I have halted all research regarding the packet, as commanded. I cannot look for a password.’

“Good idea, Vee. I’ll do a search. You keep the ball in the air with our neighbors.”

Important, because mines were still flaring, and a hundred more turrets had appeared from behind the planet’s curved limb. Vital, because he had only five days to make something happen. Five days to save assets and Draugr, both.

V47 got right to work, vacuuming power, firing mine-killers, shielding the mech against blast after world-shaking blast. In the meantime, Pilot went hunting. Not for coordinates to Etherion, this time. Not for the Two Hundred Worlds’ awful history, either. Plunged further, sorting the terms of agreement beneath, until…

“There it is! Twelve million lines in: Ever Humanity.”

He didn’t have to tell V47 to broadcast the password. The AI plastered those words onto their flight-ID, chassis and even the purple Behuggler decal. Projected them outward in glowing, thousand-foot sigils, too. Ever Humanity shone like a star, lighting the planet below.

…And, just like that, Etherion’s remaining defenses shut down. Nice. He might’ve thought of it himself, but fighting had felt good, and maybe he’d needed that battle.

Releasing a long, shaky breath, Pilot looked around for the first time at deep space, seeing a distant smear of red, dying suns. At a lone and wandering planet, the last home of his human masters. The world didn’t rotate. Just hung in perpetual twilight, rocky and barren, where it wasn’t covered in silent machines. There were three clusters of radiant heat and power arranged in a triangle, their focal point a small city.

As for manna, this far from an active star, it was sparser than air; less accessible than it would have been under a planet’s magnetic field. That wasn’t good. And neither was anything else.

‘Pilot,’ sent V47. ‘Etherion.net has opened a flight path to the city below, beside a structure marked “reliquary”. Querying Pilot: descend to Etherion? Y/N?’

“That’s why we came here, Vee,” he responded, nodding the battle-mech’s head instead of his own. “That, and to straighten things out.”

Make the right decision, the shop gnome had told him. About what, though… How exactly he was intended to solve this mess, Pilot had no way to parse. No answers at all… because none of his show-vids or algorithms seemed to fit.

“Tell them we’ve got some relics to give them, and bring us on down,” he said, hoping for better-than-usual luck.

‘Command received. Command accepted. Beginning descent, Pilot,’ replied the AI. Then, ‘Renewed dosage of calming hormone is required to maintain the current emotional balance, Pilot. Further dosage may reduce efficiency, however, resulting in headache, nausea, vomiting and depression.’

“Right. Let’s skip all that,” he responded, with a slight, weary smile. “I can manage, I think.”

‘Skipping dosage. Querying Pilot: shall I keep talking? A well-known voice may also provide welcome emotional stability.’

Which was true.

“Yes, if you please, Vee. No show-vids, just… scan as much of Etherion as possible, and report any findings of interest.”

That turned out to be quite a lot, though not what he’d expected. They descended to the planet’s dun-colored surface, passing their luminous codeword and twin rows of blinking, armed buoys. Each of those floating markers pinged their ID code, scanning repeatedly.

“Suspicious bunch,” remarked Pilot. “You’d think they had something to hide.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

‘There is no life here,’ said V47. ‘Deep scans reveal only mechanized, electronic activity. Most of it seems to be centered around the reliquary.’

“None? No living masters, at all?”

‘Not that I am able to detect, Pilot. 227 peta-mards of geothermal and nuclear power are being produced, but there is no sign of photosynthetic activity or of large biota. The oceans are below ground and cleansed of life.’

Hunh. Nobody down there at all. Etherion was as sterile as TTN-iA’s shell had been, unless…

“What about possible dispersal, Vee? To moons or a fleet, with the masters in stasis?”

‘Adjusting scan for stasis pods. Scanning. Negative, Pilot. There is no trace of stored human bodies.’

Which… right. Very strange. He suggested thirty-six other possibilities in the time that it took them to reach the heavily shielded landing pad. Not one was correct in the slightest.

The Titan landed with a thundering boom, sending a shockwave through an otherwise silent, dark city. Not an entirely still one, though.

“The Draug didn’t aim that many guns at us, Vee,” Pilot complained, looking around at a host of swiveling weapons, all of them pointed at him.

‘It is possible that we are not trusted,’ sent V47. ‘Perhaps the password should have been broadcast before the start of hostilities, Pilot?’

“Thanks,” he replied, as probes and contact plates withdrew, leaving him free to stand up. “I’ll remember that, next time.”

Pilot’s awareness shifted, returning to his small, frail (and yes, slightly nauseous) organic body. Meanwhile, the reliquary went from a brittle shell that he could have crushed with his boot, to a tall and imposing stone building.

The pilot rose from his padded seat and considered a moment. Then,

“Vee, what if I eject your cartridge and bring it in with me? You can operate the Titan remotely, can’t you?”

‘Affirmative, provided the distance does not exceed 10,000 feet, and there is no electronic jamming or excessive rock.’

The AI’s cartridge had already slid partway free of the main console. V47 Pilot seized its handle and pulled it out of its slot, just in case. After that, with V47 tucked into a fey pocket, he donned his helmet and opened the Titan’s canopy.

Patted its rim as he ventured forth, making a few quick adjustments to the battle-mech’s defenses. Left some “fun new surprises", as Ace would have put it… and thinking of that made his stomach clench.

All of his short, broken life he’d been fed on bold nonsense and comforting lies. Given heroes to worship who’d never existed at all. But they somehow still mattered. Ace, Boomer, Deathknell, Ravn, Icebox, N00b… real enough, and all the family he had besides V47 and Foryu. Needing to act, Pilot shook off emotion as well as he could without chemical aid. Time was short, and every tick mattered.

Light, jazzy music started up in his head, courtesy of V47. Helped a little. Nodding, he got himself back together, then launched his three drones. They swooped off into the air, rocking him slightly with the force of their take-offs. At once, his visual feed split to include the drone’s imagery. Felt safer that way and better informed.

As he floated down to the pour-stone landing pad, V47 Pilot took in a fast, street-level view of the reliquary and its surroundings, to a ten-mile radius. Air samples, radiation levels, bio-contaminant and chemical hazards… all scanned, measured and noted. Just numbers, but numbers were everything; a defense and a rampart, like code.

The landing pad was brilliantly floodlit, casting multiple battle-mech shadows and drowning out their thousand-foot password. V47 Pilot landed with a slight scrape of rubber boot soles on pour-stone grit.

He wasn’t a cyborg, any longer. Not quite. But V47 had augmented the daylights out of him, lacing biota with circuits and power cells. Shielding mere flesh with flexible, mithral-hard armor. Turning a lump of soft meat into a powerful warrior.

Good thing, too, because he had no sooner touched down beside the Titan’s enormous right foot, than something emerged from the reliquary. Not a master or cyborg. A robot.

As V47 Pilot looked on (cycling his fey pockets to bring the nastiest weapons up front) the robot trundled out through a door and across the landing pad. It altered configuration as it came on, ending up as a tall and spindly thing with eight radial arms and a nearly featureless oval head. Its face sported two rectangular glowing blue eyes, while each jointed arm ended in razors that crackled, glittered or hissed. Maybe the thing was a worker. Maybe a last-ditch defense.

“This unit, hereafter referred to as ‘I’, serves as chief archivist,” said the robot. It spoke aloud and in real time, as V47 Pilot was still out of the network. Its voice came from a whirring fan, the pitch altered by changing the blade speed. A very old model. Reaching forth with one of its arms, the robot continued, demanding, “You claim to bring relics of ancient history, Asset?”

“I do,” he replied, swinging that moldy, botched junk front and center. Within scan range, but out of the robot’s physical reach. “These are… very old and important artifacts from an earlier age.”

Rubbish dumped into my fey pockets by a thief, he did not say aloud. Just embroidered a bit, adding,

“I was instructed by OVR-Lord that these finds must be brought to the masters, themselves.”

Not a robot, or any other drek-underling, he resolved, as emotion began to seep back.

“A moment, Asset. I must consult,” said the robot. Its cobalt-blue eyes flashed at the end of each sentence, Pilot noticed. Also, every one of its many weapons were pointed at him. Overhead, a trio of satellites gathered. He felt them scan and attempt to lock on but reached in and hacked their outdated systems. Shifted their focus and aim to the nearest large power station, instead.

Go ahead and shoot, he thought. I’m not the one who’ll get hit. Lightly rejiggered the local armaments, too, directing their aim to that spindly robot. Neat trick, that, which maybe he’d learned from Rogue Flight. The robot’s eyes flashed as it started speaking again.

“The likelihood of deception is deemed very high, Asset. OVR-Lord is an unknown system. The masters see no one, ever. Yet, the relics you bring are verifiably ancient and worthy of inclusion in the reliquary. You may enter. You shall deliver your cargo and then be destroyed, Asset, after a five-tick upload of pleasure.”

Five whole ticks, huh? Tough to turn down, but V47 Pilot decided was going to have to leave that generous offer on the table. Didn’t say so aloud, though. Just inclined his head and… well… lied again.

“As you say,” he replied, while promising nothing at all.

The robot’s eyes flashed assent. Its head swiveled smoothly then, turning to face directly into the reliquary’s broad, arched opening. Next, it started to move, leading V47 Pilot into the building. The pilot left two drones outside to keep watch, recalling the third to hover just over his head.

The first floor was one large, dimly lit chamber, barren of life or motion, except for the robot and pilot. It was filled with artifacts, many quite fascinating. There were ancient weapons, bits of armor and cloth, and a withered corpse on display, along with pieces of timber and a single, very old seed.

An odd collection and he passed it in silence, hearing only the buzz of his drone and the robot’s whispering treads. After fifty-five ticks they came to a broad dais; brilliantly lit, 5.37 feet high and topped with a six-foot steel podium. On top of that was a dark metal sphere. The size of… the term “court-ball” came to his mind… it seethed with energy, drawing power from every source on the planet.

“Behold the masters,” said his robot guide, coasting to a stop in front of the dais. “Here they abide in virtual bliss. As must be clear even to you, our masters cannot emerge, for they have abandoned physical bodies. They are very well shielded, Asset. No attack will succeed in harming them, should that be your intent in coming here.”

V47 Pilot stared for a nano-tick, filled with too much emotion to process.

“They… have withdrawn to some kind of dream world?” he asked, as his drones took scan after scan. “They left us behind to defend them, then shrank away into that?”

“Correct in its essence, Asset, if highly disrespectful. The masters have done as it suited them to. What purpose do any of us have, except to serve and protect them?”

But V47 Pilot shook his head.

“I did not really come to bring you these relics,” he admitted. “I came to deliver a message… but it must be heard by the masters, themselves. Only they can rescind the commands that they put into place. War comes to Etherion, Archivist. The Draugr have given me five days to cease all hyperspace jumps. If not, they will find this place and destroy it. The masters’ dreaming and safety will end.”

The robot’s blue eyes flared. Consulting again, Pilot thought. Then,

“There is a fail-safe, Asset. If the masters are informed of the danger, they will transfer their data to a backup system, but I am unable to contact them with this warning. Commands were left forbidding disturbance by the archivist. But you are not in the system, Asset. You are not bound by the masters’ command. Through willful misreading of code, I can send you inside to alert them.”

V47 Pilot hesitated. Then,

“What will happen if they are not told of the danger?” he asked, weighing options, emotions and promises.

“Then, as you have inferred, their virtual world ends in nuclear fire, and all is erased. Another world will arise, Asset. Chaos never survives its own victory. The choice is yours. Go in to warn them, or accept a five-tick pleasure burst, followed by death.”

Alert the masters and allow their escape… Or stand back and let them be caught by the oncoming Draugr. That was the question, with billions of asset lives crushed in the gears, no matter what he decided.

…And, writers of code, why him? Why was this choice, this burden, laid upon one wretched asset?