Writing Prompt: "The stars didn't seem right"

Some nights the sky lit up in strange fires- nebulous violets, radioactive greens, brilliant yellows and oranges, strontium reds. The whole sky was a brilliant, seething mass of rainbow fire that terrified the commonfolk and caused the Hive City nobility to raise their lead shields and spend the evening entertaining their guests under the fitful light of electrics, indulging in pleasures that were deemed illegal, heretical, and banned at every level of governance.

Holy Knight Jeanne of Block Seven in Hive City Al-Omeg unlatched her respirator mask and took a polite swallow from the drink she’d been handed after disembarking from Evelína’s warm embrace.

Truth be told, she felt hollowed out and gutted when she wasn’t with Evelína, but one didn’t show up to a party dressed in a Smirtka Battlesuit.

“Ah, Sister Jeanne!” A graying man approached her, wisps of his hair blowing about his head like a halo. He was tall but thin, nearly emaciated. His face was dotted with rad scars, uncommon amidst the nobility.

“Lord Darren.” She greeted him politely, affixing her respirator and taking a few breaths.

He gave her a baffled look. “Is there something wrong with our air, Lady Knight?” He asked, his voice layered with familiarity, gentle humor, and concern.

She shook her head. “It’s not the air quality, old friend.” She replied, and then frowned at the grating, mechanical voice that came out of the vox. She took the mask away and repeated herself.

“It’s life support.” She added. “...” She started to add more, to explain that she could no longer live without being joined to her partner, her biomechanical battlesuit, but refrained. There was no point in explaining, and he wouldn’t understand anyway.

His brows rose alarmingly. “Life support!” He exclaimed gently, tactfully keeping his voice low. “Are you well? Will you be retiring from service?” He asked, concerned. She smiled a little, but shook her head and took a few more breaths.

“No retirement yet.” She replied.

“Well, that’s good to hear. It brings me peace of mind to know your services will not cease.” He added, and took one of her hands in his. Three years ago, his House had been set upon by assassins, and though she had unintentionally and coincidentally saved his wife and daughter, he had always been kind, quietly supportive, and respectful to her.

“You’re too kind.” She replied politely, and then took a few more breaths.

“I would have a request for you.” He asked, continuing to hold her strong right hand in his frail left.

“What’s that?” She asked, after taking the mask away. She liked the old man, and the harsh, grating tones of the vox wouldn’t do for her friend.

“I’ve heard that to the north, the skies are clear sometimes.” He lowered his voice discreetly. “I’d like to have a picture of Blessed Luna to give my wife and daughters.”

She reattached her respirator while she thought. A picture of Blessed Luna, taken in a clear sky, would be considered a Holy Relic, something the Holy Church would covet. The idea that the skies were clear “somewhere else” was a pure fantasy, however. There was never a point when the skies were completely clear. The air was filled with dirt and ash, the skies filled with viruses, chemicals, and nuclear crud from what scholars dubbed The Great Burn.

“I can head north for you, I suppose.” She decided, and then took another breath. “Is there a deadline?” She asked.

He shrugged. “There’s no rush. If there’s a lull in your duties...” He passed her a tiny memory chip, which she palmed as a rotund man in opulent dress approached the two.

She nodded and replaced her ventilator and took a few needed breaths as Lord Darren of House Darren stepped back, releasing her hand.

“Thank you for your service, Lady Knight.” Lord Darren said, more formally this time. She nodded crisply.

The obese man, greasy with sweat, joined them.

“Ahh, a Lady Knight from the Lunar Temple!” He greeted. His voice was thick and breathy, his teeth clearly porcelain, his stubby fingers dripping with rings.

Rather than greet him, she silently held out her hand. The greasy man frowned irritably, but kissed her ring respectfully.

“It is good to see one of your stature here at this gathering.” He greeted, noticing her markings of rank.

“You should keep your vices in check, Councillor.” She spoke through her vox at him. “I can smell the stench of them on you. Perhaps a night of reflection and prayer would do you good.”

His smile died by inches, and he retreated as Lord Darren gave her a respectful bow and left as well.

Sister Irene joined Jeanne after hearing her sister’s denouncement.

“Jeanne.”

“Sister Irene.” Jeanne greeted back.

“Be careful. Don’t antagonize too much. These cretins are still technically our sponsors.” Irene warned gently. Unlike Jeanne, she wasn’t wholly dependent on her Smirtka for survival.

Jeanne unlatched her mask and took a polite drink.

“It must be terrible for you, to be chained to life support equipment like this.” Irene observed quietly.

“There’s a silvery light in this night sky, Sister.” Jeanne replied quietly. “When I’m allowed to leave, I’ll be rejoined with Evelína.”

“You miss her so much?” Irene asked curiously. Jeanne shook her head and immediately wished she didn’t, as the room spun a little.

“You’re young. You’ll figure it out for yourself, eventually.” Jeanne replied, and then re-latched her respirator.

“Figure out what, Elder Sister?” Irene asked curiously, blue eyes wide above her veil.

Jeanne took several stabilizing breaths. Without Evelína to filter the alcohol from her system, she had to depend on her own liver, a shoddy thing that seemed woefully inefficient compared to her partner’s systems.

“For me, Evelína is more than a battlesuit. She’s my partner, my friend...” She trailed off, and then shrugged. “...and now I cannot be alive without being a part of her, and she of me.” She set down her drink and reattached her mask.

“I didn’t just come to this party for the Church, you know.” Irene spoke up then, quietly. “There’s a package on the hoverpad for you.”

Jeanne nodded a little, struggling against the alcohol’s intoxicants. She closed her eyes and sighed, and with numb fingers, she loosened her respirator. “I can’t stay here any longer. Irene, please help me back to Evelína.” She complained. “I won’t be able to stand much longer.”

“Can you walk out of here?” Irene asked, already reattaching Jeanne’s respirator.

Jeanne shook her head slightly, so Irene walked with her to one of the exits, holding her up when Jeanne started to falter.

Once out of sight and away from the party proper, Irene scooped up Jeanne and raced up the stairways towards the hoverpad, judging the elevator too slow.

As Irene approached Evelína, she called out to the biomechanical battlesuit.

“Smirtka Battlesuit Evelína, I have your pilot Jeanne with me. I request your help-”

The battlesuit opened, tendrils and mechanical armatures opening and reaching for Jeanne. Parts of the suit opened up like petals from a flower, the mechanical parts separated like metal teeth.

As Evelína plucked Jeanne from Irene’s grasp, stripped her life-support gear from her, and pulled her into itself, Irene couldn’t help but shudder; the process looked too much like some sort of greedy digestion than when she climbed into her own Smirtka.

The battlesuit churned and flexed in a disgustingly organic way, the night-black and silver lines of the battlesuit interlocking, pulling together. Finally, the death’s head insignia appeared on the battlesuit and the eyes flared alight.

Jeanne’s voice called out from the Smirtka. “According to Evelína, my drink was poisoned. If you hadn’t gotten me out of there when you did, you might have taken my remains to the mulcher.”

A bolt of adrenaline lanced through Irene’s chest.

“Poison?!” She blurted, reaching for her wristpad to summon her own Smirtka.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they dumped out the drink when we left the party.” Jeanne added. “Chalk it up as a learning experience.” Her voice was frustrated.

“Mmm? Oh, right. Lord Warren gave it to me.” Jeanne continued, obviously talking with Evelína. “We’ll have a look when we have a minute.”

Irene’s own Smirtka arrived and opened for her.

“That package you were talking about?” Jeanne asked.

Irene’s own Smirtka disgorged a canister after Irene’s reconnection.

“You were issued a Phoebe for your part in the issue with the Silvermein Family of Al-Cestus.” Irene replied, as if Jeanne didn’t already know this. “You are now allowed the use of plasma ordinance.”

She let out a sigh. “I am deeply envious of you, Elder Sister. I’ve seen plasma ordinance in the test field and it is breathtaking.”

Evelína accepted the installation of the plasma generator with a purr directly in Jeanne’s ear.

“Listen to you.” Jeanne accused gently. “You’re more excited than I am to try it out.”

“In truth, I could probably generate plasma ordinance without this plasma generator.” Evelína murmured, and a flicker of indicators explained everything to Jeanne. Since Evelína contained two Seeds, there was an excess of power. With some modification of Evelína’s systems, she would have been able create some rudimentary plasma weaponry.

“I’m glad you didn’t decide to try.” Jeanne replied, mentally pulling up the files regarding the early days of plasma weapons trials.

Evelína began her usual humming in Jeanne’s ear. Jeanne toggled her comms. “Installation successful. I’m going to take a trip into the wasteland and fire off a test salvo.” She reported to Irene, and then sent a duplicate of her transmission to her Abbess, since all activity within a Smirtka had to be reported.

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“I don’t much like Hellena.” Evelína announced.

“Hmmm?” Jeanne asked. She was being lured to sleep by Evelína’s work on her, cycling her blood through Evelína’s filtration system and having it sent back into her. She felt weak and drowsy, and she trusted Evelína enough to keep her safe as they rocketed through the air.

“Irene’s Smirtka. You couldn’t tell?”

Jeanne struggled to focus. “I don’t follow you at all.” She mumbled, and then fell asleep.

Evelína hummed a lullaby in Jeanne’s ear as they flew.

Jeanne awoke as Evelína touched down.

“Where are we?” Jeanne asked, mentally pulling up her battlesuit’s status, though she no longer had to do such a thing anymore, since they were now more or less permanently fused together.

“The coordinates you got from Lord Warren.” Evelína replied calmly. “You slept the whole way.”

“Was it really that bad?” Jeanne asked, blinking and looking around in her battlesuit. They stood on a cliff she didn’t immediately recognize, looking over a sludgy lake that shimmered with an oily iridescent sheen.

“The poison was easy to flush out of your system; the damage it caused, however, took time to fix.” Evelína replied.

“The sky.” Jeanne called. “Warren said the sky would be clear here-” She cut off as she looked up. The sky was thick and choked with ash and dust, as usual.

“Clear skies for miles in every direction.” Evelína’s sarcasm came through perfectly. “Though strangely the air is quite clear at this spot. I don’t understand why, but you wouldn’t need an air filter here at all.”

“Really?” Jeanne asked doubtfully.

“Yes, really. It smells atrocious though, so I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Jeanne chuckled and Evelína shared the moment, chuckling along with her.

“Any way we could fly up above the crud?” Jeanne asked, already knowing the answer.

Evelína gave her the answer she expected; it was categorically impossible to get above the crud in an unassisted battlesuit.

“Hmm. We’ve got an excess of energy from two plasma reactors and we have a plasma generator, can we punch some holes in the crud with the ordinance long enough... or big enough to get the picture Warren wants?”

Evelína sang in her ear as she ran the calculations.

“No, I don't think so, Jeanne. Sorry.” Evelína replied.

Jeanne sighed with frustration. “Well, shit. I was kind of hoping...” She trailed off.

“I know. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Luna.” Evelína replied.

“...we should move.” Jeanne suddenly decided, a sudden surge of uneasiness flooding through her. She triggered her jetpack just as the ground disappeared underneath her.

“Go, Evelína!” Jeanne cried as they lunged forward across the gap that had appeared underneath their feet.

“Holy shit, I don’t know what happened there, but-”

A display appeared in her vision, what looked like a vent had opened up underneath her. A blast of steam roared out, thick, hot clouds of moisture, water vapor that blasted upwards into the air.

“...geyser?” Jeanne asked, baffled.

“There’s no record of it in the files.” Evelína replied. “Though sonar says there’s some bizarre seismic activity.”

“Bizarre?” Jeanne asked.

The ultrasonic sensors assembled a three-dimensional image for her, and as the the waves permeated the bedrock, they revealed-

“Those... those look like tunnels.”

“An underground facility?” Evelína asked. “Perhaps this is to be the site of a new Hive City?” She asked curiously.

“You think I would know something like that?” Jeanne asked sardonically.

“I’m just saying-” Evelína began somewhat sourly, but then cut off. “Something... big is coming from above, Jeanne.” she warned.

Jeanne skipped backward with her jump jets a few steps, triggering the commands for her heavy-duty anti-tank rifle, a codeset she had received just before the Silvermein incident.

“Hey, can we-” Jeanne began, but Evelína cut her off just as quickly.

“Yes we can.”

“I love you.” Jeanne praised, and Evelína laughed as she began using the instruction sets to also assemble a heavy-duty long-range plasma rifle.

“I know. I love you, too.” Evelína sang in Jeanne’s ear. “Though, when I said ‘big’, I meant ‘huge’. Look at the thermal bloom.”

Jeanne froze as the datasets overwhelmed her.

Huge was right. The thermal bloom in the sky was overwhelmingly massive. It stretched for miles in every direction.

There was no way to escape it.

The sky lit up, then: brilliant colors of every part of the spectrum scattering, flashing, searing away to atomic dust as whatever bore down on the earth chewed through the ash, dust, radioactive and chemical clouds.

“It’s beautiful.” Jeanne mumbled, and blinked away tears. “I’m glad I got to see it with you, Evelína.”

“Me too, Jeanne. May the Lunar Princess carry our souls home-” She broke off as the lower-most clouds broke apart, revealing what had split the sky asunder.

A triangular ship, bone-white, hovered above ground, silvery-white thrusters keeping it aloft.

“By the Princess.” Jeanne breathed. “Evelína, are you recording this?”

“Of course I am.” Evelína replied back.

“What is it?” Jeanne asked.

“I have no idea.” Evelína replied.

“Weapons lock?” Jeanne asked, her wonder and awe slowly fading.

“You want to fire on it?” Evelína asked with a certain skeptical incredulity.

“You think we could do damage to it?” Jeanne shot back.

“Well, locking on is no problem...” Evelína replied dubiously as targeting reticles panned the ship, targeting the thrusters and several telltale bulges that could be core systems.

“Targets locked.” Evelína offered, and then added, “Though I don’t think we’ve got the output to do anything-”

Suddenly there was a horrific blast of static that raced across every frequency, every tone, every spectrum as a beam of light illuminated Jeanne and her Smirtka. Jeanne, linked to Evelína as she was, even felt it blast across her nerves and skitter across her brain. She screamed hoarsely as her senses were replaced with pain.

Blind, deaf, insensate, she triggered the command to fire, hammering the mental fire button in her head over and over.

“Frankly, I’m unsurprised. Disappointed perhaps, but also unsurprised. We give them a gift, they turn it into a weapon to use on each other.”

“Commander, it seems she can hear us.”

“By all that is- is that wired directly into her nervous system?”

“It looks like part of it is growing in her brain-”

“Cut the power! Who knows what it’s doing to the poor thing-”

Jeanne was dreaming. In the dream she was sitting side-by-side with a woman that looked vaguely like her. Whenever Jeanne moved, the woman next to her would do the exact same thing.

A woman appeared, wearing clothes Jeanne had never seen before. She was slim, nearly gaunt, her face severe and cold, her salt-and-pepper hair drawn into a bun at the nape of her neck.

“I’ll forgive your... attack... on my ship,” her tone indicating just how pitiful Jeanne’s attack was, “if you’ll forgive our scan. It seems your... suit... was ill-equipped to deal with a focused scan from my vessel.”

“That was... a scan?” Jeanne asked, baffled.

The woman nodded. “It hurt, didn’t it?” She asked sympathetically. Jeanne nodded.

“I can imagine. Well, scanning something is basically throwing waves at it and seeing what bounces back.”

Jeanne nodded. She knew that much, at least. Evelína was equipped with a full active and passive sensor package.

“Were you aware that Plant is merging with you?” The woman asked cautiously.

“Evelína? Jeanne asked. “She’s... my partner.”

“Well, obviously. I mean-” The lady sighed, frustrated. “Look, I’m honestly not cut out for these sorts of things.”

“What things?” Jeanne asked, trying to get Evelína to wake up.

“First contact. Interacting with the local tribes. That sort of thing.” The woman flapped her hands dismissively. “So let’s just agree that this didn’t happen, all right? You didn’t fire on my ship, I didn’t nearly fry your brain with a sensor scan. Agreed?”

“I can’t honestly say I know what’s going on-” Jeanne began, but the other woman cut her off.

“Agreed?” She insisted.

“I, uh-”

“Agreed?” She insisted again, sternly.

Numbly, not understanding, Jeanne agreed.

“Good! Great! I’ve transmitted the necessary codes to your... partner... to undo the damage it’s doing to you. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

Jeanne nodded at that, and the woman faded from view.

“Am I awake? Am I dreaming?” She asked, but nobody responded. After a while, with nothing to see, nothing to hear, and bored out of her mind, Jeanne decided to sleep.

When Jeanne opened her eyes, she was laying in the dirt, and the massive ship was dropping large white boxes from a massive hatch on its underbelly, obviously some sort of cargo hold. The white boxes were disappearing from her line of sight.

She tried to move and discovered she couldn’t.

“Evelína?” She asked, but there was no response from her partner at all.

“Shit.”

Her body had weakened since she’d taken in the second Seed, but she could still stand up while in Evelína. She grimly struggled to her feet, remembering her novitiate days where she had been required to run inside Evelína’s bulk.

She hadn’t had to use manual controls in a very long time. She ran through several startup sequences, frustrated that Evelína wasn’t responding to anything, worried that since Evelína was basically responsible for keeping her heart beating, her lungs filled with oxygen, her-

She stopped. Evelína wasn’t responding at all, but Jeanne didn’t seem to be having any problems.

“Execute Manual Code 57-E.”

Evelína spit Jeanne out as ordered. Too late, Jeanne realized he’d forgotten her respirator and filters.

She clapped both hands over her face and ran to the rear of the Smirtka battlesuit, where she poked and prodded at the inputs of the Seed until it obliged and opened a hatch that contained a respirator mask with filters, a handful of rations, a water recirculator, and a handgun.

She watched the ship load and unload those giant white boxes all day, blissfully unaware that she sat in the sunlight, a sunlight that was unfiltered by clouds, ash, radioactive waste, or anything.

It was reaching evening when Evelína chirped in her ear.

“You’re awake.” Jeanne observed.

“I am.” Evelína replied. “I would like to point out that the skycover is gone.”

“True enough. I hadn’t noticed.” Jeanne replied.

“Did you remember that I told you that the air was breathable?” Evelína asked, and Jeanne shook her head. “Completely slipped my mind.”

“When nightfall comes, we should be able to get an exceptional picture of Sacred Luna.” Evelína suggested.

“Oooh, I like that idea. We could take a few now. I think she looks especially lovely in this light.” Jeanne suggested.

“Done.” Evelína replied.

As night approached, the giant triangular ship flared its thrusters and rose back up through the atmosphere, burning away the crud that was beginning to accumulate again.

“It’s getting cold.” Jeanne observed.

“It’s not cold in here.” Evelína invited.

Jeanne got up, dusted off her legs, and walked back to her partner, who opened up for her.

“I’ve been thinking a lot of things while you were sleeping.” Jeanne announced as she climbed in, Evelína shifting around to accommodate Jeanne’s movements.

“Oh?”

“I think we should delete the stuff about that ship.” She decided.

“What ship?” Evelína asked sweetly, already deleting the footage.

“I like the way you think.” Jeanne observed, triggering Evelína’s jump packs to where Evelina was suggesting would make the best spot to take a picture of the Silver Princess.

“We’re partners, after all.” Evelína replied, already humming a hymn in Jeanne’s ear as they flew through the air.

As they took several pictures, Jean marveled, “I have seen the moon- and sometimes the stars, even- through the clouds many times before.” She observed. “But a clear night like this? The stars don’t seem right.”

“Time to head home?” Evelína asked, showing a projected course.

“Time to head home.” Jeanne agreed.