[SHOCKS Internal Communications Log] EVG Control Zone, August 13, 2032
Trooper Sarah Evans; Director Zoltan Carroll
- - - - -
Carroll: Status report. Now.
Evans: We’ve successfully captured the 'molly and are in the process of extracting it from Temp Site 652. ETA to Headquarters is twenty-three minutes. The LT is down, but stable. We lost Perkins, though. Body is…non-recoverable.
Carroll: Field containment should hold. Mobile Containment Units are at the trucks. Keep it tight.
Evans: Copy that.
Silence for two minutes, thirteen seconds. An explosion is heard. Gunfire is heard.
Evans: Command, Evans. The whole area just erupted. Huge amounts of plant growth—off the charts. LT got dropped in the chaos, and it just ripped him—-
Caroll: Copy. We’re seeing it. Proceed with extraction. RST Pi-Five is on the way to reinforce. ETA four minutes.
Evans: We won’t make it four minutes, sir! It’s breaking loose!
An explosion is heard. The sound of the earth tearing itself open drowns out the following gunfire. Silence is heard, broken only by an organic, creaking sound. The audio feed ends. Log ends.
----------------------------------------
Location Unknown, Location Unknown, Time Unknown
- - - - -
It takes a few minutes, and the Pendleton keeps listing farther to port as I drag Rodriguez, her clothes, and my sorry butt up to the deck. Pipes break all around me, and the ship fills with a gummy, sand-and-oil mixture that goes blue and rips through the hull, but I’m halfway down the rope when it really starts sinking into the nothing below.
The whole ship’s coming apart, the oil stain’s spreading, and I have to swing the rope as I slide uncontrollably down toward a gap in the sand. Rodriguez and I hit the sand hard, leaving blue streaks behind. She slips out of my grip and rolls, then pushes herself to her knees. “Fuck. Fuck! L4, come in!”
“I’ve got you!” I yell. I pick her up. She’s heavy—solid muscle, and almost five-foot-eight of it—but I pick her up easily and throw her over my shoulder. Then, we keep moving away from the collapsing wreck of the Pendleton.
I look over my shoulder as it screeches and twists. It buckles at the crevice halfway down its hull. Then, it drops like a rock through the sand, and it’s gone.
[L4-1, L4-3, I have locational fixes on the rest of RST Lambda-Four,] James says. He’s using the computer voice; I shiver as he keeps talking. [They’re up ahead on the beach and moving slowly, although the rover is gone. L4-4 is badly injured but movable, and L4-5 and L4-2 are still at full combat effectiveness.]
That’s good. We’re in trouble, but that’s good. I grit my teeth and keep walking down the beach. All around me, the sand falls away like an hourglass.
We can’t follow them directly, so catching up is more about coming in at an angle to intercept, but we catch up. Rodriguez slides off my back and starts pulling on her uniform until she’s fully dressed, but I can’t help catching the burned circles on her skin where the pipes made contact. They’re red and black, and the skin’s already peeling and flaking. She ignores them except when her battle uniform rubs and catches on them. The whole time, she keeps moving just ahead of the blue sand.
Strauss and L4-4 have L4-2 between them in a carry. They’re struggling across the sand, and I clear my throat. With Rodriguez gone and my Endurance, I can handle the weight. They shift Munroe to me, and I flop him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Very heavy, uncomfortable potatoes.
“Lieutenant,” Strauss says, “Command is working on extraction. Triangulating our reality is taking the JAMES Unit a long time, though. We have contact with it again, but this one’s not in its databases.”
[Affirmative. However, I’d estimate we’ll have a connection within the next hour. Ramirez wants two portals, the first for Lambda-Four and the second for L4-3 to continue her mission.]
“Like hell,” Rodriguez says. “We’re carrying on the mission. Lambda-Four’s still in the game. Four out of five of us are still combat-ready, so you can tell Paul to—“
[I agree with his assessment, Lieutenant. At least two of you are currently not combat-ready. Your injuries require treatment and recovery as well. However, I am arguing for Claire and Sergeant Strauss, as well as Sergeant Daley, to receive a small break before continuing. No more than 24 hours. This has been hard on her.]
Rodriguez goes quiet, but I can feel the fury boiling off of her. I don’t care, though. James and Director Ramirez are right; the Recovery and Stabilization Team is beat up, and wherever SHOCKS wants to send us, Munroe and Rodriguez aren’t going to be useful there.
No one says anything for a long time, except for James, and he’s only talking to me. [Claire, I’ve scrubbed all the recordings of what happened in the Pendleton’s crew quarters.]
“What?” I whisper.
When James speaks, his voice is quiet. [You picked up a new power. It’s very Voiceless Singer-like. I’m concerned that if Director Ramirez were to see it in action, you would become a SHOCKS target for research purposes again, and your continued freedom is too valuable to me to sacrifice it. Please be careful when using that power in the future.]
I’ve already been thinking about all the ways I could use Absolution. It can’t just be good against Post-Life Entities—though it instantly removed Jameson as a threat. It also stripped the whole Pendleton of its anomalous status when I used it. Could I do the same thing to the sand below our feet?
“How do we get out of here?” I ask.
Rodriguez holds up a hand. She’s a little shaky, and her face looks drawn under her helmet. Her lips move; she’s talking to Director Ramirez. I think about asking James to patch me into the conversation so I can hear it, but something from the last hour tickles the back of my mind, and I decide not to. And isn’t absolution a religious thing?
We keep walking, but slowly—barely outstripping the collapsing beach behind us. Munroe’s heavier than Rodriguez was, but at least he’s unconscious. I’ve got a hand around his intact leg and one around his wrists, wearing him like a much-too-big scarf.
“Normally, we’d set up an extraction point and wait for a helicopter or truck,” Strauss says.
“You guys get helicopters?”
Strauss sighs. “Of course we get helicopters, L4-3. We’re the big bad government agency. We don’t use them often, and SHOCKS Victoria and Vancouver Island loaned ours to the SeaTac district just before this kicked off, but we have helicopters.”
I roll my eyes. “We could have been flying right now.”
“Focus. Normally, we’d set up an easily-defended extraction point and hold that, along with whatever package we’re supposed to collect. We’d pick a place with good lines of sight and no way for enemies to flank us, dig in hard, and set up our Reality Anchors and other defenses. Then we’d wait.”
There’s a definite problem that I see already. “We can’t defend a point.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
[Incorrect,] James says.
“Incorrect,” Rodriguez says at the same time. “We can easily defend a point; we just can’t occupy that point until the moment we extract. I’m not worried about something showing up. So far, this reality’s only been ghost ships and sand. I haven’t even seen a tree yet.”
She points at the horizon, where the spit of sand widens around a bay in a wide, sickle-shaped beach. “Paul—“
“Command here.”
“Fine. Command, we’re going to set up extraction for the far side of that beach. You think it’ll take ten minutes to calibrate for our location?”
“Correct. That beach looks adequate. We have your coordinates. Merge generator starting up,” Ramirez says. “Hold position as best you can.”
“Copy that. See you soon.” Rodriguez points again, and a section of sand lights up green. “That’s our target. Take it easy on the speed so we don’t overshoot.”
The back of my neck tingles and my ears start to ring.
And just like that, a black hole in space opens up behind us, looming overhead, and a Voiceless Singer steps through.
----------------------------------------
“L4-3, main mission objective has arrived. Can you subdue it?” Command—Director Ramirez—asks.
“Probably not.”
“Can you stop it from killing the team?”
“Yes. Yes, I can do that,” I say.
The Voiceless Singer just hangs there in the air, staring at me. It has no clear face, but I can still feel its gaze locked on me. “Strauss, take Munroe,” I murmur as I shrug the injured man off my shoulders and onto the sergeant’s. He buckles under the weight but keeps moving.
My helmet’s earpieces pop, and so does my aug as the Voiceless Singer’s song hits us. “James, you’ve got them, right?”
[Yes, I do.]
“Great.” James said we shouldn’t fight a big anomaly on the sands, and the Voiceless Singer is definitely one of the most powerful I’ve encountered. We don’t have a Faraday Cage. We don’t have the same weapons we had when SHOCKS captured the first Voiceless Singer. Even Strauss’s rover—which might have had the firepower to knock this thing out if it detonated everything at once—is missing.
I don’t want to fight the Voiceless Singer. Not here. Not when I don’t have a chance at winning.
But I don’t have a choice. I draw the Revolver. “Keep moving. I’ll keep it off you. See you on the other side.”
Rodriguez pauses. Then she nods. “You heard L4-3. Nice and slow. She’s got our back.”
I load the reality skippers. [Claire, you can’t win this fight,] James says.
“I don’t need to win. I just have to stall.”
The Voiceless Singer pauses as I level the Revolver. Then its song crashes down on me with all its weight. I have one hundred percent of its attention.
The sand under my feet starts to vanish, and I run left—right toward Strauss’s path. It collapses, too. I jump over it. Bullet Time activates mid-air, and I put three shots into the Voiceless Singer before I hit the ground on the far side. Sapphire sand flies up all around me. Some lands on my face and arms. The three shots exit their micromerges and slam into the Voiceless Singer.
It screams.
It’s the same wall of sonic force as the others, hitting me like a truck filled with bricks. It shoves me away and sends me cartwheeling across the sand. I Slither over a gap to the void and turn, then activate Determination. The scream finishes a moment later, and my Stability starts dropping.
[Stability 10/10]
[Stability 9/10]
Time is running out. It might already have run out; I’m definitely bringing back a Stability-failure merge with me when I go through that portal. But that doesn’t matter. “James, warn SHOCKS that it’s going to be a messy extraction.” I fire another shot and Smoke Form the next scream.
[On it.] James isn’t saying much. He hasn’t started Analyzing the Voiceless Singer. Come to think of it, he hasn’t Analyzed any of the Voiceless Singers. That feels important.
I leap over another gap. The beach around me looks less like a place to vacation and more like rotten Swiss cheese. The rest of Lambda-Four’s moving slowly; there’s a few dozen yards of less destroyed sand between me and them. I step back, firing into the Voiceless Singer like that will do something.
[Stability 8/10]
The truth is that even though I know I can’t win this fight, I think I just need a window—and I can create one of those myself. I replace the empty Inquiry with a new one.
►What’s the best way to wear down a Voiceless Singer?
[This is a bad idea, Claire,] James says.
I dodge over another pit and keep blasting away. I don’t respond to James. He’s my friend, but right now, I need to stay focused.
[Stability 7/10]
I do. I focus so hard that my head hurts; James calls out attacks and safe spots as the beach around me disintegrates and I rotate cylinders to gravity shells. The Voiceless Singer surges forward, screaming and raising its song’s volume. I keep firing and drive it back. It hovers over almost solid abyss. There’s no sand left where I’ve been.
[Stability 6/10]
Behind me, the rest of Lambda-Four keeps retreating. They’ve figured out what’s happening and spread out, leaving three long tears in the ground. It looks like a gigantic bear has ripped the ground apart with its claws. I want to thank them, but I’m out of breath.
And worse, the Voiceless Singer doesn’t seem to be trying. It hasn’t tried to hit me with a vision yet. The visions always force my hand.
Why hasn’t it tried that yet?
I fire another gravity shell. The Revolver fires on an empty chamber, and I switch again, back to the reality skippers. Another Bullet Time. The shots go off, and I start moving.
[Skill Learned: Revolver Mastery 17]
The scream hits me again like a wave. At the same time, my Determination-granted Stability ticks down.
[Stability 4/10]
But the vision still doesn’t come. I roll across the sand and pop up. My skin’s bleeding from a dozen holes where grains of blue sand disappeared and tore into my skin. It hurts, but I’m still upright.
[Skill Learned: Physical Anomaly Resistance 11]
I keep backpedaling. The Voiceless Singer keeps moving forward. Nothing I’ve done so far has so much as scratched it—at least, from what I can see. But it’s hesitant now. I breathe heavily, not quite standing still, but walking instead of running.
Finally—finally—it tries a vision. The burning planet fills my mind, and I immediately Soundbreak.
----------------------------------------
A lot happens in the next ten seconds, and it all happens at once.
The vision snaps. The song mutes as my counterpoint hits the void angel. My Stability drops further, and I retreat toward the extraction spot.
[Stability 2/10]
The Voiceless Singer hits the ground.
It hits the ground, and the sand below it goes blue.
I’ve got a window—an opportunity. I dash left, putting distance between me and the retreating RST. The only way this is going to work is with perfect timing. The gravity shells go back into the Revolver.
I start firing at the sand below the Voiceless Singer’s recovering non-form.
None of the shots hit the angel. They catch it, though, holding it over the vanishing sand. I space my shots. All I want to do is hold the Voiceless Singer where it is until the space under it’s done forming. Then I can drop it.
It won’t be a victory. Not the one SHOCKS wants, at least. But it’ll save the Recovery and Stabilization Team, and it’ll save me.
[Stability 1/10]
My breathing picks up, and I have to resist the urge to keep shooting. Instead, I back up, hop over one of the bear claw scratches in the ground, and switch to the fire rounds. My ears ring and my hair stands up as the portal behind me opens.
I use Bullet Time once more, firing into the Voiceless Singer. Then I wait for the scream to hit me.
[Stability 0/10]
The second it does, I’m running. I don’t stop until I’m in front of the portal—past the RST. They start hooking onto my harness, but I don’t bother with that; I pull their safety lines into one fist, make sure there are four of them, and jump through.
I don’t bother seeing what anomaly I’ve ‘accidentally’ summoned onto the beach. I don’t wait around to see if the Voiceless Singer survives.
I just leave.
----------------------------------------
SHOCKS Headquarters, Victoria, British Columbia - June 14, 2043, 4:51 PM
- - - - -
The clean-up crew’s already working on the rest of RST Lambda-Four’s puke and the blue sand that’s shredded half the merge generator’s ramp when I land. Munroe’s on a gurney; Rodriguez should be, too, but she’s fighting it tooth and nail, and right now, at least, she’s winning. The rest of the team is still on the ground, and researchers and agents swarm them. I’m alone—at least for now. The calm in the eye of the storm.
I sit down. “James, show me the last thirty seconds of the fight.”
[Replaying the final thirty seconds now,] James says.
I watch the Soundbreak. The realization that I’d hurt the thing and my attempt to pressure it into staying down. If it hadn’t been for the terrain, I could have had something there. But I couldn’t have gotten close enough to use Absolution and break it apart. The ground was too shredded.
Still, I can’t help shiver in excitement. I had a window, and I took advantage of it. And more importantly, it worked—in theory.
The equation is solved. I rescued all the Lambda-Four troopers, solved the haunting of the Pendleton, and escaped. But even more importantly, I beat the Voiceless Singer. Not stalemated it. Not lured it into a trap. Beat it.
If I can do it once, I can do it again. It’s about lining up Soundbreaks with their visions. It’s about controlling the battlefield, not trying to do damage. It’s about maintaining my Stability as long as possible to try and outlast an angel.
No one tries to stop me as I leave the Experimental Sector. Director Ramirez glances my way, but he’s busy trying to deal with a very amped-up and pissed-off Lieutenant Rodriguez. I’ll be getting a visit from him later. Or maybe a message. But I don’t care. Right now, I want to retreat to my space and keep exploring the Voiceless Singer footage.
It’s quiet in my room. The shower sounds great, but one look at the showerhead on its pipe sticking out of the wall, and I shake my head, shivering. Not yet. Maybe later, but not yet.
Instead, I bunker down under the covers and watch the fight over and over. Everything has a tell when it wants to attack. Everything reacts when it’s hurt. The Voiceless Singer is no different.
By the time I go to sleep, I’ve got it. A weakness that I can exploit.
A way to wear them down.
It’s not a Truth—not yet—but it is a viable theory.