---Useless---
---Brunhilda’s perspective---
“They did WHAT?!?!?!” screams the giant Spiderwoman, causing an uncomfortable flare of my arachnophobia as her (too many) legs shift.
She glowers from the broken off end of the spear shaft she holds to the dent stamped into the floor of her dorm’s commonroom.
“They took your spearhead, Khr’kowan. I’m sorry… They came in and out so fast that Yuán was the only one close enough and awake enough to get there in time… I assumed he would be able to stop them, since they’ve never beaten him before, but they didn’t seem as if they were able to feel any pain at the time and that gave them enough of an edge to send him to the ship’s medical ward!”
Being woken up to carry the man I’ve spent a year and change learning martial arts from to medical on a stretcher, I assumed we had to be facing another augment like Stetter!
I thought, even if one of the Vrakhand had taken exception to him, she wouldn’t of been able to put him in that state and, herself, still been in a state where she was able to walk away!
Seeing the video of Cuddles and Thran, their faces blank masks of indifference as they ruthlessly beat their master into the ground… it was chilling!
I’ve never seen them fight like that before!
Thran wasn’t her normal reactive self… and she completely ignored the black eyes and broken nose Yuán gave her.
Victor’s always fought with… feels odd to say but… I guess the word is ‘compassion’…?
At his very core, he’s a protector!
He fights to defend others and (to a much lesser degree) himself!
The way he fought Yuán with Thran… it was absolutely ruthless!
Not angry! That wouldn’t have been anywhere near as bad!
It was cold… detached… like he didn’t have the slightest emotional investment in what he was doing!
That man can’t even make a piece of toast without cracking a smile at the fact that he’s about to have toast in his belly(!)
Seeing him so outwardly ferocious while his face was so devoid of emotions was… frightening…
“AND WHY!?” demands the empress, flexing her fangs and baring her toothplates, turning my stomach in the process.
“I think they were mind controlled.” states Twila, apologetically.
Horror slowly spreads over the terrifying woman’s face before she asks “Mind controlled?!… Such a thing is possible?” aghast.
Twila briefly has the same look of bewilderment that Dormouse gets when someone’s said something she thinks is stupid before she answers “Uhm… Yes? You’re wearing something that controls your mind right now?… So is every organic in this room…”
Khr’kowan’s hand flies to her temple but she manages to restrain herself from immediately removing the little metal disc there, long enough to finish listening to Twila explain.
“…obviously, translators aren’t capable of overriding the will of the person wearing them… but they do act on the central nervous system to take meaning from the brain of whoever you’re listening to and relay it to yours, letting you understand what they’re saying despite never having learned their language… This would just be a more comprehensive version of that… The same mechanisms your translator is using to put the meaning of the words I’m saying into your mind right now would allow it to control you if it did them differently to different parts of your brain.”
Dismayed, Khr’kowan asks “Then… why is this the first time I’m hearing about this? If your technology makes enthralling another’s will possible, why isn’t it a much more common occurrence!?”
Here, Emiko cuts in “I promise that we weren’t hiding it from you, Khr’kowan! Mind control is just one of millions of facts about our reality that we haven’t judged to be worth bringing up with you yet. Using any technique that allows you to control someone’s mind is highly illegal in all GU jurisdictions, of course… But, on top of that, it’s just not usually very practical at all!… The dearth of publicly available research means that, effectively, every time someone wants to try it (especially with a new species), they’ve got to largely reinvent the wheel… A person whose will has been subverted is also, as I understand it, almost invariably very easy to spot, removing their utility as infiltrators… In this case, Twila was able to tell that there was something up just from the way they were walking and, when she tried to ask them what was going on, they flat out ignored her… If it weren’t for the fact that they were two of the most formidable individuals in the galaxy, their retrieval mission probably wouldn’t have ended successfully… Also, mind controlled individuals can’t really act too well outside of instructions they’re given and often interpret those instructions differently to how they were intended. Thran, for instance, hesitated over Yuán after she and Victor had beaten him… I think that probably means that whoever’s puppeteering them gave them orders to the effect of ‘kill anyone who tries to stop you’ but, because they didn’t actually use the word ‘kill’, Thran and Victor had the latitude to be able to leave him alive… As soldiers, controlled individuals are only comparable to nonsentient combat droids of the same strength and, while stripping another of their will does negate the cost of manufacturing a droid, it introduces an enormous amount of risk, both in trying to get the device on the individual you want to control and in what happens after they’ve disappeared and their loved ones go looking for them! For all these reasons, mind control just isn’t that common a problem…”
Khr’kowan gives an unhappy grimace but says nothing, seeming to accept that not enlightening her wasn’t a decision made out of malice.
Emiko continues “I would like to know how exactly whoever’s in control here managed to get devices on both Victor and Thran though! I know she’s not the most socially aware but I would like to think that neither of those two would be foolish enough to jack in an unfamiliar device given to them by a stranger… The only other possibility, though, is that the devices were attached forcibly and, if they had the power to do that, why not just come for the thanatite themself?”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Well, on that front…” says Twila bringing up still images of the pair under mind control on the wall, highlighting the devices at their temples “…the apparatus controlling each of them appears to be nanoforged from their own translators.”
“What, so…?” I start, sceptically “…instead of ‘Hello, pair of very strong strangers! Could I trouble you to attach these devices to your skull?’ it was ‘Could I trouble you to give me your translators to be reforged and then given back and reattached?’(?) I don’t really think they’d’ve been any more likely to fall for that!”
Twila’s actuators whirr as she shakes her head “I don’t think that’s what happened either… Comparing the placement of the devices to where their translators were when they left earlier reveals two perfect matches!… I’m sure you all feel like you put your translators on in the same place every time but, trust me, the odds of someone taking off their translator and naturally putting it back so close to where it was before that I can’t detect the difference is negligible! The odds against that happening twice are astronomical!”
“Meaning…?” asks a serious Xon.
“Meaning that I think they were reforged without being removed.” answers Twila.
“Riiiiight…” I sigh “…so it was ‘Greetings, strangers! Could I trouble you to stick your heads into these nanoforges and keep them there for several consecutive minutes? Don’t worry about what they’re doing!’ then? Because I’m suuuuure they’d’ve fallen for that(!)” sarcastically.
“Or someone forced their heads into forges but, again, why bother?… If you’re already strong enough to overpower Victor ‘Cuddles’ Taylor and Thran ‘Gimli’ Hunter to that extent, why not just incapacitate them off the ship and come here yourself?” frowns Emiko.
“Well, I’m not saying either of those ways makes any more sense but, nonetheless, one or other of them seems as if it must have been what happened...” says Twila.
“Alright. That doesn’t matter right now! We can figure out how this happened after we’ve got them and, preferably, the thanatite back!” I assert, doing my best to channel my missing boss’s authoritativeness “Twila, have you notified the local law enforcement about Victor and Thran?”
“Yes, Samus. Any ship leaving the planet with Humans aboard right now should need to submit to a search… It isn’t foolproof but it should hopefully be better than nothing. I left out the part about the thanatite, for obvious reasons.”
“Alright. We’re gonna need to search for them… but… I’m gonna say, no one leaving this ship at the moment can be wearing any nervejacks of any kind… case whatever happened to them happens to us! That means that any group is gonna need at least one holo with them so Twila can translate what they’re saying. Fortunately, this is an open carry planet, so I’m gonna say everyone who’s licenced is taking a pulsegun! For the Vrakhand, I’m guessing the five of you can take Thran and Victor down nonfatally if you work together?” I ask Khr’kowan, doing my best to see her as a woman and not as a giant Spider.
She bristles slightly (not helping) and answers “I should think so!”
“Good then…” I say, concealing my relief at getting to look away from her and over to the little Goblin woman “…Viig, if any of the Twigg want to join in the search, I’m going to need you to tell them to bring their holos and call Twila if they see Thran or Victor, OK? I think, if it comes to a fight between you and them, you might be able to overwhelm them with numbers and speed… but not without risking a lot of you dying, so don’t try it! Just call Twila, she’ll let us know.”
“I’ll tell them.” responds the yellow eyed woman, flatly.
“Thank you.” I say before turning to the two lanky girls whose respective partners are the ones missing “Tuun, Xon… I need you both to promise me that if you find them, you’re going to be able to unload on them until they’ve stopped moving and aren’t going to utter phrases like ‘snap out of it’ or ‘I know you’re in there’…”
Both of them scowling, Xon answers “Samus, this is serious!”
“And I’m being serious!” I respond, seriously “We’re already down our three best fighters and are up against the second and third! This obviously wasn’t a random crime of opportunity! The puppeteer wouldn’t have risked it with Cuddles and Thran if they didn’t already know we were here and had thanatite aboard! By some means we don’t understand, they managed to either trick or force them into getting their translators reforged as mind control devices! I don’t fancy going from two friends I’ve got to bring in without killing to four, so, if either of you can’t promise me you’re going to be sensible, if you can’t say you’re not going to let sentimentality cloud your judgement, if you can’t look me in the eye and tell me you can pull the trigger when it counts, you’re staying here and guarding the ship along with the noncombatant Terrans!”
Both of them look stunned.
Obviously, they thought I was just joking around. They didn’t think I had actual reasoning behind my demand.
“I promise.” says Xon.
“I promise.” follows Tuun, more sheepishly.
“Alright then, good… if I could ask…”
“Wait!” Khr’kowan interrupts me “I still don’t understand what the [puppeteer] wants the thanatite for? I know I’ve been told it’s remarkable… but… what use is a single spearhead to anyone?”
“We can answer that…” answers Ziva, walking into the room with Leon, both of their faces solemn “…they probably want it to try and work out how to produce lab grown thanatite… and we’re probably the ones they originally got that idea from.”
“You’re what?” snarl me and Khr’kowan in unison.
“A little while ago…” Leon explains “…we gave our report to the UTCIS… we mentioned thanatite… gave them the idea that, if we could tactfully navigate its cultural significance to you guys, it could be used to make the next generation of battle armour. Almost as effective as durasteel at a fraction the cost!… It seems as if there must be either a leak or a mole who spilled that idea to someone… unsavory… Someone who wants to be able to grow thanatite and doesn’t care how you guys feel about that or how many crimes they need to commit to do it.”
“So this is your fault?!” snarls the Spiderwoman, surging forward to loom over the pair.
“Khr’kowan, now’s not the time for pointing fingers…” consoles Emiko, gently, stepping between the armoured woman and the two spies “…let’s assign blame once we have our friends and your grandmother’s foot back. Alright?”
The arachnoid gives a frustrated growl but (thankfully) backs off.
Then she frowns “Wait… correct me if I’m wrong but… Wouldn’t they need intact flesh from which to read the information that would let them grow thanatite?… If that’s the case then my grandmother’s foot would be…”
---Circe’s perspective---
“What do you mean ‘useless’?” I demand.
The hologram of the tall, handsome biologist speaks in a cultivated New Australian accent “Just what I said, Circe. The way they’ve scoured the socket with heat and chemicals, I don’t think there’s going to be a single intact cell nucleus to be found! Having it in hand doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. I need a gene sample before I can enter production.”
“Could you not simply reverse engineer their genetic code from the protein structure?!” I pose.
He laughs out loud, making me feel stupid for not already knowing what he does (definitely my least favourite of his traits) and answers “*Hahahahaha*… Yeeeeeah, suuuure(!) I’ll get riiiiight on that(!) Should only take me about 30 years(!)”
“*sigh*… So you’re telling me I need a sample from one of the living ones then?”
“Yeah… you need a sample from one of the living ones, Circe.” he patronises.
With one final exasperated sigh, I end the call and turn to face the mass of pale and light tan muscle topped by curly copper and frizzy orange hair that’s writhing around on my bed.
“You two!” I bark at my new toys.
Four green eyes turn blankly up to face me, the darker two framed by a thoroughly bloody bruised face.
“You can stop warming eachother up for me and get your tops back on… We have more work to do before I can play with you.”