The orb didn't bounce. It didn't roll or skip. And despite Connie bracing herself, her body tensed and face scrunched with dread, the orb did not explode. It sat motionless on the floor where it had landed, patiently waiting for Connie to float down on top of it.
"Connie Jade?" Peridot called from the top of the platform. "What is that thing?"
As she drifted down the last few feet, Connie called back over her shoulder, "Not sure." She would have said more, but as she looked back at the orb, her innards clenched in sudden fear.
The orb was moving again. It rolled out from under Connie as she landed, picking up a thin stripe of dust and leaving a bright clean line behind it as it crossed the floor. That dusty stripe grew thicker as the ball picked up speed seemingly under its own power, since Connie couldn't see anything else that had set it in motion.
"It's moving," Connie called to the air above. Her feet squeaked against the floor as she carefully shifted, aiming her next moon-hop to follow the orb. Then she stopped, and frowned, and twisted her shoe against the floor hard, listening to it squeak again. Crouching, she ran her hand across the tiled white floor and confirmed what her ears told her.
The floor was immaculate. There was no dust.
Her fingers tested the "clean" path left behind the orb, and she could feel a shallow divot in the floor's surface. And during her brief examination, the golden orb had run in tight circles around the floor, leaving a widening divot behind it in crisscrossing paths. White powder clung to its surface, painting over its glowing luminescence. Within seconds, the orb doubled in size. Then it doubled again.
"Guys!" Connie yelled, pushing herself back in alarm. "It's eating the floor!"
"What are you—whoa!" A yellow spade of hair emerged over the edge of the platform only to shrink back at the sight of the zooming sphere.
Anger rushed through Connie as she watched the baseball-sized orb scraping up loops and circles of floor. She couldn't tell if her anger came from her half-hollow or if it drained into it, but neither half could hold it anymore. "You're ruining my space mission," she growled at the orb. Her fists clenched until they hurt. "You RUINED my space mission!" she bellowed.
She tilted forward and leapt at the orb. Gravity's weak hold left her hanging in the air for what seemed like forever, but at last she drifted onto the zigzagged trenches left in the orb's wake. Her lips curled back from her teeth as, with a little kick, she glided sideways to catch the orb on its next pass.
Though her fury made her strong, and determined, it failed to remind Connie of a few continuing developments in her situation: that the floor feeding the orb was made of white stone that, even pulverized, would possess a significant density; that the orb had only continued to pick up speed while it gobbled up pulverized floor; and that the speedy orb had grown into roughly the size of a yoga ball.
So when that tremendous stone sphere plowed through Connie's legs at full speed, she didn't feel any sense of righteousness. She didn't feel foolish either, though, even when the impact flipped her through the air like a screaming caber toss. The only thing she felt was the explosive pain in her shins, a pain so fierce that it filled her eyes with darkness and shooting stars.
Something grabbed her, cradling her head and spine to ease away the spinning. She felt air rushing around her, and as her eyesight cleared of stars she saw a blue haze above her. "Are you alright?" the haze asked in Lapis's voice.
Connie blinked her eyes clear and took stock of her new altitude. Lapis had caught Connie out of the air and was looping them both back to Peridot at the top of the platform. Meanwhile, the orb, seemingly unimpressed with Connie's sense of outrage, continued to gobble up wide swaths of floor, and had grown to be as tall as Connie.
The little engineer scampered to meet them as Lapis landed. "Connie Jade! Are you hurt? Do you need new bones? I never learned to make new bones! Curse my lack of foresight! Earth is full of spare bones, I could—"
"Peridot!" Connie snapped as Lapis lowered her onto her feet. "I don't—"
The instant her soles pressed to the floor, a white-hot pain erupted in both of her shins, filling her eyes with stars again. It was only because of the reduced gravity that she didn't pass out. Her full Earth weight would have folded her legs like accordions. Each of her shins throbbed around a raw red patch, with a deeper red bloom surrounding that, guaranteed to become a tapestry of black and blue bruising within the hour. But when she touched gingerly at the bone, she didn't think she felt a break.
"I don't need new bones," Connie assured the Gem, breathless with pain. "I might want new ones right now, but I'm okay."
An explosive crack from below smothered Peridot's reply. Startled, all three of them hurried back to the platform's edge, Connie's ginger little hops getting her there last. She had to nestle between the two Gems to see.
Another crack resounded as the orb, now large enough to plug up the double doors of The Big Donut, pounded itself into the bottom step. It rolled back and pounded again, and again, filling the chamber with deafening reverberations that Connie could feel in her oh-so-aching bones. The orb's vicious efforts broke huge swaths of the base of the platform, scattering rubble across the floor. But those poundings took their toll on the sphere as well, lacing its surface with thick fractures.
"It's breaking itself," Peridot observed. Her hands flew into the air, and she cried, "We win by default!"
As the orb jerked back from its self-made crater, a geyser of rubble followed it. Only this geyser did not spray, or drift in the low gravity. It cleaved together into a tightly-packed shaft that adhered to the orb's surface. A cluster of five short nubs wriggled at the end of the shaft, which bent at the midpoint to raise those nubs high.
And Connie realized then that the shaft protruding from the orb was an arm.
The arm reached down to press against the floor, lifting its orb body over itself. It slammed the orb back down, shattering the floor in an explosion of sound that yielded no debris, for the broken pieces of floor were now stuck to the orb in two long, thick stalks that vaguely resembled the nascent arm. And as the orb rose up once more, those two new stalks shaped themselves into legs.
The three-limbed thing lurched back at the stairs, and its orb body started to flatten and stretch. Shoulders, hips, and a massive torso shaped themselves from grinding stone and powder. The center of the chest protruded in a thick, faceted bauble that could only be a gemstone, or at least a facsimile of one made from debris. It slammed its empty shoulder into the steps, gathering a second arm to match its first. Then it slammed its empty neck into the widening crater in the platform and pulled back with a completed head.
Connie stared into the rocky, jagged face of something that looked like a Gem, albeit of a kind she had never seen before. The rubble creature possessed blocky features—head, limbs, torso, even nose and lips and eyes, all rectangular. Its gaze swept emptily across the room as if to take in its own swaths of destructive creation. Connie guessed that the creature stood more than ten feet tall, judging by how many of the platform's steps it eclipsed.
"It looks like a Bauxite?" Lapis said. Her voice teetered between confusion and terror.
Peridot folded her arms and sneered down at the rubble creature. "That is 'not' a Bauxite," she declared.
Stone parted with a rapport like a gunshot, and the rubble creature opened its mouth. The piecemeal rock crackled and grinded as its lips tested themselves. When the creature spoke, the whole chamber rumbled with its words. "I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay-El," it said in a deep feminine voice.
"She says she's a Bauxite," Lapis said, her voice tipping toward confusion.
"I heard her! But she's not a Bauxite!" howled Peridot. "She's made out of floor!"
Oblivious to Peridot's objections, the self-ascribed Bauxite lumbered toward the shattered steps that had made it. Between each ponderous footfall, its voice continued, "I was created in Earth's Prime Kindergarten to serve at the behest of Pink Diamond. Like all Bauxites, I lived to lift up the foundational elements of our civilization. As construction materials arrived to Earth from the Galaxy Warp, I would take them to the sites of our colony's future temples and monuments, raising them under the directions of our Bismuth overseers."
The volume of Bauxite's story vibrated deep in Connie's chest, but its tone and cadence teased her mind differently. The creature's voice was no monstrous growl, no avalanche-as-words as she'd always imagined a rock monster's voice would be. It sounded like a She, and spoke more like one of Connie's teachers, patient and steady and doggedly informative.
Bauxite drew its fist back and then punched the platform deep in the crater. The whole chamber quaked with an eruption of rubble pluming out from under the blow, these rocks scattering instead of joining the strange creation. Bauxite punched again, and again, digging deeper into the platform with each heavy blow. And its lecture continued.
"But then came Rose Quartz." Bwoom! "Her lies corrupted the purpose of so many Gems." Thoom! "I fell among the first of her corruptions, turning against my Diamond and my design." Bwoom! "She instilled violence in me, and forced me to attack innocent Gems." Thoom!
The Moon's weak gravity left Connie floating just above the surface of the quaking platform. Peridot and Lapis, though, were thrown from their feet by the force of the creature's onslaught.
"Why does she hate these stairs so much?" Lapis cried, sprawled across the seat of the throne with her long fingers wrapped over one armrest.
Crouched on all fours like a panicking cat, Peridot squalled, "It's digging through the platform! If it damages the data core underneath us, we'll lose all the information we need!"
Which, Connie realized, had been Polarite's intent all along. The off-world scientist must have required something from Pink's records as well, perhaps even information on the Celerity Forge or the Opulence, and thought to booby trap the site in case any Crystal Gem came up with the same idea. Connie had to appreciate that kind of clever foresight, even while it threatened to ruin their mission and possibly kill them.
"Peridot," Connie snapped, "get that patch connected."
"But—" The engineer began to protest, but another Bwoom! rocked the ground beneath them.
"I'll distract Bauxite," Connie said, and felt strangely proud at how confident she had made such a ridiculous claim sound. "Lapis, you…"
When she glanced at the throne, her heart sank as she saw a look of absolute terror wracking Lapis's delicate features. The lithe blue Gem might have been the most powerful force on Earth, but she wasn't on Earth at that moment. She had no water to protect her and no way to escape unless she could fly through a reinforced dome or slip past their enigmatic golem foe. The Gem's eyes shimmered with silent pleading as she met Connie's gaze.
"…you stay here. Help Peridot," Connie finished. "I got this."
At least one part of Connie had confidence in her boast, for a glowing sailcloth fwmped out of Jade's gemstone and into her hands.
"You know what? I can actually use you." Connie's fists wrung the sailcloth tightly as she stared down at the not-a-Gem who had already smashed a dozen feet deep into the platform. Swallowing hard, Connie muttered, "Here goes nothing," and pushed off the top step.
The slow descent gave her far too much time to question all of her recent life choices. Still, she fell onward, dropping with one-sixth the force she was accustomed to, until she bounced lightly onto Bauxite's head.
All through her pulverizing, Bauxite never stopped extolling her misdeeds. "I toppled the Snow Spire, that grand outpost I had once helped to erect. I joined in an unnatural fusion to vanquish a Nephrite scout legion. Never once did I show remorse. Rose Quartz's corruption was absolute. Irreversible."
Rock shards peppered the air, forcing Connie to shield her face from the pugilistic excavation. Taking up the sailcloth by its corners, she looped the cloth over Bauxite's face. The creature continued to pound through stone without pause. As she'd suspected, covering the golem's eyes did nothing to slow its digging. Whatever Bauxite was, it saw the world through some other means.
So Connie planted her heels in Bauxite's shoulders and yanked back on the cloth with everything she had. Gem strength, Gem strength, Gem strength! she chanted, and loosed the boundaries on her half-hollow.
With her legs screaming in protest, Connie dragged the stone head backwards, forcing Bauxite off-balance. The golem staggered backwards, its oversized hands reaching up to snatch the fulcrum pulling it backwards. Each of its hands could have crushed Connie with room to spare. But the golem's rock body didn't have the give of flesh and bone, or of photomatter. Its arms couldn't angle backwards enough to pluck Connie off its neck. It continued to stagger, flailing.
"By Rose Quartz's betrayal, and by my faith in her lies, I was abandoned on Earth, quarantined to keep the rebellion's sickness from spreading. We acted as beasts. Our sickness turned us into beasts," Bauxite said, muffled by the cloth over its face.
Connie grinned viciously, feeling her half-hollow swell as her efforts drove Bauxite back from the platform step by step. She felt a surge through her body that pulled the anvil-sized head of the golem back another inch, achingly closer to the toppling point. Bauxite's stagger built up speed into a full, lurching stride.
But Connie's smile withered when she realized why Bauxite was actually picking up speed. She glanced over her shoulder and shocked at the sight of the oncoming crystal wall, which Bauxite backed toward at full speed to crush its wrangler against the inside of the dome.
A light push sent Connie overtop Bauxite's head. Then she yanked on the sailcloth still wrapped around Bauxite's face, pulling herself through low gravity into a long, sideways drop that launched her away from the golem. A crunch of glass on stone resonated behind her, making her heart drop. With time to spare in her long slow fall, she flipped herself around, then winced as Bauxite pulled away from the glass to reveal a milky patch where its head had collided with the dome. Whatever its material, the dome had held without cracking, but Bauxite's head had scraped or warped the material to opacity. Any worse damage might threaten its integrity, which would mean explosive decompression, which would mean no more Connie.
None the worse for wear, Bauxite straightened and began lumbering at Connie. Its hands joined together in a grasp the size of a bulldozer's blade. "I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay-El. I was created in Earth's Prime Kindergarten to serve at the behest of Pink Diamond," it said.
"I heard you the first time," Connie taunted. As she landed, she reached out with her half-hollow, gathering the air behind the golem into the beginnings of a grenade.
A low, keening groan filled the chamber, emanating from the entirety of the dome all at once.
"Connie Jade, no!" Peridot screamed from the top of the platform. Her voice sounded more distant than it should have. "We're in a pressurized environment!"
Connie drew a breath to shout back, and then staggered, lightheaded. The last of her oxygenated thoughts coalesced around Peridot's warning.
Of course. The dome being pressurized meant that it had been designed to withstand a constant internal pressure pushing out against it. If Connie changed that pressure by capturing the finite air supply within the power of Jade's gemstone, the dome might crumple in on itself. And even if it survived the pressure drop, the increased pressure wave from the air grenade could pop the dome like a crystal balloon. And that assumed that Connie could retain consciousness while she pressed all of the air into a fixed point far away from where her lungs actually needed it.
With as much finesse as she could manage, Connie unclenched the air from her half-hollow's grasp. The atmosphere of the chamber returned to an equilibrium, quieting the dome's creakings. Connie breathed a full-lunged sigh of relief.
Then she yelped and leapt, narrowly missing Bauxite's fist as it smashed the floor where she'd stood. "Like all Bauxites, I lived to lift up the foundational elements of our civilization," the golem droned.
Legs throbbing, Connie dangled helplessly above the floor. Her instinctive jump had thrown her out of immediate danger only to strand her in midair. She drifted, thrashing her arms and legs, utterly helpless to escape as Bauxite reach up to pluck her from her slow fall.
One end of the sailcloth still dangled from her fist. Snatching up the other end, she clenched two corners in either fist and grasped at the air with her half-hollow again. The dome wouldn't survive an air grenade, but she hoped it would forgive a little circulation.
She pushed a gust of air into the sailcloth and clutched the ends for dear life as the cloth yanked her upwards. Connie's wind mastery was a pale shadow of what Jade could have done. On Earth, the gust would have barely staggered Connie. But she was on the Moon. Her favorite moon. She knew its gravity wouldn't let her down.
She rode the sailcloth like a parachute straight into the air, trying to ignore the screaming pain in her arms that threatened to outdo the pain in her legs. "As construction materials arrived to Earth from the Galaxy Warp, I would take them to the sites of our colony's future temples and monuments, raising them under the directions of our Bismuth overseers," she heard from far beneath her.
The gust petered out high above the top of the platform. Looking down, Connie could see Peridot furiously at work in the ruins of the console with Lapis at her side. Whatever their progress, she didn't see a phone anywhere, which meant they couldn't be very close to finished.
Something between a laugh and a sob wracked Connie's throat as she dangled. Her eyes grew blurry, stinging, and she couldn't tell if it was from tears or sweat.
Wait.
Letting go of one end of the cloth, Connie let herself descend toward the platform, aiming for the center-ish of the square through the wet haze of her vision. "Lapis!" she cried. She thought she could see the blue smudge looking up in reply. "Skin water!"
A long moment crawled by filled only with the sounds of Bauxite stomping back toward the crater she had started in the base of the platform. "But then came Rose Quartz," it said. Bwoom!
"Close your eyes," Lapis called upwards. "I don't want to accidentally pull them out."
Connie screwed her eyes shut and clenched her lips into a tight line. An instant later, she felt a bizarre sensation, like something had grabbed every inch of her body at once. The all-encompassing touch slithered like a living thing, making her feel like she had been swallowed. Then, without warning, the touch ripped all of her body forward. Her skin tried to jump off her bones. Her clothes billowed, stretching to the point of exploding off of her at the seams. The shoes flew off her feet with the socks still inside them.
And then it was over. The touch vanished. Connie opened one crusty eyelid, then the other, grateful that she still had both eyes, though she had to blink a dozen times just to moisten them into functioning again. Every inch of Connie's skin felt somehow desiccated and greasy at the same time, too dry and too oily to stand. But as her bare feet caught the platform, she saw that the minor discomfort had been well worth it.
Lapis stood tall, holding aloft her palm. A sphere of water maybe the size of a jumbo jawbreaker floated above her hand. The Gem's expression had transformed from sheer terror into grim, righteous anger. Connie had never seen this kind of ramrod defiance in the blue Gem before, not even when Flint and Milky had attacked her on the farm.
"Thanks, Connie," Lapis said, her voice brittle but hard.
"No problem," Connie wheezed through cracked lips. She swallowed, trying to soothe her parched throat.
"Her lies corrupted the purpose of so many Gems." The platform shook with a new Thoom! and a spray of debris from below.
Narrowing her eyes at the floating pebbles, Lapis growled, "I'll take care of this." Her wings snapped out from her back, and she launched herself over the edge with her tiny arsenal of water in hand.
In the next instant, the violent shaking of the platform stopped. The sounds of stone being mercilessly pulverized did not.
Connie crouched next to the ruins of Pink Diamond's console, where Peridot had yanked a small thicket of wiring out of the floor and buried herself up to the knees in the delicate cords. "Peridot?" Connie prompted her.
Peridot lifted her hands out of the thicket, unveiling a deconstructed smartphone cupped in her palms. The case lay discarded, exposing the phone's innards. Six or seven of the wires were jammed into the circuit board of the phone, and the phone's screen flashed with sequences of unrecognizable glyphs.
"I'm trying, Connie Jade!" the engineer complained. "I've connected to the database, but teaching it to talk to this primitive machine is nigh-impossible. It's taken me this long just to figure out how to display any data at all. It's just scanning through all of the files as one conglomerated file until I figure out how to demarcate—"
Thunder cracked below, and Bauxite stumbled out of its crater, slamming back into the dome wall and collapsing onto its hand and knees. Lapis strode across the floor and gathered her jawbreaker of water back to her hand. She stopped before her toppled foe with a hand cocked on her hip.
"I fell among the first of her corruptions, turning against my Diamond and my design," the golem rumbled, pushing itself back to its feet.
"You're big," Lapis said. "Big doesn't impress me. You're stone? I move mountains."
"She instilled violence in me, and forced me to attack innocent Gems." Its fist rose to smash the blue Gem.
With a gesture, Lapis flattened her water sphere into a pizza-sized disc, and then flung it through Bauxite's elbow. The sound of crackling rock pierced the air, and the golem's fist thudded into the floor, trailing a severed arm. Another gesture from Lapis zipped the disc in a tight turn behind Bauxite, then through its opposite shoulder, dropping the other arm to the floor with an even louder crack!
The disc leapt back to her hand, and Lapis gathered it back into a ball. "I'm not that innocent," she said. Then she let the ball fly.
Bauxite's head exploded.
Dust and shards filled the air, pluming above the jagged stump of the golem's neck. The creature dropped to its knees, the room quaking with its apparent defeat.
Peridot's body unclenched at the vicious finale, her eyebrows rising in surprise. "Oh. Well, I suppose I now have ample time to program a proper interface. Good."
As Connie's dumbfounded shock began to fade, she stared at the golem's remains, which still knelt in front of Lapis. Despite the loss of its head, the golem had not staggered or toppled. "Lapis…?" Connie called uncertainly.
Lapis turned around, wearing a tremendous grin. "Did you see that? That was amazing! I tried tough-talking him, and it worked! All of those goofy one-liners really do make you feel less scared in a fight."
Motion blurred behind the blue Gem, and Connie's bewilderment withered into horror. "Look out!" she screamed at Lapis.
Whirling, Lapis jumped backwards, barely avoiding the headless-armless golem as it slammed its shoulder into the floor. Spiderweb cracks spilled underfoot through the smooth tiles, chasing Lapis into the air. Then, as the shoulder pulled back, it withdrew a fresh arm made from broken stones and dust out of the shattered floor. Its empty elbow slammed down as well, and it drew out a second fresh arm. On hands and knees, it pounded its neck deep into the growing crater beneath it.
As the golem rose once more, a new head of pressed stone sat atop its shoulders. "I toppled the Snow Spire, that grand outpost I had once helped to erect. I joined in an unnatural fusion to vanquish a Nephrite scout legion," it said with its new mouth. Its empty eyes stared straight through Lapis. "Never once did I show remorse."
Lapis flapped higher. Her water became a disc again, and she lashed out in a flurry of swipes. "Goofy one-liners didn't work after all!" she cried.
The water disc sliced through Bauxite's arm. This time, its opposite hand snapped up and caught the falling limb, jamming it back into place. The disc hacked crosswise through a knee, but Bauxite stomped its stump down and reattached the leg. Cuts across the face and chest went ignored. Those paltry wounds scabbed themselves shut, filling in with smaller pebbles.
Lapis called back her disc, pulling it into a globe again. The remains of her water totaled into something smaller than a cue ball. Evaporation, and the dry slurry of powder and pebbles that comprised Bauxite, were taking its toll on the dwindling water supply. "This place is too dry! I'm losing water!" Lapis cried. "Connie, do you have any more?"
Connie swallowed, and her throat ached in one giant dry lump. She hadn't had much to drink that day, and suspected that every ounce of spare water she'd had was already in Lapis's hand. Maybe more than that, given how much her skin itched and eyes burned. "Just hold on!" she shouted. Then to Peridot she croaked, "How much longer?"
"I don't know! Hours? Days?" Peridot snapped. "No one has ever done this before! The data is here, but it's all jammed together in one continuous stream." She swiped her thumb across the screen, switching from one page of glyphs to the next, and the next, and the next. None of it looked intelligible to Connie. "If we had a day to just sit down and scroll through the data—"
"We don't have a day!" Connie exploded, helpless as she watched Lapis hammering at Bauxite with the dwindling ball of water. "We just have…"
Connie fell silent. Her hand drifted up to grasp the stone in her chest.
"Rose Quartz's corruption was absolute. Irreversible," Bauxite said, rebuilding herself faster than Lapis's onslaught could tear her apart.
"Peridot," Connie said, this time in a calm tone, "can you make the screen scroll through all of that data automatically?"
"Well, obviously," Peridot snapped, sounding peevish at Connie's previous shouting. "But I can't read it faster than I already…am…" Her eyes widened, her face slackening with realization.
"Thirty screens per second," Connie told her. She thought they might be able to get away with a faster rate, but wouldn't risk losing any of the data for it. "Lapis, hold on for a few minutes!" she called down to the floor below.
The remaining water was barely a marble zipping through the air beside Lapis in flight. "Minutes?" she shrieked, and darted around a clumsy swipe from the golem. The marble bounced off Bauxite's skin leaving cracks that sealed themselves within seconds.
"Peridot!" Connie hissed.
The engineer's tongue poked through her teeth as her thumbs danced on the screen. "Almost… There!" She stuffed the dismantled phone into Connie's hands. "Touch the screen. Don't blink," Peridot told her gravely.
Connie blinked hard several times, squeezing the last of her body's spare water into her eyes. Then she tapped the screen, and booked.
Images flashed across the smartphone, page after page of Gem glyphs arranged in columns and rows, appearing and vanishing too quickly for her conscious mind to register them. As the pages strobed, Connie fought to keep her focus loose on the screen, staring at all of it without isolating any one incidental glyph at the expense of a whole page. Seconds crawled by. Her eyes began to ache. Then burn. Then throb.
All the while, Bauxite continued its lecture. Distantly, Connie could hear it begin anew all over again. The battle cries she heard from Lapis quickly collapsed into sobs of alarm at too many close calls and near misses.
Connie forced her eyelids open as far as she could to keep from blinking while an entire database flashed before her eyes. The lost secrets of Pink Diamond became an indelible part of her at thirty frames per second.
"By Rose Quartz's betrayal, and by my faith in her lies, I was abandoned on Earth, quarantined to keep the rebellion's sickness from spreading." The sounds of battle crashed nearer in the chamber. Connie felt the platform rock underneath her, but she kept her gaze locked on the screen.
Glyphs. Glyphs. Glyphs. Glyphs. None of it meant anything to Connie. Yet, when the pages suddenly stopped changing, she panicked. Her fingertip hammered the screen as she tried to get it moving again before her eyes gave up. "Peridot, it's broken!" she wailed.
Peridot squeezed under Connie's arm to look at the screen. "No, it worked! That's the last page!" she said. Stepping away, she gave Connie a hesitant, searching look. "Did it work?"
Connie tried to picture any one of the glyph pages in her mind. They all rushed through her thoughts at once, the sheer volume of information making her stagger. "I got it. I got it!" Her voice shook in a disbelieving laugh.
"Way to assimilate information, Connie Jade!" Peridot cheered. "And of course, way to prepare said information, Perid—"
Blue hands shoved the two of them off the platform. Peridot tumbled down the stairs in a flurry of limbs and grunts. But Connie floated, twisting around to see Lapis sprawled out on the platform where they had been standing, her flying tackle having launched them to safety. The spritely Gem loomed under the shadow of Bauxite, who had scaled the platform and stood poised to crush that very spot.
And so it did.
"No!" Connie screamed into the explosion of dust and stone that plumed up from Bauxite's fist hammering the floor where Lapis lay. She watched the dust intently, hoping she would see watery wings pierce the shroud and carry the Gem to safety. But nothing came. And Connie's eyes throbbed for the tears she didn't have left in her.
As Connie's bare toes finally touched the ground, the dust above began to settle. Through the gentle rain of powder that coated her greasy skin, Connie saw the ruins of the platform take shape. The top three levels had been obliterated, and the center of the platform had collapsed into a hollow of broken stone and ruined alien machinery. No trace of the throne, or anything that had stood near it, remained.
Bauxite loomed atop the ruins. "We acted as beasts," the golem said.
Connie was leaping before she even realized it. Her half-hollow opened its borders, flooding her tired and aching body with all of the worst of her that had been brewing inside it. Lightning stormed through her veins, and she flew over the steps to the top of the ruins, her teeth pulled back in a snarl.
Her fists clenched, and she felt her fingers squeezing around something. Distantly she realized that she had held onto Jade's sailcloth through the database's booking. Now it was the only weapon she had to stop the dead-eyed homunculus.
"Our sickness turned us into beasts," Bauxite lamented, turning its fists to meet Connie's leap.
Connie screamed. She swung the sailcloth around, hoping that maybe she could tangle it around one of Bauxite's fingers, or use it to alter her course and avoid being pulped on the golem's cantaloupe-sized knuckles.
But then the sailcloth stopped being a sailcloth.
The metallic green fabric did not change. But as Connie swung it before her, the material began to writhe in her grip. It became taut in portions, flattening itself, then folding over itself, forming new corners that tucked under folds that creased into other folds, all faster than her eye could follow. That same folding happened under her grasp too, twitching and pushing at her hand so quickly that she almost dropped the cloth in surprise.
With three final creases, the cloth stood rigid in her grasp, its shape extending before her. She swung it on instinct to meet Bauxite's fist—
—and knocked it aside, sending three of its fingers tumbling to the floor far below.
As Bauxite staggered back, Connie landed atop the rubble and stared at the shape in her hand. It still bore the folds and crease-marks of the sailcloth. Yet as Connie ran her hand up its flat length, she felt something akin to a smooth alloy. It fit her hand perfectly and with immaculate balance. She had never seen anything like it before, yet she knew every inch of it by heart.
It was a sword. Long, but not as long as a saber. Broad, but less so than a broadsword or gladius. Strong, with the barest hint of flexibility. A wicked edge graced both sides, the blade paper-thin but harder than steel. It featured a stubby guard just wide enough to protect her fingers without getting in her way. Connie couldn't have imagined such a weapon, yet it seemed to fit every part of her, body and style.
Bauxite had recovered. Its fist swung again to flatten Connie into paste.
Connie hopped, keeping herself just above the uneven rubble. The green sword flashed in her quick hand. This time an entire fist went drifting away from Bauxite. Connie barely felt the blade slow as it passed through the tightly packed wrist of the golem. Before it could rebuild its hand, she touched down and pushed off again.
"I am Bauxite Facet Five, Cut One-Jay—"
Her sword cleaved the bottom jaw off the creature, silencing its lecture. She moved in a green blur, carving stone from stone, lopping off fingers, fists, feet, all faster than Bauxite could recover. Connie roared in fury and swung, two-handed, becoming a storm. Jagged rocks blasted in all directions at the touch of her sword.
Her sword.
Deep in Bauxite's pitted, gouged chest, Connie saw a glimpse of light. She tried to cut deeper, but the golem's thick body resisted, and hurried to rebuild itself around the glimmer inside of it. With no arms left to strike, Bauxite flopped itself forward, seeking to crush Connie under its bulk. Gravity worked against Connie this time, and the move caught her between floating steps, scrabbling for leverage she couldn't reach with her bare toes above the rubble.
The rocks beneath them burst apart, and from the scattering remains of the platform, Lapis arose, rock and dust pouring from her form in thick rivulets. A primal scream shook the Gem's body, howling with such fury that it stopped Connie and her stone lecturer cold.
Lapis's wings rose and curled into giant makeshift fists, which swung back and then hammered into Bauxite's chest with the force of a cannon shot. The effort knocked Lapis clean off her feet and across the rubble, slamming her into a cluster of packed stone slabs. But Bauxite suffered more of the blow, and the towering creature's chest shattered.
As the rocks bled out of Bauxite's shape, Connie saw the golden orb at its heart now exposed. She leapt and thrust her sword into the orb with all of her might, throwing the full might of her body behind one last strike. The sword carved through the orb's luminous shape and burst it into motes that spilled over her sword's guard and across her hand.
Bauxite's form crumbled, raining across Connie in a low-gravity shower of dusty rock.
The constant low barrage didn't hurt, but as it piled atop her, Connie took care to keep herself from being buried. Coughing, Connie wiped the dust out of her eyes and felt about, calling, "Lapis?"
Another hand found hers, and Lapis appeared through the settling dust. The Gem had rocks in her hair, and her soft blue hues had turned gray under all the muck. Dark splotches mottled her form, bruises and scrapes from her lone stand against the enemy. But her smile shone brightly through all of it. "Connie," she said, sighing her name in relief.
Connie fell forward to wrap the Gem in a fierce embrace. "I thought you were shattered," she moaned, and squeezed with everything she had left.
"Me too," admitted Lapis. The Gem held Connie just as fiercely. "Then I heard you fighting, and I…"
"You were awesome!" Connie pulled back far enough so Lapis could see her grinning. "I've never seen your wings do that before!"
Lapis smirked. "Me? How about 'that'?" She jerked her chin to the sword resting half-buried in the debris beside Connie.
Connie struggled for an answer as she pulled the blade out of the stones. She didn't know what to make of it yet. One thing was certain, though: the blade was hers. Hers, not Jade's.
She didn't know how to feel about that yet, either.
"Lapis!" Peridot cried, clambering up the broken steps to join them. Her feet scrabbled for purchase in the loose stone, but she finally made it to the top, and threw herself around Lapis's waist in a desperate hug. "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay."
Her voice dropped into a murmur as she kept repeating the words, until they grew too soft to be meant for anyone but herself. Connie stepped back, giving the pair room to breathe.
Sobering, Lapis returned Peridot's embrace, this time more gently than she had with Connie. "I'm okay," she agreed softly.
Peridot stiffened suddenly, pulling away with a sharp step. She cleared her throat and said, "Yes, well, of course you are. I never had a doubt. You're quite the capable specimen of Lazuli, after all."
"Darn right I am," Lapis said, grinning warmly.
A matching grin spread beneath Peridot's visor. It didn't last long, however, as her gaze trailed down to the carnage beneath their feet. "That's the end of Pink Diamond's database, I'm afraid. At least, the software version. We still have our wetware version." She winked at Connie. "Aside from a few unexpected setbacks, I believe we can consider this mission a total success. Eh, Connie Jade?"
Connie looked down at her blade, her former sailcloth, the tip of which trailed through the ruins of the database that now lived only inside of her. Her gaze rose up and out through the battered dome at the vast, unknowable lunar sea, and at the infinite, un-twinkling stars cast above them in perfect clarity. Her body itched, ached, creaked, and trembled.
It felt good, she decided. Or at least, good enough.
"Total success," Connie echoed, and sank down to rest atop the debris.