Chapter 26: Brachistochrone transfer

"This is Tracer command to Ishigami. We've cracked the first code," a voice in his ear said. "It's T.C.A.K.T.Y."

"Excellent," he glided through Oakheart's enormous cavity. His loyalist guards intermingled with technicians below, keeping watch over a delicate assembly line. Dozens of Tracers. An army at his disposal. He placed his hand to his ear, "begin preparations to power up the core and open the traversable gate."

"Yes sir. It will take time to gather enough energy- shall I focus on the second code?"

"Yes, and change orbital inclination. Prepare to put her down directly over Serilona. We must integrate the reactionaries first."

"Of course, changing inclination now."

"It won't move," Royce banged on the side console inside the heart of the giant mech. They were still inside the giant snake's mouth. "Come on, why won't you move!"

"Royce, I can't- do it-" Diana slumped over the front seat. Her exhaustion visible. Her words labored.

I can't let them go alone. Not again.

"Move! Move! Come on you hunk of junk! Move!"

"It's me, Royce. I-" she said weakly. "I can't-"

His rage slowly subsided as he realized the truth of their situation.

"Diana- are you- okay?"

"I can't keep piloting this thing. If I do- it's not going to end well- for me."

"It's okay, I don't care if you're not human-"

"You don't get it, do you?"

"Understand what? I love you, no matter if you're human or-"

"Platitudes, Royce! Is that all you can give me?" She gritted her teeth and looked up at him. The pain on her face only accentuated by her frustration, "is that all love means to you? Sacrificing yourself for someone else? That's not love! That's- co-dependency! It's not real."

"What?" He couldn't believe the words, "I thought this was- I thought I was your Dar-"

"Real love means compromise, not sacrifice. Stop believing the holos and the picture books! Start thinking for yourself. I was just unconscious for, what? The last half hour? But at least I KNOW when I'm unconscious. I know what it means to make decisions!"

"But I just meant- if you ever stopped being human- I'd do whatever it took to stay with you, even if that means becoming what you are."

"Royce," she lifted herself up painfully, staggered toward him and touched his cheek. "Real love means looking out for yourself first. I know it's not sexy. I know it's not the kind of thing they write stories about. But it's the only way to survive, for a relationship to survive, in the real world. It's the only way to have something real."

Lights began flickering on the consoles, life started to return to the machine.

"What's happening," he looked around in astonishment.

"I need you to drive," she smiled. "I'll be fine. Just got to communicate- the old fashioned way. Think you can handle that?"

"Of course," he gazed into her eyes which for once he saw no magical lights within and they kissed. As equals.

"Rear seat is in command, front seat opto control link lost" the cockpit's automatic voice system announced. He saw Diana grab a set of manual controls from the front seat.

Together they managed to maneuver the mech's arms slowly. In one great motion the mech heaved the snake's mouth open until it broke, then they stepped away into a rubble filled street. Four vertical columns of smoke rose from the city. He extended the mech's wings rockets and slowly lifted them off the ground as the mech shook from side to side with tremendous force.

He looked up and saw the pale azure darkening slowly as the shaking continued.

"Diana are you back online?" came Cho's voice over the radio.

"It's Royce, Diana's taking a break. We're back online. Catching up with you now."

"Good to hear! Ash cloud is changing its inclination, we might not have the fuel to rendezvous," Cho announced. He sounded labored. His voice coarse and his breathing erratic.

"What do we do?"

"Elder Ikuno's got a message for you, Royce," Victor said, "Minister Hyrroc relayed it. She says they're okay. But an invasion fleet is forming behind the moon. They say only you can stop whatever Ishigami's planning."

"Me? Why me?" he asked in exhaustion.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep," Diana smiled up at him. Her wide eyes never ceased to captivate him.

"What?" he asked.

"But you have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep."

"And miles to go before I sleep?"

"Frost," she pointed up at the top display. Little shards of ice surrounded the camera. Salt spray which hardened into a vague white haze over black vacuum of space.

"Is that some sort of poem?"

"It's life," she said. "Might as well do something meaningful while you're at it."

He spoke into the mic, "Okay- I guess- how do I- we- get there?"

"Grab on," came Cho's voice. "I'm rich on fuel and I can't fight like this. Might as well do you a favor."

He reached out and thrusted toward Cho's mech. It was white and blue colored with long talons, a long pointed head and silvery wings. It resembled a great crane bird with red fiery eyes.

The bird reached out and caught his mech's arm and began to swing him around, faster and faster like a merry-go-round.

"What are you doing?"

"No way to transfer fuel. Got to transfer momentum."

"What?"

"I'm out- you're on your own buddy!"

Suddenly the acceleration stopped. Everything stopped. They were in freefall. The crane blasted away in the opposite direction. They were weightless. Diana floated gracefully above her console, legs extended and hands behind her head. She looked quite relaxed for the amount of g-force they just endured.

"To Ash Cloud," she turned to him and smiled.

"Together." He released the controls and they began their long drift toward the other side of the Earth.

"Well I suppose that's it then," Morisato leaned back in his chair and Victor looked up at him from the front seat of Shrike Phoenix.

"What's it?" Victor asked.

"Diana and Royce are off to save the world. Cho took a one way trip back to Earth to play the hero and fool around with that red-head Tsundere. And we're out of fucking fuel," he stood up and pointed with a wide open hand at the digital gauge on his console now reading a big fat "E".

"Why the hell'd you burn the re-entry reserve!?"

"I thought I could make it! It's right there," he pointed a finger at a computer-assisted targeting reticle moving quickly across the display in front of them.

"Victor, don't you know anything about orbital mechanics? Just because you can see the damn thing doesn't mean you can get there!"

"What do I look like? A rocket scientist," he shouted and then slammed back into his seat. "You got any ideas?"

"Not if you want to bring this thing back undamaged."

He raised an eyebrow. "It's a battlefield. We can scratch it up a little- not like we're paying the repair bills… I mean, I'm sure the Khanians got insurance on their biomechanical mechs."

"Uh huh. Well I was gonna say- since you didn't actually succeed in your misguided bid for inertia matching, we might just have a chance to intercept."

"Wait- what? How?"

Victor stood up and waved his hand at a simulated Earth with Ash Cloud's and their own orbits labeled. It looked like two rings around a planet just barely out of alignment but with one a slightly larger diameter.

"We're here-" he pointed at a small dot moving around the outer blue orbit. "And Ash Cloud is here," he pointed at a second dot speeding along the inner purple orbit slightly off kilter. "You see how the orbits cross, roughly once, about every twenty minutes?"

"Sure."

"Well thanks to your shitty maneuvering, you managed to misalign both the speed and the orbital inclinations. Ash Cloud is circularized but we're slightly ecliptic, sharing an apogee, but the perigees are mismatched."

"In English."

Victor spun his finger in a circle and the dots accelerated dramatically, crossing once every few seconds now. "You see how every orbit- the dots get a little closer to each other?"

"Yeah."

"You see where I'm going with this?"

"Yeah! We just collide with the station instead of docking with it!"

"Well- we never actually collide. We'd get very close at certain points, but never close enough to collide. At least, not in any meaningful timeframe. We'd go hungry or re-enter the atmosphere long before that happened. Space is huge. Crazy huge. But we'd still get close. If we can get reasonably close on one orbit, and then burn a little bit of thrust right here," he pointed to the opposite side of the planet, "we can calculate exactly how much more thrust we'd need to collide."

"What the hell good is that? We're out of fuel," he pointed again at the empty fuel gauge.

Victor leaned over and pointed at the other side of the console labeled "weapon systems".

She'd been staring at her sharp metallic fingernails for the last few minutes. Finally he heard her whisper, "Did I request thee, maker, from my clay to mold me? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?"

"What?" he asked, bewildered.

"Frankenstein," she smiled. "Sometimes I think I'm that monster. The creature some old doctor raised from the dead. Out of bits and pieces of things better left in the ground."

He pondered the thought for a moment. "You're no monster. You're as human as I am. I don't get why you're so hung up on this. About where you came from. I don't care about your fingers or your eyes and fangs. Because whatever you are- you were the first girl who- paid attention to me."

She nodded, "And you were the first boy I met. The boy who rescued me, then left me all alone."

"It's not like I had a choice."

"You did. You left me in that hallway, left me to be recaptured by the Khanians. You thought you needed to protect me but I didn't need protecting. I just needed – someone to be with. You left, just like everyone else. Because you were scared of me. Because of what I did. Because I'm a monster."

Now I get it.

He lowered his head in shame.

"Even so- I still searched for you. Because you were the closest thing to a friend. For a year, I searched everywhere in the city. But you were gone. Then fifteen years later, you show up again. Even though you'd forgotten all about me, and even though I didn't recognize you. Now somehow- here we are."

She lifted her arms with the stars all around her as they drifted through space toward the tiny dot in the distance growing larger by the minute.

"I should have stayed by your side. I'm not denying my destiny any more." He spoke the words. A note of confidence in his voice.

She shrugged, "I don't believe in destiny, but I suppose- this is about as close as it gets."

Her arms were still outstretched when the tiny dot on the horizon widened exponentially.

!COLLISION ALARM!

"COLLISION ALARM" came an urgent voice. But it was too late.

The station was upon them in a flash and before he could say a word or move an inch it was upon them, the world slowed as he felt tremendous motion all around him. He saw a pained expression on her face as her hair flew out in all directions and her body accelerated forward. The mech's right arm smashed into the underbelly of Ash cloud and he grasped at the smooth metal trying to grab hold of anything to slow their collision. He saw her slam into the side console and a massive white crack appeared in his world.

The craft was toppling end over end. He smashed the mech's feet into the thin metal below which rended and tore like paper beneath them. Great heaps of steam billowed out of the tear in the white station. Huge purple and white blocks flew out of the gash as the air pressure blasted human and machine alike into the void below.

Finally he caught a hold of something solid. A massive structural beam on the end of a long white spire.

The entire station began to tilt ever so slightly, then slowly rocked back, dragging them along with it. Debris like white confetti continued to pour out of the belly of the station with the Earth, a pale tan monstrosity rotating slowly beneath them.

They hung on for dear life at the end of a long spire. With his free hand, he grabbed on, and slowly he began to climb toward the upper glass dome, toward the twin spires of Ash City.

He looked down at Diana. She lay spread eagle on the floor. Her shoulder smashed into the bulkhead and a bright white crack led down to where she lay. A splatter of blood punctuated the white flashing display. Her arm was limp and shaking as she tried to lift herself up.