"How's our approach?" Wraith calls back to Bangalore.
Bangalore is standing at the controls of Wraith's twelve ton cruiser, but they're no use. All the systems are inert, the ship completely powered down. They're skating the station, drifting in unpowered. With no systems online, they're a hundred times harder to detect by any security systems the station is likely to be equipped with.
Wraith rests a hand against the upper hull, looking out one of the small port windows.
The IMC orbital station drifts on a wide orbit high above the surface of Noctus, a black and purple planet draped with scant, wispy white clouds. The station itself, like many, is disc shaped, slowly rotating as it glides through the Void. The side is labeled Pilgrim Nine.
Every once in a very, very long while, Renee would see something that triggers some kind of memory for her. Sometimes it's good, other times it's bad. The name Pilgrim Nine had triggered something for her. But she can't decide what it feels like, yet.
It's gonna get ugly.
You know what to do.
Give 'em hell.
Wraith starts nodding.
"Hey, Cap," says Mirage. "You're great at brooding, but keep us in the loop, yeah?"
"Aren't you the king of improvising?" Wraith shoots back.
"Well, I mean, you know it, but—"
"Anita?" Wraith says.
Bangalore looks her way, then back through the frontal plate. "Vectors are holding. We'll kiss them within ten minutes, probably."
"Once we're close," says Wraith, "we lash to the old fashioned way. I'll walk in and secure us an airlock. From there, we go hot."
"Nice! Yes! I love Wraith plans!" says Mirage. He's a bit jittery. "Whew! Don't worry, I'm excited. Just gotta shake it out, yeah."
"Don't worry, friend!" says Pathfinder, calmly seated in one of the passenger seats. "The combined firepower on this vessel is truly something to be reckoned with!"
Mirage points at him smartly. "That's it! That's what I like to hear! Man, you're great morale support, Pathy."
"Thank you!"
Bangalore smirks over her shoulder at them. She catches Wraith's eye again. Wraith can feel her heart beating faster.
Don't worry.
You can do this.
We will help.
We can keep them safe.
Stay frosty.
Wraith smiles and nods at Bangalore, looking back out the window.
And a few minutes later, the side of the space station is drawing quite close. It's rotating in the direction they're drifting.
"I'm going to bring up a couple subsystems so we can use the tether," says Bangalore. "It'll be quick, but if security spots us, we might need to jet." She flips two switches on the console, and a few lights start blinking across the dashboard. "Acquiring." There are some muted mechanical whirring sounds as the tether gun swivels. "Firing."
There are two 'plunks' as the guns fire. Wraith sees them dig into the side of the station.
"Contact!" says Bangalore. "Bringing us in, and… we're cold again." She flips the switches, cutting the power again.
"Are we good?" asks Mirage.
"Think so," says Bangalore. "Not seeing any signs of detection."
"Time for step two, then," says Wraith. She jumps into the air, entering the Void as she does so, slipping through the hull of her cruiser.
They're all wearing EVA suits, but Wraith doesn't need protection in the Void. In the Void, the vacuum of space is little different from a lush tropical forest. Echoing. Cold. But amenable.
The side of the space station drifts toward her, its image shimmering through the distortion of the Void. There's a body lock not far from where they tethered. Using a little more energy, she wills herself in its direction. She passes through the outer door, taking traction on the floor of the lock. She moves forward, raising her hand toward the inner door. But when she reaches it, she can't pass through.
What?
Renee blinks. She pushes, but it resists her, like nothing she has ever encountered in the Void. She focuses, her gaze penetrating the steel of the door. Inside it, there is a bright pink energy barrier of some kind, semi-translucent, pulsating at high frequency.
This is new.
This isn't good.
You don't have unlimited energy here, Renee.
Renee clenches her teeth. She has no intention of turning around. She presses harder on the barrier, focusing her energy. It begins to give.
That does it and she takes a breath and directs all her strength at one spot, bashing into it.
There's a snap, a sting, a blinding flash, and she finds herself stumbling to the steel floor of the station, corporeal. She coughs a couple times and catches her breath. Less than the exertion, that was pretty scary.
What the fuck was that?
She looks around. She's alone in bodylock control room. She focuses on the Void and looks behind her. Indeed, there's a spherical shield, only visible in the Void. Looking around, as far as she can tell it spreads all the way around the ship.
'Well, if it's meant to keep Voidwalkers out, the tech is pretty shit,' she says inwardly.
Yeah, but we didn't even know that was possible.
And maybe it's not meant to keep things out.
Wraith sees a pulse in the Void, deeper in the ship. At first it looks like a star, but it's something else. A source of Void energy. There are several around, but one of them, it stands out clearly, like a beacon. It pulses again, its bright pink light enticing, and somehow familiar.
Come home.
Wraith freezes. This voice is different. She's never heard it before. Has she…?
'What was that?' she asks.
What?
'Who just said that?'
Said what?
'Are you kidding me? Who just told me to come home?'
The silence carries on.
Renee…
That wasn't us.
Wraith feels a chill. The implications of that…
She grits her teeth. Don't fucking matter. She shakes the thoughts off and approaches the console. As soon as she activates it, she notices the blinking orange light. There's a security warning. It reads 'Membrane breach, location X91TF.'
Shit.
Ignoring it, Wraith hurriedly opens the external lock gate. Through the small window, she can see the others climbing inside in their armored EVA suits.
Things start happening on the console screen without her input.
"What, the…?"
All at once, Singh's face appears on the screen.
"What the hell is going on in there?" he shouts in aggravation. When he sees Wraith, he freezes. "What…? Who the hell are you?"
Wraith is in her EVA suit, too, face invisible behind her shaded purple visor. She thinks for a second.
"An old friend," she projects through the suit speaker.
"What…? Renee?"
Wraith hits two more commands on the console, and the inner lock door opens.
"Took you long enough," says Bangalore in her suit. "I was starting to—" Her eyes snap to Singh on the screen. "Already?!"
"Already." Wraith pulls out her Flatline assault rifle and puts the butt to her shoulder.
Further security might be an issue, but the next door opens automatically. Wraith starts stalking down the hall, just waiting for a threat.
It appears pretty quickly. Four IMC guards in light armor are hustling down the long corridor toward them. When they see the four armed intruders, they pull up in shock.
The hesitation is all they need, and the four Legends tear into them. The gunblasts would be deafening in the metal corridor without their suits. In just a few seconds, the guards are all dead.
"Lot of guys on this ship, Renee," says Bangalore. "Where are we going?"
Glimpsing into the Void again, Renee eyes the pulsing light like a North Star. "Follow me."
Continuing down the corridor, they pass a few more doors, but none catch her eye. She knows what they need, if they're going to get all the way to Singh. Wide doors with 'Mess 2' painted on them enter her vision.
Perfect.
The doors open for her and she walks right in. It's a cavernous space, at least a hundred feet across, strewn from end to end with simple metal tables, half of them occupied. Dozens of eyes turn their way, and about two seconds later, panic erupts.
There are only a handful of armed guards in the room. They acquire the Legends but don't shoot due to the mass of people running around and diving for cover.
Bangalore shoots a few smoke canisters into the room to enhance the chaos. Wraith pushes over an abandoned table for cover, peering around it.
The civilians present are all wearing a type of uniform, apparently mandated. It's simple gray fabric, but there are many different colored collars.
Purple. You want a purple collar.
She relays this to the team as she eyes one of the guards. He nears them, but he's clearly lost track of them. He catches a round in the forehead.
"Don't like the civs in here," says Bangalore. True, Wraith would rather minimize collateral.
"Mirage, flush out the guards," says Wraith.
"You got it." Mirage activates the console on his wrist, and sends a hologram of each of them running out in different directions, firing wildly.
The guards go straight for it, and the last of the panicking civilians drops to the ground to avoid the crossfire.
"Go," says Wraith.
They all emerge from cover at the same time, and the poorly armored guards go down quickly.
He's getting away!
The only purple collar Wraith can see is currently sprinting for another exit across the mess hall. "Shit!" says Wraith.
"I've got it!" says Pathfinder. He deftly shoots his grappling hook and manages to hook the man's leg. The man cries out as Pathfinder's ascender drags him rapidly toward them, bouncing off tables and chairs as he slides across the polished floor. He finally stops at Pathfinder's feet, groaning. It's an older man, balding, probably pretty dignified up until this moment. Pathfinder reaches down, picking the man up around his waist, like a child.
"Sorry, elderly friend!" he says before throwing the man over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
"Let's move," says Wraith. They're moving fast. It's good, but they can't stop.
They move through the cafeteria, completely uncontested by the remaining population. Wraith directs them, following the beacon in the Void. Somehow she knows it's the principle lab.
They pass through a few more hallways. The man Pathfinder is carrying groans now and then, but doesn't resist. He's their ticket to the heart of this place. It's not long before they reach their first secure door. Pathfinder simply holds the man in front of the sensor, and the doors slide open, despite the ignominious condition of the person the security system is admitting. Classic IMC oversight.
Bangalore and Wraith keep point, and they do run into a few more scattered patrols. They're aware of their presence now, but security is clearly struggling to keep up with their blitz. Two guys spin around a corner, shooting in unison, but the Legends' armor is far superior, and their shielding isn't even being taxed, yet. Bangalore and Wraith's Flatlines bark until their bodies go still.
They emerge into a surprisingly green area. It's a wide space forming a wide park, with real plant life and an artificial sky. They see the back of one civ as he runs to a distant exit. It's otherwise clear. Their feet pound the manicured grass, making it halfway across without issue.
'Caution, deploying in this zone,' a loud, robotic voice booms. Red lights start flashing about the space.
Reaper!
Wraith turns and sees a hatch embedded in the wall open. She curses when she recognizes the chassis of the robotic giant.
"Spread out!" Bangalore cries.
The massive spectre spins up quickly, swiveling its multi-ton form as it acquires them. It flares its boosters and takes to the air, crashing down where they'd been standing moments before. Its Gatling guns being spinning up, trained on Wraith.
Scary, but it's a good thing, and right when they're about to fire, she slips into the Void. It's clearly confused by this, body swiveling slightly as its eye lens tries to reacquire its target.
Meanwhile, the others are lighting it up with their assault rifles, but Wraith knows from experience that it can take a hell of a lot of punishment. Two more pops herald the arrival of more of Bangalore's smoke canisters, giving them some visual cover. The Reaper turns and is able to make Bangalore, though. She curses, having nowhere to run.
There's a clang, and all the sudden Pathfinder is spinning around the Reaper at a breakneck clip, having attached his grapple to it.
The Reaper is confounded by this, and tries to take Pathfinder out as he swings wildly through the air, but its guns generally just blast holes into the grass turf and steel walls of the chamber.
Wraith emerges from the Void right next to the unit. She takes a thermite grenade and rams it up into its upper chassis, near its processing units. It seems to sense her, though. One of its large metal legs juts out suddenly, slamming into her midsection, winding her and sending her tumbling over the grass. The thermite grenade is jerked loose by the impact, burning futilely on the ground.
"Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit," Mirage is saying over and over even as he reloads and dumps more rounds into the heating vent on one of the monstrosity's sides. Flames gout out of the vent as indeed his damage starts to become evident.
The Reaper reassesses and aims for Mirage, who activates his holo tech in a panic, sprinting in every direction. And this time, it works, the Reaper's bullets tearing uselessly through the projections.
Pathfinder, still careening through the air, is tossed upward by one of the Reaper's jerking movements, and succeeds in landing gracefully on its head. He pulls out a thermite grenade of his own, rams it underneath its armor plates, then backflips off to the grassy soil below.
A blinding streak of light appears from the top of the monster's head, but at first it doesn't react. It continues firing at Mirage's holos, until it suddenly staggers, almost losing its feet. Then it staggers again and falls on its side, still firing its massive Gatling guns.
Without missing a beat, Pathfinder, Bangalore and Wraith all shoulder their guns and fire mercilessly into the breach in its armor until its whirring engine slows to a stop.
There's heavy breathing from all sides. Except Pathfinder's.
"N… nice one, Pathy," says Mirage.
"I was almost like a pilot for a second!"
"We need to move," says Bangalore.
"Where's our ticket?" asks Wraith.
They look around for a second, until they all see the purple collared civilian, or what's left of him. He lays in a heap thirty feet away, riddled with the Reaper's bullets.
"Do you think he'll still work?" Pathfinder asks.
"I doubt it," says Bangalore, wrinkling her nose.
"Worth a try at least!" says Pathfinder, picking up the man's severed arm.
It's a nauseous sight, but Wraith says nothing.
Come home.
The voice comes again, unbidden. Wraith looks. The Void beacon is close. It's got to be the heart of the lab, where Singh is likely to be.
"We're close," says Wraith. "Let's move."
After clearing the park zone, bells start going off in Wraith's mind. Her surroundings almost feel familiar. Wraith can practically feel the beacon now, almost hear it, like a faint ringing. She wonders if it's the same artifact, from that day.
They turn a corner, Wraith senses something, and she just knows this is it. She glimpses the Void, the artifact is close, it's purple light brilliant. It's on the other side of a wall from them.
"This is it!" says Wraith. They stop in front of two large double doors. The area is labeled 'Theoretical Application.'
Pathfinder steps forward and holds the severed arm in front of the door's scanner. It beeps and returns an error.
"Damn!" says Mirage. "That would have made a good story."
They can hear shouting, there are several guards on the other side of the door, preparing for them. Then Wraith hears another voice.
"Form a tight line! Tight! They can't get in here, do whatever you need to!" It wants to be authoritative, but it's too shrill. He's scared.
Wraith glimpses into the Void again. She can see his shadowy outline, standing in his lab coat, urgently minding one of the consoles.
"Wraith?" says Bangalore. "You got a plan or something? Wanna update us?"
"Smoke the door," she replies.
Bangalore cocks an eyebrow, but shoots a canister into her hand casually and drops it in front of the door. The smoke spreads rapidly through the hallway.
"Losing visual!" one of the guards shouts.
"Be ready to go hot," says Wraith, slipping into the Void.
She pushes through the thick steel doors, passed the unaware guardsmen. They're weapons are up, but they look nervous. Legends have a sort of reputation.
The other man stands back, eyes darting between the door and a camera feed rendered useless by the smoke.
Wraith hangs on a second. He's oblivious that she's two feet from him. His face is shadowy and distorted from the Void, but she can make out his features. He has shoulder length hair. He's still unwrinkled, his skin fresh. He looks healthy.
She drops out of the Void and he wheels on her in shock. He can't see her face under her helmet.
She slugs him in the jaw and grabs the back of his collar as he turns. Hearing that, the soldiers turn, but she's using him as a shield. They can't shoot her without shooting Singh. Almost casually, she uses her free hand to spin down the manual lockdown on the door, and presses the open command.
The doors slide open quickly, spilling smoke into the room.
"Shit!" one of the soldiers shouts. Then the shooting starts.
Ten or fifteen Legends pour into the room, but Wraith knows most of them are holos. The guards start firing at random into the smoke, but bullets start ripping through them. Pathfinder's robotic fist hammers into one of their helmets, knocking him out cold. The real Bangalore pops out last, lighting one guy up with an R-99 and diving behind one of the desks. Mirage starts shooting from behind a desk across the room, and Wraith is adding to the damage with her P2020, her other hand clutching a cowering Singh as a shield.
The whole thing takes maybe twelve seconds.
"Can you secure us or something?" Bangalore shouts.
Wraith reaches for the console again and seals the door, restoring the administrative lockdown. "The room's sealed. No one's getting in. Not to this place."
"L-legends…" stammers Singh. All eyes turn to him. Wraith lets go of him. For whatever reason, he doesn't look at her. "Bangalore… Mirage… Pathfinder? What the hell are you doing here? Why do you care about the IMC? How did you find this place?"
"Look at me if you really want to find out," says Wraith. He turns and she unclasps her helmet, pulling it off and dropping it to the ground.
His face spasms and he jerks back. "Wr… Wr…" he stutters.
"Renee," she finishes.
"I… how…" he's grasping at straws. "You… you were incompetent. You lost your mind."
Wrath's hand flexes. There's a heat in her gut, and her head, but her face is cool. "Not quite," she menaces.
"You, you can't hurt me. I'm important—they'll come after you!"
"Shut up!" she finally roars, silencing him. He trembles.
Silence fills the air. Bangalore watches in her peripheral, eyes on the door, hands on her gun. Her brow is knitted, but she doesn't interfere. Wraith stomps over to Singh and grabs him around the collar. His eyes go wide and he grimaces.
"I'll tell you what," she says, "I still don't remember everything. But I know enough."
He purses his lips and shakes his head, as if he doesn't know what she's talking about.
"I know what you did to me."
"I didn't! I did nothing! You did it yourself! You said—"
"Not that," she growls. "After the experiment."
His eyes flit back and forth, desperately looking for an escape. He settles on pleading. "Please, Renny, I didn't know what to do—"
"Don't call me that!" she shouts at him. He squirms in her grip. She looks him up and down, disgusted. "You really are a coward, aren't you?"
He stares back, unresponding, petrified. This is it. The time has come. Wraith takes a breath. The heat drains from her face, her mind becoming more level. She addresses him plainly.
"You love like a coward, too."
Mirage starts at that. He glances between them, astounded. Bangalore is shocked, too.
Renee gives him a little shove and he collapses to the ground against the desk behind him. He stares up at her while she continues. "When that day came, you couldn't face what happened." She snorts. "Like me, but even more pathetic. You stowed me away, unwilling to look at me. You sent me off to slowly die in your little failures pit, like broken equipment. All those nights you wheedled me into your bed. And when the time came, you had neither the strength to help me, nor to end my life.
"And it's not because you were merciful, or merciless. It's because you were scared. Scared of me," she kneels in front of him, "and scared of your guilt."
There are tears in his eyes and his mouth is gaping. He wants to pull away but he can't.
Wraith just starts shaking her head. "But I can't blame you that I fell for you. God help me, I saw the good in you, the little enough there was, and I took that as enough, didn't I?" She sniffs. "I should have known." She turns away, frowning. Angry, for a moment, at herself. "I should have known, after Typhon. I felt horror. You felt wonder."
"Wraith," Bangalore says quietly, "we need to think about next steps, here."
"Yeah," says Wraith, "we do." She reaches out and grabs Amer's collar one last time. She pulls him closer. His hands grab hers, not resisting, but trembling. "And now it's time for me to do the thing you never had the strength to."
His lip is trembling. His eyes dart to the P2020 still in her hand. "No," he whimpers. "Please… no…"
She pulls him close.
"It's over between us."
She lets him go and he thumps against the desk, panting. Standing, Wraith sees from a stain in his pants that he pissed himself.
"That was intense," says Mirage, not as quietly as he probably should. Bangalore and Pathfinder look at him. "What?" he says.
"I don't think that was the moment for comic relief," says Pathfinder.
"Okay, well," says Bangalore, "we need to actually get off this hunk of metal, and we can't shoot our way through the entire station. I've got an idea…"
Bangalore starts elaborating, but Renee's mind is elsewhere.
Beyond the desks and lab tables, toward the back of the cavernous laboratory, there is heavier equipment. Robotic arms and fabricators, but also containment units. Tiny dots of purple light in glass walled cases decorate the area. But there's another containment unit. A much bigger one. It's just around the corner.
"So we just blow him up?" Mirage is saying.
"No, blockhead," says Bangalore. "We put this on him. They can't disable it or take it off. They let us off the station, or we blow his ass up."
"Can't we just take him with us?" says Pathfinder.
"No way," she replies, "not how the IMC works. If we tried, they'd happily kill us all rather than let him slip into enemy hands."
Wraith is moving toward the back of the lab, unnoticed by the others. The large containment unit is slowly coming into view. The purple light it casts pours across the floor. The primary containment unit comes into view within the eight by four meter cage of metal housing and indestructible glass plate walls. It's a smaller vessel of much more dense tech, with small, porthole windows on six sides. The light is so bright it's difficult to see, but the figure of the child's doll can just be made out.
Not even glimpsing the Void, Wraith feels a pulse emanate from the artifact. She can feel it move across her whole body.
Come home, it tells her. For once, the Whispers are silent. Or is this strange song she's hearing more of a roar?
She finds herself standing at the door to the outer containment unit, hand with the P2020 resting on the glass, peering through it. She looks at the gun, realizing she has no more use for it. She drops it to the textured steel plating underfoot.
The others had been talking animatedly, but they stop suddenly. Wraith hears Bangalore's voice.
"Renee?"
Wraith reaches to the door console and commands it to open. It complies immediately.
"Jesus fuck! Renee, what are you doing!?"
Wraith steps into the confines of the cell. Anita is still calling after her. She can hear their footsteps approaching. They're going to try and stop her. She can't have that.
She reaches behind her and seals the door, then she turns to a heavy switch. Using both hands, she pulls it down into closed position, triggering manual lockdown.
"Renee!" Bangalore's face appears on the other side of the glass. She tries the door console a few times, realizing it won't work. She pounds the glass with her fist. "Renee, what the fuck are you doing!?"
Renee feels for her, but she can't let Anita get in her way. Not when she's this close. Anita's brow is all pinched up and her teeth are showing.
Renee knows what that feels like. She gives her a sympathetic smile and turns toward the artifact containment.
Bangalore keeps pounding on the glass, and the others start shouting, too.
Things are starting to come back to Renee. It's started a while ago, but she hadn't mentioned anything to the others. When she saw the space station. When they grabbed the purple collared man. When they ran into that park.
When she spoke with Singh.
At that, she turns intuitively and Singh is there, standing twenty feet away, watching the spectacle. He's quiet. Tinges of fear show on his face, but more than that, he's fascinated. That brings a memory back, too. The fascinated look, it's how he watched experiments.
There's muted gunfire that clatters off the containment glass, but a Reaper's cannons couldn't penetrate that stuff.
"You!" Bangalore yells. She can hear Singh's muffled alarm. "Override it! Get her out of there!"
"Me? I, I can't—"
"Yeah, does this say you can't?"
"P-p-p-please, the, the—the manual lockdown, no one can override that from here, we'd need—"
Renee's hands are already on the primary containment unit. It floats unsupported a few feet in the air, an oddity resulting from the artifact's own power. She begins decoupling the interconnected mechanisms holding the whole array together.
Bangalore is still shouting.
"Nita, calm down!" Mirage attempts.
"I'm, I'm telling you, I can't!" Singh is almost as scared of Anita. "It's mechanical! It's designed for redundant safety—"
"I've got your redundant—"
"Nita, I think she's about to get it open!"
He's right. Renee's hand is on the final coupling. She hesitates. She looks over her shoulder.
Mirage is staring with an alert but neutral expression, as if waiting to see what's going to happen. Pathfinder's display emotes confusion and anxiety.
Anita is harder to look at. Her left hand is pressed up against the glass. Her brow is all knitted. Her eyes are scared, helpless. She refuses to accept what she's seeing.
Renee favors her with a smile, then unlatches the final coupling.
The many electro-mechanical plates housing the artifact separate on their own, opening up to reveal it, hovering in place around it.
It doesn't exactly have a sound. It's like an endless drone, too low to hear, too loud to ignore. It's light pulses like a heartbeat now. It floats slowly toward her.
You came, it says.
"I did," Renee replies.
It is time.
Then the light flares until Renee can see nothing else, and she experiences everything.