Fire, icy cold, burns through her limbs and fills the gashes and tears and makes them whole again.
The searing cold radiance pushes into her chest but catches on something sharp and mangling. Her chest tightens around it and she coughs a splatter of blood and shrapnel onto the inside of her helmet visor.
"Hey, you alright?" Telysa says somewhere off to the side.
Linvana unclasps her helmet seals and sucks down a breath of non-bloody air. "I will be."
"Okay. I got Khariss, but some of his lackeys hit their stealth harnesses and escaped. You good to watch Simin while I hunt them down?"
She nods, and then Telysa is gone, vanished into the bowels of the compound.
"Hey," Simin says. The bruised Corsair is slumped against the wall, shock pistol in one hand, radio in the other. "You saved my life. Several times over. I owe you."
"Don't mention it," Linvana says. She wipes the flecks of metal off of her helmet and sets it on the ground for Polaris to clean. Her insides still feel like a mess, but at least she doesn't have a skull-splitting headache. One of the nice things about not getting disintegrated. "Are you okay?" she asks.
"I'll be fine. I'm serious though," Simin insists, "I made a colossal misjudgment of the situation. You and Telysa put yourselves at risk to correct it, and I will never repay that debt.."
Linvana collects her shotgun and kneels beside Simin. She still looks awful, but doesn't appear to have taken any major injuries. "What's up with that though? You said you knew Khariss's type, knew how he'd react. Instead…" She motions to the Fallen corpses scattered around the room.
Simin shakes her head. "There used to be an unspoken arrangement between the navy and the smugglers. As long as people weren't getting hurt, we'd turn a blind eye. If we had to step in, they knew they'd crossed the line. I guess…things are changing in the Belt. More than I realized."
"Well he had big plans for this little syndicate of his. Putting his flag on all of Fortuna." Linvana picks up the muzzle they'd put on Simin. It's a fairly simple construction; a wide band of stiff material shaped to fit around the mouth and neck, with a pair of buckles on the back. "He said something about making you his slave."
"He was mad because he thought telling him not to mess with the Vex was some sort of oppression. Idiot. It's common sense."
"Yeah, but that doesn't explain this." Linvana holds up the muzzle. "Did they make it just for you?"
"No, they slapped it on me as soon as they got me inside…" Simin goes pale as she realizes the implication. "Shadows and starlight, I wasn't the first."
Linvana summons Polaris with a gesture. "Patch me in to Tel."
The Ghost chirps.
"I'm a little busy," Telysa says a moment later. There's a savage hiss followed by three staccato gunshots.
"Look, you need to try to bring one of them in alive," Linvana says, "There's something big going on here, and we need information."
"Fine, but you owe me one." The line cuts off with a click.
Polaris decompiles and Linvana starts pacing. She has a rough suspicion of what Khariss was up to. Something to do with trafficking Awoken. But why did he decide to set up shop at the Vex's front door?
She tries to think it through, but instead the solution to an entirely different problem pops into her head. She stops short and gapes at Simin. "You knew her."
"Come again?"
"Telysa, you knew her."
"Well yes, I'd hired her for a-"
"No, not that. You said 'relationships with Telysa are always complicated.' But she says by the time she came out to the Reef, she'd shut everyone out. So either she's lying to me, or you knew her before. Before she became a Guardian. Before she…died."
Simin meets Linvana's gaze for a moment that stretches on and on. Then she closes her eyes and lets out a long breath. "Shit."
The confirmation twists in Linvana's stomach like a knife. "You didn't just now her either, you were close. Friends…lovers."
The Corsair refuses to look at Linvana. She drags herself to her feet and limps over to the glass wall. After a while, Linvana steps up beside her. The throne room overlooks the Vex helix in all its glittering crimson majesty.
"Does she know?" Linvana asks.
"No. Nobody's supposed to know. What they say about Guardians when they're reborn is true. When she first showed up on Vesta, to me it was seeing a ghost. But to her I'm just another Corsair of the Awoken Royal Navy." Simin sniffles and wipes her eye.
It's Linvana's turn to sigh and curse. "I can't imagine what this feels like for you. To watch someone you loved die and come back with someone else in tow…"
"It's actually…" She gives a bitter chuckle. "We'd ended things long before then. She left the Reef saying she needed a fresh start. She…got what she wanted."
A soft silence settles over the two women. Linvana watches tears slide down Simin's reflection in the glass.
"I am so, so very sorry," Linvana whispers.
"Don't be. Telysa, she reminds me of the woman I knew, but that person is gone. Died on Earth, trying to start a farm so a shabby village of refugees wouldn't starve in the winter."
The door to the throne room hisses open. Linvana whirls around, shotgun ready, but it's just Telysa.
Just Telysa. Wearing the face of someone Simin once loved.
"Well, you wanted this piece of shit alive," the Hunter says. She's dragging a tangle of armored limbs along the floor. A vandal, with one of its legs twisted in an unnatural angle. She drops it, eliciting a hiss of pain. "Can't imagine it's in a talkative mood."
Linvana retrieves the muzzle and approaches the vandal. It squirms when it sees her, but stops when Telysa rests her boot on its neck.
"This," Linvana says, crouching so it can see the muzzle. "This won't fit a Fallen."
It stares blankly at her, until Simin speaks a few sharp words of Eliksni. The vandal's eyes sharpen as it spits out a response.
"She says of course not," Simin translates, "Collars are for dogs."
"So you've kept humanoid prisoner before," Linvana continues. "Are there any others here?"
"If there were, I would never tell you."
"Never is a long time," Telysa growls, "Tell us, or it's going to get a lot longer."
The vandal glares up at Telysa. "The pain you offer is nothing compared to what we suffered under the Awoken. I will die a thousand times if it makes just one of our slavers suffer." She turns to Simin. "You'll never find them. They'll die alone in the dark, choking on their own breath!" A long, reedy laugh follows.
"You listen here you little shit," Simin snarls as she stomps forward. She pushes Linvana aside and presses her shock pistol to its neck. A blistering argument in Eliksni ensues.
They go back and forth for at least a minute. Then the vandal lunges forward mid-sentence, clawing at Simin. Telysa's boot comes down with a crunch.
"Damnit," Telysa says as she realizes what she's done. "We needed her alive, didn't we?"
Simin sags on her haunches, looking more defeated by the argument than she had from being captured.
"It's alright," she rasps. "She was never going to help us."
"We'll find them Simin," Linvana says. "We'll tear this whole place apart if we have to." She summons Polaris, who doesn't need prompting to start scanning the compound for heat signatures. Telysa has Azul do the same.
They call Ollin in, who'd been watching the entrance with his rifle, in case any Fallen tried to escape that way. He tends to Simin's cuts and bruises while Tel and Linvana and their Ghosts search. They find
The compound has all the rooms you'd expect to find in a smuggler's den. Store rooms filled with Vex scrap, ether bales, and all assortments of illicit goods. Cramped sleeping quarters for the dregs. A maintenance shop with half-disassembled pilot servitor. At one point they find what must have been a processing room for their captures. One wall is occupied by bins of Awoken gear: Communicators, tools, discarded armor and clothing. The table on the opposite side still has Simin's stuff, including her outer flight suit and grenade launcher. There's a rack of muzzles and cuffs in the corner, but no sign of any prisoners.
The move deeper and deeper, into the sub-levels bored into the asteroid. Polaris and Azul scan every nook hidden between the generators and air scrubbers and turn up nothing.
"Let's face it," Telysa says when they reach the end of the last tunnel. "There's nothing. There isn't even a room that looks like a prison."
"You don't think they would have killed them, do you?" Linvana asks.
"No, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered making restraints for them. But they didn't keep them here."
"Where would they take them? There's nothing else out here."
"There's one more thing we can check," Telysa says. She beckons Azul over. "The skiffs up in the docks. Can you crack the nav-cores?"
"I'll try," the Ghost says.
Back up at the docks, Azul and Polaris scour the skiffs' systems.
"It's thoroughly encrypted," Polaris notes. "With time, we could decipher it, but it might take a while."
"Days, at the least," Azul agrees. "Unless we could convince the pilot servitors to help us…hold on, one of the skiffs was preparing to launch. And it has a flight path queued up."
"Where?" Telysa asks.
"A small satellite platform on the far side of Fortuna."
"Bring our ships in," Linvana orders. "We're leaving now."