Chapter Ten: Across the Bow
A light tapping noise jolted Tifa from her half-napping state. Cold waves of dread shuddered down her spine, raising gooseflesh on her arms. Her grip on consciousness had nearly slipped, and sleeping wasn't such a great idea anymore. Perhaps it would have been restful on the second try, but the alternative was that she'd wind up slipping into that chasm Sephiroth had seeded into the back of her mind again. Surviving without rest for a while was more palatable by far; both it and its creator would be gone soon enough.
Louder and far less patient, another two taps prompted her to look up.
Waiting and fidgeting outside her window was a petite, pale-skinned, auburn-haired woman. If not for the four stripes on her right arm, Tifa would have mistaken her for a twelve-year-old. She had bright, wide ultramarine eyes that sort of reminded her of Cloud's from way back when they were kids, and barely stood five feet tall. An expedition to make contact with another planet didn't seem like a place for children, but she admittedly knew nothing about how these people viewed raising them. If there was some kind of educational cadet's program, maybe the person waving her over was that young.
Reluctantly, she stood and approached the glass barrier. "Hey, you probably shouldn't be playing—"
"Finally," the woman interjected, her voice a frustrated and very adult contralto—not at all the girlish lilt Tifa had expected to hear. "If you hadn't been snoring like that, I'd have thought you were comatose. Name's Della. I do the medical poking and scraping when they have me on board. Oh, and before you ask, I'm thirty-two, and yes, it's been more than two years since I passed my exams. It's always a question with newbies, no matter where they come from…Let's see," she sighed, pawing at a tablet similar to what Aron had carried.
Attempting to shirk off how poorly she'd sized up her new visitor, she asked, "…Was I completely asleep?"
"Well, you weren't quite drooling yet, if that makes any difference," Della quipped, attaching her tablet to the window.
Recent changes—ones she'd quickly grown to loathe pondering—should have allowed her to stay awake without too much trouble, but she'd already passed out again regardless. It was yet another thing she couldn't control, but worrying would have to wait. She was safe and sound in her own mind for the time being. Fretting about it would be a waste of emotional energy she had little to spare, and she had plenty of work ahead to distract her. "At least there's that…I'm Tifa."
"So I've heard," Della smiled. "Tifa, this is terribly rude of me, but I'm going to have to ask for a few strands from that lovely mane of yours. If possible, please try to get them up by the follicles. I'm going to open a drawer on your side. Just drop them in there."
She stared back at the other woman. It was an innocuous request, and Aron had said something about minor tests, but, "Why?"
"Because the ship's going to dock soon, and I think you'd prefer walking out of that cramped hole on your own two feet over riding in a metal box. I've worked up a thing that might help with that, but I need something off of you to test first."
Embarrassed, Tifa turned aside and winced as she yanked out a small cluster of hairs from her bangs. Just under the window and above her knees, a compartment hissed open, and she dropped them in. "There. All set."
The drawer retracted and clicked shut. Inside the wall, what sounded like a sort of ventilation mechanism kicked on, followed by a deep thrumming. Della narrowed her eyes at her tablet when it sounded moments later, presumably with test results. "Fuck me sideways. I was sure Sudira had broken into the Admirals' sauce again, but he wasn't kidding."
"What is it? What's happening…?" Tifa trailed off, lamenting out loud without meaning to, and instantly wished she could take the second part back. She didn't want to wind up having to confess that she sucked the life out of things by mere touch, but she'd just let on that she was perfectly aware of something amiss beyond what they'd already observed. What she'd seen of their technology instilled hope that they'd be able to help her turn it off, but that didn't mean she could trust them to understand that it was never intentional, or that she wasn't born like that.
Della clasped her hands together. "When the Commander briefed me, he said that you'd been exposed to extraordinary levels of bio-tectonic radiation. He told me that he suspected something like symbiosis. It sounded mad, but here the readings are…It's enough to give us an inkling for how you're not dead from it, at any rate."
Bio-tectonic. Tifa rolled the word around in her mind, discouraged. It was unmistakably a technical term for the Lifestream or Mako cooked up by people who didn't believe in its spiritual essence. If she tried to share the more personal parts of her story—those about her internal relationship with her friends, the concept of a planetary consciousness, or about Sephiroth's telepathic projection—they wouldn't buy a single word, would they? She could probably trim the fat about her friends, but the other two were fundamental to how Sephiroth's power and his growing fixation on her might pose a threat to them. "Symbiosis," Tifa repeated, latching onto the word to slow her racing thoughts. That was a place to start. She'd just have listen carefully to the people around her and attempt to get by using words they'd accept.
"You're one for the books. Discovering how life flourishes in different parts of the universe is one of our missions, but to uncover something like this in one of our own is off the charts nutty…Anyhow, I'm sending the drawer back your way. There's a bangle in it that should dampen the radiation. If I've calibrated it right, you'll be a lot less shiny," Della replied.
Tifa scooped up the bangle when the compartment opened on her side again, sliding it onto her right wrist. A plain, silvery loop with three tiny, white lights on the side, it was inconspicuous and not uncomfortable. Staticky warmth pulsed where it touched her skin, but it was essentially painless. After a moment, the lights flashed and then lit up green one by one.
Della poked at her tablet a few times. "Good, good. Better than I projected. Now I can come in there and we can talk like normal people. I also need to jab you as a safety precaution. Samples and vaccines. The air in there is registering clean, but we can't be too careful about pathogens since you're not from around here."
The door's lock released, and it wheeled backward on a track Tifa hadn't been able to see when they'd brought her in. Della rounded the corner and entered, leaving the exit wide open. A stray, invasive thought about making a break for it skittered across Tifa's mind, and she cringed. That would be completely senseless. No one was holding her prisoner—not really—and running would be self-defeating. If a time came when they gave her a good reason not to cooperate, she could deal with it then. What it would mean, if it came to that, though...
"Oh no. You look like you're about to cry," Della suddenly blurted out.
Tifa wrinkled her nose and blinked rapidly to stifle the urge, but her eyes only stung hotter, allowing a few droplets to escape. "I'm sorry. It's been a very long trip. I'm just ready for all of it to be over."
"There's never an in-between, is there?"
"Hm?"
"No in-between. Either things are going perfectly copacetic, or they're balls to the walls trying to eat your brain. Although, I can't imagine being in your shoes, whole planet blown away and all that," Della commented while lifting up a slat on the wall to reveal an arm-sized hole with a cuff. "I can't imagine being the last one. I think I'd lose my mind."
Tifa gave a light shrug, swiping again at her eyes. "I just try to keep remembering everyone. Sometimes they feel so far away, but I keep going. I don't always think I have it in me, but what else can I do? There's nothing else…"
"You're a better person than I am, then. I don't think I'd give a damn about what happened to the rest of the universe if I were the last one left. Now, if you'll just pick whichever arm you like the least to shove into the wall there, that will take care of the samples and injections," Della instructed.
"How bad is this going to hurt?"
"You'll feel like you got stung ten times at once for two seconds. After that, not much."
Looking away, Tifa jammed her left arm into the cuff. The device gave off a ka-chunk sound, like an oversized stapler, and she hissed, sucking a breath in through her teeth.
"Huh…" Della intoned, holding a hand over her mouth while she intently studied new results coming in from the blood samples.
"What's the matter?" Tifa prodded again, retracting her offended limb.
"Nothing. You're disease-free as far as I can see, and now you're vaccinated against most of what you could catch from us. Something's a little off about some of your cellular structure. It looks mostly normal but...maybe…maybe that's just how the symbiosis expresses itself?" Della finished in a perturbed half-whisper, shaking her head.
After forcing herself to swallow a light breakfast, Tifa followed Della to the Passage's exit terminal, and into a docking bay. They'd arrived in humanity's home system, which they called Eos. On the way in, Della had given a skeletal explanation for how they were organized. All three planets they currently occupied had an orbital station like this one. Each acted as a base for a branch of the stellar navy, which was split up into Research, Investigations, and Defense. Research was charged with exploring the known universe, looking for life and valuable resources, including anything they could use to assist in their terraforming efforts. The people who'd found her were from Investigations, and this was their station, orbiting the second planet they'd successfully terraformed. They were responsible for monitoring any major changes in the local neighborhood and following up on reports of possibly sentient life Research handed off to them. Lastly, Defense was the genuinely military heart of the whole organization, specializing in weaponry, policing activities, and medical science. Because they'd never encountered a hostile race, Defense was mostly dedicated to pursuits of medicine and energy development alongside Research. Alien disease was generally regarded as the greatest security threat; not invasion.
Tifa had wanted to ask Della a little more. What were their planets' names? What was everyday life like living on each of them? How did people there make a living, and what did they do for fun? Were there any holidays? She'd tried to ask, but the words wouldn't dislodge themselves from the tip of her tongue, anchored by a lead weight around her heart. Everyday life—doing normal work, making friends, building families, taking up hobbies—she felt so detached from all of it. None of it was for her; not anymore. Even if—when—she succeeded in destroying Sephiroth, thinking about the future beyond that made something in the pit of her stomach recoil. All she could see there when she tried to look was this monstrous, empty void, tinged and bound by everything she'd suffered through and everyone she'd lost.
"Hey, did you hear what I just said?" Della stopped, poking her shoulder.
"No…I don't think I did," Tifa admitted.
"You have a conference with our Admirals in about an hour. Sudira just got done presenting his findings from your interview, and they want to talk to you yesterday," she repeated. "In the meantime, I'll take you to see your new room. You can freshen up there if you want."
"Will I be locked in this one?"
"No. No locks, no excessive surveillance. You've been cleared as friendly. Take that bangle off and half the station's security detail will probably body-slam you, though. Not to offend, but it doubles as a tracking device. Basic mobility clearance is a matter of efficiency, but trust takes time," Della explained.
A speck of amused relief peeked through Tifa's darkened mood. "Honestly, I feel the same about trusting all of you."
"It's not like the first place we threw you was somewhere we could have dissected you at a moment's notice. Oh wait; we did exactly that thing."
Tifa stopped cold, indifferent to the people weaving their way around her. "Would you do something like that?"
With an exaggerated eye-roll, Della walked back to retrieve her. "Really now, you took me seriously? Are you going to tell me that emergency surgery wasn't a thing back on your world, or should I just assume that you were chewing your worst-case scenario into a fine paste?"
Heat welled up in Tifa's face, but the tension lifted from her shoulders. In spite of her best efforts to dismiss most of them, her mind had been zipping from one terrifying possibility to the next since she'd arrived. What she couldn't brush away, it dawned on her, was that ShinRa's atrocities hadn't really been that long ago. Exploitation in the name of discovery was still too familiar a concept. How could she not fear she might find more of the same? "I'm afraid the worst case was real for a long time where I came from. It didn't happen to me, but…"
ShinRa had imprisoned and used so many people she'd known. Cloud. Aerith. Vincent. Nanaki. Sephiroth, however deeply she resented him. If ShinRa hadn't made him into an experimental toy, Gaia and everyone she loved would still be alive. The dominoes had never stopped falling since then, dropping one upon the other until their combined weight had crashed down right on top of her. The damned company no longer existed, and she still hated them—an impotent, useless hatred that did little else but add insult to injury.
"Alright, well…we'll leave that alone, then," Della sighed, failing to restrain her irritation. "Unless you're secretly some kind of tentacled horror from the old world, try not to worry too much about it."
They hurried the rest of the way down the hall from the docking bay in silence, turning a corner that let out into a broad walkway. Overhead, a transparent ceiling revealed tiny streaks of light buzzing past the station—more of their ships or other transports, Tifa guessed. Aside from being constructed of polished, chrome-like materials, the path ahead itself was jarringly reminiscent of Junon, lined with three and four-story cubical buildings that connected with the ceiling. A few entrances along the ground level were open, sporting signs that looked like advertisements, but Tifa couldn't read them. Some of the characters were similar to those she knew, but not enough to try to decipher. Still, if she wandered into one and found a materia merchant, it wouldn't feel out of place. The more she saw, the more evident Eos' connection with Gaia became; as if these people truly were once part of the same collective consciousness.
Home. Someone's home. Like hers, but not for her. An invisible dagger twisted itself deeper into her heart.
"Over here," Della motioned, quickly trotting across the walkway.
Tifa followed, having to skip the last step to avoid a small hovering vehicle that came whizzing by behind her, nearly clipping the backs of her heels. She glared after it as its rider continued onward, weaving sloppily through the other pedestrians with about as much regard they had given her. "Does that happen often around here?"
"Nope. That guy's probably going to find himself in lock up sooner rather than later." Stepping up to one of the closed doors, Della pressed her palm onto a smooth surface near the lock, and it clicked once. "Okay, now you do the same. That will register you to this building. When you get in, you'll go to the fifth room to the right on the second floor. I'll wait down here."
"I'll try to be quick," Tifa said. The door clicked under her palm, and she noticed that one of the lights on her bangle blinked once.
The narrow stairwell led up to an equally cramped hallway. At least it was cleaner than Junon, she mused to herself. The men that had lived in places like this back there usually weren't content until everything was coated in a layer of dirty clothes and stickiness. Counting the doors, she found that hers was located at the very end. Stepping lightly so as not to disturb anyone, she approached it and palmed the hand-reading mechanism, and it opened revealing a sparsely furnished bedroom. Off to her left, a sliding glass door with a thick, white curtain hung in front of it concealed the washroom. Tifa pulled the curtain and the door aside and frowned inwardly. Her nerves were getting to her. Amongst all her much heavier concerns, she'd somehow allowed a split second of panic to slip in over whether or not she'd know how to use the bathrooms here. Sure, things were a little differently-shaped, but there was no mistaking what they were—shower, toilet, and a small vanity with a sink.
"I need to stop this," she chastised herself, flipping up a lever on the wall next to the sink. As hoped, it turned on the water, and she adjusted it until it ran icy.
Vigorously, she splashed her face, paying special attention to the burning sensation lingering around her eyes. When she was satisfied that she'd made enough of a sopping mess on the counter and at her feet, she shut the faucet off and grabbed a thin, gray cloth that was folded up neatly in one corner. Staring herself down in the mirror, she dabbed away the droplets. It was the first time she'd seen her own reflection this clearly since her encounter with a distant moon's Lifestream. The red highlights in her eyes had grown remarkably brighter, but she still passed as human. She still was human, she corrected herself. So much Mako exposure was bound to have the SOLDIER effect or something like it. She could carry herself to her next meeting without worrying about appearances.
"Seems fine to me," Cloud softly chimed in.
Tifa took a small step back, mildly startled. "I keep wishing I looked a little messier. Or at least tired. Anything to match how I really feel."
"Want to look different?" he asked.
"Not so sure I have the time…What's this about, Cloud?"
"We've been trying to think of how we can help. You can change how you look now, right? What if you could let one of us take over?"
"…I don't know," she started. She'd spent so much time trying to pretend that those changes weren't happening, she hadn't really considered how she could use them in her favor. Wild ideas like shape-shifting and transferring motor control of her body to one of her friends hadn't occurred to her. Now that she did, the risks seemed just as outlandish, and all the more terrible. "What if I got something wrong and wound up absorbing you instead? Erasing you forever…I could never forgive myself if I did that..."
"It'll be alright," Aerith reassured her, sounding far more collected than the last time Tifa had heard from her. That was a relief; she tended to take her distress as a sign of exactly how hopeless her situation was panning out. "Melding with another soul means taking over them and tearing them apart so that they're forced to become a part of you. Even with everything living in here, you've still managed not to. Besides, this is the opposite of that. This is more like setting yourself aside to make room for another."
"Okay. Okay, here it goes…" Trusting that Aerith knew what she was talking about, Tifa exhaled and concentrated on her memory of Cloud; on his presence within her psyche. She felt him carefully slipping forward in her mind. He was there, closer to the forefront, closer to-
He was in front of her. Right there in the mirror, staring back at her in reciprocated shock. She stepped forward again, caressing the glass surface with shaky fingertips. Not her own, but Cloud's, thicker and well-calloused from years of sword-fighting. She was still the one moving the body—it was still her—but he was as conscious and present in mind as she was, sharing the same space. "Cloud…?" she uttered his name, and his voice spoke it.
Overwhelmed and dizzy, she resumed full control, instantly morphing back into herself. Control. Cloud and Aerith had just shown her part of these cursed abilities she could actually control! Tifa wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream, curse, run halfway around the station and back, and do it all over again. She wanted to break down and sob for hours, because she'd just seen Cloud in the flesh for the first time since he'd passed. Not just a voice in her head or a post-apocalyptic specter that seemed to imitate a body, but a physical being in the waking world.
Instead, she resumed drying her hands and face, reminded herself, "I'm not alone in this. I'm not," in a shaky breath, and departed.
A few miles from the unit that contained her room, the walkway dead-ended at a silver wall. Only a set of double doors perforated it at ground level, guarded by two unabashedly bored but well-armed younger men. While Della approached them, Tifa caught herself staring up at the ceiling again, watching for the colorful darts of light that occasionally streaked past. There was always some kind of traffic up there, making her wonder exactly how large their fleet had to be.
"Lieutenant Della Emila, this can't be her, right? She looks kind of like a beefed-up version of my sister's babysitter. The way the brass is talking, we expected you show up hauling something with an extra head," one of the guards laughed.
"Or wings, or a tail, or maybe a proboscis—" the other one piped up, but Della cut him off.
"Sorry guys, she's just another plain, boring human. Now, do you want to let us in so we're not late, or do you want back on shit-scraping duty for the next three weeks? Because if that's what I get, I'm dragging the both of you down with me."
Tifa grimaced at the guards' disappointment with the fact that she was one of them, but the tightness in her chest loosened for how Della had referred to her. Just another boring human. Yes, that was the truth she was going to carry with her to meet their leadership. The only truth she cared for.
"Hard-ass," the first one snorted. Both turned to disengage the lock then, and silently held the doors open.
Beyond the entrance, a blue-lit hallway extended before them for about twenty feet. A few doors lined the sides, all of which were expectedly locked down.
"Sorry about the Privates' display back there. They get restless too easily. Those two in particular are serial discipline cases," Della apologized while they fast-walked to the end.
Tifa bowed her head slightly. "…It can't be helped." She was a novelty here, and probably would be for a while.
When they reached very end, the hallway opened up into a wide, rectangular conference room. The entirety of the opposing side was constructed of a similar type of window to what she'd seen in her medical enclosure, extending up to the ceiling. Every few feet, there were tablets attached, and directly over them in the middle, a huge, translucent map was displayed. Although the wording was unintelligible, she was able to discern that the three, larger glowing orbs toward the bottom were meant to indicate the planets and their respective stations. There was a fourth, similar sized orb that bore no labels. Tifa guessed that it was probably their abandoned world home world. About a quarter of the way across the map to the upper right, a red dot urgently blinked. There were two others just like it, but they were each much further away. Dotted lines flashed and vanished between them, seeming to show different routes between the points. Perhaps they had something in common. Maybe they were proposed mission destinations?
Shifting her attention away from the star map, Tifa took in an even greater spectacle outside. Dozens of spacecrafts were lined up to form a great bow that pointed outward from the station. Larger dreadnoughts—smooth, glossy, elliptical capsules at least a mile long each, bearing innumerable lines of lights and portals—were situated in the center of the fleet. Smaller ships were docked alongside them, sorted in descending size on either side.
"Lockhart! I see Emila was able to break you out of the nuke tank," Aron greeted her.
Sloughing off her half-dreamy haze and prying her eyes away from the window, Tifa forced a friendly smile. "It's good to be out. I was getting a little bored," she lied. If only that were true. Boredom would have meant that nothing had happened; that she hadn't been abducted out of her own mind.
"I wish I could tell you it was going to get better, but our Admirals are probably going to rehash everything I did and then some. Speaking of, I should probably tell you who they are and what they do."
"That could be helpful," Tifa agreed.
"Alright, so Admiral Nessia Santri is my C.O. She's over Investigations. She was the one barking orders at us when you first arrived. She's an asshole and she loves getting her hands dirty. When she retires, we'll probably throw a funeral even if she's still alive. Then there's Admiral Luthi Nia, over Research. He's too damn young for his rank and a total prick, but he's basically a genius, so we put up with him. Lastly, there's Admiral Kalle Ruri, over Defense. Ruri's an older guy whose idea of a stern reprimand involves drinking you under the table. Don't be surprised if he wants you to mix him a drink after all of this. He's curious what a barkeep from light years away might serve up."
"Maybe I'll just offer. It's been way too long." This time, she felt her lips turn up slightly of their own accord. It would be nice, just for once, to be able to do something so natural and familiar again. To make it familiar again.
"Sudira, they've arrived," Della grabbed his attention. "Tifa, you'll be sitting on the side of the table with your back to the window. We'll be standing along the wall."
As instructed, she settled down at the conference table with her back to the window display and the massive port beyond it, folding her hands together in front of her. She did her best to avoid staring while the three figures she recognized from Aron's explanation filed into their own seats directly across from her. Nia wasn't much older than her, with blond hair, pale gray eyes, and a harsh face to belie his youth. His uniform matched his eyes, and a ridiculous golden medal on his breast pocket was the only thing distinguishing him from an average-looking technician. Santri was a lean woman with close-cropped platinum hair, bright green eyes, and a uniform nearly identical to Aron's, again with the exception of an ornate medal. Dark bags under her eyes betrayed that she was probably sleep deprived. Ruri was a husky older man as promised, balding on top, with muttonchops growing down his face. Ironically, his all-black uniform was the tidiest, with all stripes and medallions dutifully placed and nary a wrinkle in sight. This was it. Time to come clean about as much as she possibly could. About as much as they'd believe.
Santri was the first to address her, "Tifa Lockhart?"
"Yes, that's me," she affirmed.
"We've been over the recording that Commander Sudira gave us several times, and I must confess that if we hadn't stumbled upon you the way we had, a lot of it would be difficult to believe. Not to mention your bizarre medical state. No one should be able to survive that kind of radioactive exposure, much less become a living emission point. But here you are…and here we are, and we still have a lot of questions."
Tifa stared hard at her hands, awash in shame. "There were some things I left out, because I was afraid you'd get the wrong idea about me. I'm still afraid, but…"
Santri raised an incredulous eyebrow. "But?"
Looking to Aron instead, she revealed, "Sephiroth already knows everything. I lied about not being 'bait'. I wanted to believe I could make it true, but he's always…always on me, somehow."
Aron exchanged a quick glance with Santri, and then, "Yeah, don't sweat it. That was pretty predictable from the readings I got."
Leaning forward with interlaced fingers, Santri continued, "Define 'somehow'."
"Mentally. Telepathically. Dreams," Tifa nearly groaned in response to the words as they left her mouth. So much for figuring out terms they'd be more comfortable with. "I know I'm asking you to believe me about voices in my head. I know it sounds ridiculous."
"Well," Admiral Ruri started, adjusting his position and clearing his throat, "everything we've found about you so far can be termed 'unreal', but we can't just ignore what's right in front of us, now can we? Assuming this Sephiroth fellow exists, and assuming you've given us an accurate account of his capabilities, what's a few mind games to the mix?"
Tifa's stomach sank. If Sephiroth exists. Mind games. That's where they still were? Trying to determine if the greatest danger to their existence—to all creation—was even real? Referring to his capacity for manipulation and destruction as mere games?
Admiral Nia leaned back in his chair, smirking slightly and putting one foot up on the table's edge, allowing him to stare down his nose at her without having to stand. Petty. Self-assured. Tifa already disliked him. "Regardless if the threat we're dealing with is ultimately from you or this other figure we're waiting to see materialize, the solution is the same." Pausing, he gestured to the other two, lifting one hand slightly. "May I?"
"I don't see the harm," Ruri replied.
Santri's neutral expression faded into a tight-lipped scowl, but she nodded once.
"Commander Sudira may have filled you in on a little bit, but there's a low-orbit device we use to siphon and transport tectonic energy from other worlds. Nothing's stopping us from pointing a few of those at something other than a planet. Assuming this friend of yours derives his power from those energies, we need only take them away. We've already taken the precaution of setting them up all around this station. They can be activated and running at full power within nanoseconds." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "We'll bleed him dry."
"He's not a friend," Tifa quickly retorted, correcting him.
"Oh, I'm sure. Just rest assured that if he shows up in Eos, he's as good as dead. Which leaves us to contend with you," Nia finished.
Santri cast a sharp glare at Nia, and then set her sights back on Tifa. "I apologize. The Research Admiral has clearly failed to review the newer piece of intel that we believe clears you. Yesterday, around the time we were processing you, some of our long-distance probes recorded what we believe was the destruction of a third world. At a first glance, it merely appeared to be an unfortunate run-in with some over-sized space debris; a natural event. However, rather than continue the life cycle, that planet's bio-tectonic energies converged onto a single point and vanished. After that, we have nothing but interference."
"That's him. That's how…" Tifa breathed but couldn't bring herself to say more. Her head was swimming with a cluster of grim realizations. She now knew that the system of Eos existed only because its founders were stealing the life blood of distant stars for their own use. She tried to make herself think of it as a transfusion, but the process came off as ghoulish and their tools were essentially flying Mako reactors. It was possible they were being slow and careful, but for all she knew, they were simply sapping one planet and moving on to the next. Worse, Sephiroth had taken at least three worlds. Not that she hadn't known what he was up to, but to hear it in such plain words, and see it expressed as three little angry red dots on a map made her mind go instantly numb. Innumerable lives were being consumed in premature judgement days at hands of someone completely unworthy to make that kind of call.
"Tifa," Santri gently coaxed her back into focus, "can you tell me more about your connection to Sephiroth?"
Hunched over slightly, Tifa began, "It started…it probably really started when I adopted a little boy back home. This kid was different; he—" She paused, distracted by a sharp itch on her wrist. The skin near her bangle had turned red, and tiny, pin-point blisters had formed. Once they were finished here, she'd have to show Della. It was probably an allergic reaction. "I'm sorry. This kid was someone that Sephiroth had created—a part of himself. He used that part to trick my friends and I into helping him." Tifa stopped again, sighing heavily. This was going to be impossible without explaining the Lifestream; without completely redefining their understanding of life and death.
But abruptly, the Admirals, Aron, and Della were no longer so interested in what she had to say. All five had risen from their places and were cautiously advancing on the window, moving past her as if she no longer existed.
"What the hell is that?" Della mumbled.
Whipping around, Tifa spotted what had drawn them out. From an indeterminate point in space, a long, arced blade of light was approaching the port. Descending rapidly relative to their view, it sheared through the largest dreadnought lengthwise upon contact, slicing it clean in half. Minor shockwaves emanated from the impact site, triggering small explosions in the two halves and sending chunks of debris hurtling into the adjacent ships nearby.
Without so much as a gasp, Ruri punched several icons on one of the tablets, and began issuing orders, "Control room, we've just gone hot. I want radar, lidar, and sonar scanning for the source of that strike immediately. As soon as you find it, power up every single siphon cannon we've erected to maximum intake and don't shut them down until we're sucking vacuum."
Holding herself, trembling, Tifa waited for that familiar, mocking voice to emerge in the back of her head. She waited to hear him say that it was time; that he was coming. To hear that there would be no reprieve for humankind, that their weapons would fail against him as all else had and always would, and that she should simply submit to him and follow.
Only a dead, heavy silence and her own bated breath greeted her.