No Light, but Darkness Visible
(or Pilot's Not Dead, Darn it!)
by Cecily
"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe"
--Milton, Paradise Lost
Chapter 1
47-12 Mark 25
Numb. Rage. Despair. All of it together. Scout didn't know what to feel. So the numbness grew--easiest to be frozen, helpless. Especially when the Captain had turned into a statue. Power's initial grief had fallen away, and now he moved with a practical efficiency. It was unreal. Scout wanted to shake him.
They'd never lost anyone before. They'd come close--they'd been lucky. Until now.
After loading up the skybike--Pilot's last gift--they took to the air. What else could they do but keep moving? Out of habit, Scout checked the comm system at his station. A blinking light on the display drew him out of his haze. With a sinking feeling, he realized what it meant.
The computer had recorded Pilot's last transmission.
He glanced at the Captain, who stared ahead without seeming to actually see anything. Scout wouldn't tell him. Maybe later. A few hours, or days.
In fact, he thought for a moment it might be better for everyone if he deleted it.
Almost against his will, though, he put on the headphones and punched in the replay command.
"No, Jon! Stay clear--"
The recording had captured the entire nightmare exchange. Scout had never heard the Captain sound so desperate. He'd never heard Pilot sound so scared.
But she was defiant, true to herself, right to the end. "Go to hell!" she shouted at the biodread. Then a click of a button, a roar, then cut to static.
Static. All that was left. But before that, Scout could almost use the sounds to work out exactly what had happened, where she'd been, how she'd made her stand. She'd have turned, then heard the whine as the biodread raised its weapon, the click as she activated the reactor's destruct, then a hum, then a roar, then--
He played the recording again, just the last three seconds. The click, then the hum--he assumed that was the explosion. But it was too close. There was something else happening.
He fed the recording into the analysis program. Filtered out identifiable sounds--voices, fire, static. What was left: a strangely familiar hum, with a whine rising in pitch. He gave the computer a command: identify.
The reply took only a second. 84 probability: digitization beam.
"You've got to be kidding," Scout murmured, disbelieving, unwilling to indulge in the slightest hope.
"Scout? Is something wrong?" the Captain said.
"Besides the obvious?" Scout said, then immediately added, "Sorry. It's just--I think I've found something."
"What is it?"
Scout hesitated. This was going to be tough. Saying the words, playing the recording--he took a deep breath. "The comm captured a recording of that last transmission. There was an anomaly, right at the end. Here, let me play it for you--"
"Don't." Power's voice was rough. "I don't think--"
Scout looked at him. "Just the last few seconds. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't important."
The Captain dropped his gaze and nodded. Scout touched the button. "Go to hell!" Pilot yelled again, then the whine, then the static.
Scout continued. "Here's the same thing, with everything filtered out but that last whine." He played it again. Over the speakers, in the open, the sound was unmistakable.
Tank said, "I've heard that before."
Hawk glanced at Tank, then at Scout, his jaw open, amazed. "Is that what I think it is?"
Power stared. "Sergeant Baker, what are you implying?"
"There's a chance--if she was digitized, if the biodread's memory banks survived the explosion--there's a chance she's alive."
The rumble of the ship's engines filled the silence. A long silence. Scout's mind was still numb. He couldn't make the choice--decide whether to latch on to the faint piece of evidence and take action. The odds were too much. Or too little.
"How much of a chance?" Power said.
Scout swallowed. "A small chance."
Said out loud, the choice wasn't hard at all.
"Hawk," the Captain said. "Turn the ship around. We'll land. Off-load the skybikes. We can sneak through a transit gate, to the base. See what's left."
Power spoke with unnatural calm, his voice flat, like a man who was numb. They all had to stay numb for a little while longer. They had work to do.
Time enough later to beat his fists against a wall.
The ship banked and rocketed ahead.
-------------------
They either worked, or they gave into rage. So they worked, calmly and silently. Hawk flew in his suit, the others rode skybikes. The transit gate into the base had been cut off by the explosion. They jumped in as close as they could, then rode hard the rest of the way, as fast as they could.
An hour and ten minutes after the explosion, they arrived at the mountain ridge south of the base. Too long. Dread would send troops to scavenge the place. It was a race and they'd already taken too long.
They parked the bikes and climbed the ridge to an overlook. Hawk was already there and waiting, peering through a set of binoculars at the base--at where the base used to be.
The mountainside had a crater, like a giant had come along and scooped out a handful of rock. Half of the mountain was gone--the hole where the base had rested. It wasn't their base anymore. It was a pile of anonymous debris.
Scout activated the telescopic function on his face shield. Sure enough, Dread had troops here already. Biomechs crawled over the site, commanded by overunits in protective radiation suits. They kicked their way through broken sheets of metal and tangled wires, some of them still burning, desecrating the base's grave, swarming like maggots.
Hawk handed the binoculars to the Captain. Scout watched for his reaction. The Captain gazed--but didn't react. Still not feeling. His whole life reduced to ash, Pilot missing, and he was stone.
"Scout, scan the area. Any sign of the biodread, any sign of life. Any sign of Pilot."
The energy readings were thick and scattered. Radiation from the destroyed reactor covered the crater. He filtered out what he could and found a familiar signature--a biodread transmission.
"Captain, I'm picking up a trace of Blastarr. I think it survived."
"There--there it is."
The Captain pointed. A squad of biomechs carried pieces--shining, gleaming pieces of quicksilver metal. Biodread parts.
Hawk said, "They wouldn't be in there if there wasn't something to salvage."
"So we go in," Tank said. "Hit them hard. Take it from them."
The Captain handed the binoculars back to Hawk. "No."
They all turned to him. Scout said, "We're not going in?"
"No." Cold as ice.
Now, the dam burst. The numbness slipped, replaced by rage. "And why exactly not, sir?"
"It's not the time or place."
Scout nearly screamed. "What do you mean, not the time or place? We've hit twice as many troops as this, places twice as fortified. We've attacked Volcania! Don't you want her back?"
The Captain lunged at him. Scout didn't have a chance to blink before Power grabbed the neck of his armor and slammed him back against the rock.
"Even if we can recover the biodread, even if we can contain it after it regenerates, which is highly doubtful given our current situation, even then we have no way of accessing its memory banks and retrieving what's inside. We don't have the technology to rematerialize her safely. I want her back more than you will ever know but we have to let her go. We have to let Dread take her. Then we go after her. We have to wait. Do you understand?"
Scout nodded warily.
The Captain gave him a last angry shove, then slid down the hill, away from them.
Scout started to go after him. "Captain!"
Hawk and Tank each grabbed one of his arms to stop him. "Let him go," Hawk said. "Just let him go for now."
They all stared after the Captain. Tank said, "I don't know how we're going to get through this one."
Scout knew exactly what he meant. They'd been through hell, the five of them. At least, it had seemed like hell at the time. But this was something else entirely. He looked back to the ruins of the base.
"I'm going in," Scout said, resolved.
Hawk growled at him. "No. The Captain's right. I hate it as much as you do, but he's right."
Scout shook his head. "I can sneak in there. Plant a homing transmitter with the biodread so we know where it ends up. Take a close up scan of the ruins. Make sure she really isn't there." Make sure there was no body, no trace of remains. He didn't want to say the words. "Just give me twenty minutes."
He punched a series of buttons on his wrist control panel. A holographic image of a biomech shimmered into place over his power suit.
"You have fifteen," Hawk said.
Scout gave him a thumbs up, then hopped over the ridge and slid down into the still-smoking crater.
Fifteen minutes later, three skybikes and a winged human figure were airborn, cruising low to the ground, out of the grasping reach of Dread's troops' radar.
Scout had found no sign of human remains in the ruins.