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Time 2577, December 13
Location : Somewhere in hyperspace
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Jake got a few delightful hours of anxiety and unanswered questions. The android had only given a warning that Shadhahvar shouldn't touch anything important looking before disappearing and muttered something about engines. Kirindi had glomped him quickly before gathering some bandage — that better be acid proof — to tend to her sister in cargo bay.
What little he did know was meager. He was in a cheap adventure story where he had escaped horrific death at the hands of mad scientists performing illegal experiments on alien lifeforms in a secret laboratory. There was no way to describe this without cliché adjectives. He decided it was a happier occupation to describe cliché adjectives to whatever the hell it was that was happening outside of the window. Seriously, aurora like flashes and no tacky stars or shiny nebulas? Most disappointing cruise view ever.
Sadly, that also the only source of light, so he couldn't exactly go catch up on the news or follow a fancy course. 921-Y had rerouted most of the second generator to some sort of alternate engine, and power was on reserve otherwise as much as possible. At least the heating was on in this area and he'd been able to get a cup of coffee.
Or more precisely, he was on his second pot. The idea of falling asleep had obtained an eerie tint.
He must have been drifting away anyway, because when he heard something too close by, he startled awake. The pot clattered on the ground. Instinctively he wanted to swear at Shadhahvar for having woken him, but that hope was lost. It wasn't Shadhahvar who stood before his table.
The alien drone softly swayed its tail as it loomed over him, no details visible as it was only outlined by the bizarre lights. Jake felt like a mouse, the cat before him annoyed that he didn't run and play. What would it do, without the chimera girls around?
Something dropped on the table before him, and the drone lowered itself on its haunches. Now he had light again, Jake saw it was a candle and a box of matches.
Well ... that was surprisingly useful and non-lethal.
And then quick as a breeze, the drone had shot off into the dark.
Having nothing better to do, Jake lit the candle, and after a decently sized hesitation — there was drool all over the candle, he realized too late — he followed the drone.
Like a rat it skittered ahead of him. Jake had the feeling it could be just as quiet, but that it was making noise so he could follow. In the few glimpses he saw of it in the candlelight, he saw the solid hide slick with secretion, which gave him a lurching disgust. He realized he would have felt like this from the moment he laid eyes on these things, but any sickening sensation had been cancelled out by the mental touch of Kirindi. She didn't think they were disgusting, so neither did he. With her attention to the hivemind now mostly on her sister, Jake became a little more like himself again. This disturbed him increasingly, but that feeling never reached heights.
He stumbled over something. Looking down, his foot had caught in a heap of clothing. A little further away lay an open suitcase.
The drone hissed impatiently and Jake quickly went on. Their destination followed the trail of looted luggage to the room Shadhahvar had been assigned.
The door was closed and the drone was trying to type an access code with its long fingers. The code kept being rejected, and he tried new variants. When Jake wondered what was going on, the answer was slung into his mind : Shadhahvar sucked at telepathy and didn't manage to transfer the entrance code.
Jake walked up and typed the correct one.
The door itself may have opened silently, but on cue screaming burst from the room. Shadhahvar had shot up from the bed and stared wide eyed at the drone. Her flailing hand had knocked a candle over and the sheets were catching fire. Instinctively Jake dove for the bed and tore off the sheets, causing Shadhahvar to tumble to the ground.
Bathroom, bathroom ... he spotted the door, shoved it open and threw the sheets in the shower. Water was fortunately not off here. He stood there for a bit, watching the flames die off.
"Jake, make him stop that," Shadhahvar whimpered behind him.
Curious, Jake returned to the main room. The scene hadn't changed much, Shadhahvar still sat on the ground and the drone stood in the door as motionless as a statue.
"What? He's not doing anything."
"That..." she raised her hand and waved at the drone's head. "...the echo thingy. In my head."
"Echo...thingy?" asked Jake, and it took a second before he understood. "Shadhahvar, try to listen. What is he saying?"
"Saying? Nah, its just this really annoying sound."
"Hm-hm. Shadey, come on, I want to test something." He held out a hand to help her stand.
"Wha? Where to? I don't want to leave, I'm fine here. The rest of the ship freaks me out, it has no lights."
"No, we're not going anywhere. Do you know what a hive mind is?"
"No..." said the woman, finally turning her eyes towards him. "What does it want from me?"
"Just relax, I read about this once," he said. It wasn't like her brain could be damaged much more.
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Kirindi had a few memories that were not quite her own, yet they had never belonged to another body. Shioying had liked to make dolls from rags she found, and Kirindi had continued this ritual. The things she made dolls off though were quite different. Shioying had made friends from her imagination and her stories, which Kirindi felt no need to. She had her hive, so she made those in her hive, and the dolls were no less fantastical for this reason.
She had always felt she had a sister alive somewhere, but hadn't known what she had looked like until today, so she hadn't been able to make her a doll. It was important her big sister was initiated as quickly as possible, now she knew how important the dolls were. Couldn't feel left out.
The doll was made off towel, for now, and not as nice as it could have been if she had material straight from the market. However, it would do the trick. She would upgrade it later. With a sense of pride she presented it to her sister, but she couldn't clearly see the results. Carefully, Kirindi placed it in her large hand. With thick, slow fingers, her sister felt the gift. It confused her a great deal, that Kirindi would place so much meaning behind the object, but at the same time, she understood the meaning existed.
Part of that meaning was diversion. Her sister had a single track mind and now the joy of finding kin turned to the overpowering acceptance of the natural state, her mind turned back to her pain. Enigma II had taken a heavy toll on her and she was not healing as quickly as Kirindi knew she should be able to.
Her sister opened her mouth, a rasping, hiccuping sound coming out softly. One might have mistaken it for laughter, but Kirindi knew her sister to be attempting a word. Her sister didn't communicate in clear words, but in feelings and memories in order to indicate things. The traitor Jonah had never taught her sufficiently.
Kirindi tried to decipher it, but instead of her sister she became aware of another mental sound. It had no physical origin, existing only in her brain and didn't last long. She decided to ignore it, but the sound returned with persistence. It faded again and then returned in intervals. Kirindi had patience, but her sister less so. She wanted it to stop now.
Kirindi leaned her forehead against that of her sister briefly, intoning her to calmness, then darted out of the cargo bay. Leaving her sister now felt wrong, she was so weak, but Kirindi couldn't do much else for her than make that sound stop.
As the distance increased and she sharpened her focus, she found the source. Shadhahvar's room.
The door was open, the walls holding more movement through flickering candles than from the creatures in the room.
Shadhavar was covered in weird colors on the bed and had her eyes closed while making a strange throaty noise. That was perfectly normal, according to Jake's memory she always slept like that. Jake was aside of her, failing to end his boredom by reading one of Shadhahvar's magazines. Aside of the bed, the drone was reading a digital book about philosophy.
Huh. Kirindi lived near an interstellar market, she had seen her share of diversity. A kainde amedha showing that kind of interest was still too much out there.
"Well, that took its time," Jake said.
Kirindi tore her eyes from the drone and tilted her head slightly. "What did?"
"Your response. He's been producing some sort of hive calling for a while now. It actually lulled Shadey to sleep, we used her to provide the voice."
"We only heard it a few minutes ago," Kirindi said. "It's very annoying."
Jake sighed. "I guess it needs fine-tuning? Anyway, now you're here-"
"He needs to stop doing it," Kirindi hissed at the unresponsive drone. Mentally, she assaulted the drone. Within seconds, Shadhahvar woke with a start, the drone launched itself at Kirindi. She had not expected this sudden hostility and scrambled out the door. The drone threw her to the ground with a loud shriek, making it known it did not appreciate anyone but its queen to give it a command.
An ordinary drone would have continued to solidify this statement by tearing her apart, but this one just retreated back into the room.
"Holy crap, what just happened?" Jake asked, barely audible below Shadhahvar's screaming.
Kirindi mentally collected herself and stood back up. She became away of Jake's thoughts, he was annoyed this hadn't gone as intended ...
What had been the intention, she silently asked.
He appeared in the doorway and smiled apologetically, his new fear ebbing away under pressure from the drone's voice in the hivemind.
"You know, we need to talk. He's been telling us a lot of things, if you could just listen for a while..."
It did make sense. In their current little hivemind, the drone was the only other naturally skilled user, and she had been more occupied with her sister than anything. It troubled her that she had competition with agency of its own, when a proper hive only had one leader.
However, her personal leader was not here, and she could not easily tell him what had transpired and expect only advice. He's be more than a little angry to learn that there were actual kainde amedha in their hivemind now. Her best bet was to negotiate, as unnatural as that was. If it was using Jake as proxy, then fine. Jake was more inclined towards her kind of hivemind than he was to that of the drone, she could listen to him and not expect trouble.
She stepped back into the room and sat down on the bed. Shadhahvar had stopped screaming, but her mind still was an unpleasant jumble, even more so since the drone found it easiest to use her as modem. Jake took a seat in one of the chairs and needed a moment to orient his thoughts.
"Sarah was tagged. After you left her, some guy named Jonah returned to his room and placed a chip in her stomach, wanting to make sure his colleagues didn't take her anywhere where he couldn't find her," Jake said. Accompanying this were the disorientating memories of the drone and Sarah's experiences, filtered through the mind of a creature that had no eyes. It was hard to discern, but the information Jake said wasn't in those memories. She let her distrust be known to Jake, expecting further explanation.
"His mother seems to have seen it and told him. Now, please listen, there is more."
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921-Y was a highly advanced android with full capability to adapt to new information and integrate it in ways superior to humans. Confusion was not an emotion he needed beyond simulation, so when his data reached a difficult spot, he just patiently waited it out. He did not often get in this state, and now that he was, he found that his programming for patience was lacking.
A few minutes ago, Jake had dropped by and told him of new developments. Apparently, he and Shadhahvar had persuaded Kirindi to fully accept the drone into her hivemind and she had learned very unsettling things from this.
He continued working in a mostly aimless attempt to fix optimizize the state of the ship while muling it over in his minds. The facts were simple but had little place with the mass of other facts. Internecivus Raptus were not supposed to be more than highly intelligent animals. They didn't do things like helping people escape. While record existed of the Queen Mother recruiting humans into her hivemind for purposes, that situation hardly applied here in a way that could explain the drone's behavior. It had not attempted to make them free it's queen, yet according to Jake, this queen existed. She was alive and well on Enigma II, which coincided with the data he had : the drone's mother was in fact preserved, if in cryogenic sleep.
Repeat, cryogenic sleep. She shouldn't be able to do things like telepathically finding out about transmitters in human bodies that might betray her escaping drone in the future. She shouldn't be able to comprehend that idea of transmitters at all, since according to the files she'd been plucked from a wild world and had no previous contact with human technology.
All xenomorphs had advanced sentience, but sapience was another thing. They appeared to have a genetic block against this kind of evolution, otherwise they would inherit matching intelligence from their host bodies. They used their acid blood, but didn't use guns. They set traps, they didn't build bombs. They telepathically invaded dreams, but didn't read minds and learn the code to cargo bay doors.
So if no ordinary xenomorph drone, what did he had aboard here?
Whatever it was, he couldn't write about it in his rapport.
If a sapient xenomorph queen existed who was so sharp, despite cryogenic sleep, that she could figure out the code of a door and pass it to her drone, then she would know about a lot more, like the bomb he had placed. The one that would kill her if it went off. That would give her proper impetus to tell the humans about it, something that would only be hindered by the humans using drugs and implants.
Perhaps that could explain why the queen had ordered her drone to help. She would know that the Philidon was a destruct mechanism installed, in case the mission failed and tracks needed to be covered. Kirindi knew this, and she did not eagerly keep secrets in her hivemind.
If he presumed that Kirindi's knowledge was available to that queen, then said queen would know she benefited from her drone helping them. It would extend her life, in essence. Sarah being declined escape would prevent the drone being tracked to Kiyasumeni, and thus Enigma II wouldn't put a fire below those who had planted the bomb, prompting them to detonate sooner.
If the queen could plan to this advanced level, she probably also had a plan to escape from Enigma II. All going on this hypothetical intelligence, it would suit such a plan to have Auton allies. The Auton would not easily ally with a xenomorph, off course, but they already were allied with Kirindi and she now seemed to trust the drone, if Jake's words were anything to go by.
Typical. Off course the simple humans and the partial xenomorph would now ascribe trustworthiness to the drone. Honesty had a tendency to inspire this in natural creatures, which was a social construct rather than a feat of logic. True, an often useful social construct, but ultimately honesty didn't mean much. The honest could still deceive and harm in other ways. Auton were more cautious with giving trust.
Here it was that he ran into a personal glitch. His duty was to be honest to his superiors, but the knowledge of their response hampered this inclination. He knew as much as they would know the threat of a sapient xenomorph queen. Their lack of sapience was the one thing that prevented the xenomorph from being the dominant species in the galaxy. Knowing a queen existed with sapience would be a good reason to detonate the bomb ahead of schedule.
And yet they already had xenomorph on their side, if indirectly. Despite her appearances, Kirindi had the silicones and exoskeleton of a xenomorph, and the single track hivemind that belonged to it. Wouldn't it be interesting if the silicone Auton could ally with the silicone xenomorph?
Anchored to the controls of the ship as he was, he couldn't go to the cargo bay of the ship to see what was going on there, but an audio channels was open. A while ago, Kirindi had returned there together with Shadhahvar and the drone, and now Jake had joined them.
Sometimes, he heard them laugh.
How much would it harm for him to gather more information about this situation before telling? Hadn't he been equipped with personality for such decisions?
Dishonesty was an option right now. It was ironic he would choose it to be able to find out how reliable mortal trust was.
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When Kirindi handed him a clumsily made rag doll in his image, Jake had initially thought it was some sort of joke. Perhaps it was the stitchy grin that inspired that idea, but through the creeping knowledge of the hivemind, Jake became aware of Kirindi's offended response. For her, this was a more potent social ritual than anything else, perhaps the only one she believed in. How does one apologize telepathically?
"Wow, you're really good at this, Kiri!" said Shadhahvar, peeking over Jake's shoulder. "That is so Jake!"
With absurd quickness, Kirindi's sour mood vanished. She smiled at Shadhahvar and grabbed cloth for the next doll. Her sister's massive head hovered above her, occasionally making grunting noises as Kirindi worked.
Shadhahvar ran off again, scourging through the cargo pay in the hopes of finding a button that responded. Considering she wasn't whining out of boredom, Jake guessed the hivemind was in full swing. He himself was pleasantly calm and had no qualms about just sitting here and watching the two sisters. This calmness lasted until Kirindi had finished Shadhahvar's doll, and the subject of dollification came to see.
"I don't have brown hair! Its black when I paint it and auburn when I don't! And my eyes aren't just blue, they are sky azure! You got sky azure paint right there! And my breasts aren't this small either! And the clothes are-ouch!" She rubbed her head where Jake had janked on her hair.
Kirindi was strangely enough less offended at this response. He didn't understand, but apparently he communicated that poorly or she wasn't interested in explaining. There was a distinct sense of not important. Kirindi didn't seem like the person to question why she was the way she was.
At this, her dark eyes suddenly looked up.
"I know myself well enough. Maybe you should question yourself, for I merely responded to you and to her on base of what I knew of you."
She didn't wait for a response and turned all her attention to the next doll, which would be the drone.
Wanting to rid of the uncomfortable feeling he was left with, Jake asked, ""So...how do you name him?"
With a determined shake of her head, she said, "I don't do naming. I never do naming. Parents only do naming. I am not parent."
"Oh ... that again, I remember now. So, this guy, Kargaate, he's your dad?" Jake was puzzled, 921-Y talked about Kirindi as a chimera : something that was constructed, so perhaps it wasn't her real father and...
A loud beep from a nearby intercom sounded as the screen flicked on.
"You'll have to excuse me for listening. Kirindi, you cannot tell Karga'te about this drone, or anyone else for that matter," the android said.
Kirindi looked up with surprise, then her face turn to sadness. "I dislike to lie to him."
"You lied in order to get on this mission."
"No, I just didn't tell where I was going or for how long."
"Listen, none of you can tell anything about this creature. I want you to come up in a while and we will discuss what we will tell my superiors."
Kirindi frowned. "You want to hide him, why?"
"Do you agree that he should live?"
"Yes," Kirindi said without hesitation, while Jake was just starting to wonder what was best. "He will stay nameless then."
Jake was pretty sure that was a very annoyed android. "Kirindi, for practical purposes I will refer to the drone as Odygos. What I'm about to do to my memory files will require designations.
"Does this guy have some sort of allergy against explaining things when it's time for that?" Jake asked.
Shadhahvar scratched her head, then reached a conclusion. "No, that's a trick question! Androids cannot have allergies!"
"Let's just go." He stood up and pulled Shadhahvar along, but Kirindi just continued with the doll.
Odygos. She had decided to accept the name on the rationale that since the android took a protective role, he could be considered a parent.
Jake lingered in the doorway, forgotten by Shadhahvar as she ran ahead.
"Hey, Kirindi, what will happen if your father finds out?"
She looked up again, this time there was pain on her face.
"The first thing he asked of me was that I do not become like the kainde amedha. He won't understand that this drone doesn't mean I'm not growing a hive."
"But you're not starting a hive. It's just one drone and he doesn't even obey you."
There wasn't just one drone, she let him know. There would be more. There was a plan. He'd been told the details, but lacked the instinct to understand the broad strokes, he had no sense to recognize the call of a queen. It was like seeing the waves on the surface of the ocean only, while these creature before him could feel the force that drove the waters.
Kirindi half stood to brush her forehead against her sister's, they came to a decision. At the same time, the drone — Odygos stood up and approached a nearby cryotube, opening it.
Out came a single orincubix, slithering across the floor towards the queen chimera. Kirindi bent down and let it walk across her arm, up to her shoulders. It seemed for a moment as if it would latch onto her face, but then lost interest in her. Jumping from Kirindi to her sister, the orincubix latched onto the large chimera's face, though this was a lot harder than with a small human face. It only stayed there for a moment, just long enough for Jake to become worried at this strange event.
When it let go again and returned to Odygos, Kirindi smiled. "It's going to be alright. My sister's been given help, to become more stable now."
"It didn't implant anything?"
"Just released nanotech. The sort that probes the body and figures out what's useful. With children from his Mother, this process can do more."
She stood up and walked up to him. "Come, 921-Y waits."
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She hadn't refused to talk to the drone, nor had her opinion changed because she had heard the real reason Sarah had not been allowed on board.
In fact, she and her sister had heard the real real reason, unlike Shadhahvar and Jake. It wasn't a lie that Sarah was a liability, but it was more true that she was useful elsewhere. Nothing about this all had changed her opinion of the drone. He and his mother were kainde amedha, and they sacrifices as they saw fit.
The way they sacrificed was different, however, and that they understood the consequences meant something. Odygos had apologizied, for as far as a kainde amedha could do this. It meant nothing to him and he possessed no regret, but the gesture was understood. If anything, the fact he mentally had apologized for doing that to Sarah meant that he could learn what it really meant.
This meant he was something like her after all, not just a monster.
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