· · · · · · ·

May 23, 2578

Location : Enigma II

· · · · · · ·

"No, it's called ace," Jay said, holding up the card.

"Jayce," Lemura mumbled. She remembered to smile this time, but it appeared as a toothy.

"Whatever," he said through gritted teeth. Sarah considered not telling Lemura he was uncomfortable, but that wouldn't be honest.

Lemura's face and mind fell the moment she learned, she didn't know how to do better. Sarah promised she'd get the hang of expression, and Jay would get used to it anyway.

Where Sarah only got glimmers of information with others, the exchange between her and Lemura was much clearer and went both directions. In a way she had to give up privacy, but that was a compromise she was willing to make. Unlike Utara, Lemura wouldn't be prying information from her mind for malicious purposes.

Right now, Lemura and Jay had the opposite problem. Jay had a lot of catching up to do and Lemura needed to learn to engage with minds not Sarah and not while dreaming. So, she gave them a little incentive to pick up things in the form of a game. Bison played a hand too, with Sarah sitting by thinking very openly about his cards to see whether the others would pick anything up.

If not for this, none of them would even be playing cards, but Lemura made things different in more ways than just getting Jay into the hive mind. Though Lemura learned far quicker than any human child, she still had to be raised. Understanding language didn't make her understand the importance of humanity, of rules, of why they couldn't just go up and kill Jonah — the latter some resident impulse her mother must have. Especially that had to be suppressed. As it stood, Lemura barely grasped that attacking Jay the way she'd done was wrong.

Figuring card names and rules gave her mind things to do other than listening to xenomorph drive too. Card play fascinated Lemura not because of winning things, but the method of it. Playing against someone whom you are mentally linked to to was double tricky, cause of keeping secrets.

Double bonus, it got Jay up to date with his new status as telepathic. He still struggled against comic book ideas of how thoughts and telepathy worked, though he was unusually apt at picking up extra things. Surface thoughts like what was in anyone's hands he missed more easily than Lemura, but he picked up broad strokes even Sarah didn't get, like feelings and desire. Lemura wanting to jump on the table and bounce wasn't the kind of thing Sarah picked up from the far away Kirindi and Ti'chai-di. Some time, once they were free, she'd have to figure out why it was different per brain.

Probably too much, considering by now Jay slumped in his chair and the cards lay in his hands unsteady.

"Are you alright?" Bison asked.

"It's hard. I think I'm at my limit of information processing," Jay said. "Can you get me something sugary to drink?"

Bison was half up already by the time Jay was done talking and needed no hints to guess what Jay would want, while Sarah could't tell with her telepathy. Yet.

Jay's exhaustion from this struck Sarah as odd, till she remembered some distant article on how too much thought is exhausting to explain why some workers got tired just from talking a lot. It seemed Noasyvé had upgraded her brain to be able to handle more. Jay might catch up after he'd had an upgrade.

What was he even getting overloaded by?

Maybe Lemura? Sarah now noticed the child's small fingers clutch into the cards, when she was so careful before.

"Sarah, is something wrong?" Jay stuttered.

"Maybe ... Jay, how do you feel?"

"Angry ... irritated ..." Jay muttered.

"You are?" Bison asked. "Why?"

No, someone else was. Sarah didn't catch it as strongly, but it was there : a prevailing sense of wrong, out of order, stop doing that.

Leave my job to me.

Eliath?

Sarah focused all her own awareness on Karga'te, on Eliath, trying to get them to move, stop moving, anything — Syvé, what went wrong, what could she do? Do something!

Lemura twitched in her seat.

Jay's eyes turned wide. "Wait."

Lemura turned her head to Bison, bared her fangs and jumped.

Just barely, Sarah hooked her arm around Lemura. While Jay got before Bison, she tripped over a fallen chair as she scrambled against the wall.

Not bother to right herself, she pulled Lemura close, refusing to cave to the trashing or her own sudden heartbeats.

Jay kept an eye on Lemura all along, while trying to see whether Bison was okay. Bison himself repeatedly said as much, shaken but not very surprised.

"That thing should be locked up!" Jay spat.

"Calm down, it wasn't her!"

"Then what was it?" Jay shrieked. "It felt like it'd kill!"

"~ One of the drones in our hive, Eliath. He ...has trouble with developing individuality. He got triggered by something, Lemura copied it. Right now, Bison seems most threatening cause he's blanked out, ~" Sarah said. "~ Lemura is young and has sensitive instincts, she lived his aggression as if it were her own. ~"

And maybe Jay did too. He paced to the other end of the room, always between her and Bison. More tense than she'd ever seen him. "Is this gonna happen to us?"

"No," Sarah said. "We are adults and we don't have prominent mental instabilities due to mixed nature and warped conception."

"Sure we don't. We just live in Madness Central ... how the hell does this even work? It takes radio waves years to cross regular space! Even if we use hyperdrive or warp space, it takes time! How does telepathy work?"

"I don't know. There's some sort of field unbound by regular space." Sarah wanted to gesture, but Lemura still struggled. It wasn't getting better.

"What's gonna happen if that queen wakes up and starts using it all the way? There's something here, you know. It's always here. The pressure. What are we gonna be under her?"

Sarah froze up. That was a very good question.

Right then, Lemura shot out of her grasp. Jay stepped in the way, but Bison grabbed a chair, pushed past him and smacked Lemura out of mid air, throwing her near the door.

Lemura got up and hissed, but didn't attack again. She turned tail and ran from the room.

Jay quickly closed the door behind her with shaking hands. "Sarah, please, what's going to happen?"

"I don't know. It ... it can't be worse than what humans or Utara are doing. Let's worry about it later."

"What if it's too late?"

"Okay, Jay, that's enough. Fretting is not going to help us." Sarah took his arm and coaxed him to sit down. "I'm going to find Lemura now. I'll close the door if that makes you feel safer."

He nodded without looking up from the floor. Sarah patted his shoulder, gave a hopefully assuring look to Bison, and left.

Once the door clicked shut, a sense of loneliness settled. People weren't gone, they were never alone, but something about physical presence was different. You can see more, could prove more.

That's why she wanted to find Lemura before they talked. For her sake and Sarah's own, because the thing that was wrongly called humanity might be slipping. Unlike the biomechanoids, humans needed touch to connect with each other too.

Absently, Sarah noticed she her own was a little off. Urgency gone, she had no after effects. Panic wasn't useful now, true, but she wondered where the feeling had gone.

Rather, her mind filled with information from Kirindi and Ti'chai-di, prioritizing that over anything.

Karga'te wanted to know what had happened. She ... she couldn't tell whether what she replied was her own theory or inspired by Noasyvé's distant mind. Odygos and Eliath weren't quite right in the head, so different, so in need of guidance. He should be giving that, just like Sarah did to Lemura.

Noasyvé didn't trust her own children to help her escape right, nor to not reveal anything unwanted. She rather stayed and hope for outside help than risk letting her children gestate. Someone had to control them there. The Auton wouldn't like hearing this, so Karga'te had to get this under control for more than just Noasyvé's escape.

She had to get control too.

· · · · · · ·

Once a bathroom, more of a pool, now it was a hospital for Odygos. This involves some spit to thicken the water, dumping Odygos in it, and not checking the resin from overgrowing everything. The last one was Kirindi's person of flowers by the bed — the only non Eliath related opinion she'd expressed since it happened.

Karga'te thought it redundant since he'd be fine soon, but Ti'chai-di thought he'd need longer. Karga'te lacked an exoskeleton to reconfigure and could just scar tissue over everything and still function.

Really now? Great, then Odygos wouldn't be all over this floor with whatever existential dread he'd get once Sarah slash purpose deprivation kicked in again. That was bound to happen now that Sarah apparently had an incident of her own.

Kirindi insisted that was resonance from Eliath's aggression, since Lemura had aggressive instincts of her own to cope with. All the more reason to see what could be done about Eliath now.

Any time now.

He was still in the living room, trying to untangle the incompetent mess he got from that new guy in the hive mind, Sarah's dry bursts of information and constant reminders to handle Eliath, and his own thoughts on Kirindi.

All her instant perfect forgiveness made even less sense now. What Karga'te did out of the hivemind didn't seem to affect her opinion, but what Eliath did while within the same hivemind as Odygos unsettled her to the core. She was distracted, she constantly asked what Eliath was going to do, she didn't create anything, even her dreams were in chaos. She could not bear to continue holding it against Eliath because that violated the hive unity she wished for, yet it felt like a violation to her that he'd done something to disturb this unity and harm a member. It scared her on a level she didn't know and that Karga'te had no word for. It wasn't honor, integrity, or even outright personal.

Sarah kept going on about control, but what did that even help? Eliath and Odygos were brothers, they should be better at that. You didn't seek to control family.

Then again, Eliath and Odygos were in no place to be called family from him.

Sarah wasn't helpful here, so he shut her out. Her point of view wasn't very helpful anyway, she was too human.

Hmm ... what was Eliath's point of view? Kirindi had explained her side, but Karga'te didn't actually know from himself.

"~ Kirindi, can you get Eliath to tell me directly why he thinks he did that? ~"

She couldn't, but she swore that the answer was that he didn't know how to deal with Odygos right then and there.

"~ You don't know how to deal with Eliath either and you're not hurting him now, are you? ~"

That should have gone on to but you hurt me when you thought you had a good reason. She didn't even call it to mind, or maybe she was good at hiding this. Just how much of her thinking did she regulate around not getting him worked up over something? He didn't know how to deal with that either.

The door clicked up and then close again as Jake and Shadhahvar returned. Jake was already up to date, yet still felt the need to ask, "Man, how could Eliath just do that? Aren't they part of the same hive thing?"

Karga'te rolled his eyes.

"No, those are supposed to all thing alike. Its not like with the hardmeat, and it's not like with—" Jake was thinking about dogs in a pack, who fight but not try to destroy each other so randomly. "... what, were you expecting, dogs?" Karga'te said.

Jake shrugged. "Badly raised dogs rebel."

Eliath let it be known that almost made it worth figuring out laughter. He was the rebellious one? Karga'te had nearly killed Kirindi, who had kept Eliath and Odygos a secret because Karga'te could not be trusted to answer to their Mother. He'd have killed her for being right about him.

"~ Stop reminding me. ~" Karga'te snarled. Fine.

He called the sisters over, they were heading out.

Once at the bottom of the pillar, Karga'te climbed on Ti'chai-di's back, which he had to share with a persistent Shadhahvar who for some reason carried popcorn. Kirindi went on Eliath's back so he looked less scary to onlookers. It didn't seemed effective. Hell, once they reached the public roads, the number of people moving aside in sheer horror rather stood out. More than than usual.

According to Kirindi, news that Eliath had attacked one of his own had spread like wildfire, and squashed xenomorph was a meme already.

Once they reached the public roads, the number of people moving aside in sheer horror rather stood out. More than than usual.

Karga'te bonked into Hrugheeit's mental space to get it to warn people they were passing to the outer pillar.

Hrugheeit said, "~ Oh, I'm sure people are used to our new guards by now. ~"

"~ Which is why they're so peacefully running away. Yep, just look at that. Only three out of four are seriously considering to shoot at us if we get too close. ~"

"~ They're just a bit fidgety after hearing about the elevator incident. ~"

Karga'te groaned and gave up. Hrugheeit knew bloody well what the situation was and just was cursed with an eternally optimistic personality. Seriously, that worm wasn't normal.

"~ Ah yes, my kind often marvels at that blessing of living like an eternal grouch, but us poor souls will never experience it. It's really lonely, being one of the few species for whom cynicism is actually detrimental. ~"

"~ If you're not useful, then shut up. ~"

"~ I'll be happy to accept this conceding of defeat! ~"

"~ Whatever. ~"

"~ What are you doing anyway? ~"

Kirindi took the word, "~ Father wants to try whether Eliath can be a dog. ~"

"~ Duly noted in the public registers. ~"

Karga'te groaned and asked Kirindi to not talk to it any further, and keep Shadhahvar from the same or she'd be kicked off.

Between the outer most pillar and the rainforest was a barren area divided between picnic spots, junk stashes and emergency landings. They went into the junk section.

Once below a wrecked ship and between stacked crates, where no fliers could see or record them, Karga'te took position on one end. Kirindi and Eliath were opposite of him a hundred meter away or so.

Eliath sat down next to Kirindi, and stayed there when Karga'te called Kirindi to him. Ti'chai-di stayed near her, while Shadhahvar started eating her popcorn on a giant pipe.

Karga'te crossed his arms, looked over at the thing eager to kill him and was held back by the sheer absurdity of the situation. He was going to try training a xenomorph?

As a yautja, he was raised to believe in physical power above all. That thoughts alone could hold powers was far beyond that, in the realm of fantasy or the tools of lesser civilizations. Well, damn all that. He'd not cared that he had no idea when he started training ziou'ra. He would do this.

Eliath was stupid anyway, it shouldn't be hard.

Kirindi pulled at one of his dreads. "It's just that Eliath isn't curious, so he misses a lot."

Exactly. Stupid.

"No, he can be creative, he just doesn't get everywhere. I think it's like a maze in the mind. Odygos enters mazes all the time so he spent more time learning, Eliath only enters mind mazes when he needs something. So Odygos knows stuff better."

Huh. Kinda like how yautja doctrine kept people from thinking too hard about what their hunting achieved.

He buried his face in a hand. Like himself.

"Kirindi, can you get him to go from underneath this ship, onto that stack of crates?"

"Uh ..." She asked Eliath in her quiet way.

Eliath didn't budge.

"He ... he really doesn't want to. He knows it's an order from you. I'm not even sure he'd listen if it wasn't, but I don't ask him pointless stuff."

That figured.

Eliath was capable of functioning as part of the city's raid team. He'd take orders if they came in context of survival here, but it wasn't obedience, let alone loyalty. There had to be something to it.

"~ Kirindi, try to get him to do it once more. Ti'chai-di, you need to lend her your range and push ~," he said.

So she did, this time with the hum undertone of Ti'chai-di.

Unlike before, Eliath didn't sit still while denial. He stood up, sat back down again and ... started wagging his tail.

Okay, he was mocking now.

Odygos from his miserable pool piped into say Eliath wanted dogs explained, so he did.

"~ Don't you have a damn problem with what he did to you? ~"

Odygos informed him it hurt like hell, but Eliath was just stupid and had to be lived with.

Yeah, right. The thing that despised frivolities was bothering with mockery now, Karga'te didn't buy it.

Odygos thought Eliath wasn't going to do something useless, and Karga'te was always useless.

That was somewhat more helpful, actually.

There had to be some trick to making a command seem urgent or important. Once Eliath got simple things, they could work on more complex stuff like 'don't squash your brother' and 'stop right there' and 'memes are annoying don't give them fuel'.

Hmm. Karga'te closed his eyes and tried to imagine. Within dreams, the world seemed so real that he could navigate it without questioning it, so he fabricated a reason for Eliath to to the trivial command of going up on those crates. Something dangerous was there, that he had to check out. If that was connected to a command enforced by Ti'chai-di, it might sound more like what a queen did.

It was easy enough to convince Eliath of a threat. First incite hyper focus on alarm, then imagine a suitably feathery relative here to scout out the area and having picked up Kirindi's scent.

Eliath took a few steps, hesitated, then some more.

Shadhahvar stopped eating popcorn. "You this is pretend to be a dog 202?"

"No," Karga'te snarled. "This is being creative."

Eliath stood at the bottom of the crates, one leg in the air ... and then he spun around.

Shit, he had figured it out.

And he had registered Karga'te as a renewed threat for creating an obstacle. It meant he could conceal further intent to harm Kirindi.

The way Eliath let him know that this was why, this was the reason he might defy what his own mother commanded, made their battle over Kirindi's fate seem trivial. They hadn't been linked then. Between a praetorian and devastation of purpose stood their queen, and for Eliath that was Kirindi.

That took enough of his senses that he registered too late that Eliath came hurling at him. He barely crossed his arms to brace against the impact and leaned in, but was off balance and fell to the side. On relfex he grabbed Eliath and threw him over his back. Both went to the ground.

It hadn't been a real attack so much as a warning, but Karga'te still ended up with his back scratched open and a lock torn off.

Ti'chai-di moved on Kirindi's bid to pin Eliath with her arm, forcing him to stay with sheer weight. She might not have the authority of a queen, the sickening crunches still cemented her as stronger. Stay. Where Kirindi could give specific commands, Ti'chai-di's mind was not developed enough for complex plots, but she had far more capacity. All this power she now focused on Eliath.

Kirindi was torn between her sister's overwhelming want and the need to stop Eliath from being in pain. She called in Karga'te, asking him what to do.

Bah, what a mess. Ti'chai-di functioned on a detached instinct to destroy the loose canon, it wasn't even particular hatred. Karga'te snuffed it out, less with the reason they needed him and more the sheer force of dominance ... no, precision. Ti'chai-di had no defined will like Eliath, she could bend like a reed.

Ti'chai-di was family, though. Where did beast end and family begin when their minds were so different? What kind of orders were even normal for family?

Ti'chai-di stepped back, but kept a paw on Eliath. Kirindi's discontent ebbed away, back to her usual neutrality. Only Eliath still had his displeasure. All of them had one clear feeling now, save for Karga'te himself.

On one end, have craved this kind of power in a way he couldn't place, and on the other end it struck him with full force just how much control he had over the sisters. He'd always thought Kirindi was just an obedient child — not a servant animal. He'd never known her to be otherwise.

Before the hivemind he hadn't been in this kind of control over anyone ... the constant pressure of Nra'tex-ne versus Oihana at her worst had never even seemed in the same category, but from this angle they looked like the same thing for a moment.

Kirindi did have desire and will of her own, to an extent. Right now, she perched before Eliath and quietly reasoned him out of a fight, using her own gentle persuasion. That in itself worked on an instinct that someone — Syvé — had decided would be there.

"This is getting boring," Shadhahvar drawled. "Hey, Eliath, isn't it bad for protecting Kirindi if you hurt Odygos? There's gonna be an enemy invasion, right? What if they do tomorrow and Odygos can't help cause he's broken?"

Eliath had to admit she was right and connected those dots with needing Karga'te. For now. Ti'chai-di let go.

"The point was that he'd get a hang of respect," Karga'te grumbled. "And follow orders."

"Ooooh, full offense : you're godawful at that yourself," Shadhahvar said.

Eliath stood up on broken legs and turned back to where he had come from. Kirindi braced against him as he walked away, till they were at the gate of the junk yard.

"See? All better now!" Shadhahvar said. "Buy me more popcorn."

Karga'te groaned. "I'll do that once I can make hardmeat dance."

He didn't owe her, but he probably owed Kirindi once more.

· · · · · · ·

Lemura didn't let herself be found as easily as Sarah was to. It wasn't just that she'd lost her way in this area and that Utara wasn't active to ask for a map, but rather a haze that lay between them and over everything.

Lemura had calmed down and Eliath's influence was lesser now. She wanted to say sorry to Bison, regretted it far more than Eliath did, knew it was wrong to have done now ... and only now. Sarah almost promised she'd grow out of it, but would she, really?

The ordinary xenomorph drone could mature within a single day. Lemura took far longer to grow and she might still growing, and so might her brain. Still time for new connections to be made, and maybe she could even prune away needless ones.

Maybe she could talk to everyone.

What?

Lemura had to be near, she began getting directions now.

"~ The pressure's here, ~" Lemura said. Had that been only auditory words, Sarah would've missed the true meaning. Pressure was defined as an entity in Lemura's mind. Just like she considered Noasyvé a kind of presence she'd never met, except that was more light and sun than this cold.

It wasn't just the atmosphere?

Sarah rounded one more corner into a dark passage and frozen.

There crouched someone, closer than she expected, yet somehow she was so accustomed to the presence she needed a moment to realize it was there as a person. Not background radiation, not an undercurrent of the hives, not anything but its own individual being. All around.

Lemura sat before it, doing nothing, saying nothing. She just stare back in its eyes, while its malformed hand hovered hear a head.

"What ..."

The thing itself didn't move, but tendrils or wires coming from its back and head grew tense and jerked it down a hall behind it.

Sarah pushed herself to close the distance and lift Lemura. Holding her close, she hesitated for a long moment whether to run, or to see what was down that hall.

One step back that she didn't take, two ahead. Lemura wasn't afraid, didn't even understand what Sarah thought was unusual. It'd felt so normal, right?

Right.

Sarah peered down the dark hall. She took a deep breath, habit more than need, and entered.

She passed three long halls without any signs something had moved, let alone something that could jerk around a human size body like that.

No direct signs at least. It was rather odd though that the doors were unlocked and open though. Only one door each hall, two at the end and the last one leading to blackness.

Down that one was was nothing but an empty elevator shaft. Pitch black at the bottom, so deep the echo of her steps hazed out.

"Hello?" It wasn't her own voice, but Lemura acting on the childish impulse Sarah herself knew to surpress.

"Any monsters down there?" A little louder now and the echo carried deeper.

Someone else whispered, "Yes, just like up with you."

It was much closer to them than the depth from where their own echo came from.

The slightest hint of a shape cradling itself in a corner, its wires drooped and stretched in the dark like a web.

They could come down. Talk to it. Tell everything about what the anger had been. So strong, everyone noticed. Down below. The beasts of the stars up in the dens, under the knives and ice.

Everyone wanted to know who was here, yet wasn't.

It'd catch them, if they wanted to. They wouldn't die.

Lemura believed it, but Sarah was enough of a human to find such a call unnatural.

Whatever it was, it had a stake in luring them. It might not want a struggle. She backed away now, one step at a time.

"No, Sarah," Lemura whispered in her ear. The coarse inhumanity of her voice stood out far more than it should.

Another step.

At some point, she would have to turned around. There were doors to open eventually.

Nothing happened. No sounds of crawling up the shaft, no lurching figures came screeching after them.

Lemura put her arms around Sarah's neck. Sarah looked down for a moment, then back up.

Still nothing had changed.

She kept her eyes on the black hole as she slowly turned around, then only ahead.

Another step. She counted fifteen long strides until she reached the other end of the hall.

When she was at there she looked back over her shoulder. Just over the edge, a motionless face stared back. It was too dark in there to see whether it had no eyes or simply deep sockets.

Lemura pushed a hand over her shoulder and pointed in its direction, not caught by the fibers of fear that finally crawled up Sarah's mind. Late, but not too late. She clung to the fear to ground herself, it sank to her legs and got them moving at last.

She ran all the way to the living quarters. Jay and Bison were in the kitchen, but she didn't beeline. The door needed to be closed, even if she understood it could get in, could have always gotten in. A chair planted against it was hardly a counter measure, but it felt a little better.

The kitchen steamed with pleasant scents. It felt a little safer, but now she knew the psychic pressure was alive it felt deceptive.

Jay was less fidgety now, fully absorbed in his cooking. Jay sat at the table reading though and noticed Sarah. He almost asked her what was wrong, but she shook her head.

"That took you long," Jay said. His voice was strained. "Did you close the door behind you?"

Sarah nodded before remembering to speak. "~Yes.~"

"Good. Dinner will be done soon." Jay never sounded like that when he cooked.

He'd noticed it too.

Sarah sat at the table, braving the bewildered look of Bison.

Now her heart didn't race, she didn't sweat, her body was perfectly in control, but her mind screamed for an answer. Nobody could answer.

She held a little closer to Lemura, who laid her head against her shoulder. It brought no comfort because Lemura said, "I'd have liked to see more. It knew about monsters."

"It's not our kind of monster, okay?" Sarah said. "Remember that."

· · · · · · ·