Liara disengaged the shuttle's engines, exhaling slowly as she got out.
Serrice had not changed much since she had last been here, but she hadn't been to this side of the city in decades, not since she still lived with her mother. Looking around, she noted how near the ocean seemed to be compared to her own apartment.
I can hear the waves.
"I think it's... right that place there?" Tyra asked, following two steps behind, rushing from around the shuttle's other side.
"You don't know?"
Tyra looked sheepish. "I just asked over the comms... The Serrice team might have mentioned that he lived here, but they didn't give me his actual address, you know."
Liara sighed, nodding as she began to walk towards the door. Inhaling to steady herself, she lightly rang the chime in the door and then lowered her hand, taking a step back.
They waited.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
"Huh..." Tyra mumbled, looking around.
Liara frowned, turning to look at her roommate. "Are you certain that this is the place?"
"Uh... No?"
Liara sighed, chiming the door again with a frown. Beside her, Tyra walked up to a window and looked inside, causing Liara to start at that. "H-hey, I don't think we should..."
"Just checking, you know, that it's really his place." Tyra waved her concerns away, peering inside. "Uh, can't really tell. It's so neat. I was hoping that maybe he'd have left a shirt on the floor, or something."
"We can't all be so sloppy." Liara murmured.
"Hey! I heard that." Tyra objected immediately.
"As you well should, I have told you several times by now. The washing room exists for a reason."
"Yeah, whatever," Tyra grunted, walking back to the door.
"Hey, what are you..."
They both froze as the door opened when Tyra touched it. They slowly looked at each other, neither so much as breathing.
"...Huh, guess he must be home, then." Tyra shrugged, walking inside.
"T-Tyra, you cannot simply...! Wait, don't just...!" Liara tried to stop her, only to end up following her inside. Behind them, the door closed with a click that echoed through the empty house.
Liara started at the sound, inhaling as she tried to whisper to Tyra that they should leave. But the other ignored her.
"Hello! Anyone in here? Saiga, you home?"
Liara bit her lip as she followed after Tyra, nervously looking around. It was a rather roomy place, with plenty of open space and windows that let the natural light in. It seemed like it barely had walls, even. As if it was a house built with the intention of 'openness' in mind.
"Huh... I guess he's not home."
"Tyra, we do not even know if this is his house. We should leave..." She tried to turn and leave.
"No, it is his place," Tyra interjected, causing Liara to pause. Walking over to the entrance hall, Tyra picked up a bag with a pair of handles sticking out of it. Pulling open the bag, she pulled out a one-handed sword that curved slightly. "See, his i'usushij are here. Whoa, this thing is heavy! No wonder he's ripped."
She swung it a couple of times, only to flinch as suddenly there was a blue spark across the blade's surface, that lit up the patterns of eezo running through the steel. Immediately as a result, where the tip had been pointing there was a flare of dark energy as a chair was knocked over.
Both jump at the sound of it falling against the hard floor, bouncing once. They blinked, looking at each other.
"Whoops."
Liara scowled. "Put that back, right now."
Tyra raised a hand in a placating gesture, nodding at Liara to show that she understood, as she put the dull practice blade back into the bag with the other.
Sighing, Liara looked around.
Her earlier hesitations all but forgotten—if he was home, he would have surely showed up already at the sounds they were making—she looked around, as her curiosity overtook her. She walked in, noting the rather spartan and ascetic motif in the decoration of the house.
"It is quite large for a single person to live in..." she said, more to herself than to Tyra.
"Yeah." Her roommate agreed nonetheless. "Does he live here alone?"
"I believe so. I have not seen anything that suggests otherwise."
They walked around, looking at every little thing curiously as they continued searching. Finally, in finding the bedroom, did they discover a room that looked like it was actually lived in.
There was exercise equipment on the floor in a corner, a datapad by the bed, and a potted plant by the window. The sea and horizon beyond could be seen just outside as one blue whole, melting together seamlessly. She blinked as she realized she had been staring out for several seconds.
It's a beautiful view; the light must be refracting just right for the blues to blend just right, or is it the glass...?
"I guess he's not home, then..." Tyra muttered, hanging from his pull-up bar, with her feet dangling in the air freely even with her arms straight.
Liara sighed, shaking her head. "Get down from there."
"Why?" Tyra asked, grinning. "He's like, three times my size—minimum—it's not gonna fall cuz of little old me..."
Liara rolled her eyes, inhaling slowly. There were no smells in the whole house, she realized.
How unusual, he must clean very thoroughly. Or the sea breeze through must cover it all...
Shaking her head, she turned around to leave the bedroom. "Come on, Tyra. Let us ask the neighbors if they have seen him."
"Hmm? Oh, sure. Maybe they have his number or mail address." Tyra nodded, jumping down and with a spring to her step moved to follow after Liara.
They made it to the front entrance, as Tyra sighed. "I hope he didn't leave or something. Was just starting to get along with him, too."
Liara looked at her, saying nothing.
"I think I could incorporate like a kick to my game, too. Like, I hold it like normal and then drop it with a spin and kick it while running. That would minimize the time it's airborne without control and let me keep moving, right? Throw in a well-timed charge and it could be killer, you know?"
Blinking, Liara shook her head as she understood nothing of what Tyra was talking about. She had never had any real interest for the sport, beyond one or two games she had been a part of as a child. She never did manage to make friends with those others...
"Well, I suppose..." She began but stopped as the front door opened just in front of them as they reached the entrance hall. She felt a surge of panic, realizing again that they had entered someone else's house without permission.
Inhaling, she tried to calm herself and managed relatively well, as Tyra reacted immediately.
"Yo, Saiga, we came to play!"
But both froze in their places as the door swung open to reveal a pistol being pointed at them. Liara suddenly felt cold sweat run down the back of her neck, staring at that weapon and following the arm up to stare at the unfamiliar face.
"Well, well... Who do we have here, now?"
;
"Alright." Emiya nodded, leaning back.
Sitting in one of the two pilots' chairs, strapped in and wearing his hardsuit save for the helmet, he looked at the various outputs and gauges before him. He exhaled, turning off the VI pilot that he had let handle navigation for a few minutes while he had been changing into his hardsuit.
While the Tristar had primary life support, it still felt like a good idea to wear the thing in case of something happening.
He was glad that he hadn't stuffed the suit into the storage compartment with the rest of his gear, but rather kept it near in the work compartment. The Tristar was divided into roughly three internal spaces. First, the working compartment with the two pilots' chairs and the controls for handling all of the systems that took up two-thirds of the entire internal space. Second, there was the cramped engine room, where he had been working in for the last ten hours to get the Tristar into flying condition. And lastly, there was the storage compartment. It was where hardsuits and work clothes were usually stored, but he had simply stuffed all of his luggage there and closed the door to keep stuff from being loose inside of the ship.
Everything was smooth sailing so far; he had left Thessia a while back, having gone up to Hosin's to drop off the pagoda and then set out for the next Mass Relay to continue his journey to Dretirop.
By the time he came back, the trap he had left behind should have sprung.
Unlike Alliance vessels, the Tristar lacked a window, thus he only had his sensors and screens to work with. But really, that was better.
No structural weaknesses to worry about.
This way, the whole starship acted as a sealed environment.
Behind him, the Mass Relay from Thessia was disappearing rapidly from the sensor's range of view. He had already completed one jump with the relays, moving hundreds of light-years in the span of less than half an hour altogether. With the optimized mass effect field, the commercial ion engine was finally able to show off its true potential. It almost felt like it was a fish let free in the sea for the first time, with how excitable the controls felt.
"Should have spent some time calibrating those, huh..."
He may have managed to get the eezo core's output into order, but due to that it now behaved like a flying brick with jet engines attached to it. There was no finesse with this thing. In the void between star systems, that wouldn't be a problem. But landing on a planet might be tricky.
Well, Hosin can worry about that once I bring it back. It'll cost him another pretty penny. Though it's one he should have much less difficulty with.
Leaving behind the hustle and bustle of Thessia was refreshing, in a way. Though he was a loner only truly by habit, he still felt at ease the most when he was on the move. He always had to be doing something, preparing, training, learning, figuring out new things, or scoping his next task.
The 'slow life' on Thessia might have been slowly driving him a little mad, he realized. Even as he had been busying himself every day with something, it felt like he had not been truly going anywhere with his efforts.
Also, with millions of kilometers to the closest extranet hub, he could not hear any of that strange signal anymore. It was all gone. The Tristar acted almost like a Faraday cage which could seal him in, but not quite enough to be safe in Serrice he reasoned. But this far out, it should still be safe to jump out of his body and try to figure out what to do about the signal. He had been putting it off since there was just too much that could go wrong on Thessia.
Additionally, he did still have full access to the extranet, in the form of the tightbeam communications of the Tristar itself. By turning off the internal extranet connectivity inside the ship, which would have allowed him to use an omnitool, his cybernetics, or a datapad through the tightbeam, he could ensure that nothing would leak out.
It was like turning off the wifi and only using the cable to connect out, in terms of his original era.
Closing his eyes, he set his body to the meditation routine that allowed it to recover and minimize caloric burn and then stepped out of his body.
Jumping into the ship's operating system immediately with a dive, he waited with bated breath as he arrived inside that digital sea. Nothing. Since nothing was 'pinging' his brain, it was not sending back any kind of response either. He let out a relieved breath.
Alright, that clears the conditions for at least trying to figure this stuff out.
He had run through some plans in his head already...
Creating a mesh that acted as a Faraday cage embedded in his skull, a hood or helmet that did the same, had been his first idea. But the problem was that it had to be complete enough to prevent any signal from going through, since a mesh would let some of the signals on a wider wavelength pass through, and he could not properly cover the bottom of his head with a hat or helmet. He couldn't very well cut off his brainstem and neck to completely isolate his brain, after all.
The hat or helmet idea had some merits, in that he could take it off once he returned to his body, but it failed to cover his head enough, he feared.
Another idea was to simply extend the coverage to his whole body in a custom hardsuit of sorts, but that would prove tricky.
The signals used for communication worked on a wide spectrum, making use of the various properties to ensure coverage everywhere at all times. This meant that it had to be a complete sheet of metal, rather than a mesh or 'cage', per se, since otherwise specific wavelengths would still pass through.
The unstoppable march of consumer luxury electronics that could not be opposed had become his biggest obstacle.
If people would pay for the ability to browse the extranet anywhere, then it was obvious that it would be the norm for coverage.
Putting the whole mesh into his skull, either on the inside or outside the bone or even fusing it into the skull, also had some potential. But that would require him to go through a rather difficult and precise operation which he could not do alone. Additionally, it would cut off his current ability to simply reach out into any device capable of extranet connectivity while inside of his body. Thus it would keep him alive, but losing his ability to spoof cameras and ID checks on the fly would mean that he would have to give up on living in any city.
That and again the problem of capacity. A Faraday Cage needed to be grounded because otherwise it might simply become charged by all the signals and start re-radiating it past its supposed protection. In that sense, the body-suit, with more material and capable of touching the ground through his feet had more potential.
Except that went right back into the problem of constructing such a thing and keeping it inconspicuous.
He could hardly walk around in a suit of medieval plate armor...
If I could just figure out what part is responsible for connecting to the extranet and was able to simply flick it off...
But the problem was that the parts inside of his head weren't consumer electronics.
They were custom-made parts, fresh from an automated line, made by top-of-the-line experts for a very specific purpose. There were no manuals for him to peruse to gain an understanding, no forums he could ask questions in, no guides or shortcuts through which he could simply figure it out. Of course, he had tried to use Structural Analysis over the years on the parts, but that had not been very helpful either.
The way a personal computer and brain functioned was very different. With the former, everything had a clear and well-defined function; the power supply got everything going, the hard drive stored data for long term, the Random Access Memory stored less data but was quicker to function while the Central Processing Unit handled all of the calculations and such like quickly through its caches...
It was all very specific and specialized. Modular, even.
But for the human brain, it wasn't that simple.
Parts of the brain did specific jobs, but they also did a lot of other things. In his time and even in the current era, it still remained a mysterious organ. Even detailed scans and efforts to reason the function out had failed to crack the mystery known as 'consciousness'. The leading theory, which was also use in AI development, was simply that once a specific threshold was exceeded in the amount of processing capability then consciousness would 'emerge'.
In essence, most had thrown up their hands and concluded that consciousness was something that was greater than the sum of its parts, that simply happened by itself somehow.
Of course, that made sense given his knowledge of Magecraft. The brain was the seat of the soul and mind; it wasn't responsible for thinking, it was more like an antenna to a higher dimension where information was stored in the soul. And anything could develop a soul, more or less—No, don't try and bring magecraft into this, I've already muddled my head with enough useless factors to consider. Consider it later, once you have a basic idea...
Focusing back on the material, he excluded his magical understanding of matters for now.
So, to replicate that, the cybernetics were not simply set to do one thing as in a personal computer, but to function as the organic brain. In fact, all of the parts did a little bit of everything at the onset. And then, given the process of making it work by forcing it to learn from the organic brain in a method that was still too complex to be clearly recorded and understood...
Well, no one had any idea what currently did what in his head.
Not even the specialists who had put the cybernetics in there would, he feared. Well, perhaps they could point out which part was supposed to connect to the extranet, but given his habit of constantly being connected, it was entirely possible that all of the parts were now doing it. The cybernetics were a black box that simply was understood to work by its results, not through its functionality being observed and understood to be correct.
They were a formula with more abstract symbols to mark out unknowns than with known quantities.
For all he knew, trying to use Reinforcement to attempt shutting off the signal might just turn off everything. And since those cybernetics were currently the only thing keeping his body alive...
It simply was not a risk he was willing to take.
He sighed, focusing on something else for a moment.
It was strange, possessing a starship as he was, right now. And he was truly possessing it; he had not hacked it, nor was he really flying it through its controls. He had simply become the starship. The digital ocean he had come to expect had been overlain with new surroundings and inputs as well, completing that sense of being something else. The Tristar's external sensors were something he could directly interpret in this mode, giving him a very good ability to process what was going on outside.
In effect, he felt like he was flying through space even as he was currently in a full dive.
Offhandedly he handled the communications with a nearby control station as he marveled at the space all around him. It was as easy as breathing, or moving a limb for him, at that moment. There weren't any sensors that acted like his hearing or sense of touch on any of the surfaces, but the various scans felt like his vision had been expanded to see wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation he had never even considered before.
It was difficult to judge through it all, as to what was junk or background noise, and what he should be paying attention.
Like staring at the static screen of old televisions, finding patterns in the snow crash.
He was sure there was a lot being said and received in those 'colorful' waves that were being interpreted into understandable data, but to him, it was all just a dazzling and ever-changing rainbow of nameless colors. To the naked eye, space had seemed empty and dark, but to the ship's sensors, it was awash and alive. Solar wind and waves of something, pulsing stars, and distant nebula looked beautiful beyond anything he had seen in his life before.
Still, the controls were awkward as he had noted even before his dive.
Emiya huffed - even magic did not pick up the slack for a poor job once hastily completed, it seemed.
He exhaled, turning his attention back to his body. He could not sense it currently, given that the Tristar lacked any internal sensors.
Which meant he would have to turn on the extranet signal to connect to himself.
Shutting off the tightbeam communication to isolate the ship—just to be safe—Emiya turned on the internal signal. Immediately he noticed the signal being broadcast by the ship and his brain's cybernetics reacting, in turn, to signal back. He reached out and opened his body's eyes, suddenly receiving sensory information from both a human and a ship.
Feeling around, he tried to fiddle with his cybernetics, but he couldn't find anything that seemed to change a thing within the bounds he dared to experiment within.
Sighing, he closed off the extranet wireless connectivity and deleted all traces of the unique signal his cybernetics gave off.
I can roll back the ship's firmware so that it doesn't send out the signal... but the moment I connect to the extranet it will automatically update, huh. So, in theory, if I hack everything, everywhere, I could fix the signal issue...
He shook his head.
"Hah, that's just not happening."
For now, it seemed that his only option was to encase himself in a grounded full-body Faraday cage if he wanted to step out of his body and not worry about being found out. It was a slight bit cumbersome, but given his options, it was the best he could come up with.
He huffed to himself, smirking.
I hope they weren't expecting me to be stopped by just this half-measure...
Eyeing the approaching Mass Relay, Emiya noted that his sense of how overwhelming it was seemed muted inside of a dive. Did that mean that his ability to sense disturbances in the world relied on a sense that the starship had no equivalent for? Or did that mean he was in some dimension that was removed from its effect? Or even both?
Even after five years of trying everything he could think of and reading all that he could get his hands on, he still understood very little of what element zero truly was or why it affected the world in a way he could sense.
Approaching the relay, he sent in the necessary data and for a moment he could feel something overwhelming beyond that connection. But as he shot forward, through millions of kilometers of space in a single instant, that sensation instantly disappeared. He blinked, considering carefully what had just happened, putting a note of it for later consideration, even as he began to approach the end of the relay jump.
Dretirop was a quarter of the galaxy away from Thessia, but he was making good time. Chiefly that was due to him burning through fuel to reach high accelerations in very un-economic bursts since he suspected that time was of the essence. Scanning around, he spotted the next fuel depot he had planned along his route in the distance and made minor course adjustments for it.
Though Mass Relays made travel between distant stars much, much easier, for travel to and from the relays themselves other more conventional limitations still remained, and additionally not every star system had one.
Thus, only select star systems could be colonized or traveled to on any regular basis, due to the practical considerations of fuel and time.
Space was a void, meaning that any forward momentum was maintained effectively indefinitely - so in theory, if time was not an issue then even at slower velocities it was possible to reach any destination. But in practice, due to the immense distances between individual stars—or even planets—it was necessary to reach beyond the speed of light. Momentum could partly be controlled by adjusting mass—by making the vessel heavier to slow down or even lighter to go faster—but that, too, required energy just as generating acceleration normally did.
So ultimately, fuel consumption was the biggest limiter for the flow of goods and people in the galaxy, causing certain properties in star systems to adjust how valuable they were.
This hierarchy could be quite fluid, depending on infrastructures and economics but in general, any star system's viability was a function of whether or not there was a Mass Relay, gas giants suitable for fuel skimming, or a garden world suitable for habitation there, in that order of importance.
If there were valuable minerals or other resources there in large quantities, fuel depots or large habitations could be built and maintained, but usually only so long as it remained profitable. In that sense, garden worlds where large-scale industry and habitation could occur cheaply were the most valuable resource, but only in terms of multi-generational prospects, and thus did not quite apply to the usual rules for the viability of interstellar travel and expansion.
Conversely, this made certain star systems not worth the investment of reaching.
Earth had been rather lucky in that regard, given that besides Earth and the Charon Relay, there were also multiple planets that could function as a source of Helium-3 - the premier fuel source of the galaxy for fusion energy cells.
It made the Sol system something of a burgeoning economic powerhouse, even when the seat of the government had moved to Arcturus Station, allowing for an unrestrained growth of the human economy without any energy bottlenecks to worry about. Humanity's expansionist energies had been directed through the Charon Relay long before first contact, as the plentiful helium-3 deposits on Eirene and Themis had been that much more attractive and promising as prospects, compared to the star systems near Sol, where within a 15 light-year radius only the Epsilon Indi system had any confirmed helium-3 sources.
And since then with the discovery of galactic commerce, any drive left for serious expansion outwards from Sol had effectively been cut in the bud.
It was the same corralling effect as oil had had in the 20th and 21st centuries; people congregated around areas where oil-based transportation was dominant, where roads could be built for cars, or where ships or planes could effectively reach.
Humanity and the Batarian Hegemony were the oddballs in that sense, in still exploring the galaxy where most of the Council races and affiliates preferred to keep to their own secure little corners of the Milkyway.
Dretirop was another strange world in that regard.
Lacking both a Mass Relay and a suitable source of fuel in its system, along with the planet itself being mostly arid and lifeless deserts, it had remained unexplored like many other systems and planets until someone had found traces of Prothean ruins on its surface with a long-range scan when they had been charting out the possible garden world.
So far, no efforts had been made to colonize the world, but that might change with time. Experts had hypothesized that at one time there could have been a relay there and that it could have merely disappeared since. It could have frozen over, as the Charon Relay had in the Sol system, or it could have crashed down on a planet and been buried or destroyed, or it could be somewhere in the darkness beyond even now in some abnormal orbit, or knocked free by some passing by asteroid.
The presence of extensive Prothean ruins lent credence to this theory, based on the assumption that the Protheans also had similar limitations with conventional star travel - it seemed rather obvious that if the Protheans had once lived there, then they would have constructed a Mass Relay for their needs.
Whatever the case may be, it was a faraway and distant place where few ever tread today. The nearest Mass Relay and fueling station lay some 10 light-years away.
A not insubstantial distance, even with a starship.
Which meant that he had to fuel up to the brim by the time he left the last mass relay to ensure that he could fly there and back properly. What was the point of a search-and-slash-or-rescue mission that ended with one needing to be rescued oneself?
As he noted that his fuel tank had been filled, he disengaged from the fuel station and continued on his way to the next Mass Relay. Having calculated a course that allowed him to go at full burn and fuel up as efficiently as possible, he figured he could get to Dretirop in less than ten hours of flight.
Of course, he was burning through credits at a rather spectacular rate but what was money worth if you did not use it?
As he continued onward, he pondered whether he could use Structural Analysis on the starship while he was flying it, from inside the dive. But it seemed like there was a disconnect that did not allow him to get a feel for it, which lent credence to the theory that he was in some adjacent space that was cut off from 'reality' when he was in a dive.
Yet, the projections seem to work and bleed through. A case of them having greater spiritual weight?
Shrugging, he gave up and turned to the tightbeam communications to the extranet. He might as well see if there was anything else of interest going on at the moment, while he continued flying.
;
Huntress Shiawe uncrossed her arms, standing proudly at the helm. She reigned over this bridge currently. It was a great honor, considering whom this starship belonged to.
She stared down at the various asari working by consoles, all around her. While she was not standing on a raised platform, the others were still seated, giving her the ability to loom over all of them. This was her domain right now and she reveled in it. She deserved to be here, having worked harder than everyone else, earning this honor.
She felt someone breathe on the back of her neck and for a moment she could only blink. Turning around, she came face to face with a severe asari in a bright red hardsuit. They stood half a meter apart, easily within a range where any competent huntress could have disabled or killed her with contemptuous ease.
"Justicar Anatha!" The asari huntress in command of the bridge sharpened up, snapping her feet together as she bowed for the Matriarch who had appeared behind her.
How did she sneak up on me?! The huntress thought while barely controlling herself, the dark energy roiling across her skin from the nervous energy. The cold purple eyes of the ancient warrior settled on the officer, narrowing only slightly.
"Sloppy."
The huntress felt her heart stop for a second.
"I-I..."
"Set course for Dretirop immediately."
The Justicar waited not a second further after stating that order, turning around to leave without bothering to acknowledge the huntress.
"Yes, Justicar!" she shouted, feeling her heart race. Then, she ground her teeth as she lamented her failure. She still had much to learn, though she was the foremost among her peers, even as mere Maiden among Matrons.
Looking up, she found the pilot looking at her with wide eyes. "Ma'am?"
She nodded in return.
"You heard her, set course for Dretirop. Full speed ahead!"
"Yes, ma'am!" The pilot responded, quickly turning to tap away on the haptic adaptive interface before her.
Looking at the star map to see where exactly this 'Dretirop' was, the huntress frowned.
What could we possibly want in a place as that remote?
;
Dretirop loomed ahead, just half a star system away.
A distance that a lifetime ago would have been uncrossable, but now had become next to nothing.
Emiya had begun to slow down as he had approached the edge of the Dretirop system, raising his mass back up from near-zero to maintain his momentum, as it was better to become heavier and maintain it than it was to burn fuel to fight against previously burned fuel.
As he had left the nearby system with the Mass Relay for his approach to the system where Dretirop lay, his connection to the extranet through the tightbeam had finally been severed.
He had been poring over every bit of intel he could get his hands on about the Dretirop expedition, burning through credits almost as fast as he had on fuel, purchasing access to a number of research papers and exclusive interviews published on Thessia. It ranged from simple timelines of what the investigators had been doing, to the areas of the planet they had been exploring.
It hadn't gone into any excruciating detail, but he did get a grounding in where to look for the asari camps and digsites, what to expect when he landed, such as the poisonous algae with their paralyzing gas emissions, or the massive chains of volcanoes creating a chain of caldera and cave system that wrapped around a third of Dretirop's equator...
But there was only so much there to analyze and plan around, leaving him eventually with nothing but the extranet to occupy him.
And finally with the loss of that avenue of investigation and distraction while in-dive, he had instead focused on all of the external sensors, sweeping the surroundings.
And before even crossing the orbit of the outermost planet in the system, he found the asari distress beacon that would contact the tightbeam buoy near the Mass Relay back in the system he had just come from, orbiting very slowly around the star at an extreme distance.
It would carry forward the distress signal if something happened on Dretirop, calling in the cavalry from Thessia.
In theory, anyhow. The fact that he had been able to find it with just this commercial model starship's sensors, simply by combing through the sensor feed for an electromagnetic anomaly in the darkness, seemed to vindicate his coming this far. If he could find it, then so could anybody else.
Emiya took a closer look at the distress beacon as he flew past it, connecting himself to it and affixing a solid connection to its computer, but had been unable to figure out whether it worked as it should.
As the beacon's only purpose was to receive signals and simply send them forward, he had no way to tell if something further 'up the line' was broken or not. Besides that one main function, the beacon could essentially only scan its surroundings to ensure that it wasn't dangerously near anything, like a proximity alarm that allowed it to send out a warning that it needed towing or rescuing from an imminent crash.
It wasn't so much a different function, as a different application of the built-in light emitters and scanners.
The same miniaturized Mass Relay technology which allowed it to send and receive FTL laser messages—tightbeams—also allowed it to send pulses around itself and receive whatever was reflected back, which it could use to calculate the distance to nearby objects.
But with the distances between two star systems being what they were, for a reliable real-time signal to work he reasoned that there had to be more than one beacon, set up like a daisy chain to carry forward the signal from the far-off Dretirop by creating a tunnel through which Faster-than-Light tightbeam communications could be sent.
The tech was based on the Mass Relays themselves and they too needed multiples to be chained across the galaxy.
And it was pretty much just a miniature relay, but one that allowed laser pulses to be sent over vast distances which would normally take years for light to cross.
In this case at least eight years, to be precise.
So if one or more links of the chain were severed... Then maybe the asari would not have been able to call for help.
He had tried to find more of the beacons, but so far he had not found a single one in the interstellar space between the two systems. Perhaps there had been more of them, but they had already been brought back by one of the other ships that had returned to Thessia. Or perhaps they had been destroyed or better hidden somewhere inside the star system where there was enough mass and background radiation to camouflage it better.
Emiya could only make guesses as he accelerated forward, raising the mass effect field intensity to lower the Tristar's mass again.
Still, he took the time to look around for any obvious signs of another beacon or starship, scanning the outermost planets and larger celestial objects in passing. Dretirop was the second of six planets, though there were several smaller asteroids circling the star as well, meaning there was plenty of space to hide a beacon or dozen.
As he passed by the second-outermost planet—a dark ice dwarf of seemingly no consequence—did he finally spot something unusual.
Behind him from the darkness of interstellar space, another starship dropped back into sub-light from FTL near the beacon buoy.
Emiya only noticed because he had been scrying for anything unusual while keeping an eye out through the one he had already found, maintaining an FTL tightbeam connection through its own emitters for a nearly-instant live connection to give himself to sets of eyes as it were.
Did I trigger some tripwire when I first approached the beacon? Or is it just a coincidence?
He blinked, turning his focus in the digital realm around as he looked through the lidar sensors available to him through the beacon, as the newly arrived ship was far beyond his Tristar's own effective sensor range.
That's a lot bigger than the Tristar and if I'm reading this right, the engine output is massive compared to mine...
A frigate, or a cruiser even?
At this distance the Tristar's own sensors were next to useless, meaning he could not get a better look nor a visual feed of the other ship, just a rough outline through the lidar pings. The strange ship continued drifting into the system, having slowed down from FTL to be able to scan around properly using its own FTL lidar that first lit up the beacon's sensors and then the Tristar's, as the light bounced back to the starship.
A second later in real-time, it turned around and acquired an intercept vector for his Tristar.
Emiya blinked, almost smelling the blood in the air already. He attempted hailing the other vessel using the tightbeam communicator but they ignored him.
Not here to talk, or they don't want to risk my recording or identifying them somehow. I have no weapons on this thing. My engines are inferior. They can track me from across the system, putting their range in nearly the light-month range. I can't hack through if they don't accept a comm-line, and I don't have enough fuel for a long chase...
He frowned, reaching a conclusion.
This is bad.
Without waiting for another second, he gunned the engines to maximum burn as he set a course directly away from the approaching starship, buying himself some more time. While spirit hacking, he had all the time in the world to analyze and look over information, but right now he just didn't have enough pieces to do anything. So he needed to buy more real time, even if it meant cutting off his connection to the FTL beacon.
But with his commercial ion engine—a slow-burn thing that needed minutes to reach FTL from a cold stop—there was little chance he could outrun them; despite their ship being more massive, his pursuers were accelerating that much more quickly.
I'd love to take a look at that engine, any other time...
He could take a turn, try and shake them off by flying at a right angle to their course, hoping that they might fly past him... But it was too late for that, they had a sensor lock on him already and would only continue to calculate his trajectory from his trail until they could cut him off, catching up slowly all the while.
In space, there was no such thing as stealth.
That was one of the things he had been taught early on at the University of Serrice when he had taken his first courses on space and starships, and a point which was repeated often in one form or another. Against the near-absolute zero cold of the vacuum of space, any starship would glow like a bonfire at night, as would any trail left behind in FTL travel, making it extremely difficult to remain undetected.
As long as he remained in outer space he had no way of dealing with his pursuer. The only option left to him was to run for it. As long as he made it to FTL, they would momentarily lose track of him as the conventional sensors would fail to keep up with him directly then.
But it would only buy him time until he had to stop next and they could get a better reading off his location again, if they were persistent and stuck to his glowing trail.
If they stick around, I won't be able to investigate Dretirop.
Was that their goal - preventing any investigation?
He was heading in the wrong direction if he wanted to escape through the Mass Relays, too, with the system he had jumped through effectively behind him, with his pursuers in the way. He would need to come to a full stop if he wanted to turn around which would put him in a check-mate.
Should I head for a planet and try to hide?
The second planet of the system slowly approached as he continued to accelerate. It would make for a rough time if he actually tried to land at this speed, but he couldn't stop or slow down given that the starship behind him was still catching up.
Something disturbed the mass effect fields - the kinetic barriers set to stop head-on collisions against any floating debris flaring.
Did I run into something—No.
Alarms were off: a radiator panel had gone off-line and the excess heat of the Tristar began spiking almost immediately as a result. He had been shot at from behind, where the Tristar's kinetic barriers were weakened. It wasn't a warship, something built to withstand being shot at, and in transit there was no way anything could have impacted the ship from behind naturally.
Forced to turn down his engine's output lest he fries himself to death with the excess heat, the Tristar's acceleration lagged. He had managed to over-spec it in preparation for his mad rush to Dretirop across the galaxy, but the loss of one of the radiators was still a critical blow.
The starship in pursuit of him began to catch up more quickly and Emiya had to tear his attention away from the Tristar's gauges.
I can't outrun them anymore, the ship will overheat before I get to FTL now if I try to override the safeties.
He cursed, checking the sensors, sending another tightbeam ping behind him and reading the feedback, calculating the propagation time. They were getting close, but...
They're not in FTL yet.
Another rule of starship engineering that had been hammered in his head was that mass mattered.
The lighter the craft, the less energy it needed to accelerate and the faster it could consequently go for a given amount of fuel. Mass effect fields helped by making things lighter, but they consumed power too, necessitating even more mass to accommodate all the related systems for control and cooling, which all necessitated more fuel for power and so on and so on.
In that sense, his stripped-down Tristar had a slight advantage.
Except for the fact that his pursuers had some sort of spinal-mounted gun on their ship, shooting even lighter projectiles in turn.
There was no way to outrun a speeding bullet in space. It was exactly the same as with small arms mass accelerators in personal combat. Even he—a Servant—could not track the projectiles fired from those after they were fired. Barring extreme distances, all defensive actions had to take place before the shot was fired, just as he had done to block a bullet on Mars.
Prediction and positioning was the name of the game.
Question is... Did they barely miss, or did they hit the radiator on purpose?
If they wanted to board his ship, this was the best way to force him to slow down and come to a stop. If that was their plan, he could allow it and launch his counter-attack once they were close enough for his astralized body to be able to board them.
But if they had missed...
Slowing down wasn't an option. The odds were too long to risk it with this little information.
That meant he needed to make it to Dretirop before they caught up with him and use its mass to blot out their sensors. With the planet between the two ships, he could maneuver more slowly without the worry of being seen and find a place to hide his ship somewhere before they caught up or sight of him again.
The atmosphere would give him that much more concealment than empty space from most sensors.
Exhaling out his frustration, he added a small random pattern to his flying to avoid getting hit as he continued to fly towards Dretirop, deciding that was preferable to trying to re-route his kinetic barriers behind him and risk running into something in front of him.
Even as the other ship was catching up, he would still make it in time with enough time to hide on the opposite side. Though with his less than perfectly straight course he was losing his lead rapidly again. It was going to be a narrow thing.
But it looks like I was right to keep going.
The sensors couldn't detect anything behind him anymore, but up ahead several relativistic rounds seemed to have punched into the looming planet's atmosphere. He had no idea when exactly they had been fired, but it couldn't have been more than a minute ago in real-time if he could spot it already at this distance.
His pursuers must have gambled on additional shots, diverting power from their lightening mass effect field to the spinal gun and slowing themselves with the recoil each time, gambling away their superior acceleration.
Lucky for him, as the misses had bought him at least several seconds more to work with during all this.
This is going to be rough. I'm coming in way too fast.
As he approached the planet he began to reverse his thrusters and setting his mass effect field to increase his ship's mass, to retard his acceleration as much as possible within the limits of his internal inertial dampeners. Simultaneously as his speed fell enough for him to actually be caught by the planet's gravity well—the increased mass helping with the gravitational attraction—he adjusted his orbit so that he would be caught by it to swing around in a spiraling descent.
The Tristar would be going around three-quarters a full rotation. Which meant that he should swing around the planet's back and then land somewhere on the 'front', while the pursuers would still be behind the planet, reining in their own massive momentum.
If he still had that radiator panel, he might have attempted a slingshot in the gravity well back around to the Mass Relay instead.
But by diving into the atmosphere, this was turning into a game of chicken.
Out in space, it was possible to build gigantic vessels, and that even had an economy of its own, allowing for bigger margins of amenities in mass—as the asari knew, building some of the biggest starships in the galaxy—but inside a gravity well, the bigger you were the more careful you had to be.
Cruisers and above could not even land on medium-gravity planets for fear of becoming unable to take off again.
Meaning he could enter the planet's atmosphere that much faster and more recklessly than his pursuers in their larger starship could.
"Come now, this Tristar's a headstrong girl - she won't even look your way if you just give up that easily." He smirked as he began to read through the sensor data that was just filtering in, giving him an idea of the planet's geography. "There!"
A cave large enough to fit his Tristar, surrounded by numerous mountains and other caves! A haystack in which to hide the proverbial needle.
As he entered the atmosphere, dozens of alarms started beeping and screeching at him. He dismissed all of them, focusing on getting the angle of descent right as he struggled with slowing down while still maintaining evasive maneuvers.
Distantly, he noted that the pursuing vessel finally appeared on his Tristar's sensors, flying far past the planet's atmosphere while trying to slow down and turn around, before the planet came between them and cut off direct line of sight.
Right, where are those damn caves...
He glanced at the internal temperature and life-support readouts, sighing at the rising heat. It was still fine, but he was cutting it close. You weren't supposed to be coming in this hot when landing, or at all really.
A hundred kilometers from the ground. Fifty. Twenty. Five. One.
Emiya grit his teeth as he flew straight for the cavern he saw in the scans. Making it inside, he barely had enough thrust left to stop before he crashed into the far wall. The proximity parking sensor was beeping at him incessantly, noting that he was parked too close to a wall according to regulation.
Immediately, he shut off everything and jumped out of the dive and the Tristar.
Landing outside in his spiritualized state, he readied a shield in his mind for Projection as he jumped to the entrance of the cave. From the outside, it wasn't possible to see in, and with the slope and the hot sunlight heating up the massive mountain he had flown into, his heat signature should be hidden as well.
But you could never be too cautious.
Looking out, he strained to see if anything was approaching. Focusing on his breathing by habit, he ignored the treacherous prediction in his mind's eye that his ship was about to be bombarded from orbit by the pursuing starship. Against an attack like that, so far beyond even his range, he had no real means of defense or retaliation.
He waited for fifteen minutes until he exhaled and relaxed.
Nothing. That must mean they have no trace on me.
Dismissing the ancient greek armament and shaking his head, he turned around to stare at the Tristar. It was smoking; the radiator panels were scorched and warped from the heat of landing into an atmosphere that quickly and the front was charred black.
Fixing this will take several hours, at least. At least I have enough food and water to fuel my use of magic.
Sighing, he jumped inside of the ship and landed inside of his body without having to re-adjust his jump, having judged his position accurately enough. But he had just had time to see something alarming out of the corner of his eye, an instant before he was inside of himself again.
As he opened his eyes and inhaled the warm air, his hearing only confirmed what he had seen.
He could hear quiet sobbing.
Removing the straps around his torso and hips he got up and turned around. Finding the source of the noise he inhaled slowly. At the sound of him getting up, Hoana who was sitting in a corner of the ship and crying looked up with big, red, and puffy eyes.
Their eyes met and she hiccuped once.
Emiya had no idea what to say, as the slow realization dawned on him that he had fucked up.
That he had really fucked up.
He glanced at the normally sealed-off section where he had put most of his bags. It looked like she had crawled in there at some point when he had been at Hosin's, he realized with growing horror.
Which means she's been all alone inside of the ship and I didn't notice at all. It's been hours since I dived in...
He could imagine her shock at realizing she was in a starship flying who knew where, trying to wake him up and utterly failing as he had been out of his body. Hours, completely powerless and lost. Alone.
"Hoana, I—" he began, swallowing as he realized he had no idea what to say or do, right then.
She surged forward, wrapping her arms around his hips and bawling her eyes out. He blinked, raising his hands away from the adolescent asari as he completely and utterly froze.
I've dealt with kids before, just calm down...
Exhaling, he got down to one knee, wrapping his arms around the adolescent asari, and began to murmur in a soft voice that it was going to be all right. She released his legs, wrapping her hands around his neck, holding as if her life depended on it, wholly unaware of his attempts at calming her down. It wasn't accurate to say that he was good with kids, rather, that he knew just enough. It wasn't uncommon for him to run into orphans and child soldiers, given the places and conflicts he had waded into.
Still, that had been centuries ago.
And he wasn't sure if he wanted to handle her the way he had gotten used to handling traumatized human kids, who could be bought with chocolate and needed to be taught how to fend for themselves rather than hugs. He was more used to child soldiers than well-adjusted ones...
She slowly began to regain her breath, hiccuping as she tried to explain.
"You... weren't moving... I tried, tried to—wake up, but—Didn't listen... so scared, you weren't, I'm sorry—I'm sorry..." The torrent of incoherent words in between sobs assaulted him like knives as he exhaled.
As he did his best to calm her down, he continued cursing in his mind. No matter how much he tried to change himself, his failures always ended with someone crying.
That much it seemed would never change.
Placing a hand on her neck, he considered simply stunning her for a second. But then he shook his head; that would only delay the issue and he didn't know how she might react to it. He could deal with a little discomfort for her sake.
But I do need to figure out what's going on and how to handle it...
The cavern was been deep enough that he should be shielded from any direct scans he could think of being used on the whole of the planet. As long as he kept the ship turned off there would not be any electromagnetic radiation for him to be located through.
However, small electronics still probably be fine, given how thick the ceiling of the cavern was.
It meant he would probably have to use Reinforcement to fix everything, too. Well, it was quicker that way, so it wasn't really an issue.
During his scanning run, he had also found what he thought was the Prothean dig site. It wasn't too far away from here, even on foot. The scans hadn't given him any clues of what had happened on the sites, meaning he would have to go there in person to take a look.
But I'll have to leave her behind, huh.
After fifteen minutes of crying and incoherent words, it seemed that Hoana had exhausted herself and fallen asleep in his arms. He wasn't exactly sure how old she was, but given that Hosin was still alive and quite spry, it meant that she couldn't be very old. Less than fifty years, at least.
How mature did that make her?
Asari matured slowly and in stages that had no equivalent to humans, meaning that he could not simply place a number on her so easily.
But given the complex nervous system and brains of asari, she can't be very mentally developed yet... Probably? She did not seem that young, back when we met earlier...
He sighed, getting up with her in his arm. Walking to the second pilot seat, he adjusted the back until it was nearly completely leveled back and as flat as possible.
'—Trace, on'—begin projection;
The mattress fell on top of the chair, molded to the shape so that it would not fall off and making the top of the mattress to be flat despite the uneven surface of the chair it resting was on. He put Hoana down on the mattress, struggling with individual fingers as she held onto him even in her sleep.
Taking out a blanket, he covered her as he began to open up his packed rations.
He couldn't very well leave now, even if he was strained for time. If she woke up alone it would be even more traumatizing for her. But he needed to fix the Tristar, visit the Prothean ruins, and keep an eye out for the ship that had been pursuing him, along with figuring out a way to deal with it.
"What a mess."
;
Emiya put his hand on the radiator panel and closed his eyes.
"—Trace, on"—begin synchronization;
Extending his senses through his magical energy, he felt out the damage that had been wrought. He nodded, pulling back and opening his eyes.
The hit only grazed by the radiator panel, I can still probably fix it without too much magic...
Behind him, he heard a gasp and ruffle of cloth. Turning around, he spotted Hoana who had just woken up. Her eyes were wide open, the panic obvious as she looked around wildly until she spotted him.
"Good morning."
She blinked her mouth opening and closing once.
I have no experience with asari kids. Should I treat her like a human child? They were usually tough and adaptable once the crying was done, but what about asari? So much for understanding their 'logos'...
"Umm... morning..." she quietly murmured, getting down from the mattress and staring at the fine red sand beneath her feet on the ground.
She looked around, obviously overwhelmed by her strange new surroundings. Dretirop had a breathable atmosphere and a rather pleasant 0.9 G gravity. Compared to the space station that maintained the normal Thessian 1.1 G, it must have felt like she was as light as a feather, as she took her first steps on the red sand.
"Where are we?" she quietly asked, her previous panic all but forgotten.
Emiya looked around at the insides of the cavern they were in. The smooth surface of the red sandstone reminded him rather of Australian deserts and cliffs, the slightly purple sky outside only further fueling the strangeness of their new environment.
The subdued darkness of the cave mixed with the orange brightness flooding in through the entrance made for a rather surreal setting, all things considered.
She had obviously realized that they weren't on Thessia.
"We're in a cave on a planet called Dretirop."
"Umm... Dretirop?" she repeated, tilting her head.
"It's a planet quite far away from Thessia, without any cities or people living on it. We went through several Mass Relay jumps," he answered.
Her eyes widened as she suddenly remembered where she had been and what had happened. She bit her lip, looking down as she clenched her small fists.
Emiya inhaled, jumping down from the Tristar's roof where he had been looking at the radiator panels. Landing in the orange sand, his feet sunk almost wholly into the ground up to his shins. Pulling himself free with easy steps, he walked over to her. She looked up at his approach, tears forming in her eyes already.
Going down to one knee, he put his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
"Hoana, I'm sorry."
She blinked, two tears rolling down her cheeks before she shook her head. She mumbled something, before wiping at her face with her hands as she tried to say it again.
He patiently waited until she could speak.
"Papa... Papa always scolds me..."
Emiya let out a light laugh, causing her to blink and look up. "Yeah, falling asleep on starships and stowing away is a pretty bad habit."
To punctuate his words, he lightly flicked her forehead causing her to flinch and stare at him with wide eyes while covering where he had flicked her with both of her hands.
"Umm... Sorry..."
He chuckled again, feeling more confident already as he put a hand on her head. "We both made a mistake, so let's leave it at that, alright?"
She looked at him strangely again, not quite certain what to make of the gesture but accepting his words nonetheless.
Hmm, it seems she's not that different from a human child, after all.
Getting up, he walked over to grab the datapad he had brought outside along with the mattress and some of his tools.
"Now, I'd like nothing more than to get you home. But we have a bit of a problem right now," He began, causing her to look bewildered. "In that, I can't fly the ship back. Not until I repair the damage the pirates did to the ship, at least."
"P-pirates?" Hoana blinked, utterly taken aback.
He nodded, pulling up footage from the chase on the datapad and handing it to her. It showed the part where he had been shot at and how the radiator panel had been broken, before cutting off. He had actually kind of forged the footage, since there were no cameras pointed at the radiators.
But he doubted she would notice.
She looked up at him wide-eyed, mouth hanging wide open.
To forestall any tantrums, he had simply decided to impress the seriousness of the situation on her right from the get-go. Kids were quite good at reading the mood—human kids, at least—thus as long as he made the situation clear and displayed his confidence, it should keep her calm. He wasn't actually sure if they were pirates, but it seemed a reasonable enough description for the moment.
"So, I need your help, if we are to get back home."
She swallowed, overwhelmed by his words as she stared at him with wide eyes.
"Can I count on your help?" he asked, extending a single hand to her as he took to one knee again to be closer to her height.
She shook her head lightly, stepping back, clearly still overwhelmed.
That won't do. I need to occupy and build trust with her. Impress on her how I need her help... I'll need to show vulnerability, then.
"The reason I didn't notice you before, is that I have a medical condition," he continued speaking, tapping at his head. "In the past, I had an accident and I had to have a very serious operation."
She hesitantly nodded, not quite understanding. That was fine - she only needed to believe him enough so his bouts of catatonia would not freak her out again.
Getting down on one knee, he parted his hair and turned his head to show where a noticeable scar from the operation remained, causing her mouth to fall open with shock. "When I fall asleep, I fall into a very deep sleep because of it. So deep, that I can't be woken up easily. I might even seem like I'm dead, but it's just because I'm resting."
"O-oh..." She nodded, frowning as she thought back.
It seemed to make sense to her, she must have tried to wake him up several times when she had realized he had taken off. Had she fallen asleep somewhere as well? He hadn't dived until he had left the Parnitha system.
Well, it didn't matter anymore.
"So when I'm sleeping, I need you to keep me safe. We'll be inside the spaceship when it happens, but I still need you to watch over me," he continued.
She still hesitated, nodding only slightly.
"And to get off Dretirop, we also need to fix the ship. I could use your help there, too."
"B-but... I don't know..." She looked away from him, then.
He smiled at her. "Hey, aren't you the head machinist at Hosin's?"
"Umm... But..." She shook her head, not sure what to say.
"See, look what I found..." He put his hand behind his back, projecting something into his hand surreptitiously before pulling it out.
Her eyes went wide at the sight of the small D-plier with a pink handle. He extended his hand forward, and she hesitantly accepted the proffered tool. Her eyes seemed to sparkle as she accepted it, her small fingers wrapping around the handle and squeezing as if to make sure it was really there.
She looked up, drawing courage from the tool as their eyes met. "I-I'll help you...!"
He grinned at her then, nodding back.
Now, rather than feeling helpless and lost, I've made her responsible and gotten her involved. The radiator will be familiar enough that she won't feel overwhelmed, while delegating my 'safety' while asleep will directly address why I didn't wake up earlier. Hopefully, this won't be a traumatic memory but rather something she'll remember for years as a formative character-building event.
It would also keep her occupied while he handled the rest of this mess.
"Then I'll be counting on you, Hoana."
"Umm, yeah...!" She seemed a little hesitant, still.
"...Do you remember my name?"
"Umm... Well, it was... Umm..."
Obviously not.
He huffed. "Saiga Fujimura."
"That, yes! Papa talks about you!" she shouted, pointing at him and nodding.
"I'd love to hear what he has to say about me. But first, let's eat," he said, nodding back.
Hoana blinked and a second later her belly rumbled to agree with his point. She looked down and up, and as their eyes met again she flushed purple in embarrassment.
He had brought out a portable heater set, along with water and his packed rations already before she had woken up. Eating pemmican raw was fine, but if he had the time he preferred to actually cook it in some way. As it was, he was making a basic stew using the water he had brought along. The taste should be mild enough that she should be able to eat it, compared to some of the more spiced mixes he had made.
Plus, drinking plenty of water was vital.
Even in the shade of the cavern, it was hot.
She blinked, looking at the pot that had been quietly simmering for a good while now behind her. The water wasn't boiling, but during the process of making the pemmican, he had only dried out the meat at a temperature a little over his own body temperature. That way the nutrients in the meat remained untouched, allowing him to slow cook it like this properly.
"Is that water...?"
"Yes."
She frowned. "I don't like it..."
He huffed. "It's filtered, don't worry. Besides, it's so hot outside, so you need to drink plenty. Try it at least?"
She blinked, before nodding as her belly rumbled again. "Well... okay."
Tasting it to make sure that it was good already, he nodded and took out two bowls. It had been simmering for two hours now, allowing the broth to absorb a lot of the taste, making for a rich flavor with plenty of nutrients and energy.
A common problem with traveler's diets that relied on salted meat had been scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies, a common issue with meat- or grain-only diets. But he had specifically bought meat from Thessian wildlife that had been grass-fed. 'You are what you eat' was quite true, especially when it came to cooking, be it nutritionally or in terms of taste. What the animal ate could drastically affect the taste of the meat in the end.
His mouth still occasionally watered at the memory of eating that wild hog in Finland, once. It had been gorging on blueberries for several months, giving it a sweetness that simply could not be found anywhere else.
"Here you go," he said, offering her a deep bowl with a spoon. She looked at the food and the spoon with a frown, before accepting it.
He took his own bowl and began to eat with a quiet 'itadakimasu' that made her blink in confusion since it wasn't in any asari tongue. He would need about half a kilogram of pemmican to keep himself going, she considerably less. That meant he had enough supplies for well over a week, assuming they only ate what he had prepared.
Proper planning and preparation...
Though, he was not a hundred percent certain if a pemmican diet contained all of the necessary nutrients for an asari to live. It meant that he couldn't simply expect her to be fine with a diet he knew was acceptable for himself.
Five years and still there are gaps like this in my understanding of the asari...
Additionally, he had to consider how much water they would both need.
For now, his tanks should last at least four days - more if he developed a filtration system for urine or sweat.
Another thing he had noticed and constantly kept stumbling over, was his complete and utter disconnect from the extranet. He had gotten used to having all of the extranet's resources available to him at all times. He had gotten so used to simply looking up information on the fly, be it in the middle of a conversation or while working out, that the sudden inability led to some metaphorical tripping as he realized that it was no longer an option.
I've grown too reliant on it, after all.
Well, even if he wasn't sure about its nutritional balance, it did seem to be edible for her, at least.
Nodding with the satisfaction of at least that going right, he looked out of the corner of his eye at Hoana who was finally eating her first spoonful. She paused, slowly chewing, before looking surprised and getting immersed in the meal as she began to eat with ever-increasing gusto.
She must have been hungry. He said nothing, turning to his own meal again.
No better compliment from a child than that.
;
"Is it really alright if I go to sleep, too?" Hoana asked, frowning with worry at him. "Shouldn't I umm... keep guard?"
"Yeah, the sun has set, which means it's bedtime, right? We've worked hard today, so it's important to rest too. Tomorrow we'll be leaving, so I need you in tip-top shape, okay?"
She tilted her head at him, then. "Tip-top?"
He nodded, patting her on the head again before lying down on his own mattress on the floor of the Tristar. She looked down at him from the upraised chair for a few seconds, before settling under her own blanket as well. Judging from her breathing after shuffling around for a while, she fell asleep ten minutes later.
It had been a rather hectic day.
The ship was in mostly working order again and he had made some plans for how to handle his current situation as well. There hadn't been any problems, a local mega-fauna predator showing up to claim the cavern for itself aside. Or perhaps reclaim?
Hoana had screamed as the large six-legged lizard—standing at two meters by the shoulders, with a three-way parting mouth and a meter long tongue—had appeared by the cavern's entrance, running for the safety of the Tristar in panic.
Emiya had simply grabbed a large wrench and beaten the thing black and blue while dancing around its attempts at claw and bite him until it decided that it no longer wanted any part of this place and slinking back out with its four-pronged tail between its legs.
Hoana had been cheering at him for the whole time.
After that, she seemed absolutely certain that everything was going to be fine, so it had been a rather fortuitous event after all.
Waiting another five minutes, he finally closed his eyes and stepped out of his body. Hopping outside of the Tristar and materializing, he grabbed the datapad he had left outside and ran a short-range scan.
Hmm, good. Nothing seems to be broadcasting. I would prefer to put myself in another Faraday coffin, but it can't be helped with Hoana there.
Turning around, he grabbed the rest of the equipment he had left outside. It was all stuff he had prepared during the daytime after he had gotten the ship mostly fixed.
The biggest problem he faced at the moment was simply the fact that he had no idea who had been pursuing him, and why. If they were simple pirates, it was entirely possible that they had already left. But if they were related to Professor Henell going missing then it was also entirely possible that they would want to capture or kill him, and were just patiently waiting for him to make a move again.
Additionally, he could not scan for them, given that turning on the ship would cause it to flare up like a bonfire in the night on this otherwise uninhabited planet. He had been lucky that this cavern had been located so near the equator of the planet, facing the star as he had landed. The red mountain inside of which he had landed had been soaking in the sunlight for the entire day; even now as the sun had set, it was still warm enough that he could have fried an egg on the rust-colored cliffs.
Stepping out into the open beyond the cavern's entrance, he gazed out.
They were up a third of the way to the mountain's top, the cavern's entrance looking down into a long valley running far below. Between the mountain ranges, he could see thick forests of some sort along with a hint of a river running through at the bottom. It reminded him of Germany and Switzerland in the way the terrain was shaped, even as the tropic climate gave it an entirely different appearance at a closer look.
He inhaled, tasting the outside air and noting that there did not seem to be any wind at the moment. It was still rather warm and the stars above twinkled peculiarly, as a purple aurora shone overhead, dancing between the millions of small dots of light.
Emiya mentally checked the map he had memorized, carefully choosing his heading with the help of the stars shining above as he began to run.
Getting down the worst of the slope, he jumped and began to soar through the air with each leap. His hair and red mantle danced with the wind, as he continued to jump and leap forward, crossing hundreds of meters with every step. He had to take extra care with the equipment he was carrying, though. Making sure to bend his knees with every landing and making sure his hands were allowing the cases he was carrying to bounce, he kept moving.
Clearing the mountain range, he appeared on a dry plain. Cracked dry earth stretched out as far as the eye could see. And 200 kilometers ahead the Prothean dig sites awaited, hidden between the dunes of sand.
It was his ultimate destination for the moment, but he hadn't been traveling in a straight path, rather he had taken a slight detour further up north first. He had devised a plan to look for the ship that had taken to pursuing him earlier, to try to see if they were still looking for him.
Moving out along the side of the desert, he arrived at another mountain.
Climbing it with long leaps, he landed on the top shortly. As he inhaled the crisp air, with his boots sinking into the snow-covered top, he looked around. From this position, he could see Dretirop all around him. The valleys and mountains, the thickly grown forests that would not lose out to any of the jungles on Earth, the grasslands near the rivers with countless mega-fauna sleeping by, and far in the distance a great green lake that sparkled with the stars above.
Exhaling, he shook his head and began to clear away some of the snow as he began to set up the equipment he had brought along.
The simple catch-22 he was presented with was that if he looked for his pursuers they would instantly detect him and certainly come swooping in. But if he did not scan for them then he could not know whether it was safe to leave, and the moment he tried getting off the planet he would be completely at their mercy again if they were still there.
To see if it was safe to use electronics, he would have to use electronics.
But the simple problem had an equally simple solution; simply gut the sensors from the ship and run the test elsewhere. This mountaintop would let him safely look for his pursuers without the danger of his ship being found out. Of course, it left his ship lacking some of its normal sensors, which was less than optimal, but he just had to make do.
The best-case scenario was that he would simply be able to re-install it on his ship again and that would be that.
Of course, he could not simply wait here and look over the readings in person. Or well, perhaps if he dove in or remained spiritualized he could, but he would rather not get shot from outer space if his pursuers got excitable again. Therefore he had simply set the sensors to broadcast its results to a datapad he would take with him and then move elsewhere.
Finishing the setup, and setting the timer that would turn on the sensors in five minutes, he got up. Grabbing the datapad, he turned around and with all his strength leaped off the top of the mountain.
The wind howled in his ears as he spread his arms and legs to maximize his drag coefficient, his mantle flapping at his waist as the ground approached.
It was almost like parachuting. Just without the parachute.
Then at the last second, he pulled his arm inward to shield the datapad against his chest, closing his legs while angling himself to fall forward at an angle towards the ground ahead. His lone extended hand touched the ground and he allowed it to give and bend as he turned his angled fall into a forward roll to bleed off momentum, and as he got to his feet again he continued at nearly the same speed forward in a run instead.
Some may have scoffed at him in London for joining on that one Parkour seminar before he had first set out to be a Hero of Justice, but those skills he had learned had been useful to this very day. Or well, he had learned the basic forward breakfall roll in middle school Judo lessons, but learning to apply it to higher jumps had been a valuable lesson nonetheless.
Hell, the impact from landing directly alone would have been so large that it would have left a crater. This way, most of it had been bled off to leave a much less noticeable indentation in the ground from his roll.
He continued running for several minutes until he found a spot within the edge of the sensors' broadcast range that had relatively decent concealment. Crouching down, he turned on the datapad and began to wait for the incoming transmission.
Half a minute later, it began to broadcast and he waited with bated breath. Would someone show up? Would his pursuers appear to check it out in person? Had they left? Would they just shoot it out from outer space? As the data began to stream in, he waited patiently. One minute passed. Two. Ten.
After half an hour, the sensor stopped scanning and went back into sleep mode.
Emiya sighed, closing the datapad and getting up.
"No bite, huh."
At the very least, he had not found the starship anywhere on this side of the planet. There was a lot of 'static' and background noise, which could have just been solar wind and other miscellaneous radiation, from what he had been able to see. Or it could have been a low-power surveillance drone or some kind of small satellite looking for him right at that moment.
Frowning, he turned towards the cave where his Tristar was hidden as he paused.
Had he made a mistake by setting up the scanner so close to his actual hiding place? There was no way a normal human would have been able to set it up this far away, but a good surveillance system would still have been able to cover a wide enough area that it was still looking over the area where his Tristar was hidden. Just because he had not found anything did not mean that there wasn't anyone out there.
It was possible that he was being monitored right now from somewhere in outer space; there was no way for him to tell.
If he went back to his ship like that, it might lead his pursuers right to him.
Sighing, he looked at the datapad in his hand. It contained nothing sensitive or valuable. Not really. Hell, he had three more on the Tristar. They were the equivalent of a ballpoint pen or a post-it note in this day and age.
"Tch, look at me now, littering." Saying that he dropped it to the ground after having made sure that both the memory drive and cache had been completely wiped.
Maybe I should have set it up on the other side of the planet as a distraction, and then flown away while they might have been looking at that?
He shook his head.
No, if they're in outer space and have something like smaller satellites or drones in orbit, it wouldn't make a difference. Not enough information for me to make such a large play.
Spiritualizing, he returned to the mountaintop one more time to check that the results he had gotten weren't any different. It would be rather embarrassing if he were to find out that the broadcast had been hacked and he had just been shown a spoofed feed to lull him into a false sense of security.
Finding nothing unusual, he turned to look out at the desert. Even from this mountain's peak, he could not see the ruins.
It stretched well over a third of the planet after all. One of the reports he had been able to find on the Serrice U intranet had mentioned a theory about some kind of environmental disaster that had caused the desert to appear and begin spreading, some fifty-five thousand years ago.
Leaping out once again, he soared through the air out over the desert. He had returned to the mountain for more than just the sensor equipment's sake; he needed to see the stars clearly and have his starting position. Once he was in the heart of the desert, navigation would prove rather difficult. Thus, he had beforehand consulted his ship's star charts and the scan of the planet he had taken on landing.
As long as I follow that star, starting from this mountain, I should arrive at the third dig site. From there, I should be able to find the other dig sites as well.
In his spiritual form and without any extra gear like before, he lacked mass, thus he had no need for the momentum conserving roll he had used before, simply continuing his stride upon landing as if he had simply jumped lightly instead of fallen from a mountain's peak.
He ran for at least thirty minutes in his invisible, ghostly state before he began to see signs of an asari expedition dig site.
Slowing down, he arrived at a mile-wide hole in the ground. It was only some fifty meters in depth. But with the fine sand here, it was necessary to remove everything at a wide radius to ensure that nothing came collapsing down when one dug a hole.
It kind of looks like a gigantic antlion's pit, he thought, before shaking his head.
At the bottom, he could see a flat surface of some kind, almost like a hatch. It was darker than the red sand, thus he jumped down to get a better look. He frowned, noting that the surface seemed like a later addition. Dropping down through the metal trapdoor, he arrived inside of the ruin. It was pitch black, but he felt a floor beneath him solid enough to support his weight.
Materializing, he projected a shining sword again to provide himself with some light. Looking around, he could see marks where a stairway had been bolted into the side of this ruin to provide a safe entrance from the bottom of the sandpit.
He walked around, looking with some interest before he shook his head.
There was nothing here.
As far as he could tell, it was simply a skyscraper of some kind that had fallen down without actually breaking apart on impact and then been covered in sand. The building materials were quite incredible and the windows were the same materials as the test tubes he had seen on Mars, he noted. It was quite impressive how they could hold up the tons and tons of sand that must lay above it, all these millennia later.
But it wasn't what he was looking for.
Dismissing the sword, he de-materialized again and jumped up through the side of the building and through the deep sand. Arriving at the surface, he oriented himself again by the stars above and began to run towards the place he knew as the first dig site. It was where the primary camp had been constructed, as far as he knew, and where he was most likely to find evidence of any foul play.
It took him another hour to make it to the camp, though he almost missed it. All of the prefab buildings had long since been removed and the imprints had not remained in the sand for long, the winds covering up all evidence of the team ever having been here.
He only realized that he had arrived by noticing the first ruins that had been spotted. They had originally been spotted on planetary scans based on the fact that a part of the building was sticking out of the sand, making it possible to detect from orbit much more easily than the fallen skyscraper he had passed by earlier.
Thus, the first dig site had been erected here and expanded outward along with the additional discoveries.
The only signs of the campsite that remained were the remnants of the washing facility and some miscellaneous debris, like wrapping plastic and cloth that remained here and there, buried in the sand. All of the prefab buildings had been dismantled and taken back with the other ships, he knew.
There's nothing here, huh...
No matter how he tried to look around, it had been removed too long ago. Everything on the surface had been lost to the shifting sands. With sensors, he might be able to scan beneath the sands, but he hadn't been able to bring anything like that with him. And Structural Analysis did not do well with it, either.
Sighing, he turned to look at the ruins.
Well, I've nothing else to try my luck with...
He leaped forward, delving into the sealed ruins just as he had before. Materializing and projecting another shining sword, he looked around after phasing through the sealed entrance. Unlike the previous ruin, he could not immediately recognize it as anything familiar so quickly.
But just like the other ruin, even as he walked in deeper, it seemed like it had been swept clean of everything distinctly Prothean.
He noticed however that the architecture had changed considerably. It was obvious in hindsight, but the Mars ruins had been an exception in that regard as it had been in many other ways. He would have to try to date this place, somehow. Perhaps by hacking the Serrice University intranet to gain access to their files when he returned?
Placing a hand on the wall, he exhaled as he spoke quietly.
"—Trace, on"—begin synchronization;
First, he simply tried to grasp the nearby structure itself. But beyond gaining an understanding of the nearby layout and the material properties, he could glean little through his Structural Analysis.
He had never tried to read a 'wall' this deeply before, but he suspected that it would be difficult to find anything after even a year of its construction. This place was much older than a month, of course, meaning he had no hope of gaining an understanding of those who had built it through such roundabout means.
It was the same as other mundane items, like with the alien blades. He could read the normal echoes and shadows of events past, but none of the detailed history that he was familiar with from swords. A little of what and when, but none of the how and why.
Mostly he could catch glimpses and hints of the enthusiasm with which the asari team of experts had been poring over the whole structure in the recent decade, touching everything a hundred and thousand times.
But little else.
Changing tack, he exhaled, and instead of trying to go 'deeper', he widened the area he was looking into, spreading his magical energy outward.
Hmm, there...?
Opening his eyes, he turned to run towards the end of the entrance hall.
Taking a left, he entered the labyrinthine guts of this place. Unlike the skyscraper that seemed quite logically built—the fall putting all the doors at odd places on the walls aside—this ruin was a long series of halls and closed-off rooms that seemed to follow no rhyme or reason. The low ceiling made it feel somewhat claustrophobic, even as he continued advancing through.
Left, right, right...
It almost reminded him of a hotel, only many of the rooms were interconnected and hallways aside there was none of the uniformity one would expect.
Arriving at the spot that had stood out to him, Emiya raised the shining sword to look at a spot that had caught his attention before.
Tracing a hand over the wall, he frowned.
There was a spot where cracks spread outwards from an impact against the wall, looking fairly recent as well. It seemed like something tiny had hit the wall with extreme force or with substantial speed.
Bullet marks? A firefight, perhaps?
He continued looking around, but could not find any other suspicious signs. No further impact marks, nor any fallen debris or blood could he find. Then again, he did somehow feel as if this place had been swept relatively recently. Was that merely a sign of the constant use by the asari expedition in the last decade, or had someone cleaned up after a possible fight?
He put his hand on the wall, closing his eyes as he extended his magical energy outward again.
Emiya opened his eyes, frowning as he looked upwards. Unlike the low halls, the ceiling was quite a bit higher up here. So far up in fact, that he could not properly see it beyond the range of illumination that the shining sword gave off.
Pushing more of his energy into the blade, the light it gave off greatly increased until it was like he was holding onto a small sun in his hand. The entire room was filled with brightness, and in the new clarity, he peered at the ceiling. There was no sign of impact such as with the bullet hole he had found earlier, but there was a microfracture that seemed recent. And there...
That looks like...?
He bent his knees, inhaling as he judged the height of the ceiling.
Jumping up, at the apex of his ascent he was just at the right height to stretch out his empty hand against the ceiling. Falling down, his boots made a hard sound against the floor even as he bent his knees to absorb the impact of the drop. Staring at his hand, he opened it slowly.
In his palm was something: extremely thin flakes, black in color and very brittle. This isn't dust... This is paint. From a hardsuit, maybe?
Looking up, he wondered how it could have gotten there. Looking back at the spot where the wall had been shot and at the surrounding labyrinthine halls. Furrowing his brows, he began to replay a hypothetical battle in his mind.
Someone was running; being chased.
Turning around with his sword hand raised, with the index finger extended akin to a gun's barrel.
Someone shot from here at that person who was trying to take that corner for cover, missing the shot perhaps?
He looked up at the exact spot he was standing in.
And that person, a powerful biotic, turned around and slammed them straight into the ceiling hard enough to crack the armor?
Dropping his hand, he frowned.
"It's possible."
Changing his area of focus from the walls or ceiling, he looked at the floor. If someone had been thrown up and hit the ceiling, they should have fallen down right here, he reasoned. Unlike the quick surprise of the impact against a ceiling or the impersonal bullet, this seemed like the best place to focus on.
Crouching down, he put his palm against the floor and closed his eyes.
Exhaling, he pushed deep into the floor with his magical energy.
Emiya twitched as he found something. Furrowing his brows, he inhaled and focused on the sensation.
Just like with the turian knives and asari blades; take it slow, figure out the basics and then try to reason out what it means.
It took him a full minute until he felt confident in his analysis. Standing up, he nodded.
Someone did fall down here, the minute damage and hysteresis remaining and different from the rest of the floor. Someone heavy—much too heavy to be an asari—fell down here. Judging from the height... 120 kilograms? No, lower gravity, so around... 133 kilograms?
That was about the weight range of a man in a combat hardsuit.
"There was a fight here."
That still did not give him any leads on where Professor Henell and the rest of the expedition rearguard could be. Shaking his head, he got up and continued to look around.
;
Four hours had passed since he had first come out of the cavern.
He had gone through five dig sites, but none of them had yielded any more useful information.
The first ruin had been the location of the primary camp where the last starship to leave should have been. But due to the shifting sands and wind, no traces remained of where it had been parked. It was nowhere to be found at the moment, either.
Really, as things stood, he had no more leads on Dretirop.
From here Emiya imagined he would have to start looking at the nearest habitable planets with space control. If he could sift through enough arrival and departure records combined with fuel expenditures, he might be able to find whoever it was that had appeared on Dretirop and disappeared with Professor Henell. With luck, he might even be able to find a ship that had on an official record set out to Dretirop and returned within the feasible time frame.
Within one Mass Relay jump, it was still a feasible task. If they had taken two jumps then it would be a far more daunting task as the number of possible planets jumped to double digits. And if they had done three Mass Relay jumps before touching down somewhere, or if they had a private base somewhere, or if they had falsified their records...
It would become an astronomical amount of data to try and analyze.
Well, it was a long shot, but it was all he had at the moment to go off on.
Even his earlier interest in the Prothean ruins had long since waned. There was nothing here - everything of interest had been cataloged and shipped back to Thessia for further study, and the ancient structures had no secrets to share with him. It seemed like Dretirop was a dead end and he ought to be taking his leave.
But there was one question that still remained.
Who were the people who had appeared out of nowhere and started chasing after him when he entered the star system? Were they related to Henell's disappearance? Were they still up there, waiting for him to attempt leaving?
"Playing hide-and-seek with starships that can take me out from outer space really isn't my kind of game," he grumbled.
Additionally, he had Hoana to consider. He couldn't very well play his usual tactics if she was on the line as well. Thus, he had to flush them out first.
And so, he had come up with a plan.
That plan had led him back to the mountaintop where he had left the sensors he had gutted from his ship.
The thing about those sensors was that in broad strokes functionality they weren't all that different from a tightbeam communicator. It was merely a matter of focus in the signals used, something which was not a matter of hardware, but really of software. It was the same in the beacon, which could use its light emitters and sensors both to carry forward messages and to scan its surroundings.
That meant that he could dive in and re-purpose the gutted scanners to function as an ad-hoc tightbeam with minimal effort. Or rather, something which functioned very similarly to one. Enough at least, that it was difficult to tell the difference with a ship's scans. Enough to make someone think he had managed to create a tightbeam connection to one of the beacons.
Emiya had not been able to find any additional asari comm buoys in the systems, both due to being interrupted and due to simply how many places for hiding such a thing existed. Star systems were massive, even when only considered as a two-dimensional place.
But he was willing to bet that those who had been after Henell had not been able to find many—if any at all—either.
It was more likely they had aimed at the starting point for the messages, targeting the asari's ability to send a message in the first place. There would have been a transmitter of some kind installed on the planet, capable of receiving a distress signal from omnitools and other specialized devices, that then carried forward the signal to a comm buoy in space which then daisy-chained it all the way back to Thessia, Emiya reasoned.
Finding those would have been much easier than finding a dormant buoy that could have been hidden anywhere, which could have also had any number of back-ups.
A few pinpoint strikes to take out those transmitters before the actual attack and the system would have been disabled.
If those who had pursued him were related to those who had taken Henell, they would probably panic at seeing a ground transmitter connecting to the comm buoy and calling for aid. After all, they would not know who he was, only that he was flying a ship with a Thessian transmitter ID and was snooping around Dretirop after them.
That should cause them to over-react and show their hand.
Additionally, Emiya had set one more layer to the trap.
Before, he had used a wide-area broadcast to announce the results of the scan to a datapad in way that would not reveal his position. Like shouting at the top of his lungs on the mountain in all directions, it would have been impossible to tell if anyone had heard him.
This time, he intended to make a 'mistake' and have his datapad send back a confirmation of having received the broadcast, as if shouting back that he had heard it this time, giving anyone out there a direct lead to his 'hiding place'.
Landing in his spiritual form after his leap off of the mountain's peak, he continued back to where he had left the datapad. Grabbing it and semi-materializing enough to carry it, he continued to the cavern he had chosen.
It was another cave that could have plausibly hidden his Tristar much like the one he had actually flown into, one among a thousand others dotting this massive mountain chain. It was deep enough that anyone investigating would have to go hundreds of meters inside if they wanted to find a ship that could have been hidden there. Any search party would be occupied for a good while there, giving him plenty of time to observe and plan his next step.
Arriving, he turned around and looked at the mountain in the distance. Unlike his actual hiding place, this cavern was actually within a far more reasonable distance to traverse on foot and was within sight of the mountain. Even without his hawk eyes, it would have been possible to see the sensor set up on the peak.
Well, most people would have needed binoculars, but it was still within reasonable observation distance.
Turning on the datapad he finished his preparations quickly.
Setting down the datapad by the ground, he crossed his arms and stared out. Now, it was just a matter of waiting to see if anyone took the more sophisticated bait.
Counting in his head, he noted that the sensor-cum-transmitter must have gone off by now. A second later the datapad chimed, receiving a confirmation of the transmission going off and having sent a signal to space in a rough approximation of the distress beacon's direction, which it confirmed with a broadcast signal back. He waited, realizing that he had unconsciously started tapping his finger against his bicep while counting the seconds passing by.
Nothing happened.
It wasn't like he had expected the sensors to be shot from orbit with a spinal cannon, or anything, but it was somewhat disappointing that even this did not seem to elicit any reactions.
He sighed, dropping his arms to his side.
Well, that's that. I'll try leaving tomorrow morning, I suppose. I need to get Hoana back before Hosin goes too crazy— Emiya paused, blinking as he sensed something peculiar, far above him. ...Mass effect fields?
He looked up, but could not see anything in the dark night sky. It was too dispersed and weak to be a ship, anyhow. But something was falling down, coming from very high up.
Turning off the datapad and hiding it from sight, he settled to wait outside of the cavern, staring up at the sky. It took less than half a minute for him to finally be able to see what it was that had piqued his attention.
Those are... some kind of cylinders?
They came crashing downwards, only slowed down by the built-in hovercraft technology.
Three of them, spread out in a triangular pattern with nearly fifty meters between them, all around the entrance of the cavern. He half expected an impact sound as they touched ground, but instead, there was a final flare of the mass effect fields and they simply settled down, light as a feather into the red sand dunes.
With a hiss, the cylinders' sides opened and from each, six heavily armored and armed figures appeared.
Clad from head to toe in black heavy hardsuits and holding all some form of long-arm in their hands, the figures wasted no time in surging for cover and baring their weapons at the cavern's entrance.
With practiced discipline, the three teams all arrived by the cavern in less than ten seconds, moving in paired staggering groups and covering the entrance at all times as they advanced. Their black hardsuits blended into the night extremely well, the subtle shade gradient and texture of the surface preventing it from standing out in starlight somehow.
Emiya frowned, looking on as they approached.
It looks like the same shade as the paint I found in the ruins... Five fingers, the structure of the body and foot... Could be humans, or asari?
One of them spoke, saying four syllables in rapid succession followed by another two while raising a hand to halt the rest of the armored figures. As a result, all of them stopped.
Emiya blinked at that, realizing he recognized those guttural sounds.
Batarians, again.
They moved in, half advancing into the cavern while half remained outside.
Shrugging invisibly, Emiya turned around and moved to one of the drop cylinders, taking a closer look.
It doesn't seem very complex. Just something to get them down to the surface safely, huh?
He even made a quick attempt at a dive, to see if he could find anything, but it did not respond at all to his attempt. Probably shutting down the moment it hit the ground to hide from EM-scanners.
Turning his attention back to the armored figures, he dived into one of their omnitools instead. As expected, they were all wearing cheap omnitools with standard operating systems and software. It was the same style of operating procedure he had seen among the Russians in his days; in the field, they only used something so simple that it could not be subverted by a technologically superior foe.
He still remembered his initial confusion as seeing entire walls filled with confiscated smartphones that had been nailed through the screen into the wall by officers.
Well, even the simplest omnitools were on a level beyond a smartphone from his era.
All three teams were on the same comm-channel, but there did not seem to be any connection to the starship they must have come from. Either they had no contact, or only a select few among them had any specialized equipment for that purpose.
Well now, should I try to find that equipment or continue observing this team and wait until they return to the ship? Assuming they're the same group that was dealing with Henell, it would mean they will come down to remove all tracks of their arrival. Those cylinders will have to be picked up by a starship too, no doubt.
He had hoped there would a translation program in one of the omnitools, but upon investigation he found none. Then again, this group did not seem like they did much talking anyway, preferring to shoot instead and ask questions never, so it could not be helped.
Shrugging, he dove out of the omnitools and followed the party exploring the insides of the cavern for a while. But it seemed that they were merely carefully and thoroughly exploring it for the Tristar. There was little he could glean from them, thus he simply returned to the entrance. He returned in time just to see one of the armored figures stand up and begin pointing around.
Emiya blinked as the figure picked out three people and then began to point around them, followed by using his omnitool to begin talking to those who had gone to explore the cavern. In response to the figure, two parties of three got up and began looking around the cavern's entrance in an ever-expanding search pattern.
They're looking for signs of me? Well, as long as they don't find the Tristar, that's fine. It's dozens of kilometers away, so it should be safe.
Settling down at a spot up on the mountainside above the cavern's entrance, he crossed his arms and decided to simply wait and see for now.
;
And there it is, Emiya thought as he uncrossed his arms and looked up.
Far overhead, the ship that Emiya had first seen at the edges of the star system was slowly descending. It seemed that the ground party's inability to find anything had forced them to call in the starship to pick them up.
Until now, they had been holding back, hoping to bait him out.
But his non-compliance was forcing them to begin taking more overt measures.
As the ship finally came within a kilometer, Emiya crouched and with a long leap through the air landed on top of it. He continued watching, as it descended until it was low enough to pick up the three landing cylinders that had been shot out earlier.
After that. it moved to pick up the ground team that had been patiently waiting.
Or, rather unexpectedly to Emiya, it landed instead.
The bottom of the ship opened up, revealing a ramp into the belly of the ship. And out of it rolled two large four-wheeled armored ground vehicles. The ground troops who had been waiting immediately boarded the vehicles and set out.
Ah, they're going to expand their search pattern. And that can't be cheap equipment... Certainly not something mere pirating could fund.
Noting that they weren't heading in the direction of his Tristar, he nodded, deciding to observe a little while longer.
That's fine, it gives me time to see what these people are about.
Emiya crouched down, looking around before he simply phased through the top of the starship and landed inside. He held no real hope of finding Professor Henell in the brig of this ship, but it bore investigating anyway. He started walking around immaterially, taking in the designs of rooms as he went through walls and ignored the crew walking around.
It wasn't a very large ship - a frigate he supposed by Alliance classification.
Looking around he found sleeping quarters, an armory, a mess hall, and many other facilities with an obvious purpose. After poring over the ship he finally settled by the bridge, looking at a batarian in a hardsuit who was giving out orders. Or that's what it seemed to him anyhow.
Without an omnitool to translate their speech, it was difficult to get a good grasp of what was being said.
Emiya hadn't really looked into batarian body language or social norms before.
He additionally tried to dive into the ship's computer but the language barrier was still a problem.
Sure, he could parse through and figure out the machine code and programs with ease, but that only gave him access to a bunch of text or video files in another language that meant nothing at all to him without a translator. It seemed somewhat unusual for a ship to be flying around without any kind of translators, but upon reviewing some of the recorded footage from a spaceport he realized that the crew simply knew how to speak various languages themselves.
And all their records and logs were wiped daily, it seemed.
This is some kind of wetworks black ops outfit, with how careful they are about leaving no evidence behind.
The starship couldn't have been here for more than a week, though, based on the onboard rations and supplies and the space that was available for such in the storage compartments.
Given that this outfit lacked the information technology of the STG or Cerberus, it must have been a policy adopted to deal with their inferiority in those fields, just as with the omnitools.
That didn't mean that he could not read any of the data on the computer. The various sensor feeds and comm channels were easy enough to tap into, confirming his suspicions that there were satellite drones orbiting Dretirop and sending back data to the ship at all times.
Trying to leave would have resulted in his and Hoana's explosive deaths.
It's not really paranoia if there really is someone in outer space trying to get you.
At least it seemed like this was the only ship in the system.
He also found a huge stash of credits in a sealed away credit chit, which he found noteworthy.
I'll have to look into that later.
Finally, he found something interesting as he switched focus from the starship's mainframe to the omnitools found in the personal quarters. Diving into one of the omnitools, he found video footage of what seemed like the various members of the crew participating in various forms of torture, mutilation, and rape. With clinical detachment, he noted that the footage seemed to go back years, containing footage of several races and of dozens of distinct locations.
Well, I figured they weren't exactly the salvation army, given that they tried to shoot me, but that pretty much seals the deal.
He exhaled, moving on to finish his rough investigation. They were all going to die by his hand here, that was decided already.
Perhaps if it was just him, and he was here in an untraceable ship, he might have simply grounded their ship to safely leave. But given that they might very well track him down to Hosin's...
No need to leave loose ends, it never works out.
In another locker, he found a collection of knives and though they were silent to his reality marble of their past, the smell of blood and fats sticking to the organic hilts underneath the layers of oil and polish was familiar enough that he could still venture a guess as to their purpose.
There were only so many things one could need a gutting knife in a starship for.
Some he had even seen in the videos, he distantly thought.
Finally, he visited what seemed like the brig of the ship. It was more of a holding cell in a pit, near the engine room. The walls and floor were soaked with disinfectant, but he did not need magic to feel the muted despair and terror that had soaked into those walls.
The more he looked around, the more he felt like it was the rule rather than the exception for the ship's crew.
Sometimes in his journeys, he simply ran into people like this who made it a rather simple decision on how much force he ought to use against them. Perhaps these were simply some hard men making hard decisions, but at this point in time, they were simply an obstacle and had proven themselves to not be anything resembling innocents.
It wasn't that he was judging them, or justifying his actions by dehumanizing them.
It was simply that he didn't see any reason why he should spare them. He needed to get off of Dretirop and find Henell, and leaving these people behind with a nose on his trail would simply prove inconvenient.
Hopping back into the mainframe, he counted and located all of the batarians that belonged to the ship's crew. Sixteen down on the ground and an additional forty on the ship itself.
With a deep sigh, he raised his hand to his face and projected the black helmet again.
He had already long since gotten accustomed to wearing the long-sleeves and gloves on his updated diamene weave armor, but this was a job where he did not want even the slightest chance of his identity to be revealed, mirroring the batarians own care for operational security.
After a moment's hesitation, he also dismissed the red mantle, deciding that a 'clean up' such as this was not worthy of it.
Then, he finished his preparations in the mainframe of the ship.
At once, all cameras turned off, the airlocks and external hatches sealed shut, and a third of all internal doors sealed shut, leaving the rest completely ajar. The armory was sealed shut, and he sent all of the surveillance satellite drones an order to correct their flight paths into a degenerating orbit that would cause them to crash down into the planet within minutes.
Finally, he set the engine core on a restart protocol. To reverse any of the changes he had wrought, assuming they could bypass his spirit hacking, it would be necessary to first restore power.
And by that point, it would already be too late.
Garbed in all black, he dived out and materialized behind the batarian who had been standing on the bridge the whole time pacing around and issuing orders loudly now. Placing a hand on the man's neck, Emiya stunned him silently.
Zero—keep him alive for interrogation.
Turning on his heel, he turned towards the communications officer—or whatever the equivalent was for a batarian ship, tasked with overseeing all communications, judging by what Emiya had gleaned from the dive into the mainframe—who was staring confusedly at his powerless, dark terminal. It was just a quick snapping of a neck and it was over, the batarian was dead before he even knew what had happened.
One.
Turning around, he projected a curved black blade and decapitated the navigation officer on the other side of the narrow bridge. The batarian had just enough time to hear the sound of the breaking neck behind him before his own head lolled and hit the floor.
Reversing the motion, Emiya backhanded the sword forward and let go, sending it spinning into the torso of a third batarian who had just noticed him. Kanshou sunk in with a wet squelch, digging all the way into the hilt through flesh and bone from the force of the throw.
Stalking forward, Emiya pulled the blade loose as he continued walking.
Three.
Red emergency lights finally began to turn on from emergency backup power, bathing the ship's insides in a disquieting hue that made it nearly impossible to distinguish the spreading pools of blood from the floor itself.
Walking forward, he heard the approaching batarian before he saw him.
An armed and running batarian came running in, all four of his eyes turning wide a second before his raised arm was cut off and his neck was parted from his torso. He died before the pistol he had been raising had had time to hit the floor.
Four.
Following the path of unlocked doors along the length of the frigate, Emiya cut down all he could find. He had cut off all exits strategically, forcing everyone on board onto a straight path; as long as he walked to the end, he would have killed everyone.
He was down to the last five batarians who had managed to make it to the armory and were in the process of welding it open when Emiya finally ran into some resistance.
Hmm, they're holding the chokepoint with pistols. No way to get through without taking a few shots by conventional standards. Shrugging, he raised the black blade and put his right hand against the flat. Pushing in magical energy he could feel it slowly begin expanding into its breaking point.
As it began to destabilize, Emiya finally exhaled and pulled back his arm. Taking aim, he struck forward and tossed the blade into the hallway ahead, where it curved through the air just enough to fly through the chokepoint around the corner.
He heard surprised grunts as the blade sank into the metal bulkhead with a deep 'thunk'. And a second later it exploded, taking out the last of the crew inside of the ship. Checking that they were all dead, he exhaled at their state.
Explosions in enclosed spaces were never pretty.
Spiritualizing, he jumped back to the bridge and found the unconscious batarian he hadn't killed still lying limply on the floor. Mentally dubbing this one the captain, he materialized and projected a rope to tie him up with. There was no telling how long the stun would last, thus it was better to be safe than sorry.
Body searching the batarian yielded a few weapons and questionable objects, which Emiya disposed of as he left the captain tied up.
Around him, lights were turning on again as panels and terminals flickered. Diving into the mainframe, he re-established comms with the ground teams that had been trying to get inside for several minutes now.
Sixteen on the ground, present and accounted for.
All were at the foot of the ship, judging by the re-established short-range comm signals. Diving out and phasing through the bottom of the ship, he dropped among the hardsuit-clad batarians. They were loudly arguing and gesticulating everywhere, several of them pointing at the large guns mounted on their ground vehicles while others were vehemently pointing at them while shouting back.
Emiya turned around and made for a hill.
Close combat was quite effective in constrained environments, but ultimately for clean-up operations out in the open, it was most efficient to simply be at a distance. Overhead, the stars were beginning to wane as the horizon was turning a lighter shade of purple.
Dawn was fast approaching.
Stopping at a hill where he had a decent view, some half a kilometer away, he materialized again and projected his bow. Exhaling, he raised it and in his mind readied sixteen arrows. A sustained high volume of projections could be rather exhausting, but a simple volley like this was something he could easily handle.
Especially given that they were all standing still like simple targets.
Raising his bow, he took aim at the first of his targets. The arrow appeared in his hand and he pulled back the string only roughly to his jaw, raising the tip enough that it would arc and hit home.
He loosed the projectile.
Projecting the next arrow he repeated the action, only this time he lowered the bow half a finger as he pulled the string two centimeters less back.
The next arrow, again the same. And again. Lowering the aim and pulling back the arrow a little bit less with each shot.
One of the problems snipers often faced was that the moment the first target was shot, all of the other targets would become uncertainties, entering a state of flux where it became very difficult to take them out. There was no telling how they would act the moment they realized someone had been shot. Some would freeze, others would jump for cover, some would begin to fire back blindly while some would remain calm and analyze the situation.
Thus, a skilled sniper had to either be a good enough judge of character that they could choose a specific order in which to take out their targets in a group or be able to take all of his targets out before they realized what had happened.
Emiya had settled for the latter in this case.
By successively loosing arrows with less and less power but correcting for the angle of elevation, it was possible to have all of them impact the target at the same instant. This was because the slower arrows that flew at a straighter trajectory would catch up to the faster arrows that had a longer trajectory with their bigger arc.
By matching the arcs and velocities, it was possible to hit a single target simultaneously with multiple projectiles in the same instant, even if they were loosed in succession and not at the same time.
Or sixteen different targets, as it were in this case.
He had actually adopted that technique from artillery and mortar technology where it was known as 'multiple round simultaneous impact' firing.
Well, he could also do it in reverse by shooting faster and faster arrows that would catch up to the slower arrow that had been shot first, but for that he needed a much greater distance to work with. He had practiced the MRSI technique enough at half a kilometer that it was second nature, even after a century of inaction, that it was simply what he had settled on using out of habit.
Emiya exhaled, coolly observing as all sixteen targets were struck in rapid enough succession as to be called simultaneous.
Kinetic barriers went off but could not successfully hold back the 250-gram arrows flying at supersonic speeds, designed more to handle high-kinetic energy, low-momentum rounds from modern railguns. Their hardsuits fared a bit better, but the heavy, sharp points punched through the hard ceramic plates nonetheless and stabbed into their internal organs without fail.
Two—no, four survived. Poor shot placement... Their inner organs probably vastly differ from humans. Should I have gone for the heads after all? No, the rounded helmets and the lightness of their heads make it unlikely for the arrow to pierce through - arrow deflection or the head snapping back too likely. Center of mass necessary was for proper penetration.
He raised the bow again and shot four additional arrows, watching all of the batarians fall still dispassionately before he dismissed the bow and arrows alike.
Shaking his head, he spiritualized and returned to the ship.
Now then, let's try using the datapad's translation software and see if I can find anything on the mainframe or the captain...
Looking up at the star slowly rising up on the horizon, Emiya judged he had still about an hour left before he ought to return to Hoana. As he got to it, he noted how easily he had fallen back into these old habits.
Five years of peace and quiet had had no effect on him after all, it seemed.
;
Emiya opened his eyes and sat up.
"You're up!" Hoana immediately shouted, excitedly jumping to stand next to him.
He nodded, getting up from his mattress on the floor and smiling at her.
As she chattered about breakfast and about having been waiting for him to wake up, he moved to pat her head, before hesitating. Turning his palm up, he stared at it. It's nothing.
Shaking his head, he worked his jaw and inhaled through his nose. Blinking, he looked at Hoana. His mouth felt odd.
"...Did you pull at my lips while I was sleeping?"
She froze, turning her head away and avoiding his eyes.
"Umm..."
Raising a hand to his nose, he frowned.
"...Did you stick the D-plier in my nose?"
Hoana twitched, before drawing a deep breath and crossing her arms to pout at him. "...You weren't waking up."
"...And?"
"Well in 'The Adventures of the Cursed Sword Princess', Z'till used the flat of her i'usushij to see if the general was still alive! Her sword fogged up from her breathing, even if it was too faint to be felt against her skin!"
"...Ah, I see. And because my breathing was too shallow for even that, you felt you had to push it deeper to make sure, is that it?"
"Exactly!" she chimed, looking at him as she realized that he understood her intent. Only to flinch at the unimpressed stare he was giving her. "Umm... I mean..."
He reached out, lightly flicking her forehead.
"Oww..." She rubbed the spot, looking up at him with a sullen expression that tried to be a fierce frown like her mother's, but only came across as a petulant pout.
He put a hand on her head, smiling lightly. "Let's get some breakfast and then start heading back home."
"Umm, right!"
;
"Preparations for takeoff complete?"
"Aye, aye, sir!" Hoana shouted back.
"That was for receiving orders; you answer questions with just 'yes, sir'."
"Umm...? Aye, sir!"
Emiya huffed and let it slide, still making one last visual check that he had brought everything back inside the Tristar and that they were both properly strapped in.
"Power on. Start-up diagnostics... All green."
Hoana grinned, throwing him a thumbs up. Their repairs of the radiator panel had been perfect, thus he threw back a thumbs-up of his own.
"Countdown," Emiya said, flicking switches here and there, adjusting some of the sensors that he had re-installed. It had taken him a few hours, but it had been a relatively easy job.
He grinned as Hoana began.
Never underestimate the value of a hardcover manual, this could have taken so much longer without it...
"Three... Two... One... Liftoff!" And at her last word, he activated the mass effect fields and began to rise up with the thrusters.
Through the main screen, they could see in real-time a 270-degree view of the front of the Tristar. A second later, they were completely off the ground. Hoana made an excited shout, bouncing in her seat as Emiya nodded.
Adjusting the view of the main screen, he essentially reversed the controls. 'Backing out', he flew forward and carefully made his way out of the cavern. Outside, the red sands and purplish sky greeted them, and as they rose to about 40 kilometers from the ground, Hoana's jaw seemed to want to stay at the surface.
She stared around, awe and excitement obvious as she kept staring at everything.
"You want to make a short trip around the planet before we leave?" Emiya asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Can we?"
"Sure." He said, flipping a sensor offline as he adjusted the Tristar slightly to turn away from a certain direction.
She doesn't need to see that.
"Yes, please!" she immediately answered and he began to fly towards the great green lake he had only seen from the distance before.
There was no point in heading towards the mountains where the wreckage of the batarian starship remained.
The captain had been insistent that he was an independent slaver and pirate until it had become obvious that the rest of the crew was already dead, at which point he had bitten his own tongue off. He had tried to question the batarian about Henell, but aside from a bullshit answer about knowing nothing, followed by an admission of having raped and airlocked some asari he supposedly had found here, the captain had had nothing to say.
It was just meant to distract and enrage Emiya, he figured. An operation this smooth was not fielded simply to kill or capture some random asari for kicks and giggles.
Types like that—who, even in a complete loss, were motivated by sheer spite to be as troublesome as possible—were always annoying.
The datapad's translation software had not been able to circumvent all of the decryption forcing him to get creative, but overall it seemed like there wasn't all that much information stored on the ship. It seemed like standard operating procedure for batarians to wipe all evidence before setting out on a mission. For plausible deniability by whoever it was that was backing and ordering them, he supposed.
But it wasn't like he hadn't found any leads.
He had copied over the useful data to his datapad and then set about destroying the rest of the evidence. He had been tempted for a while to simply take the ship for himself, but its distinctive design, which he had not seen before on any commercial listings, along with its dubious origin had disinclined him of such notions.
Assuming that the party that had been after Henell, these operators and the hostage-takers on the Citadel five years ago were all a part of the same group, so it seemed foolish to create such an obvious link back to himself by returning with their 'recently gone missing' frigate.
That, and the whole thing was steeped in the metaphorical filth of its previous owners.
So, he simply decided to destroy it.
This was simply an event he wanted to distance himself as much as possible from before anyone managed to realize it had happened. The one encounter with a lone frigate had been enough to convince him that he did not wish to be in the sights of any major power capable of fielding starships. He simply could not fight back against something like that under any conditions less optimal than what he had been able to orchestrate with the baits.
Starships are troublesome, he thought as he completed a circuit of Dretirop.
The peridot sea had looked beautiful from a distance, and Hoana had asked if they could go swimming, but scans had indicated that it was full of poisonous seaweed which gave it that distinct color.
The mountain ranges near the north pole had been like walls of radiant crystal in the sunlight, and as they finally left for orbit Hoana had marveled at the golden desert that seemed to stretch on forever behind them.
"Well, then. Time to go home," Emiya said.
"Yeah!" Hoana agreed, smiling widely.
He began to accelerate slowly, making sure to keep an eye on the various gauges and internal sensors, to make sure that nothing would be giving way in the middle of FTL and that the radiator panel was handling the engine's heat output properly.
A part of him would have liked to believe that was the reason why he was unable to react in time, but the simple fact was that it was over before he even had time to realize.
The internal lights went off as the main screen died, thrusters automatically reversing to slow down the ship. Three seconds later, he could feel something with an absolutely massive mass effect field appear right above them and another second later a deep thunk of something attaching itself to the side of the Tristar echoed through the hull.
Ah, so that's why they were holding all comm-lines off; a cyber-attack is just that quick.
He distantly noted, trying to get access to the ship's system with his cybernetics.
But all of the extranet connectivity signals had been turned off, allowing him to only distantly feel some of the omnitools aboard the new vessel that had appeared out of nowhere.
"W-what's going on...?" Hoana asked, clutching the D-plier as she looked around. The sound of something echoing just earlier—a magnetic anchor attaching itself to the hull, Emiya realized—had spooked her completely.
"It's okay, I'll keep you safe," he said, taking off the seatbelt and getting up.
She blinked, hesitantly nodding.
The main screen suddenly turned on, revealing a stern-looking asari wearing a black hardsuit. "Crew of the Tristar TD-441-1a-C5, I am Huntress Shiawe of the Asari Republics Interstellar Diplomatic Patrol, prepare to be boarded. Do not resist - Justicar Anatha shall be there shortly and will react with extreme prejudice should you attempt to hinder her in her duties."
Emiya blinked as the feed cut off and at the same time he could hear the manual override for the hatch being worked from the outside.
Someone is forcefully opening it from the outside with biotics? Well...
Shit.
;
Thanks to randomperson6666, Something8576, Olive Birdy and Tactical Tunic for proofreading.
Thanks to daniel_gudman for an in-depth analysis of the chapter and pointing out all the errors for me. Twice!
Also, whooo boy, went and bought Outer Wilds, played it in VR, and lost a week to it. Great game - much better than this chapter lol