5: Sacrificial Coding
ANUNA-01I could have shot it to bits, but the Machine had not given me anything to shoot with. I could have caught it in my hands and torn it apart, but the Machine was in control, and in the spirit of keeping its new toy alive, it chose to have us flee.
I was angry.
We ran, our augmented muscles pounding us along for what felt like hours, darting hither and yon and ducking back and forth to keep the aim of the finned droid from ever hitting us. I could hear combat happening all over, but I had yet to see a Brute. Or anything but droids, for that matter. Flying, hovering, armor plated, shooting droids, all of whom worked for some other intelligence. Why the Machine controlling me did not have an army of its own I do not know or understand.
But oh well.
Finally, the sounds of battle drawing nearer, our… shall I be pompous and call it an escort? In any case, the droid following us did not appear to be capable of going any faster. So it stayed in the back, pursuing, but not catching. Shooting, but not hitting. At times the Machine would guide us too straight and then the quiet lasers would stitch the greenery at our flanks.
I was quite surprised, then, when I heard the familiar rattle of a Human weapon, right on top of me. The Machine turned us, and then I got to see who it was. For the briefest of instances I thought it was 'Zelisee, come to rescue me from this nightmare… but the Human's features came to me quickly and I knew this to be untrue.
For one thing… 'Zelis is neither that shape nor that slender. He was definitely one of the Demon creed, however, as it was my understanding that that kind of Human-make armor cannot be worn by anything less. His aim was true, and our droid escort crashed to the forest floor in flaming pieces. I convinced the Machine to quit running, and we drew up and turned around, ready to pounce and attack.
No!
Our hands came up, legs bracing…
Friend!
We were just a hair's breadth from getting the unsuspecting Human by the throat…
Bloodsworn!
… huh?
Whew! I'd confused it, and the confusion granted me enough time and leverage to drop our arms and straighten our stance, right as the Human turned around, the rifle's aim dropping. On one hip, there was a standard, normal looking Human sidearm, but on the other was a New Covenant style DER. I wanted it… and suddenly it was tossed at me, so the Machine caught it, querying me for its use and function.
I told it to hold it at our side, and that was how it was used.
So the Machine did so.
Stupid machines…
Then the Human made noises at us, noises the Machine had never before heard and could not begin to understand or decrypt… I got the impression that the fumbling calculations it was making were in fact a groping realization that it didn't even know what a vocal language was.
Finally, at a loss, it asked me. I demanded control. Remarkably enough, I got it, and was given a memory copy of what had been said. Oh! Yes… of course.
"Are there more of you?"
I shook our head. "No… we are alone." Eegh! My voice sounded funny! Like I had strangled on a smooth marble for a while, before coughing it up.
The Human hesitated, as if wary of my delayed reply, then said, "Understood…" Hearing the Human speak firsthand told me volumes more than getting the dead, tone-flat copy the Machine had handed me. I took a sideways step away from her, a little startled that there was a female Demon out and about. Females were… shall we say… twitchy? They do not make good warriors. Some can, I concede, but… most do not possess the cool needed to go under heavy fire and come out again still sane.
This one sounded like a gods-be-damned robot. Very professional, very 'I've been at this for a long time'. Very Human of her, actually. We had found their females dotted through the ranks of their warriors all through the Thirty Years War, and even beyond, after the Schism was over.
She settled her rifle, and rolled a shoulder, seeming to study me. "There's Brutes in the clearing behind me and a couple of cruisers on their way. How long have you been out here?"
Honestly? I really do not know… "Brutes?" Really? Could I go and kill some? Take out some of my pent-up seething at my captor?
"Yeah, Brutes." I mentally reiterated that line with some sarcasm attached. "Which direction did you come from?"
I turned, and pointed.
"That's not helpful, you blithering splitlip. I need north, and south. Which direction?"
Ooohhh, that word irked me greatly! The Machine thought an ally was quite novel indeed, though, now that it was finally convinced it had found one. Why she was an ally on first meet was a mystery to it, but it didn't allow me to punch her in the visor for calling me that. Oh, how I so dearly wanted to, though! For shame… and to think… 'Zelis would never have called me that.
He had more honor than many of his race, apparently.
"Hello? I lost Flint and I don't have time to sit around waiting for your slow brain to come up with an answer." She was an irritable thing.
But Flint rang a bell. A big damn bell. Wait… was not that 'Zelisee's other name? "Another Demon, like you?" It had been a number of years, and I wanted confirmation.
"Yeah, whatever." She waved a hand at me. "But I lost him, and I need something to blow the doors open so I can get him out. I can't get a radio signal through so I'd like to hurry."
"Where?" Oh, yes… how like him to go and get himself stuck. It was very likely this other Demon she'd called Flint, whose name rang a bell, was the same Demon I had known in the past. So, I made sure the Machine understood the severity of the situation. I was very much wanting to go and find this other Demon, if for no other reason than to find out if he was 'Zelisee… and if he'd come to save me like I'd imagined he had a moment ago.
"I… have a bad sense of direction." The female admitted, her shoulders dropping. "And those damn droids have been running me in hopeless circles all damn day."
My, my! She was well and truly justified, I now understood, in being so very irritable. I could empathize with the running from the droids thing. Very much so. I had lost Rano and Igan to those damnable machines. "Is there nothing at all to lead you back?"
"Well…" She looked past me, then around a little, before looking back at me again. "I kicked one of the pillars over?"
The Machine spun to life, generating a strange buzzing feeling in the back of my brains, calculating and comparing. Then I got a mental picture of the site… and I knew that whoever the Demon had been… he was in a lot of trouble. The Machine claimed that that was another of the reservoirs that I had dropped into. Not only was he now without equipment of any kind, he was likely going through the same process I had been through. And soon enough he'd probably be shot full of whatever it was that had turned me into this monstrosity, and be marched out again under the control of a Machine not unlike mine.
I sighed. "I know where that is… but I do not know how to get it open." The Machine knew where to take us, so we went in that direction. I let it walk for me, because I wanted to curl up in the back for a while and mull over the terrible quality of my day thus far.
Even poor 'Zelis had gotten himself stripped and implanted.
.
FLINT-093Well… that was interesting. I'd sunk to the bottom (being in a half-ton of armor will do that) at first, but then with the armor in question dissolving around me, I'd made a point to be quick about finding an edge and getting out of the… whatever it was. Acid, I dunno.
I made the discovery that it was not, in fact, an acid before I ever found the edge, but I made it up onto an arch of root some big around as I was, and got sat down on it before all the Mjolnir was gone. My guns were mush, as was the ammunition I'd packed to go with. I was annoyed, but more so that whatever it was was still eating away everything I had on me.
Even my skinsuit.
Shortly I was a little wet behind the ears but otherwise… um… naked. That part proved a little disconcerting. Now what do I do with myself? Even if I got back out, I'd be toast as soon as a droid happened along. The Mjolnir being an accelerator suit made me fast enough to evade them. Without it, I'd only be fast enough to be tired when I died horribly.
Not in the plans.
So I sat on the root and palmed my chin and wondered what to do with myself for a while as I stared at the softly rippling liquid. I had wondered if Tori had made it back to the sloop, what the liquid was, and if there was a way out of the cavern it was contained in all before anything changed. And I was wondering fairly slowly.
I raised my head off my hand to watch with mild interest as the stuff dropped in level, until finally I spotted several spinning whirlpools where it was consolidating and going down. Having my armor mixed into it had made it murky as hell, but once it was gone I noted the floor wasn't what I'd thought it might be. I hopped down from the root and paddled noisily across the wet surface over to the nearest large, circular opening, and looked down.
There was a fairly short drop to a pretty sudden stop at the bottom. But my trained eyes (even in the gloom) knew a clear tube when they saw one. They were observation tanks… and they looked about good enough to hold something a little bigger than me, with some minor elbowroom to spare.
Maybe that was what this was… a catch-all meant to collect samples of living organisms sans anything that might fool whoever was looking in into thinking the organisms in question had funny shapes.
Hence the strange liquid that had dissolved my Mjolnir for me but hadn't so much as given me a rash. I walked around to each of the chutes, but I paused when I saw one of them was broken. And there was a massive puddle of leaked liquid all over the floor down below the broken chamber. Huh! Novel. I dropped to a knee, took the lip of the hole in hand, and slid down to the bottom.
It wasn't as broken as it'd looked… but then, above me, the lid to my chamber slid shut. Okay, so there really wasn't much I could do up there anyway. So I braced against the backside of the tube I was in and punched out the fragments until the hole was big enough for me to step out through. I winced when my foot found a shard, but after pausing to pull the thing out of my foot again, I was more careful about where I stepped.
Little too used to stepping wherever the hell I damn well pleased, I guess. (probably has something to do with the Mjolnir) Around me was a more or less empty room, unsurprisingly circular, but the door to out was standing open. If in fact the doorway had had a door in it once.
I got out of the mess of shattered… eh, I guess it was glass of some kind… and walked that way, contemplating the sore spot on the bottom of my wounded foot with each step. It didn't really hurt that much, as the fragment I'd stood on had been a small one, and I'd got it yanked out again too soon for it to do much wiggling around. Still, I was leaving wet red oval-shaped prints on the floor behind me.
Outside was a corridor that linked to all the other observation rooms, and I found the tubes that led to the drowning chamber above me in each. None had anything in them. Shrugging, I turned down the other way, and walked until I found myself in another, broader chamber. There were a collection of three tightly connected metal pillars in the center of the room, and strange, alien looking equipment all along both walls, stretching all the way around the room. It had corners, though… it wasn't another circle.
Stepping into that, though, got some attention. The forward pillar suddenly wrinkled up and got ribbing all up it, then it retracted like an accordion sheath. The open shunt it revealed was empty for a moment, but a gust of stale air came out before what, for all intents and purposes, looked like a mangled up Forerunner Monitor dropped out.
But this one seemed to stand on the odd little electrical arcs that it was throwing everywhere, rather than floating freely like the Monitors do. It was still a ball-shaped thing, though with a more complete external frame, and with a diamond-shaped port in the front where the… was it an eye?… peeked out.
First it buzzed at me and twitched to the side. Then it made a very obvious hiccup sound. Sounded like it ought to have come out of Tori, not the funny little droid thing.
"Hi, there." I told it.
"Hi, there." It repeated, in a tinny little voice that sounded very badly mechanized. If I got rusty and corroded, and somehow higher pitched, I would have sounded just like it.
I frowned at it, suspecting it was merely parroting me. "And what do you do?"
I was pleasantly surprised to find my suspicion mislaid; "I am the mmmmm-monitor of this station."
Oh, wonderful. A monitor, yes. And one with a stutter! "Okay, what's this station do?"
"Why, we collect and store sam-mmm-mmples here!"
So it was the M's that gave him trouble. Okay… "Samples of what?"
"Everything!" The sphere did a little up-down nod on its little stabbing electric arcs. I hoped it didn't try to get too close to me with those things… they didn't look terribly lethal but I thought they'd burn like shit if one got me. "Organic, that is…"
And I didn't even have a t-shirt on to save me if it tried. "I suppose I found your collection tank." I looked around one more time, then back at the monitor. Then I wondered why it hadn't called security on me yet. "So… I'm a little lost. Is there a crew quarter anywhere in this… station?"
"Certainly, but it hasn't been used or opened in nearly fifty thousand mmmm-mmillennia."
Okay, okay… the stutter was starting to bother me a little. But I wasn't going to complain outright. "And when was the last time you got any maintenance?"
The thing rattled off a string of numbers… sounded vaguely like a date. I shook my head.
"Where's the crew quarter?"
"If I mmm-might be so bold as to ask," The monitor countered, "What business would one such as yourself have in standard access crew housing?"
I crossed my arms, aware I'd hit some kind of firewall. I was an intruder, technically, and was probably relying on this bug being seriously rampant just to not get fried off my bones for getting in. "I wanted some equipment…" shirt, some britches… maybe a pair of boots, and a gun?
It didn't even let me finish. "All field-qualified combat engineers are requisitioned to the forward and upper levels. Accom-mmm-modations for all their personnel and equipm-mm-ment needs are mmm-met in the front bay area. Resting quarters are in the forward drop calipers." It quirked off to one side, in a half-rolling motion, and hung that way. "You are the replacem-mm-ment sent for Hazard one-three-seven Owen-I S-3?"
"Uh…"
"You are very late. But expected. Equipm-mm-ment was set aside in anticipation of your arrival. Please follow mmm-me."
The thing was buggy as hell if it thought I was some hazard-numero-whatchimawhatever. But I was willing to play ball if it meant I got something to wear. Something armor plated, preferably. And got shown the door. Tori was likely tearing herself to bits trying to figure out what happened… that or was going to go and get something explosive and try peeling the doors I'd dropped through open.
Fool thing… she didn't know how to do that. At least not properly. I made a mental note to give her a field run on ordinance when I got back up topside.
The monitor-thing spun around on a central axis, and zapping the floor every six inches along the way, went merrily around the central pillars where it had dropped in and headed for the far doorway. Which, I noted, also did not have closure. The floor felt very cold, and a little smooth, but it was nice on my little puncture wound, so I didn't complain, even if it was making my toes go numb. On that note, the air in here was a little on the chill side. But then, it was also stale as hell and probably hadn't been recycled, vented, replaced, or even breathed in about as much time as the monitor had mentioned.
Couple of thousand millennia.
Which, come to think of it, is a long damn time to wait for a replacement to ship in. Absently I wondered what had happened to the dude who needed replacing, and what in turn had happened to the dude meant to replace him. And what in all hells Hazard meant… and what the dudes in question did for a living.
Forward and upper suggested some kind of specialty… was it the task force? Security detail? Was it a science lab, embedded in the ground under a fortress that was meant to keep it safe? I didn't really want to ask, considering such questions might clue it in to the fact that I really wasn't who it thought I was. I was taken down the corridor only a short way, then diverted into what looked like a side-passage shortcut. It proved to be one of the long, creepy hallways lined on both sides with those same observation tubes. These, however, were in maintenance mode and each had an occupant.
One looked a little like a deer. All the rest more resembled strange, alien, weird something or other type creatures, but aside from the deer, I couldn't fathom how to describe hardly any of them. One was… guess it was a cornflower blue? And another was sort of dark brown with green edging on him… her… it. One had some small tentacles or fingers or whatever around the bottom of what might have been its skull.
None I'd ever seen before. "These the samples?"
"That is correct. It is natural that the scientific staff would not perm-mm-mit one such as yourself anywhere near the sam-mm-mples. Your class are notorious for breaking fragile equipm-mm-ment. Funding was cut off some timm-me ago, and replacem-mm-ments for the equipm-mm-ment the staff has now are nolonger available." No shit about that part. The feet of every single tube had rust on it. "Please refrain from touching anything while we take this mm-minor detour. I apologize for the need to pass through here; m-mmain access routes are currently shut down and will be inaccessible until m-mm-aintenance arrives to repair them-mm."
Well, at least I wasn't a branch of maintenance… as the word 'hazard' implied.
"Mm-mm-many of the sam-mm-mples you see here are quite old, and som-mm-me are fragile and m-mm-must be handled with great care. M-mm-moving them has becom-mm-me an arduous task indeed." The monitor continued.
I shut him out after a while, giving the tubes passing glances to see what was inside each as the monitor rattled on and on about them. I found myself quite relieved when I never saw anything I recognized, but if the monitor wasn't bluffing, then this corridor was something of a corner off the block compared to what the facility at large actually contained. Out the other side, we took a right and headed around a bend to a set of stairs – interesting! – that took me up to another corridor. They were universally narrow (about as wide as I was, plus an inch or two) and mathematically perfectly rectangular. Every corner was a perfect ninety-degree angle, the edge of the walls where they met almost sharp enough to cut yourself on. Rather frightening, really. I wondered what exactly had occupied this place in the past.
Finally, we got through all the winding tunnel-like corridors and I was led through yet another doorless entryway into a refreshingly open chamber. It looked a lot like a badly trashed barracks, to tell the truth. There was shit everywhere. Most of it looked like it didn't belong there… but there were some crumbled bones in the middle of one heap and I carefully didn't look too closely.
At the far end of the room, the monitor stopped moving and turned around to show me the diamond-shaped eye it wore. "Here is your equipm-mm-ment. Once you have squared yourself, report to the Comm-mm-mmander's office for debriefing. You mm-may be needed imm-mm-mediately for duty."
I looked around once, then down at the… guess it was a locker once. "Okay." No instruction manual? I watched as the monitor toodled away again, apparently content to go and monitor something else for a while.
Well, at least I could go back to being human for a moment… I looked back at the crumbles of rusted metal, and after resisting the temptation to wipe it away – the last thing I needed was that crap stuck into my fingers – I reached through it and lifted out the first bit of something or other.
It turned out to be a bowl-shaped bit. Looked like it might be a pauldron of some kind. I whacked it against the edge of the locker to knock loose the rust that had settled onto it from the locker's decay, then set it aside. I spent the better part of the next thirty minutes just picking armor pieces out of the mess, but once I was done doing that, I found something else down in the bottom.
Lifting it out, I tapped the corner of the perfect square on the side of the locker, then tilted it back flat and blew on it. It looked a little like a mirror at first, but I knew there was more to it than that, which was what had my attention. I tipped it back and forth a few times, then looked at myself in the reflection it offered.
"Huh."
As if it were sound-activated, or something, a tiny dot of black appeared in the middle of the mirror, broadening like an ink stain in water until it wasn't reflective anymore. I felt the square get warm in my hand, then a picture faded in, showing a really bizarre landscape with some equally as alien vegetation around the edges. In the middle, and the object of the picture, was a half-curled alien creature, and just as I'd figured, it was skinny as a skeleton and wound up like a grasshopper.
Which explained the narrowness of the corridors. For Human occupation it just wasn't practical. For these guys? Guess it was. I set the picture down, and wondered how in the world I was going to make something designed to fit an emaciated alien fit me. The monitor eventually turned back up, though, and bobbed over to where I was sitting, puzzling over the strange and bizarre bits of armor plating. Some of it I could sort of guess. But it came in so many pieces, it was hard to really tell.
"Have you found everything in order?" The monitor asked, zapping the living daylights out of the heap of rubble beneath it.
"I have no idea what to do with this." I admitted, looking up. "How does it work?"
"That m-mm-machine has been broken for a while." The monitor told me. "Why are you attem-mm-mpting to fix it? You should be preparing yourself for duty."
"Machine?" I swear, it really did look like armor. Really really.
The monitor did that bobbing motion again. Unlike with Forerunner Monitors, for this one it looked voluntary… and like it meant something. "Of course. You have not found your equipm-mm-ment?"
"Ah… no."
The monitor tsked at me, but then went past… or… over… me. I yelped when that stung the crap out of my entire left side, but before I had even protested the darn thing was over and past and beyond. I grumbled and rubbed that arm, but I did get up and turn around to see where the monitor was.
He'd come to a stop over a wholly other type of locker, this one taller and broader and busily automatically opening its still-intact doors. They'd rusted over, yes, and were quite crusty for it. But when I saw the edges of them I knew that the oxidation would be a long time in eating through to the other side. More stale air gushed out of the locker, suggesting it had once been sealed or at least pressurized. I blinked at the dryness the captive air had, squinting one eye a little more than the other.
"Step nearer to the m-mm-machine. You will be m-mm-measured to ensure proper utility." The monitor told me.
I took one look at the 'machine' behind those doors and wanted to run screaming the other way. It looked like a nightmarish spider with all its cousin's legs attached to it. There were at least forty long hinged arms coming out of there, opening up to reveal the smooth centerpiece. "You're sure about that…?"
"It is natural for you to feel apprehension upon first introduction to this outfitter. It is not a fam-mm-miliar model. But I assure you, while it m-mm-may be a prototype m-mm-model, its function is quite standard and you will not be harm-mm-mmed."
I had my doubts about that last statement.
.
TORI-138I felt a little torn. Yes, I'd gotten almost used to feeling sore and agitated at Flint all the time. But my self-directed confession of having gotten attached was no less in effect now than ever before. The line of thought that made me feel torn had come about because of this; I knew I was still not precisely on good terms with him. But I missed him terribly, and I found myself worrying about if that 'water' had really been as harmless as the name implied.
What were the odds of this planet having hydrogen-oxygen combo liquid basis? The truth? Slim. Slim to none, in fact. Being a scientist for the past thirty-three years made me all kinds of painfully aware of the chemistry happening around me.
The caustic chemistry between myself and Flint notwithstanding… of course.
But my new companion (still hadn't gotten his name) wasted no time and moved at an agreeable pace too. It wasn't dead-out fast-as-hell, which was good for my aching legs, but it wasn't a casual walk, either, which would have lent to a fidgety edginess. Flint was running out of time… that or he might well be, and I didn't want to take that risk.
So the Elite leading me (somehow) back to the place where I'd lost him was both a blessing and a conundrum. He was just like Flint, in fact… very few words. Said nothing when not prompted. I wasn't a chatterbug, and especially not when I'm huffing and puffing from the biggest workout of my life, but even I noticed that defining characteristic. It seemed that if you were active-duty military, and somehow managed to get into my proximity… you were the 'strong, silent type'.
It drove me nuts.
Finally, when I could see what looked like a clearing through the trees out ahead, I piped up, "I don't suppose you know Flint, huh?"
It took a whole minute for him to answer me, but when he did, it came out sounding distracted; "What?"
"Flint." I repeated, feeling a hint of agitation touch my voice. Man, if I blew up on this guy for 'breaking the camel's back' because I was still rumpled at Flint from beforehand, then things were really out of hand. I tried to check my temper where it was. Testy I could justify. Outright enraged was inexcusable. "You know him? From before?"
"The last time I worked anywhere near one of your creed was many years ago." He told me, lifting the branches of a fern out of his way as he continued forward. "I do not recall."
I sighed. "Well, he mentioned a couple of your kind once or twice." If I could curry favor for his cause, then maybe this guy's seeming nonchalance would evaporate and we could get down to business. "Know anybody called 'Taramee?"
I saw his head lift a whole six inches before he turned it and then the rest of himself around to look back at me. "'Taramee?" I drew up before I could walk into him.
Hope had kindled at the bottom of my upset guts; "Yeah. Or… uh…" I rattled my brains for another. There were five or so he'd named, and almost a hundred that he'd admitted to. Most of those had never gotten named. "Gaul… gah… um…" I screwed my face down into a knot for a second, trying to concentrate on the memory. When he mentioned someone, he usually did so in a nonchalant, casual way – the worst way for remembering what was said. "Guh-wee?"
That earned me a laugh. "G'wi… I do recall these warriors."
I felt a world of weight lift right off me. "So you know him, then? Which one are you?"
"I am Anuna." He said. "And what name has he told you of himself, other than… Flint?"
I paused, confused. "… uh… he doesn't have any other names, he's a Spartan."
I got a nod and a smug look, before the Elite turned away again and resumed walking. I hopped through the fern he'd brushed past to make his side. "Wait, wait up, there. What was that about? You know Flint doesn't really tell stories much… I got a handful of names and events, and nothing to connect the two."
"I walked with him on the Sacred Ring that you know as Delta Halo." Anuna told me, still sounding smug. Maybe it wasn't really smug, though, but merely amused.
"I don't really know anything about that… uh… mission." I admitted, right as we made the treeline and stepped out into the clearing. I immediately spied the doors and the carpet-roll of thin topsoil, and even the crumpled, collapsed spire that I'd kicked down. "We're here!" I exclaimed, before I could really stop myself. "You found it… you really did."
The Elite stepped easily over towards the closed doors lying flat to the ground, and looked down at them silently. I stepped up beside him, looking at the rusted metal myself.
About then, some logic hammered home like some well-placed thirty-millimeter rounds, and I turned around on Anuna with less than savory intent. "How did you know how to get here? I didn't give you more than the broken spire!"
I got a dead, slack look. Or… maybe that was my perception of it. Elite faces don't make expressions, after all. How in the world they communicate quietly when words are not appropriate, I do not know. Maybe I'm just biased or untrained to look for such things. But he really did look uninterested right then. Even his glossy black eyes looked uninterested.
I cleared my throat, using the sound to press the issue. "I'm serious."
"What do you want me to say, human?" Anuna asked me. "We are here… that is a dissolution reservoir. Your companion likely met his end less than an hour after falling inside it."
His words hit me like a fist to the stomach, and I doubled onto my knees for the shock of impact. Denial froze all neural function, and I could only stare in numb horror at his knees.
Flint was… gone.
I hadn't even gotten to say goodbye.
.
ANUNA-02They were not my words. Not mine, not the truth. It was a curious connection, though. She had verified for me that yes, I did indeed know Flint. I knew him by another name, another identity. He was the same warrior, however, even by description. 'Zelis had not told any tales even when in my own company, sparing words only for when prompted… or when he needed something.
Or needed someone to know something.
And reaching the place at last, the Machine had decided to run a test, and then have a calculating look at the results. Machines are like that. But to lie to her like that… it had sucked all the life right out of her, I could see easily. She dropped as if killed, sinking instantly to her knees in defeat.
I wondered, looking down at her there, if perhaps she had a greater connection to 'Zelis than I had at first considered. I pitied her… but I couldn't get our mouth away from the Machine, to correct or defy. It was pondering what it was being shown, and it didn't want me to spoil the test situation nor muddle with its newfound subject.
She looked so sad, though… even hidden away from all the world inside that signature armor all Demons wore. I wanted badly just to tell her the truth; the reservoir would not harm living tissue. According to the Machine, they were filled with a slush of nannites. They would disassemble things like metal, glass, and plastic, but wood, flesh and bone would not be touched. The soft gel base the nannites swam in would leave the stripped body feeling moist, which was why I had nearly drowned, but aside from that… there was no harm going to come to him simply for being dropped into the reservoir. However, when it detected the foreign contaminants in the nannite soup and drained, that was when he would come into danger again.
Merely dropping into the dissolution reservoir itself was not going to hurt the human. Not in the least. Telling her he was in the same physical state as his armor and weaponry doubtless now were was a farce even I, in my dishonored state, could not stomach. The Machine was unwilling to see reason, though.
It reveled in the ability to gather new data like this. Fresh, untainted, in-the-field, unbiased. But what good would this do? What good would there be in knowing that announcing the death of a hero would cause a morale drop? I kept my mulling mind on a sharp, well-disciplined clamp. I did not want to offer the cold, unfeeling Machine any scientific queries to ask the poor female.
Personally, I had a few. But letting the Machine ask them for me would only make things worse. The 'test situation' did not get to linger long, though, when several of the type-5 rototractors appeared in the… ah, forgive me. I mean the silent demonic killer robots. Yes, the heat-laser shooting kind, with the teardrop shaped body and the small oscillating firing arms underneath. I would have glanced their way to see how many, and what direction their point of origin was, but the Machine still had control, and did not feel a glance worth the effort.
Stupid Machine.
We were both splashed with erupting particles from our surroundings, the droids typically unwilling to venture out of the trees and similarly bad shots at any sort of real distance. They got close, though, and it made us both spring away more on instinct than any real cognizant function of desire to flee.
I heard a more primal, agonized howl come out of the female than I have heard any creature emit, ever, in my entire life. And while the Machine argued with me about turning and running away versus taking our "hold-it-at-our-side-and-that-is-how-it-is-used" and shooting back, she spun on a heel, her human rifle shouldered and aimed within a single flinch, and had taken down three of the bastard robots before I won the argument, and joined her.
Previous to realizing she was making kills, the Machine had not considered fighting back to be an option for me. But seeing her do it made the dumb thing realize that yes, I can readily defend myself… given half a chance in hell, as the Human saying goes.
I sent quite a bit of plasma downrange, some of it striking, some of it merely setting fire to the bark on the trees and disorienting the remaining droids. We still had to duck and dodge the returning fire, as I well knew that the heat-lasers would pop right through anything… barring those trees, and it might well be an organic compound that similarly would block heat seeking radars.
Trees… foliage of any kind, truth be known, were like that, and it was just a fact of life that all warriors had to accept. I saw a shot pierce the breadth of one of the freestanding pillars, blowing moss and dirt everywhere in the process. The Machine duly informed me that the shot had been perfectly lined with a pre-existing perforation, blown several years ago by one of the hard munitions. Apparently, blasting the existing rubble to smaller rubble was difficult… though in fairness to the robots, that did explain why the rubble that was still here was still here.
Especially given all the shooting they did… and the fact that my people, the Brutes, and the Human next to me might well not be the first unfortunate species to use the stuff for cover against said robots.
I saw the last one – or what looked like the last one – smash and fall to the forest floor, and then heard the Machine grind over some relatively under-used victory-whoop programming. Personally I just wanted to roll my eyes… it was a stupid robot, just like the robots sent to kill me, and it always would be. For being capable of designing and implementing the upgrades dealt to me, it certainly was not behaving in much of a multi-functional manner. I guessed that maybe physical item manipulation was what it was best at, and likely all it was good for. Certainly situational analysis was beyond its meager processors.
I looked over to see the Human, and found her in an odd position indeed. She had sat down against her cover, legs splayed out as if she had lost the use of them, her arms dropped to her sides limply in a similar manner. The rifle that had once been in her hand now lay propped atop said hand, her grasp open and her fingers relaxed. I could tell her shoulders were down, but she was looking straight forward.
I got the feeling she was not looking at anything out ahead of herself, though.
The Machine was willing to allow me to do the moving for us, for the moment, so I took one – but only one – step in her direction. Fastening the DER to my thigh armor was out of the question, given what I was wearing, so I kept it in hand and hoped the Machine did not decide to use it on her at some point. "Come… we should go. This place is not safe."
Her voice sounded faint, and distant, but coming through an atmospherically sealed helmet with the mike barely an inch from her face, I knew it was a tonal and volume issue on her own part, and not the comn. "Nowhere is safe."
"Zelis would not wish you to lie there and surrender all position to this enemy." I argued, feeling just a little unwilling to venture off alone now I had finally found an ally. And the longer I could keep the Machine from shooting her in the back, the better. She might well be able to help me master the Machine, and escape this cursed world. At any rate, unless we both plunged into the dissolution reservoir, there was no way into the facility below us from here. "Come, we must go."
Finally, she raised her head, and pointed that haunting golden visor at us. Slowly, I saw her curl her fingers back around the grip on her rifle. "Who's Zelis?"
I tasted my mandibles once, contemplating the query and considering how best to answer it. I knew if I blatantly told her the truth as blatantly as the Machine had lied, she would never believe me. Especially not in her crushed emotional state. I had to wing it, and similarly guide her around the curve towards the truth in the same manner I needed in order to escape notice of the Machine for what I was up to. "Flint."
She did not reply; but she did pick up the gun, and climb back to her feet, so she stood upright when the next lance of heat lased the ground at her side.
.
FLINT-093Okay, okay. So call me overly paranoid. But the 'outfitter' as the monitor had called it, was just that. It brought down bits of armored plating held in those long spider-arms and carefully made each one fit. What it did first though, was rather interesting; it poked a scanner nozzle out (maybe that's not what it was, but that's what it looked like) and determined that my exo layer was my skin, and then it applied a very strange, fuzzy spray-on skinsuit.
That part was really weird. Even going through the finer nuances of the ORION Project were nothing like that! Having spray-on felt applied was almost as tickly as standing in the middle of a wind storm full of downy feathers. But once it was on, it felt more like firm cotton, so I didn't… tried not to… complain. When that was on, it wound out several long sticky strings of what turned out to be some kind of elastic polyurethane… or hell, maybe it was spandex. I don't know. But it was wet-looking (at that point my fingers were buried under the felt/cotton/whatever, so I couldn't tell if it was as wet and sticky as it looked) and wound them around me at blinding speeds until the felt layer was covered completely. Apparently clothing came in a can for these guys.
Viola, new skinsuit.
After that, I got to wondering how I was supposed to get back out of the thing (since it had been sprayed on, there was no entrance/exit closure on it anywhere) as the armored plates were produced. The outfitter started on my back, for some reason I cannot fathom, and worked the plating over my shoulders and down my arms before putting plating down my chest. I wanted rather badly to watch, because it looked fascinating as hell, but every time I bent my head down to look, one of the arms would trade off an armored plate and poke me in the forehead, straightening my viewpoint for me.
Don't move, stupid.
When I pouted (the expression was only going to last about a heartbeat anyway, I swear) the arm that had poked me in the forehead carefully dropped to my mouth and poked that lip back in, too.
I wanted to scream at it, but I was more tickled by the gesture than annoyed, and it was harder to not laugh than it was to not scream. From what I was feeling, the belly and legs came on next, some of the arms tasked with that while some of the others set in bits around my wrists. I got to wondering if there were more bits around my wrists than around my chest, after a while… and the pieces had to be tiny! More still of similarly small size went down across my palms and up the insides of my fingers. If the suit was powered, maybe all the points were needed for articulation, because this kind of assembly even for Mjolnir would have been rather awkward. One does not cut the gloves off the arms of Mjolnir, after all. There are important contact lines that feed through the wrists down into the hands from the sleeves.
I was about to try to steal another glance – this time at my hands – when I felt plating start going on around my neck. At first it felt taut, and I was worried that the aspect would be a bother, but when the last piece was set in, the assembly was released by the outfitter and it relaxed into place, giving me plenty enough room.
Having finished everything else, the outfitter began to apply quick segments around my jawline and the back of my head. I watched out of the corners of my eyes for as long as I dared, but just when I was about to suppose I might be better off closing them for safety reasons until the machine was done with me, fully half the arms withdrew from my visual field.
At first I didn't try to move yet, though I felt entirely in control of my own balance so I knew I could if I did try. For a full second, absolutely nothing happened. So, risking correction from the outfitter yet again, I dropped my head to look down at myself. I felt my eyebrows pop upwards at what I was seeing.
I'd been plated over in what looked like tessel tiles. Each one was about as big around as my thumbprint would have been, and about half a centimeter thick. For a plate so small, that's a little on the thick side, but for armor, it's paper. The plates were all over… and if I unfocused my eyes, I almost saw a mockery of a pattern in their placement. Bringing a hand around in front of me, I saw the plates around my wrists and over my hands and fingers were smaller, more compact.
"Is that it?" If it was, I'd almost rather be naked, than be in this ridiculous excuse for a get-up…
"Please refrain from mm-mm-moving… the outfitter is preparing the exo-plating." The monitor informed me. I let my hand fall back to my side, and lifted my head, feeling I might be satisfied with that… provided the exo-plating looked a little more utilitarian than the tessel tiles I now wore. Aside from the skinsuit, my hands were bare, and sans the suit layers, my head still was. I had begun to contemplate if I'd need to shave the back of my head to get the suit around my jawline off again when I heard the outfitter buzz to life again. Here came the exo-plates.
One huge monster of a slab of metal swung around the frontside of my right shin, followed by the plate for the front of my other leg, and when I looked down to see what that had been, I saw the backsides of the boot legs press up against my calves and get stitched to the frontsides. This new layer sat directly in contact with the little tiles, but was easily some inch or inch and a half thick. That is, just a bit, somewhat more so than Mjolnir.
Nice.
I lifted my head again, a pleased smirk on my face. Now that was more like what I had in mind… the exo-plating came out in massive chunks, but there was ribbing matted over my belly, ostensibly for flexibility, rather than one giant stiff plate. I got chest and back, then upper arm, and then a dual-connecting pauldron to attach one to the other on both sides. Just when I thought I might get to finally look at myself again, my thoughts were interrupted when a brightly reflecting sheet of convex glass dropped over the top of my head and in front of my face. I held still, wondering what it all looked like from the outside… but before I could ponder the feeling of the armor coiling around my fingers, I felt several latching points secure to me from behind, and I was lifted from the floor.
I only went about an inch up, before being set back down again. I now had bootsoles, I figured… because the floor felt different. When I felt my weight go back to my feet, and the stiffening contact points popped free of my upper body, I saw the domed visor go black as sin. I stood still for a second, squinting at it and trying to figure if the facility had lost power or if the suit was doing something independent of the external environment.
Just when I was about to try talking to the monitor-thing again, and see if I couldn't get a word out through my new helmet, it suddenly lit up bright as day, and dribbled lines of code down into what I quickly recognized as my new HUD. "Hey."
"Curious." Now the tinny voice was coming from behind my ears, suggesting the monitor was either between myself and the outfitter, or was putting its voice through a comn system inside my new outfit. When I saw the electric ball appear in front of me, I knew it was the latter. "You have strange param-mm-meters."
Oh, and now the outfitter had relayed the data on my shape, my blind monitor friend was about to ask me if I was an alien. And then I was going to get fried right off my bones.
Time to go!
"Meaning?" I tested shifting my balance before trying to take a step, and while it really wasn't that unlike being in Mjolnir, there was a nagging sense of over-powered-ness that I felt at the back of each motion I made. It was almost as if I hinted at starting to move, and then my new suit would pick me up and move me for me. Crazy. "Which way is out?"
"The outfitter reported som-mm-me asym-mm-metric qualities to your frame. Do you have previous combat experience?" You got some ugly scars there, buddy. What have you been up to?
I grinned mirthlessly. "Yeah, yeah. Which way is out?"
Surprisingly enough, the monitor bobbed once. "Of course… m-mm-medical examination occurred prior to your disem-mm-barkation. If you had not cleared, you would not have been perm-mm-mitted facility access… I will upload an axis m-mm-map into your helm-mm-met display. I m-mm-must return to m-mm-my work. Duty calls in the ancillary sections." With that, the sparky ball twisted about and crawled on lines of jumping electricity towards the door I had come in through.
I waited, wondering what that meant… and why my Human-shaped body hadn't raised any eyebrows on what was supposed to be a grasshopper-shaped society. Maybe the monitor was just that rusty around the brains. Shortly, an additional icon appeared, right atop the one that I had no clue what it meant, and showed a series of lines and corners with a small circle in the middle. I squinted at it. Was this supposed to be some kind of demented map? A moment later, a triangle popped into existence at the top of the square of lines with the dot in the middle, and flashed once.
Go this way, dummy.
When I took my first step forward, I really felt that over-powered-ness come into play. I lurched hard forward, so fast and so heavily that I dropped that foot hard and brought up my other one in a stumbling bid for balance. I got bent at the waist before I knew it, and my arms pinwheeled once before I got to the wall some five meters to the left (in about six staggering steps) and caught it, stopping myself.
"Holy shit!" I complained, leaning on the wall a little more just to be sure my suit didn't try to run off with me again. "This is going to be awkward, I can tell…" but now my little circle was tucked into a corner, rather than against a flat line, and that's when I realized what I was looking at. That little circle was me.
Straightening, I flexed my fingers and squared my shoulders; time was a-wasting, and I needed to get moving before something actually did come up and I lost a fight with the same glitchy machines that had given me this monster of a suit. Every step I took felt like ten tons of impact, but it was only jarring to the tune of about four. Still… I half wondered if my augmentations weren't what was doing this to me. I kept trying to treat it like a standard suit of Mjolnir, and it kept trying to treat me like a casual Marine type.
Like I needed help that I really didn't… so to compensate, I tried taking an easy, casual, slow and calculated step forward. The result caught to a kind of drop-gears-and-rev-it-up. If this monster was like driving a Warthog, though, then that was a new one on me. I hadn't been in a Warthog in a long while. So long, in fact, that I might be a bit hesitant with the controls at first.
If I survived this suit, though… I felt I'd be the best damn driver in the universe. I got myself walked to the door, the map moving around my dot rather than my dot moving through the map, but the triangular pointer stayed at the edge where it wanted me to be going at the moment. Rather than pointing at the door I was now facing, it was telling me to retrace my steps up the corridor I'd used to get here in the first place.
I staggered through the door and knocked my shoulder off the wall, grinding against it for a while before I managed to right my balance again, realizing I'd over-extended myself again without knowing that's what I'd done. Boy, if I managed to get outside, I could make the full extension the suit had to offer and then figure out how to go slow, and what modes of slowness it had to offer. But if I didn't know what fast was, I'd never find the right amount of tentative maneuvering that it would take to make myself just plain walk.
The pointer took me up several strange corridors, to a large open well that went down a long, long ways… but looking up the hole, I saw it also went up. However, if this was an elevator/gravity lift, it wasn't in working order anymore. So, sans that, I reached for the lip of the ceiling and hoisted myself up using my arms.
Wow! My bum shoulder was at Mjolnir-grade strength for my good arm, and the good shoulder was so hopelessly overpowered I almost slung myself right off my new handhold and took a long plummet. In an attempt to compensate for that, I pulled my left back (since that's my best aiming hand) and stabbed my armor plated fingers (they felt really fat) at the material the wall was made from. They went through, and dug a nice handhold into the divot. Ah, so my next idea really would work.
In quick succession, I pounded handholds one over the other, on occasion kicking at the wall and hoisting up with a toehold too. I knew I had to be moving at an insane speed for climbing a formerly smooth surface going up on only my own power, but it still took me some five or so minutes to reach the top. Call it an hour, if I'd had no help with it. Give or take.
At the top, past some eight or so other openings that led down other corridors, I found what looked for all intents and purposes to be a large docking bay for fighters. What really got me was the fact that this room screamed upside down to me. Even the simple architecture said it… but whatever was loose had been repositioned on the ceiling, which was now the floor.
Since the "axis-map" was still active, and I supposed maybe the monitor's comn might still be on, I asked aloud, "Is this place supposed to be upside down?"
The monitor sounded no better from a distance, but my suspicion was proved correct when I got an answer; "No, but it settled that way."
"It settled?" I echoed, feeling my guts start to twist. I set out across the breadth of the room, passing what looked like old ruins of fighters, most of which were crumpled, some of which had collapsed upon their landing struts, and all of which were rusted through. "Do you mean to tell me this place moved here from somewhere else?"
"Interstellar research stations often double as shuttling points, and are capable of independent m-mm-movement. I recognize that we do not often m-mm-move, Hazard, but at times, we have been known to. Landing here was not by intention, however. Records of the tim-m-mefram-mm-me have corrupted, but there rem-mm-mains som-me mm-em-mm-mory files that mm-make that mm-much clear."
That's when my guts really twisted. I was on a starship!
Gulp.
I found what looked like a hullside access port and went for it, but it was rusted shut and even my new suit wouldn't give me enough torque to wrench it open anyway. Going across to the other side found me another one, which hadn't rusted nearly as badly, though. That one did pop open, but the door came completely off so I set it aside before I peeked through. Evidence of why the place was so oxidized greeted me; tree roots perforated the entirety of the narrow tunnel upwards, but the topcap was already gone, and I could see a peek of daylight through a nodding treetop.
Even before I started to climb up through it, I saw a saucer zip by overhead. Pausing, I asked, "Hey, monitor. What is the state of the automated defense grid?"
"The system-mm was rated for a ten-year lifespan, but I am-m proud to announce that I have m-mm-managed to keep it operational at optim-mm-mal levels for the entirety of the tim-me between the last maintenance check and now."
"Which is what." I prompted, still looking up.
"Four thousand six hundred seventy one solar years."
I'm not certain, but the last time I recall, a solar year is a bit more than a planetary rotation. That's a long time. "How many personnel survived landfall?"
"All of them-mm."
So they slowly died out one by one after the fact. Which meant this tub had been sitting here getting buried by the terrain for longer than the previously mentioned time. That did explain why the room was upside down, but none of the occupying equipment was. The staff had turned it all over, I imagine, after everything came to a stop.
"Right. I'm going to step outside, have a look around." I reached for the first tree root, the thing nearly as big around as my arm. As an afterthought, I added, "Keep the lights on for me."
"Of course, Hazard."
When I made the topcap, the map vanished and the comn signal connecting me to the monitor cut. I recognized the icon for active channel right as it winked out, too.
Now I was on my own.
Time to see what my new toy could really do.