Chapter 3

The Past and Future

Voidwalker Maximus

Charli and I flashed in just a few inches forward from the lowered entrance ramp, said primary entrance having been foregone in favor for a quicker blink onto the ship. Now aboard the ship, I landed confidently from the foot or so up that I'd blinked above the floor. Charli's feet stuttered for a moment when she landed, her balance quickly recovering. "Whoa," she said as she caught herself. "That's new."

"You get used to it after awhile," I said. "Let's get you back to the Tower." I moved towards the middle of the ship where I kept areas of storage, unbuckling and shedding my weapons, arm bond, and robe as well as the gauntlets on my hands. Underneath the robe, I wore a black, sleeveless shirt almost entirely covered by dark, sturdy plates of metal armor that kept any projectile from searing straight through my robe and into me whenever my shields failed. My hands now free of the somewhat bulky gloves, I took off my helmet and placed it in a small cubby along with the gauntlets. The robe, I hung on a hook just in front of the storage space.

Charli sat down in one of the passenger seats folded into the wall and buckled the safety harness while I raised the entrance ramp from the pilot's chair. I tapped through a few screens to ensure everything was going to function long enough to get into the Martian orbit and disengaged the autopilot, gripping the stick with one hand and the ship's version of an accelerator in the other. I peered around the edge of the head rest on my seat. "Ready?" I asked. Charli simply nodded and grabbed the metal bars that had extended out of the wall in case she needed to grab onto something.

I flipped a switch on the console to disengage hover mode and started pushing the accelerator forward on its track, listening to the whirr of the engines increase on volume and pitch to the point it became inaudible and the ship shot forward with incredible speed. Just to toy with Charli a little bit, I did a couple of aileron rolls before pulling up slightly, trying to keep the Gs to a minimum. Then again, she was a pilot, so it didn't surprise me to see that she was just fine when I looked back. In fact, it looked like excitement was edging its way onto her face.

The Martian atmosphere steadily grew darker and darker until countless stars dotted the viewport, and a bright sun caused the light filter to kick in, so neither of us would go blind. I leveled out my flight and let the autopilot maneuver the ship into a steady orbit around Mars. Initiating a few diagnostic tests, I turned the chair around and asked, "Artificial gravity or zero g?"

Charli looked lost in thought when I spoke. She noticed my gaze after a second or two, her head perking up and eyes staring into mine. "Hmm? What was that?" she responded, now paying attention.

I changed my question, instead asking her, "You alright?" I crossed my legs and leaned back in my seat.

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I spaced out for a moment." I immediately put my head in my hand, shaking it back and forth. It took her a second, but then she realized what she'd done. "Whoops. Sorry Maximus," she said with a lighthearted chuckle. "I guess you could say that was 'pun'intentional." A devious smile was etched on her face.

"Ugh," I flung myself on the back part of the seat, the chair spinning around when I did.

"Alright, alright, I'm done. I promise." She refocused on the question, the smile still on her face. "I think I'm fine now. Didn't mean to pun."

"It's okay. We all do it from time to time. What's on your mind?"

"Oh, I won't bother you with it. Finding me must have been trouble enough." she said, literally trying to wave the question off with her hand.

She wasn't wrong. Spending several hours on this sort of mission was commonplace but not somewhere in the ten to twelve range. That was reserved for those who wouldn't stop searching or found someone. I had no doubt that the Vanguard was already growing suspicious of the latter as I'd been consistently successful on ops over the last couple weeks. "No seriously. This is probably one of the last times we won't be in a hurry for a few weeks, so please speak your mind. Besides, we've got a few minutes while these diagnostics run."

"Why didn't you do them back on Mars?" Charli asked, curious.

"I didn't want to stick around in that war zone any longer than I absolutely had to. If we hadn't stirred a hornets' nest, we'd probably still be down there. But chances are that wasn't their only tank."

Starco flashed in. "It wasn't. I checked. A pair of tanks along with a couple dozen more Cabal busted in there scarcely a minute after we left."

"At least we know where the base is," Charli added, optimistically.

"That we do, so what else is on your mind? I was in your shoes not too long ago, so I know how you feel to a certain extent."

Charli clasped her hands together. "I was just thinking about how fast everything has taken place. It seems like just yesterday I was fighting for my life against the Fallen and then crash landing on Mars. Then I wake up in the rusted cockpit below the sand and have to dig my way out." I looked at the dusty streaks of orange-red that marred the white surface of her armor. I wondered how long she'd been digging her way out. Hours? Days? "Now, I'm here, apparently a Guardian."

"Yeah. Just an FYI, not all of us are loons. Most of us are actually doing something to protect the City, and I don't think any of the Guardians will take kindly to be called one."

Charli tried to scratch the back of her neck but realized there was armor and a helmet in the way. "Oh? I forgot this was even on." She put her hands on the bottom of her helmet and pulled it off, the pressure equalling out with a gentle hiss. Charli had pasty white skin, likely due to her extended time in space, and auburn hair that meshed well with her sea blue eyes. She had thin lips that weren't quite red but not pink either. Altogether, her face screamed youth and beauty but also screamed experience, like she'd seen some messed up things in her short life. I could only imagine the horrors she would likely see during her tenure as a Guardian.

I silently chuckled. "Yeah, I've done that a couple times. Sometimes it feels as if this armor is a part of me." Starco whispered in my head, 'That's kind of the point Captain Obvious.'

"Soldiers will be soldiers, I guess. Speaking of, you're absolutely sure I died years ago?"

"Positive," I said matter-of-factly. "Pretty much the only way to be a Guardian as far as I know."

"So then, that means you died as well." The statement sounded closer to a question, but I nodded anyway. "What's your story then?"

This was a question I'd been asked with increasing frequency. Reporters, authors, and the general public wanted to pick my brain if they ever caught me in the City. Arla's had a similar experience, but she's better with people than I ever will be. "I used to be a soldier in the Allied Earth Army, tasked with pushing back the Fallen when they first invaded Earth. They'd pushed us back all the way to a cosmodrome in Old Russia and wiped us out there. I ran away but was killed by a Captain not long after the first Fallen arrived there."

"Hmm…" was the only thing she said at first, keeping it that way for several seconds as she pondered the abbreviated version of my story for her own personal reasons. "How have those skills transferred into what you do now?"

"One second," I said, holding up my index finger. There had been a ding about midway through her last sentence, a notification that the diagnostics were finished. As I looked over the reports, I heard the click of a seatbelt unlatching followed by heavy boots going across the metal floor. I looked to my right and saw Charli's eyes following the text and different reports from the various screens. At first she seemed hesitant to speak, probably out of courtesy. "Something wrong?" I asked, inviting her opinion. She did say she was a pilot after all.

"Nothing, but I could've sworn that I'd seen some parts I recognized from my time as a pilot." Her voice was confident but cautious with just a hint of curiosity hidden somewhere in the undertone. Her arm shot out. "There! The shield module! You said its been a few centuries, but you still use the CFF series?" I tapped on the console to bring up the shielding details over the stellar scene that wrapped around Mars.

I looked at the specs for the shielding. Indeed, the ship used the Contained Force Field-152 version 1.2.2 by some company called Grainger Enterprise. I knew little about them, but Starco probably did. "Looks like it. I'm not going to pretend I know much about that. I assume you do?"

Charli smiled again. "I was only a pilot. I mean, the CFF-32 was basically the only thing keeping me from the cold of space. That and the cockpit's shell."

I nodded and continued tapping through the various diagnostic reports. Generally speaking, they looked good. The systems I could check from the cockpit looked to be in working order and working as efficient as they could be for a ship that hadn't been serviced yesterday. Charli moved forward, the hand on the top of my seat being the one that provided the leverage. "These readouts from the engines look rather simplistic don't you think?" she noted, pointing at the three readouts from the cooling system, warp drive, and propulsion system, each showing a white checkmark in their blue box with an asterisk next to them and at the bottom of the box. The note at the bottom essentially said that I would need to actually go to the engine rooms to get detailed readouts.

"They are. The engines our ships use some pretty complex algorithms and quantum mechanics to function properly. With all the other systems it has to check, the ship's computer can't check everything in the engines without a separate test activated from within the engines themselves."

"Shouldn't we check them, leave nothing to Murphy's Law?"

"Ideally yes, but the fact that we got off Mars in one piece should attest to the fact that the engines are fine."

Starco flashed in. "Well there is the warp drive…" he added with a slight tinge of worry. He wasn't wrong to do so, and Charli's concern wasn't out of line. If the warp drive blew or malfunctioned while in use, it could cause a cascading quantum detonation as the atoms in the ship and us literally tore each other apart. Not the ideal sort of death. The odds of that happening were several million to one, but as Murphy's Law states, 'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' Ultimately, I conceded. "Yeah, we should probably check that then."

Charli stood up, proud her suggestion worked.. "Yes, yes we should."

I unclasped the restraints on my seat and stood up, turning around to face the back part of the ship. "Starco," I ordered. "You stay here and keep an eye out for anything hostile."

"Alright, I'll keep an eye out for any murderous Cabal," he affirmed.

"Or anything else," I warned with a finger pointed his direction.

"Or anything else," he repeated.

The Soul was a much larger ship than my ARCADIA but nowhere close to say a Fallen Skiff or a Cabal Warship, but it did outmatch them in terms of firepower. The bow of the Soul consisted of the cockpit with its various instruments, pilot seat, and access to the primary weapon systems, a blue plasma cannon in the front with two omni-directional directed laser cannons otherwise known as omni-directional destroyers or ODDs. They was a common comedy about the Tower whenever Holliday or one of her grunts would start talking about these. Guardians would simply hold up a hand or wave off the dialogue by just saying "Don't tell me the ODDs." However, a ship is more than just guns.

I keep the interior walls a gray color with some of the ship's lime greens mixed in. I installed a couple of racks for weapons on the right side (facing the back of the ship) and storage for repair materials or ammunition on the left. Just past these shelves, racks, and workspace are a pair of doors sitting across the small hallway from each other. The left one led to a small room with a bed for sleeping and a closet with a couple other robes and shader modules I kept in there. The right door was a bathroom, basically a toilet and sink. I never used it for obvious reasons, but it came with the ship, and Arla, with the new addition of Charli should she be in my ship again or anyone else for that matter, may have to use it. Behind them, another pair of doors on opposite sides leading to the engine rooms, bulkheaded with eight-inch thick, lead-lined durasteel doors just like any other piece of metal that touched the engines and any part of the ship that would normally have people in it (with the notable exception of anything behind those doors for access to the machines. After all, pretty much anything that needed to get in there was the Guardian or one of Holliday's grunts, if not the shipwright herself).

I walked over to the storage and started grabbing my pieces of armor other than the bond and robe. "Grab your helmet," I said. "Don't want to accidentally get spaced and asphyxiate."

The proud smile on her face diminished as she did so, pulling her helmet over her head but then immediately opening the faceplate. "Does that happen often?" she asked as she raised that piece of her helmet.

I pulled the gauntlets over my hands. "No, but like you said, 'Murphy's Law.'"

She pointed to my exposed arms. "What about you? Won't you be asphyxiate if you get spaced?"

"I'm an Exo. I technically don't and can't breathe, but to quell your curiosity. You see this armor on my chest?" Charli nodded. "When I put that robe on, buckle it, and put on my helmet, the armor wraps a sort of skin around exposed pieces of me, so no air can escape, even though I don't necessarily need it."

Her eyes looked a bit glazed over. Warlocks were different from other Guardians in several ways. One was their deep connection to the Traveler; another was their ability to warp space-time slightly in order to blink, something they taught a few Hunters to do, and the one that Titans and Hunters vaguely understood, how they survived space and shots "with just that thin robe." There was a reason that Warlocks were the scholars and innovators in the Tower, but not all the others were ignorant or daft. "Whatever floats your boat Max," Charli said after trying to digest the information.

I pulled my helmet over my head. "Please don't call me Max," I said in a serious tone.

"Alright," she submitted. "I take the left door, you take right? Two birds with one stone?"

"Sounds good. I'll tell you what to do as long as you keep the comms open."

"Can do," Charli responded, sliding the faceplate down and walking over to the left door in the back of the ship. I followed promptly behind her but entering the right instead. Both doors clanked loudly for several seconds as they unlocked and clanged similarly to lock back into place. It was pitch black for a second after the door shut, but the lights gradually came on, revealing the complicated machinery that surrounded a central aisle. The engines were duplicates of each other, just mirrored, so I'd be giving Charli the opposite directions of the turns I took.

The data screen was easy enough to find though. A pair of turns after some short walkways, and we were both there. The volume increased with each step as we neared our respective targets. Behind me was a large horizontal shaft, spinning several thousand revolutions every minute. The screen was a glowing turquoise with a black box and text with four tabs running vertically on the left side, each tab a detailed report what was currently going on with that system. The fourth was labeled 'test,' and was simply a single button that activated a diagnostic test.

"Alright," I said. "Now, just hit that button. The room will go dark and quiet for a minute or two while everything resets and starts testing itself."

"Okay," she said, her voice slightly muffled by the noise in the background and the nature of her microphone. "You want me to make my way to the exit after that?"

"No. It's probably best if you just wait for everything to come back online in case something needs fixing or adjusting, but if you feel the need to get out, just use the nightvision or thermal setting on your helmet. Just don't bump into anything that looks important."

"That looks like almost everything in here."

"Exactly," I replied, pressing my button.

I could tell we both pushed our buttons almost simultaneously as the deafening sound of the engines quickly decrescendoed on her side of the comms, and everything fell eerily silent, the lights shutting off a split second after. It was almost as if the entire universe stopped working for several seconds. "Dang," Charli said quietly. "When you said dark and quiet, you meant dark and quiet."

"The ship cuts all power from back here for a couple seconds, meaning nothing's on, even the lights. Then the ship's computer reactivates the engine sub-computer which then reboots everything one by one to look for errors."

"So why don't the lights just come right back on?"

"Like I said, the computer and sub-computer have to check each system and then start adding them to each other. It checks the lights first just before it cuts them but turns them on last because the ship and Guardian can survive without the lights on in the engine room, but neither can survive very long if the power maxes out before the warp drive or thrusters are fully functional."

"A little eerie don't ya think? The lights coming on last, I mean. Almost feels like something's going to jump out at you like some cheap horror movie." It was becoming apparent to me that Charli may have been compensating for a minor fear of the dark.

"A little," I responded. I wasn't afraid of the dark, not by a longshot, but whenever the dark was almost tangible, it was then that I started getting anxious, started fingering a weapon whether I actually had one or not. Multiple times, both as a Guardian and the Allied Earth Army, I'd been surprised by things in the dark. As I stared into the dark, waiting for the lights to come back on, I almost anticipated something glowing in the murk in front of me. Suddenly, I thought I saw something. Something that looked like two light blue dots at the end of the walkway that went deeper into the engines, almost ghost-like.

"So what's the Tower like?" Charli asked, the words scaring me back into reality. She must've heard me jump because she immediately followed the question with, "Everything alright over there?"

I recovered quickly. "Yeah, yeah I'm fine. Just got lost in thought for a moment." I glanced back at where those ghostly lights had been, nothing. "Could you repeat the question?"

"Some things are better experienced," I saw something flicker, like a spark. "Hold on a second."

"Everything alright?"

"Yeah. Thought I saw a spark."

"That's not good. I'll keep my eyes peeled on this end."

I could tell the tests had started. Different pieces of the engines were restarting every couple of seconds, sounds once again beginning to fill the engine room and bouncing around in the small walkway. Under normal circumstances, I would have appreciated the sound, but I started getting anxious as these sounds came from all over, surrounding me on all sides as I kept watch for the small flash of color and heat of a spark, but after several seconds, one never appeared. Instead, I was left in a tense darkness, my right hand fingering a pistol that was not even there. I could easily summon one if I needed it, all I had to do was give Starco the word, but if I missed, none of us were going to have a good day.

I stayed perfectly still, waiting for a spark or something else out of the ordinary as if the slightest movement would ruin any chance of me seeing whatever was there. More machines clicked on, adding to the overall noise of the engine room. I started to count every second until the lights came on, wishing for them to come on and essentially signaling the end of the part I could actually do something about. All the other tests were internal, checking regulators and various pressures that the Hangar would have to repair. I wondered if the warp drive had gone through its checks yet. It had a unique high squeal that made its activation very recognizable, but I hadn't heard it join the cacophony if it had indeed. Just as my mind turned to it, a ringing sound started piercing the air, slightly buried by the other components of the engine. I contacted Charli to check on her. "How's everything on your end?"

Her voice was calm but contained some obvious hints of discomfort. "Everything looks good over here. No sparks, but this high-pitched whine just started. Can barely hear it over everything else. Is that bad?"

"No. That's just the warp drive powering up. If anything starts vibrating hard enough to toss you on the ground, well, nevermind. By then it's too late to do anything."

"Not concerning at all," Charli said sarcastically. "If you can, try and filter that out of a conversation."

"Why? You're a soldier. You ought to have it straight."

"I get that, but while I do enjoy a good explosion every once in awhile, I'd rather not know when one is going to kill me."

I thought about that for a moment and connected that with her primary job during her pre-Guardian life, though there wasn't too much past it thus far. Being a pilot was often dangerous, and you were usually looking death straight in the face every second. I'd never been a starfighter pilot in a dogfight, but back in the AEA, I had a brief tenure flying a transport to a drop zone while dodging anti-air fire from the Fallen and any technologies they'd captured and repurposed. One mission in particular I hadn't been the only one, there'd been five en route, but I watched three of them get rocked by powerful explosions that would have easily killed any living being quite easily. I could see the logic in her statement, but not every pilot would die in an explosion. I thought about the Vandal that seemingly materialized on top of my transport and tried to cut me out of my seat before the co-pilot unloaded a few rounds into its dark green armor. We hadn't been in space by a long shot, but it was certainly a taste of the perils a pilot could face even while in the air.

The lights were taking their sweet time to come back on. So much so that I seriously pondered just turning on the night vision and leaving. But what if something went wrong…? Nothing was perfect, and things could break much easier than most people would care to admit, especially their manufacturers. There was something to be said about planned obsolescence, but nobody in the business of making money has never purposely described their product as functional for a very limited amount of time other than maybe bullet manufacturers, but those rarely screwed up and never intentionally.

Within the last few seconds, the volume had risen dramatically to the point that the suit enacted a decibel cap, making everything significantly quieter. Most of the remaining sound was a steady whirr originating from the spinning shaft behind me with a couple of grinds mixed in from other sources, meanwhile the whine from the warp drive remained audible, just a little less so.

Now within a realm of something a little quieter, I could notice other parts of my pitch-black surroundings, like the unshakable feeling of my every move being watched, studied. Everything was silent and still besides the various mechanical sounds produced by the engine checking itself.

Still awaiting the light, I took a couple steps forward, and then just as many back. I started pacing in the darkness, carefully feeling about walls for the first few laps to ensure I didn't hit anything besides the glassy smooth surface of the walls.

I walked forward for the second or third time. Four or five minutes had passed since Charli and I began this test, and there was no clear indicator of when everything would be cleared, and that was beginning to make me think something was wrong. I extended each direction in my pacing by a few steps and noticed a pair of blue lights from what was probably a control panel or something nearby. Maybe that would give me some clue as to what was taking so long. The lights could mean that I needed to check something. At this point, I knew I was rationalizing, but I was beginning to grow slightly impatient with this diagnostic. One person doing this took two or three minutes per engine, tops, when everything was working properly, but every passing second brought it closer to doubling that amount.

I approached the panel and attempted to find the edge but only grasped air as I tried to touch where I supposed the corners and edges were. Was it some sort of strange alcove in the engine room? A hallucination perhaps? I flipped on the night vision on my helmet and could make out a faint outline. The two lights were really the only true source of infrared, but their light bled a little more into their surroundings, making the form a little more visible. The panel was a little oddly shaped, mostly shrouded in the murky darkness of the room, but I could make out a small black spaces next to them as well as something solid beneath them. Near the bottom of what I could vaguely see was some sort of shape almost like that of an Exo's mouth, probably a coincidence.

I looked at the lights, staring at them for a moment longer before taking my right arm to touch one of them directly. Suddenly, something seized my arm in mid-air. Icy blue eyes pierced right through the discoloration of my night vision. "We need to talk," the figure said.