seven
He could feel her panic. It battered at him with the intensity of small fists and sharply booted heels. He couldn't absorb the sting of her emotions, though. Remove the energy, flush it out the other side of himself as heat, and cushion her as she fell back away. He could not soothe her rage and sorrow. He could only hold her in stasis as the ship flew part, a supernova of metal and plastic, wire and smoldering chipsets, vented gasses and frozen vapour. As the small pockets of atmosphere in the Bataille disappeared, her death song quieted and finally absorbed by silence, the magnificence of her destruction reduced to a soundless opera of light.
It was beautiful. It was terrible.
He'd seen it happen before and he would again. Time and time again. His function did not include holding the galaxy together. After directing the Reapers to repair what they had destroyed, he had sent them home. They were dark and silent hulks in the dark and silent space of their own place. And he was alone, one entity as witness to a galaxy of change. Birth and death were single moments. Time attenuated and expanded, and moments were rare.
This moment, the destruction of the Bataille, stretched on and on and on and he could do nothing to shorten it. He did sift through the flying, sparking wreckage for clues, however.
He began with the panel that had sent the first ripple through the ship and by the time Kat learned her companion had been thrust outside the skin, he had traced the illicit circuit, the connection that was not supposed to exist, through half the ship. It was organic, based on the sync mechanism. It had achieved a low level of sentience, computing power increased every time one of the engineers linked up another panel. When complete, it would be a fully functional AI. He could not tell if such a result had been anticipated or if the organic being was an unintentional byproduct of meshed technology.
A moot point, now. Something had corrupted in the thought processes and the being attacked itself, which meant destroying the ship. Flex skin had been half activated and random compartments of the ship pressurized, which only increased the scale of the disaster. A ship flying apart under pressure exploded rather than simply slipping into disarray.
Kat continued to pummel the invisible membrane of his being. The primal sounds of her efforts loud against the winnowing drama of the Bataille. He wondered if he'd wrapped himself around the wrong thing. Person. Subject. Maybe he'd come to salvage the emergent intelligence currently bent on destroying itself. Or contain it. Make sure of its destruction.
"Distracted by breasts."
Did he imagine the stir at his centre? Vast as he was, the core of his being could be everywhere and nowhere.
"Let's concentrate on the emergent entity."
If he had to talk to himself, it might as well be a constructive exercise.
"It's dumb and dying."
"Should I collect it?"
"You should destroy it."
"Is that why I am here?"
Why am I here?
He forgot, sometimes, why he existed. Then he remembered the war.
"I don't know what to do."
"Observe, wait, watch the inevitable cycle through time and retrieve your pets when everything falls to shit."
Shit. A word they hadn't used before, not in this existence. Had he used that word when he was a man?
"Probably. Heroes aren't perfect beings. We swore and drank and broke things. We killed and we saved, we hated and we loved."
Blue lines and red. Orange. Curls and angles, shapes and sigils. Skin so pale, limbs so delicate.
Sunshine.