"Rigel!" a far-off voice screamed.
Rigel couldn't help himself as he smiled sadly, knowing this would likely be the last time he ever heard his friend's voice.
We had a good run, didn't we, Nova? Rigel addressed the only companion who had been with him longer even than his exo friend.
The best, Rigel. I wouldn't change any of it.
Rigel's sad smile turned genuinely happy as he adjusted the relic on his arm where it sat like a stalwart shield.
Neither would I.
A roar like that of a proud lion erupted from Rigel's mouth as he dove through the air towards the machine he'd faced a hundred times before. With the Witness coming, Rigel knew he had to put a stop to this never ending battle of has been, is, and never was.
Rigel slammed into Atheon. The moment he made contact with the impossibility he channeled all of his light into Kabr's last hope.
This one's for you, old friend.
The relic strapped to Rigel's arm exploded with the force of a supernova, paracausal forces and time itself churning into a vortex around Rigel and Atheon with the relic's destruction.
Rigel felt reality slip away. Everything twisted, then he knew no more.
XXX
Rigel came to consciousness with a gasp, bolting upright and snapping his head around to take in his surroundings.
"Easy." a feminine voice said comfortingly.
Rigel immediately relaxed, turning to face the source of the voice.
Floating directly in front of him was his ghost. Nova. Her carefully-crafted shell had been blown apart in places, but she was otherwise undamaged, the sturdy materials she'd taken from the Dreaming City had protected her well.
"I honestly didn't expect to wake back up." Rigel said as he climbed to his feet, taking a moment to observe his surroundings. "Where…Where are we?"
The terrain around him was unfamiliar, certainly not anything like the vault or any of its past or future variations he'd trudged through time and again as he repeatedly killed Atheon over the years. The forests and vex-built structures of venus were nowhere in sight. All Rigel could see was an expanse of red sand that stretched to the horizon in all directions. The glow of an orange sun illuminated the sky. The strange coloring was probably just something to do with material in the atmosphere.
"I…I'm not entirely sure." Nova said, spinning around in the air to look at the area with him. "I've been trying every frequency I can think of, but I can't hail the Vanguard. I even tried the Reef and Dreaming City frequencies Petra and the queen gave us, but no one is responding. Without a connection of some kind, I'm limited to my personal sensors."
"So you're almost as lost as I am." Rigel concluded, feeling a resigned acceptance. He was a Risen, one of the oldest still living. This wasn't the first time he'd been stranded somewhere and it would likely not be the last if he survived. "Do you know what happened to Atheon?"
"No. Whatever happened to us probably happened to Atheon as well. My guess is the time-traveling, existence-breaking bastard is either gone for good or rewrote reality to reappear in the vault again."
Rigel sighed heavily. "And I just destroyed the only weapon that has successfully stopped him time and time again."
Atheon was one of the most annoying enemies Rigel had ever faced. In addition to being a powerful Vex mind with all of the time-warping, teleporting, and other capabilities being such granted, Atheon didn't stay dead. For over a year, the Vanguard didn't receive any reports of Atheon operating out of Venus. People had begun to hope he was permanently dead. Then the time god equivalent randomly reappeared with new tricks and stronger minions.
Rigel, being one of the six members of the original team to first defeat Atheon, was tasked to deal with it once again. This last excursion into the Vault of Glass had been Rigel's twelfth in the last year. It was hard to permanently kill something that was, is, and never existed in the first place. At least Dul Incaru stayed dead until the curse of the Dreaming City reset.
Rigel groaned as his thoughts drifted to the Hive God. "We need to get moving. Petra will be pissed if we don't make it back to the Dreaming City in time to catch the start of the loop. Do we have any weapons?"
The Dreaming City was once the pride and joy of the awoken people, viciously protected and hoarded away until Savathun's wish to the dying Riven cursed it to exist as a Taken-infested wasteland that walked through the same events every three weeks. It was just one of the many headaches Rigel had been forced to deal with since returning to life all those centuries ago.
"All I was able to find was what you had on you when you dive-bombed Atheon. If I could connect to the armory on the ship, I would have been able to get a call out for a pickup." Nova chirped, swaying through the air to hover over Rigel's shoulder.
Rigel inhaled deeply and looked down at himself. The only weapons he noted were the long, reef-made knife Petra had given him and the Ace of Spades holstered on his leg. He'd dropped everything he was holding when he'd picked up the relic, intent on destroying Atheon for good. "It could be worse." he finally said. "Can you pick up any geographical features? If we can find a mountain we might be able to boost your signal enough to get a call out."
"There's something south of here, but other than that I've got nothing."
"Define 'something'."
"Something that isn't an endless desert. I can't get a good reading unless we get closer."
"Then I guess we're going south." Rigel declared, walking in the indicated direction as Nova disappeared in a flash of blue.
X
"This is definitely something." Rigel said as he stared at the square-shaped metal hatch in the ground directly in front of him. He was still surrounded by sand to the horizon on all sides, but this was not a naturally occurring structure. At the very least, it proved someone had been here before.
"We're going in, right?" Nova said, hovering on the other side of the hatch, angled downwards to look at it.
"Nova, when have I ever explored unknown, potentially deadly underground structures without backup?"
". . .Was that rhetorical or did you actually want me to answer? I can give you the list alphabetically or chronologically. Which would you prefer?"
Chuckling, Rigel said, "Just keep a recording going in case I wind up perma-dead. Feel free to edit in some terrible, incomprehensible beast if I die from something embarrassing. I don't want to be remembered as the guy who maybe unmade Atheon for the last time only to die in a hole because he tripped on a rock and broke his neck."
"Roger that." Nova said in good humor.
Rigel bent down and grasped the pull handle, heaving the hatch open with a grunt. The hatch slammed into the sand, sounding like an Eliksni Walker stomping its foot. A dark pit greeted Rigel and Nova's waiting eyes.
"You got a light?" Rigel said, still staring into the abyss.
The next moment the hole was flooded with light as Nova projected a beam of white light much like that of a flashlight into the hole. There was an old, rusted ladder leading down past where Nova's light could reach.
"Are you jumping or climbing?"
Hidden behind his helmet, Rigel grinned at the small ghost.
Nova let out an exasperated sigh, having felt Rigel's intentions through their connection. "And here I was hoping I wouldn't have to res you again too soon."
"It'll be fine." Rigel said, hopping into the air above the hatch and plummeting into the dark, Nova racing along behind him to light the way over his shoulder.
The ladder ended up not being very long at all, only a little over thirty feet. Gliding gracefully to a stop just before making contact with the ground, Rigel took a look at his surroundings as Nova illuminated the space. While perhaps he had expected a complex of some sort, this place was nothing like that. It was far too small.
The small room Rigel found himself in was about the size of the cargo bay in his ship, compact, yet spacious enough to serve its purpose. There were crates stacked up to Rigel's chest along the far wall and several racks containing what looked to be weapons of some sort, though Rigel had never seen anything quite like them. There was also a monitor to the left of the ladder with a satellite dish connected to it.
"Jackpot!" Nova cheered, floating over to the monitor and interfacing with it.
While she did her tech thing, Rigel moved towards the crates, taking off his helmet and setting it down as he did. They were sealed via some method Rigel was unfamiliar with, but it was easily worked around. Coating his hand in the violet energy of the Void, Rigel gently dragged his fingers along the edge of one of the crates, dissolving whatever seal was in place. Gaining this much control over such a volatile energy as Void had taken Rigel a full hundred years of practice and experimentation. While he could still use Arc and Solar, he hadn't invested nearly as much time or energy into the other two forces as he had the Void.
Popping the lid off the crate, Rigel tilted his head curiously at the contents of the crate. The crate was filled with smaller, clear containers square-shaped with rounded edges. The containers were see-through, allowing Rigel a good look at the orange powder encased within.
Curiosity got the better of Rigel as he picked one of the containers up, turning it on its side and watching the powder spill over itself within the clear case.
"Do you have any idea what this stuff is, Nova?" Rigel said over his shoulder, his attention still focused on the container in his hands.
"Nova?" Rigel said again after not receiving an answer, putting the container back and turning to face his ghost.
The monitor in front of Nova was operational. An orange screen with long lines of strange symbols rapidly shifted between pages as Nova scanned through the available data at a speed only a ghost could accomplish.
"Nova? What did you find?" Rigel said, an edge of worry creeping into his voice.
Nova's shell jolted as if she'd been zapped by a wire rifle. She turned to look up at Rigel and said, "This is a drug cache for a group of aliens that just received a shipment of human slaves."
Rigel's eyes narrowed. He looked past Nova to the screen behind her.
Understanding his desire, Nova flipped through several screens until the monitor came to rest on a singular image. Pictured were five aliens of a species Rigel had never seen before. The aliens were bipedal and had two arms where a human would. They had four large, black eyes. Arced nostrils cascaded down the center of their heads towards a humanoid mouth. What looked like affixed tentacles peeled away from their nose and wrapped down to frame their mouth. Each of the aliens in the picture wore dark armor and carried a rifle nearly identical to the ones stored in the cache. The five aliens stood surrounding a line of over a dozen humans. Each human had a glowing metal collar affixed to their necks. Their hands and legs were shackled. A long chain interconnected each human's shackles to the one immediately in front of them and behind them.
Rigels fists tightened as he took in the image. "Where are they?" he said, his voice deadly calm. It was a tone Nova had heard countless times before.
"They're on planet. I don't exactly know where this planet is in relation to Earth yet, but I can–"
"We can figure that out later." Rigel interrupted, pulling his helmet back over his head and stalking towards the ladder. "We have work to do."