We've got a little bit more than just a suit.

Beta'd by Sesparra

Thankfully, I managed to make it across the gap between the Wall and the facility without being shot down, although it was closer than I would have preferred with how two of the Captains had the same kind of massive rifle that I'd been shot with just after the Ghost had found me. I heard the report of the oversized weapon a moment after I'd broken line of sight, which was followed quickly by the sound of the projectile punching into the solid concrete of the building I found myself in and then the warhead's detonation.

I could hear the whole edifice shudder with the force of that explosion, although thankfully there was only one- if they'd fired again, I suspected the building would have come down, and I wasn't actually sure if I could devote enough energy to shields quickly enough to survive that.

The room I'd found myself in was, fortunately, empty, which I very much appreciated since it would have been embarrassing to make it past the Captains just to get my ticket punched by some scavenger in the right place at the right time. Still, I brought up the raygun-looking sidearm I'd made, combat skin automatically compensating for the lack of light this deep into the building with LIDAR and sonar and half a dozen other sensors, as I swept the room.

"Step one, complete," said the Ghost, seeming almost incongruously cheerful, but I couldn't argue with the sentiment. "Let's see about the rest."

"You said it, not me," I replied, walking through to the next dusty, probably mildewing room and then, after a moment to check sight lines and angles, down the cracked and pitted concrete staircase descending from it.

With every step deeper into the complex, the more the choking miasma seemed to settle, to the point where, eventually, it appeared to be almost physical, a devouring mist wafting out of the edges of hallways and around blind corners that threatened to conceal any number of monsters straight out of horror movies within its depths, arbitrary limitations such as space and physics be damned.

"This… isn't Fallen territory anymore," said the Ghost, sounding almost afraid. "Here, look at this."

On my HUD, an image of something that looked like someone had poured concrete around a patch of barnacles, if the barnacles had been taken off the cover of a horror novel set at sea, glowed. "That looks… disgusting."

"You can say that again, but no, that wasn't really the point. This is a Hive structure, something that they use to alter local atmospheres to be more compatible with their biology. Generally ends up becoming vestigial once they stop expanding their fortifications, but with it pumping out gases like this…" I got the distinct impression that if the Ghost had a nose, they'd be wrinkling it in disgust. "Not great news."

"When you say not great news, do you mean, like, I found an early termite infestation, or, say, we're activating the Halo Array, may the Domain have mercy on our souls?" I asked, just barely checking the impulse to activate the shield gauntlet.

"Hopefully closer to termites, especially since they're at least nominally in House of Devils territory and they'd probably clear them out if they knew this was happening, but there's really no way to be sure."

"Great," I grumbled. "Any more pertinent suggestions?"

"If the thralls are glowing blue," they said, pulling up a picture of a hunched, bulbous-headed creature and then another, this one seeming to almost be hugging itself and glowing with inner light, like a deep-sea fish waiting for something to nibble on its lure before exploding into motion, "don't let them get close. They explode, and it's not pretty."

"I'll keep it in mind," I said, as I felt the phantom hammer rise once more, and then slam down.

I felt… something, inside my head, not quite a headache, but close, for a moment before it faded. For another moment, it felt like nothing had happened, but as I looked down at the gun whirring softly in my hands, parts of it that I just hadn't had the time to look at in any detail started to make sense to me.

At the same time, my combat skin jolted, and on my HUD a gear icon flashed once and opened into a list, headed by the words "Dimensional Storage Pocket" and listing a not insignificant number of items, the very first of which being the words "Laser Cannon" preceded by a stylized graphic of a flame. I selected the cannon with a finger twitch, and in a flash of Cherenkov radiation, the armor grew heavier, and protruding from over my right shoulder was a barrel almost longer than I was tall.

"You know, I think I can work with this," I said, dismissing the weapon with a quiet pop.

"Good," said the Ghost, sounding more than mildly worried, "because I'm picking up a lot of Hive-typical chatter, as well as faint signs of Light from inside. I think the Hive got their claws on whoever that Guardian whose ship is outside, and they're doing… something to them in here."

"That doesn't sound good," I said, dialing up the yield on the energy pistol I was holding. "Any idea what it is they could be doing?"

"...not really? They've got something… weird down there, and it's almost seeming like it wants to suck in the Light, so that might be related to it, but that's just taking a stab in the dark, really." The Ghost gave the impression of a sigh. "What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak…"

The line sounded familiar, even beyond how the Ghost said it with the air of a favored movie quote, but like so many other things in this frustrating second life of mine, I just couldn't place it.

"That and five bucks'll get me coffee in the morning," I said, some part of me absolutely certain of the price despite the fact that I'd been dead for who-knows-how-many years' worth of inflation driving the price up even farther. "Any other recommendations before we wade in?"

"Uh… stay mobile? That'll help a lot with the Knights and their swords, and the Thralls shouldn't be able to swarm you as well if you keep moving. On top of that, the Ogres have trouble keeping beads on targets if they move unpredictably" As the Ghost spoke, images of the three Hive forms appeared on my HUD. The Knights were hulking creatures, chitinous armor arranged in such a way to suggest protruding tendons underneath heavier plates to accompany the not-quite death's head rictus on their faces, while the Thralls were much smaller, the combination of the multiple holes going completely through their torso and their bulbous head giving an almost skeletal impression that seemed at odds with the Arc energy crackling along their claws. The Ogres dwarfed the Knights, seeming at first to be overgrown Thralls if not for the far superior armor coverage and the pulsating, almost brainlike mass that its twisted jaws hung from like a bony remora.

I took a moment to slightly reconfigure one of my arm-mounted grenade launchers, altering the casing to be both more efficient to produce and to cause it to splinter more effectively to handle swarms of Thralls, before I nodded, replacing the energy pistol on my leg in favor of a submachine gun that had been included in the cache of reverse-engineered technology. "Zombie apocalypse rules, got it."

I darted into the next room with a grenade already primed to launch into a cluster of Thralls halfway across, and the handful of triangular Acolytes, as my HUD labeled them, that were keeping the Thralls at a figurative arm's length vanished in a chattering burst of fire from the submachine gun.

From deeper within the bunker, I heard a deep, almost bone-rattling screech. "I think they know we're here," said the Ghost, sounding a little bit worried.

"That's not gonna save them," I said, feeding a solid stick of Glimmer into the submachine to restore its internal ammunition reservoir. "Push comes to shove, I draw them out and glass the place and see what I can't find deeper in."

"If you're sure," said the Ghost, managing admirably to convey their skepticism.

"Sure enough," I said, racking back the slide on the boxy weapon. "Now then, eyes up, and let's see what we can't do about the little infestation we have on our hands once they get a bit bigger."

Maeve was more than a little concerned with the fact that she'd been taken alive by the Hive.

Over all the years she'd been in the figurative saddle, she'd never heard of the Hive so much as attempting to take a Guardian alive, with the notable exception of Eris Morn's stories of the fireteam that Toland had talked into trying to kill Crota in his own throne room, and the fact that she could still feel her Ghost outside the cage the Hive had custom-grown for her was, if anything, more concerning.

Cas and Shaw were still out there, presumably, but neither of them were good enough to fight through who knew how many rooms jam-packed full of Hive bodies to get to her (Dark Below, she didn't think she was good enough for that), and with how the big Wizard had blasted her ship out of the sky on her approach at just the moment she was changing the shield frequencies over, when it would be easiest to shoot down, she wasn't sure either of them were good enough to sneak or otherwise contrive a way to get to her, not with what that said about this little operation.

Once again, she reached for the Light, feeling it fill her with the almost burning radiance that she was just shy of being able to spill over to the real world and forge into a hammer to smash her way out of the cage and, if she was lucky, the Wizard.

She waited for just a moment longer, letting the raw Solar energy burn inside her body to get her heart pumping and warm up her tendons, and, once she was sure she had enough juice for a solid recreation of Sol's hammer, then-

Felt as the Light splashed off of something between her and the world, returning to wait within her body, seething under the wet blanket of Hive magic.

Maeve didn't trust herself to turn the Solar energy into Arc or Void without her Ghost on hand to help mediate the process, not that she thought that would work any better than trying to call up Sol's Hammer had.

Experimentally, she closed her fists around two bars of her cage and pulled, just hard enough to get them to bend a little without really trying to tear them out of the ground, before giving it up as a bad idea. Even with the terrifying might of the Sunbreaker burning within her, she wasn't sure she'd be able to get out of the cage without the power of the hammer.

Absently, she remembered how Cas had described Radiance, the few times he'd let go of his Nova Bombs in exchange for Solar Light, as burning himself up for raw power and trusting in the Light to make him a wick instead of the whole candle, before her mind fixated on the idea.

Maybe if she could throw around enough Sunstrikes fueled by Radiance, she'd be able to make it out? It was worth a try, since her other option was just sitting around and waiting for rescue just in case Cas and Shaw could arrive before the Wizard tried to eat her, or whatever it was that the Hive wanted from her.

She called up the raw power of a thousand suns again, holding on far longer than she'd ever dared to before, and felt the Light starting to burn at her from within, as constrained by her own will and Hive magic as it was.

Just as she thought she might burn alive from the inside, another Guardian who delved too deep, the Hive magic faltered, and given half a chance, the Light scorched through the flickering barrier like tissue paper on a bonfire, and Maeve's fist clenched around the haft of the Hammer of Sol, the weapon's comforting warmth infusing her as she brought it crashing through the Hive prison, scattering chitinous bars like so many ninepins.

It was only once the bars shattered that she registered the sounds of a firefight outside, the detonations of Hive Boomers, the roars of Knights and the Ogre that had caught her for the Wizard, the shrieks of dying Thralls, and, above all else, the sound of energy weapons discharging.

For a moment, she thought she heard one of the Fallen Walkers' main cannons going off, but that couldn't be, there was no way they'd pushed this far into the Hive's territory so quickly and even if they had they didn't have a way to get something that big down to the level they were on.

Either way, there was someone out there taking the fight to the Hive, and hopefully one way or another she'd be able to find her Ghost, so she firmed her grasp on her hammer and leapt through the narrow tunnel that led into the cavern she'd been held in.

She landed in the massive storage room that the cavern had been tunneled out of hammer-first, scattering a not inconsiderable horde of Thralls in a spray of cinders as she whipped the weapon back up to crush the Knight who the Thralls were milling next to, then cast about for her next target.

She froze for the barest of instants as she saw the figure floating near the roof of the cavern- no, not floating, but flying, clad in sleek silver armor with veins of Arc blue, Solar orange, and the Void's not-purple spiderwebbing around its surface, a shield gauntlet presumably looted from the Fallen on one arm (and taking far more punishment than they'd ever imagined possible) and the other hand occupied with what could be mistaken for a book, if not for the barrel and chattering bursts of leaden death it spewed every now and again.

"Guardian," she heard from the internal comms of her helmet, and the voice was a smooth, feminine one, with an accent that tickled at what memories she had of Before but couldn't quite place. "I'm marking your Ghost's location on your HUD now. Go find them so we can get the hell out of this shithole before they get enough reinforcements in here to stop us."

"Is your ship nearby?" Maeve asked, throat sore but workable from… had she been screaming when she was trying to invoke Radiance? No, a question for another time.

"There's an old Arcadia-class jumpship in a hangar a floor or two down," said another voice, and she could tell somehow that this was the other Guardian's Ghost, "that between the two of us we should be able to get working before the Hive really starts to get pissed." Two markers superimposed themselves onto the screen inside her helmet, one on an out-of-the-way table in a corner of the room next to one of the corridors that had been built when the facility had originally been commissioned and the other on a staircase almost directly next to the hallway to the room she'd been imprisoned in.

"Understood," Maeve said, and in a flare of Solar light she shoved off the ground, scattering another rush of Thralls in her wake as she bounded across the room to find Sarissa.

Fortunately, she just managed to make it over to the table as her grasp on the Sunbreakers' might started to slip, and she let it go in a burst of searing heat that burnt the trio of Acolytes menacing Sarissa inside her miniature cage to ashes.

"It's good to see you," her Ghost said, and thankfully Maeve's weapons were right there on the table next to her. A handful of rounds from Fabian Strategy had enough of the bars shattered that Sarissa could squeeze out, and she tapped against Maeve's helmet once before dematerializing into her Light signature.

"Glad to see you're okay," Maeve said, turning back to the battle and holding down the trigger, walking the tracers fired by the auto-rifle across groups of Thralls while the other Guardian hurled explosives to strike down Knights and the occasional Wizards as they floated in from another room.

"Alright," came the Guardian's voice, "now that we've got everyone, it's time to blow this pop stand. Get to the staircase and start clearing rooms, I'll make sure you have a clean path and see about buying some time before the big Wizard decides to come back with friends.

One part of Maeve wanted to object, to insist she be the one in the thick of combat like a Titan should and the other Guardian be the one to clear the way to the ship so they can fix it up sooner. The more rational part of Maeve, though, took in the way that the other Guardian was throwing around grenades like they were going out of style and admitted that was probably better than what she could do even if she was able to muster enough Light up to resummon Sol's Hammer so soon after using it already.

"Got it," Maeve said, stowing Fabian Strategy in favor of The Comedian and making her first jump on the path towards the staircase.

And that's that!

Perks Earned:

Reverse Engineering (Worm, 400 CP): While you still possess an amount of scientific knowledge beyond the curve of modern society, your base technical knowledge is far less than other Tinkers. This is however because your power lets you reverse engineer the principles and workings of anything you can get your hands on, and then apply that knowledge and understanding to your own work. Just seeing a device and watching it function gives you a vague idea as to how it works, and examining something means you can derive the hows and whys as to its functions. This requires time and effort on your part, in addition to the time and resources it'll take to actually implement this new knowledge, but as long as you put in the necessary investment you can always understand virtually any new technology. Your Tinker abilities will continue to expand as you gain access to new technology and knowledge, with potentially no upper limit as long as you can keep gaining samples to work with.

Tinker-Tech Cache (Worm, Free): You get a decent sized cache of Tinker-Tech whose nature is up to you. Whether you want a large variety of computing and programming devices, an armory full of futuristic guns and weapons, or maybe just a ton of Tinker tools for your personal use. There is nothing crazy in here, but even basic Tinker tech is far more advanced than anything on modern earth. If you have a Tinker ability you get one purchase of this free for tech that corresponds to your specialty, giving you more than enough to get started. Note: Even the worst Tinker-Tech is hundreds of years ahead of modern day earth, and the samples you get here aren't bargain bin by any means, just not anything earth shaking.

If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko (fi) (https (/) (/) ko (-) fi (/) lucifra) and a Pa tre on (https (/) pa tre on .com (/) Lucifra), and you can see chapters a week early if you become a patron. (remove spaces and parentheses)

Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin, Mtron, AntaeusTheGiant, Starfall20, Danielle, Ultama Omega, Asuran Fun, KOOLAID, Journeyman_Mike, Josef Haerle, Freddie Capps, James, Darkarma, TheCosyIntrovert, JChuckS, James Blessing, Shabbat Asfaha, Yotam Bonneh, Lazzie, Drain, Aaron Seddon, Teigen Sethi, Soulsmsher, CornFlake, evilperson41, Soulsabre345, Tim Hall, Antares, Elemental Lord, abdd, brad, WorkForFood, cjfry2000, ϜΦΓβἷϷξͶ ϏπϘᾠζεϷφΣ, James Thomas, Adam Daw, anthony corcoran, Jenna Richards, Fire_Fox2590, Maleficarum, Allen Baker, Bailey Matutine, Mr Phantom, Thomas Vernet, Conor Cooney and Ember for being patrons!

I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff now (as in as of like right now it's going live)- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct, that's another option: https (/) (/) dis co rd dot com (/) NHRUKz8jyy (remove spaces and parentheses, dot to period)

That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!