085: Darkness, Peering – Seven
Despite there being seven of them, there were only two questions that all of them had in mind:
What happened, and are you okay?
With the two Eta's attached to the now fully upgraded Pelekys, Nevara brought them into subspace and set course for the main Kith fleet, the others gathered around her on the bridge as they all brought each other up to speed.
They told Viatrix of their individual encounters with figures from their pasts as they were shown how to heal the damage caused to V'tala and Pryseia by the dlegh, and all the cryptic imagery they'd been subjected to in whatever - wherever - that liminal space had been.
"I think I was in the same space, or somewhere similar?" Viatrix said once the others had come to the end of their recounting, "I think I was talking to something Hyttan. Or trying to, at the very least. There was something of a language barrier."
"I encountered that when I communed with Castore, for lack of a better word," Malakh said, restlessly pacing between the assorted stations on the bridge, "From what it was able to get across, something removed the capacity for understanding the Hyttan from every living thing in the galaxy."
"Some- a hand? Did it look like a dark hand?!" Viatrix demanded.
Malakh hummed in confirmation, saying, "What did you see about that?"
"A lot, but it was all cryptic," Viatrix grumbled, "From what I could understand, the Hyttan were super full of themselves, and went poking around in places they shouldn't. They set something loose - something that in this vision or whatever was represented by a black hand - and it systematically wiped the Hyttan out, but they managed to take it down with them. Downside, it's coming back. Upside? They made Storlayacas to deal with it."
"Yeah, speaking of," Rhea said around the disbelieving laugh that broke out of her, "Storlayacas, singular. They can - we can - all link up into one, huh?"
"That is not a feature endemic to the Odazaen," Pryseia said, sounding dazed, "If it were, it would doubtlessly have been discovered by this point, the sheer number of them in use across the galaxy and all."
Making a noise of confirmation, Viatrix continued, "Yeah, I got the sense that the Storlayacas, plural, were built to be a lot more than what the Odazaen are. But they were built too late to save the Hyttan. Each unit was constructed separately, a real don't keep your eggs in one basket type situation, but the Hyttan didn't get the chance to bring them together. They still needed something to finish them, something to unite them, something kept on the Hyttan homeworld."
"And that's what they sent me to grab." Elytra said, head in her hands as she leaned over one of the gunner stations, eyes distant as she recalled what she'd seen, "A hidden lab, and the thing that became our multi-tool. It was... so far away. But I could still feel the tether to the rest of you. See it, feel it. It pulled me back once I had what we needed."
Humming thoughtfully, Nevara speculated, "Perhaps your deeper empathic connection allowed you to travel further afield than the rest of us would have, this tether acting as some sort of bungee cord? And it was certainly a stroke of luck that it was what we needed to mend the psychic wound V'tala and Pryseia were afflicted with."
"I think that was because you're all part of the Storlayacas system, on a mechanical level." Viatrix said, rotating her avatar on the main view screen, "You're basically the software, and that tool Elytra grabbed was the patch needed to fix the data leak."
"That program did a lot of double duty, didn't it?" Rhea said, using one foot to swivel her chair back and forth, "What exactly did it do to you, Vi?"
"I think it… made me go through puberty."
That surprised a laugh out of Rhea, which was clearly the intent, as Viatrix followed that up with, "So I'm horny now. I want to get a battering ram installed on the ship."
"Menace!" Malakh cackled, "You couldn't have had one installed yourself when the ship was offline and getting converted into Hyttan tech?"
"I didn't exactly have control over what was happening to me!" Viatrix snickered, the humour in her voice fading as she said, "It was like I was there, but I wasn't. I had a sense that things were happening, but I couldn't really do anything about them? It was like being in a video while also watching it at the same time."
"That's because you were dreaming," Rhea said, "In whatever state the Hyttan upgrade had you in, it was identical to what REM brainwaves look like."
Her avatar making an odd, jerking twist, Viatrix blurted, "That's what dreaming is?! Is it always so weird?"
"It can be. Why, what did you dream of?" Pryseia asked.
"Just… nonsense? In one, we were flying through subspace, but no matter how much we opened the throttle on the engines, we couldn't seem to reach FTL speeds. In another, I was flying a drone around on the Quanvengier, but I couldn't seem to find my way around, even though I know the route I was supposed to be taking."
"I've had those kinds of dreams," Elytra said, "Be thankful you never went to school, or you could have had one where you showed up wildly late for a test you didn't know you had to study for. Or you showed up naked."
When all the organics made noises of recognition at that type of dream, Viatrix sputtered, "Showing up naked is a dream type all your species have?!"
"Clearly." Nevara confirmed.
"That's actually pretty interesting on a psychological level," Viatrix mused, "I wonder if all organic species have similar dreams…"
"That can be something you look into at a later date, but for the moment there is still the topic at hand, this being what exactly happened to you. To the ship." Pryseia said.
"The puberty thing wasn't as much of a joke as I made it out to be," Viatrix told them, "My program has developed - matured - in ways I'm still discovering. I'm still me, but there's more to me now. And since the Pelekys is my body, it needed to grow in order to accommodate the new me."
"I know you said the fuel reactor was converted into a Hyttan one, but does that mean that we now have a limitless fuel supply?" Elytra asked.
Nodding, Malakh said, "As far as I can tell, yeah. It's exactly the same as all the other Hyttan ships I've encountered. The plating seems to have the self healing properties that Hyttan building materials have, though I haven't had a chance to test if it's the interior as well as the exterior that will mend itself. Or if it's just a cosmetic thing, and it can't actually take care of it's own repairs."
V'tala turned suddenly, drawing her gun and firing at the door to the bridge. Elytra clapped her hands over her ears, while the others all drew their sidearms (or turned her arm into its cannon mode, in Pryseia's case), aiming at whatever it was V'tala had shot.
It was nothing more than the closed door of the bridge, now with a sizeable dent in it thanks to the bullet that had impacted against it. But as they watched, the flattened bullet was shoved out of the door, and the damage it had caused faded away to nothing.
"The interior has self healing capabilities." V'tala announced as she holstered her sidearm, turning to Malakh expectantly.
"I appreciate the scientific initiative, but maybe a little warning the next time you open fire in an enclosed space?" Malakh said as she slid her own weapon away before throwing herself into the nearest seat.
"Right?! Scared the piss outta me!" Rhea laughed.
Quietly, like she couldn't quite believe it, Viatrix said, "I felt that."
Her expression locking up into something guilty, V'tala said, "I hurt you."
"No," Viatrix said, lost in thought, "It wasn't what I imagined pain to be like. It was impact. I felt the bullet strike the door."
"Have you been able to feel us walk across the floor plating?" Pryseia asked.
"That bullet hit's the first I've noticed."
"What about this?" Elytra asked, slapping a hand down against the console next to her.
"Nothing."
"Then how about-" Rhea stomped hard against the floor in front of her.
"I definitely felt that!" Viatrix confirmed.
"Physical sensation," Malakh breathed, getting out of her seat in order to pace again, "Dreams. Maybe Hyttan tech has more in common with organics than just the aesthetic."
"Something to work into the Kith stuff, maybe?" Viatrix suggested, "Oh, speaking of, did you do anything to explain away my unintended absence while I was out?"
"Yes, we did a proper introduction for the Knight of the Tomb," Pryseia told her, motioning at V'tala, "And implied that she was placed in stasis by the Hyttan themselves in order to test those who would take control of the Storlayacas, with the Pelekys and the Program both being brought offline in order to receive upgrades transmitted via Enaruli. We also, based on what the others were shown by echos of the dead, hinted at a greater purpose in store for both the Storlayacas as well as us, which has proven to be quite prescient give all that you've told us of your own liminal experience."
"We also broadcast most of our fights with the Leviathan we tangled with while we were stranded," Elytra added, "And recorded the one with the last two, which involved your return and the combination of our six Storlayacas into one. We're going to have to figure out what to do with all that."
Leaning back in her seat, Rhea said, "With everything that's happened, our reality sounds more fictional than the stuff we've been coming up for our Kith storyline! We found a woman who's been kept in stasis since before her people made first contact, the AI that we inadvertently gave life to by linking a simple VI into the system of the ancient mech that compelled us to find more of its kind ended up in a coma, along with our ship, when she and it were upgraded with technology older than all our races combined, and we got said upgrade when we were pulled into some kind of afterlife adjacent place when two of our own nearly died because our stasis lady was part of a slave caste that her people buried the knowledge of because it involved psychic subservience which they feared could have been used to subjugate their race as a whole, so when she automatically harpooned our non-psychic captain, this ended up wounding them both to the point where we had to perform metaphysical surgery on the pair of them, and then we were left drifting in space fighting off increasingly powerful monsters of the deep until our AI came back online and brought with her the knowledge of how to combine our six ancient mechs into one giant one, with us linked inside as one consciousness basically. Oh, and also our mechs can communicate with us, but not really, because they were created to stop some kind of otherworldly threat that the ancients were killed by, and this thing somehow stole the ability for us to understand the ancients, and also this ancient evil is coming back at some point and we're the only thing that can stop it, us and our ancient mechs that can now become one big ancient mech because, again, our AI and ship were converted into ancient tech themselves and showed us how to do it. I think I'm going to need a little bit of time to brainstorm a script to make that all make sense when it comes to our whole, 'oooh look at us we're kind of vaguely sinister and stuff' Kith thing we've got going on."
"Well when you lay it all out like that…" Elytra laughed, sounding stunned.
"It's a lot." V'tala summed up, and the others could only nod in agreement.
"So, what's the plan going forward?" Viatrix asked quietly.
"This ancient threat, the black hand, have you any idea when or where it is set to arrive?" Pryseia asked.
On the view screen, Viatrix spun her avatar in an approximation of a shrug. "No. Or at least, not at the moment? My upgraded included a lot of new senses, for a lack of a better term, and I need to get a handle on what that all entails. For all I know, it could be showing up in three seconds or three centuries from now."
Pryseia gave a thoughtful hum, tapping her artificial fingers against the armrest of her chair. "Then for now, I think we need some time to come up with a plan for what we intend to do with our future, both on and offline. We've been so driven by the compulsion to find the pieces of Storlayacas that we've barely had the chance to think, but now that we have them all, the compulsion is no longer nipping at our heels. A cosmic threat from beyond our time is a daunting storm cloud looming on the horizon, but on the horizon it yet sits, and so while we have the time to prepare to weather it, we should tend to needs that we've long been neglecting."
"Such as…?" Rhea practically purred, grinning knowingly over at her.
Returning it, Pryseia said, "Why nothing short of a vacation, of course. We're all long overdue for one."
Coming up to the Quanvengier now was still as intimidating an experience as it was when they first laid eyes on it, but the welcome they received quickly eased any anxieties they had on approach.
"Ten Leviathan, and two of them Etas?! Impressive work, Pelekys!" The docking control agent who answered their hail let out an impressed whistle, "A crew will be out to retrieve them momentarily. Will you be needing a dry dock or just parking?"
"A berth to resupply at will be more than adequate," Pryseia said over the comms, "Thankfully our ship was able to stay out of range of these beasts while they were alive enough to be a threat, and so requires no repairs."
Thankfully, offloading their haul didn't take very long, and so within the hour the crew (including Viatrix in one of her drones) were seated at an "outdoor" restaurants in one of the Quanvengier's commercial districts.
Surrounded by the chaotically opulent decor of mixed and matched styles from hundreds of different cultures, the buttery ambient lighting casting everything in a warm glow, V'tala was stone faced as she took everything in.
"They didn't have anything like this where I was stationed." She said eventually, scanning the crowds of people walking by, on high alert for threats.
"The Quanvengier's an oddity, to be sure," Nevara agreed, "Most stations aren't this large, to say nothing of ships. I haven't the faintest idea where something of this size could even be assembled."
"The local AI are no help in that regard," Viatrix scoffed, her drone bobbing between Malakh and Rhea, "All of them have conflicting accounts on how this ship was built, something which they all seem to be incredibly amused by."
Rhea laughed, nudging her with an elbow as she said, "It adds to the mystique of what the Kith are, probably. Why tell the truth when you can make up something for shits and giggles?"
"Yeah, but I wanna know!" Viatrix whined, bumping into Rhea's side in return, "I could probably try hacking their databases myself, but that would probably cause more problems than its worth. They should just tell me the truth!"
"And I'm sure asking like that will be a surefire way to win them over." Malakh joked, but further conversation was cut off when their meals arrived, brought over by an automated drone laden with dishes.
Partway through the meal, Viatrix suddenly announced, "Oh! Funds for the Leviathan bounties just came in, as well as our cut from the salvage on those two Hyttan transports and all the Odazaen. It's… hefty."
"Then we won't need to be frugal when it comes to where we choose to go for our vacation," Pryseia said, "Any suggestions on that front?"
"We gotta go somewhere with a beach," was Rhea's response around a mouthful of pasta, "I need to see the ocean!"
"Should I be jealous?" Malakh smirked.
Rhea leaned into her side, her voice pitching low and seductive, "You better be. Her and I go way back."
V'tala frowned, eyes darting between the two of them as she said, "I feel I'm missing context."
"I grew up near the sea is all, it was a big part of my life," Rhea said with an easy smile, but then her expression shifted to one of horror as she leaned forward and demanded, "Did we not tell you that the two of us are married?!"
By the way that V'tala leaned back and blinked in surprise at that outburst, it was clear that they had not.
"Oh I feel like such an asshole!" Rhea groaned, "You fit in so easily with us that I keep forgetting that you haven't been with us the entire time!"
"That's… flattering," V'tala admitted quietly, "In my time, among the usgaisjans, there were regulations in place over who one was allowed to enter into either a romantic or sexual relationship with. I'm more shocked that two women were allowed to marry, as that was frowned upon by the society I was born into."
"Well, given how they were literally growing babies in order make them into psychic slaves, that kind of mindset doesn't shock me," Malakh growled, stabbing a piece of her steak with more force than necessary, "I'm not sure what the usgaisjans are like now, but out in space, almost no one bats an eye at who people get involved with, regardless of gender or species. As far as I know, I think all of us are into women?"
"I'm not into anyone." Nevara said definitively, "Romantically or otherwise."
"I feel the same way." Elytra said, raising a glass to cheers with her.
"Well I am most certainly into women," Pryseia said cheekily, "And a beachfront destination would be an excellent place to see some, so I would second the suggestion for a seaside vacation."
"I'm not sure what I'm into," V'tala said thoughtfully, "As a dregil, it was not something I was given the chance to explore."
Clapping her on the shoulder, Pryseia said, "You've the rest of your life to discover that now, and none to stand in your way of doing so."
"And if they try, we'll beat the shit outta them!" Rhea promised with a wink.
Unused this this kind of unwavering support, V'tala just nodded in thanks. She had the feeling that this would be only the first of many new facets to her life that she would have to come to terms with.
And that thought was thrilling.