136: Vestigial Pursuit – Three
The system they were entering was charted, but in only the most technical sense. A white star cast blue light across the four rocky bodies that accounted for the bulk of this nameless system, none of them interesting enough to have so much as a random numerical designation. Each world was a pockmarked, grey mass, the thin debris field that permeated the entire system peppering the faces of each planet infrequently enough that they didn't need to worry about meteor strikes while conducting their tests on the surface of the lucky world that would hold them soon enough.
There was a stark beauty to the system, like that of a long abandoned graveyard, the names on the tombstones worn to illegibility due to time. A fitting reflection for the mood that had enveloped them all after almost losing Pryseia.
Her own thoughts drifting to the event, Pryseia turned to V'tala, standing with arms crossed at the side of her throne, and she quietly asked, "At the activity centre, you entered my room prepared for war. Did your telekinesis somehow grant you foresight in regards to what was happening within?"
Though her eyes were facing the view screen, V'tala's gaze was focused on her memories as she drew a breath, gathering her thoughts before saying, "No. It was something else. Like something cold grabbed my attention and pointed it straight at you."
From where she was leaning against the throne on the other side of Pryseia, Rhea turned to V'tala sharply. "An ice cold sense of dread. That's why I was basically right behind you: I felt something wrong and I moved on instinct."
It was Elytra's turn to cast a stunned look then, though this one got caught on everyone in the room when she saw them all nod in agreement, and she blurted, "You all felt that? That's what- I feel Pryseia like winter."
"Empathically, I take it?" Nevara asked, her mandibles worrying together as she guided the ship towards the closest planet.
"Your emotions all feel different to me. Everyone - well, koleopterans, I mean - have a sort of synaesthesia when it comes to how they process the emotions of others. Pryseia feels like ice, cold water, snow, that kind of thing. I felt her panic like an icicle that fell from her to me. And you all felt that too?!"
"Seems that way," Malakh tried to sound casual, but with the way her eyes were darting across everyone in the room, it was obvious that her mind was kicking into overdrive, "Some koleopterans can make others feel what they feel... maybe this was a bad enough feeling that you projected it to us all?"
"I don't know how to do that," Elytra told her, "It takes years of training, and usually you've got to have some kind of aptitude for it beforehand to even get considered to take lessons from someone who knows how. We got tested for that sort of thing in school, but I never showed any signs of it, so I never even got into a beginner class."
Leaning forward to rest her head on her right fist, her left hand drumming against the arm of her seat, Pryseia murmured, "The compulsion. Malakh, you said that you were able to feel that I was the authorized pilot of Zaanlaa before I'd even the chance to see the machine?"
"Yeah," Malakh breathed, leaning back in her seat at one of the gunner stations to give Pryseia a piercing look, "I could feel a tether between it and you. Then, when we'd all gotten a turn in its cockpit, I could feel that same tether between the four of us."
"And I was able to feel that very same connection to Elytra when I first laid eyes on her in the arena on Iromay," Pryseia recounted, turning to give Elytra a look, "Despite never having encountered anything of its like, you were still marked by the Storlayacas as profoundly as the rest of us had been."
"While your connection felt like it had been damaged," Rhea said, still looking at V'tala, "Your dlegh getting in the way of you."
"I can feel you all, on the edge of my awareness at all times," V'tala said, eyes still distant in thought, "I've been able to ever since we came out of that liminal space where you mended the damage my dlegh caused."
"You and Elytra both have psychic abilities, different as they are from one another," Rhea mused, eyes darting between the two of them, "Maybe that just makes you extra sensitive? Aside from that spike during the attack, I haven't felt any of you like that before. Well..."
She cut herself off, turning to Malakh, who nodded and said, "Our vedja bond. We can feel each other through it, but we've never felt the rest of you before."
Locking the Pelekys into a stationary orbit above her world of choice, Nevara spun her chair around, her eyes drifting across them as she said, "Another question to broach with the Storlayacas, then?"
"Given that we have no other pressing business to attend to, we've time enough now to ask any that have been weighing on our minds," Pryseia said as she stood, "What answers we learn now will chart our course in the days to come, so let us quell our curiosities. For the time being, at least."
In the armoury, before they made their way to the cargo hold, Malakh showed them her prototype for their own Hyttan detecting device. Unlike the featureless cube that had been in the Dariyaschlde Institute, the casing for this one looked more like a gun, a short, thick barrel wider than it was tall, with an inset screen on the back of it just above the grip.
"Trigger activated, just to make it easier," Malakh said as she handled the device, the sleek shell of it covered in swooping, filigree designs, the bulk of it an antique silver colour, trails of purple gems set in the recesses of the ornate flourishes, the grip itself made of a richly deep purple wood, "Thankfully, there were more aesthetically pleasing examples of Gheluc design sensibilities on the network, so I based this off the look of some firearms prevalent around the time the Gheluc went extinct. I figure, since we haven't put the heist video out yet, we could digitally replace the cube with this."
"Oh, absolutely," Elytra said, eyeing up the device like she already had shots and angles in mind, "I can get going on that once we get back."
Tilting her head as she regarded it, Nevara asked, "How does it work? Or rather, how is it supposed to work?"
Turning her creation so the others could get a better look at the back end of it, Malakh explained, "Simply, but with more options than the original model. The Gheluc version of this thing only had a hologram projector on it, which would show a topographical map of the area, with any Hyttan artifacts showing up as a coloured blip. I added a smaller screen, in case we want to be a little less showy with it. Also, I don't know which display method would look better on camera, so I figured I may as well give us options to play around with. Blip size on the map denotes the amount of self repair a Hyttan artifact is currently in the middle of, rather than the size of the object, so a big item that's being kept somewhere protected enough that it doesn't need to do a lot of repair is going to show up as a smaller blip than a tiny object that is constantly in the middle of repairing itself, and obviously the closer this thing is to a Hyttan artifact, the more space the blip is going to take up on either the screen or the display. As such-"
She flipped the protective cover off the trigger mechanism and pulled, and the screen on the back of the device was immediately filled with purple light, "It's a little hard to find anything beyond the technically Hyttan ship we're currently inside."
Malakh hit a toggle on the back to bring up the holographic display, the entirety of it filled with purple light.
"So if the Storlayacas can help us-" Malakh cut herself off again, her expression shifting to one of supreme annoyance before she continued, "The cargo hold isn't Hyttan. We could have tested it in there already."
"Babe, we can test it out at both locations," Rhea said, rubbing a sympathetic circle against Malakh's back, "We still need to see how far away we have to be from the Pelekys so that it isn't interfering with things, right?"
Huffing out a sigh as she closed her eyes, Malakh groaned, "True. I'm just pissed at myself that I didn't think to test this out in the hold before this second. That's a lapse on my part."
"We've had extenuating circumstances, of late." Nevara pointed out.
"Right," Malakh agreed, shooting her a small smile, shutting down the device, "Let's see if the Storlayacas can help us be a little more productive."
Relief was the first thing that they felt when they emerged in the cargo hold, a wave of it breaking against their shore as they stepped off of the chartreuse dematting zone.
"I apologize for the scare," Pryseia called out as she and the others headed over to the walkway in front of the Storlayacas, "Even with the warning of assassins with their sights set on us, I did not take proper precautions to account for their eventuality."
A frustration like tectonic plates scraping together was the answer they all felt, not directed at any of them, but instead at those who had sought to do them harm. The sense of a question hung in the air like dust kicked up by a heavy impact: didn't the assassins understand how important the pieces of Storlayacas were?
The single, dark laugh that cracked out of Rhea was not one of amusement. "As far as they're concerned, we're just escaped slaves that need to be brought to heel. That, or thieves and murderers in need of a visit to the executioners. Even if we revealed every single scrap of information we've learned from you about this whole apocalyptic threat that the Hyttan sealed away, I doubt it would change their feelings towards us."
Every single member of the crew of the Pelekys felt a memory pulled to the forefront of their minds in response to that - Rhea seated on one of the couches in the rec room, waving a hand at a movie they'd watched not too long ago, something on screen so monumentally stupid that she'd exclaimed, "That's fucking bullshit!"
"Yeah, that sums it up," Malakh said with a stunned laugh, "Sadly, as big of a threat as the Omega is, I have no idea how we'd go about getting the information of it out there. Well, I mean I do, I just have no idea how to get people to believe it. Even with everything you've shown us, I find it hard to believe myself sometimes."
Another undercurrent of frustration washed across the room. The Storlayacas clearly had no more idea how to convince people than the rest of them did.
Leaning against the railing of the walkway to look up at them all, Pryseia said, "A solvable problem, then. I hope, at the very least. The Omega is coming, but we know not when or where. Even with what was done to upgrade her, Viatrix is only able to feel the vague sense of its inevitable arrival, no other details beyond the promise of it. We were hoping that the Hyttan would have had a more precise means of tracking this thing, and to that end we've acquired a device to track down Hyttan artifacts."
This announcement was met by a bubbling spring of excitement. The image of a rodent chewing its way through drywall, only to be caught in a trap before it could do more than enter a building, the hole quickly patched.
"Precisely what we hope to do," Nevara said as her mandibles kicked up with the force of her grin, "Stop the Omega before it has a chance to truly cause chaos in the greater galaxy."
On the closest console to the Storlayacas, Viatrix's avatar appeared. "The only trouble is that we don't know what to even begin looking for. Finding anything Hyttan isn't the problem - it's figuring out what any piece of Hyttan technology actually does."
Like the murmur of water over stones, they could feel the Storlayacas ponder that conundrum amongst themselves. How to impart knowledge when all they could really do was emote at one another?
Pulling her scanning device out of where she'd shoved it into the overalls she was wearing, Malakh turned towards the stairs of the walkway, calling over her shoulder, "May as well test this out while you're having a think about it."
It didn't take her long to make it across the cargo hold from where the Storlayacas were all arrayed, and even at that distance, the others could see when she turned on the device, the holographic display blooming above it. Thin white lines mapping the outline of the cargo hold, and seven purple blips within it.
"Okay, this thing works!" Malakh shouted, "It's picking up the Storlayacas and our bomb over there, so that's one worry off our plate, at least."
It wasn't trepidation that rolled off the Storlayacas as Malakh made her way back over, but it was close enough that it had the others on edge as Pryseia asked, "Has something gone amiss?"
A sensation like a sigh being heaved. Nuance was being lost due to the impracticality of how they were able to communicate with one another, and the necessity of that. Hesitancy. The image of a treasure submerged in dangerous waters, and the only way to retrieve it was to plunge right in.
Rhea straightened up to her full height, the doctor giving a prognosis as she said, "You want to do a deep communion again."
Like an ember tumbling from a pyre, Castore's presence drew closer to them, though the machine itself remained perfectly stationary. Worry, understanding, regret rising off of it like heat. More than the others, it knew well the dangers of such a practice, to both itself and Malakh. Into all their minds it projected the image of a puppeteer bringing a marionette to life before them. The scene seemed to blur, and then it was Malakh with her hand on the handle, Castore cavorting on the end of her strings. The scene blurred once more, only now it was Castore that had Malakh in motion.
"You want to pilot me." Malakh said, stunned. Thrilled.
"Is that even possible?" Elytra asked, looking up at the machines before them.
A low, droning hum of uncertainty reverberated through them all, but there was a higher note of hope ringing through it. They could only try.
"Oh I am more than okay with giving it a shot." Malakh said, eyes as wide as her grin as she stepped towards Castore, but Rhea caught her around the arm before she could take a step. The look Malakh turned on her was stunned, like she hadn't even realized she was there, but Rhea wasn't looking at her.
Instead, she was looking at Castore.
"Communion fucked the both of you up pretty badly the last time you tried this," she said, her words coloured by worry as much as they were a threat, "If this is going to be more of the same, then I'm not going to allow either of you to harm yourselves so."
Castore's presence shrunk at that, apologetic, pleading. Another image filled their minds, this time of a person reaching into an oven to pull a dish out from it. Wearing mitts as they were, they were protected from the burn of flesh against ceramic, the heat making its way through no threat to the hands within the gloves.
"I said before, we're not going to risk killing ourselves when our mission still sits incomplete," was Malakh's quiet assurance as she held Rhea's hand against her arm, "But this is information we need to acquire to complete said mission. We'll be careful, I promise."
Rhea's jaw worked, her eyes never leaving those of her wife. Eventually, she let out a harsh sigh through her nose, and with a brief nod, she let go of Malakh's arm. Shooting her a grateful smile, and passing over the scanning device to Nevara, Malakh stepped up to Castore's cockpit, which swung open to receive her.
As the restraints and control apparatus came up around Malakh, a cresting wave of protectiveness rose from Castore. It won't be like last time.
The cockpit didn't close, but Malakh's eyes did as she relaxed back into the pilot seat. Castore flinched around her, just once, before it fell still. And then Malakh opened her eyes.
But it wasn't Malakh who was looking out at them all.
Taking a step forward, her face slack with shock, Elytra breathed, "Castore!?"
Malakh - Castore - blinked at her, confusion writ large on her features, her head turning loosely as if she didn't quite understand how to work it. Though the control apparatus didn't pull back, the restraints on her arms did, and after a bit of fumbling, she pulled her data pad from the pouch on the front of her overalls.
She stared at the device for a moment, as if trying to recall how it worked, but then her uncoordinated movements and slouched posture straightened up, her eyes brightening with understanding. Placing the data pad on her lap, she brought something up on the screen, and soon her fingers were flying.
From where they stood, the others watched as lines of code flew across the screen with a speed that was awe inspiring. Without pause, without looking away, she hammered out something as the others waited in tense silence.
After an eternity, in no time at all, her fingers fell still. With a nod, she tucked the data pad back into her pouch and settled against the seat, her eyes falling shut.
After a few uneasy seconds, Malakh's eyes opened, blinking and dazed like she'd just awoken from a much deeper nap than she expected to take.
Rhea was at her side in an instant, her Longan already on and scanning, and with a gentle hand against Malakh's cheek she asked, "Baby, can you hear me?"
Lifting a hand to hold Rhea's in place as she shook her head slightly, blinking harder to try and dispel whatever lingering effects there were from this reverse piloting situation, Malakh stuttered, "Y-yeah, I'm here. I'm good. That was a lot."
Her eyes darting across the readings she was getting, Rhea said, "You're showing signs of exhaustion, like you've been up for three days straight. I'm not happy about that, but it's a lot better than having your entire nervous system fried."
Malakh moved to stand, Rhea rising with her, her hand immediately going to Malakh's waist. It was a good thing that it did, because Malakh buckled unexpectedly, her own hand flying to Rhea's shoulder as her head lolled.
"Alright, you're getting a medbay nap," Rhea said, ducking down so she could scoop Malakh up in a bridal carry, "We can worry about testing things once you're back on your feet."
With a nod to the others, Rhea headed off for the demat zones across the cargo hold. They followed along in her wake.
Turning to Castore, Pryseia said, "Thank you. I assume you will need to tend to your own recovery as well. We shall avoid confrontations with those who would require your services until your repairs are complete."
The flare of acknowledgement than answered her was an echo of its usual strength, Castore's presence seeming to come from a much greater distance than before. Like storm clouds gathering on the horizon, the presence of the other Storlayacas huddled around it, as protective of Castore as the organic crew was with Malakh.
Pryseia's breath stuttered in her lungs at that, at the similarities between them despite their monumental differences. Nodding in recognition of that shared affection, her eyes tear bright and her smile a quiet thing, she turned to join the others as they returned to the Pelekys proper, hope blooming bright within her.