159: Timaeus and Critias – Six
Elytra was awake for several seconds before she realized it, disoriented by her dim surroundings. She wasn't in her room, wasn't lying in bed, but instead wedged into a comfortable enough seat, though she felt wildly hungover. Everything about her ached, a bone deep weariness that had her wanting to close her eyes and conk out again, at least until she felt like a person. The warm presence that was cocooned around her was certainly making that an easy enough task.
Presence?
Lianshae.
The previous day came flooding back to her - the empty void that revealed nothing on their scanners, her attempt at an empathic scan pulling her and V'tala into the memory of the last moments before the Hyttan destroyed themselves, the rest of the crew chasing after them to bring them home, waking up in the medbay who knew how long after, then coming here to the cargo hold to help carry the weight of the Storlayacas' grief.
It was Lianshae's presence curled around her now, here in the mech's cockpit, heavy and welcome like an unexpected warm day in the dead of winter. It felt like Lianshae had condensed, wrapped itself around her like a blanket, though if it was for her benefit or Lianshae's, Elytra couldn't say. More than likely it was for the both of them.
Sadness still rolled off the presence, but it wasn't the bottomless well that it had felt like the night before. The grief instead felt like a dappling of morning dew, to be either burned off in the sunlight or to seep a chill into bone, depending on how the weather fared, so much like Elytra's own grief over her losses that she felt her heart catch in sympathy.
"Hey," her voice was barely above a whisper, dry and raw from all the crying she'd done, "How are you feeling?"
She felt Lianshae's presence curl in tighter against her, protective as much as it was seeking comfort for itself, and an image was pulled from Elytra's mind, a memory from when she was younger, staring out the window from her grandparent's seaside cabin. They'd promised to take her and her siblings out for a joyride around the bay, but they'd woken up to overcast skies, heavy grey clouds draining the colour from everything, and a chill breeze that had the iron dark sea flickering with cresting waves. That early in the day, there had been as much a chance for the clouds to clear and the weather turn balmy as it had to develop into a proper storm. It was something they'd just had to wait out to see which way it developed.
Lianshae's sentiment was clear - the grief was still there, and only time would tell if today would be a good day or a bad day.
"Trust me, I know how you feel," was Elytra's quiet reply, the memory of her family being vaporized by the Baithaiz raiding party flashing through her thoughts, "But that memory you pulled from, that overcast day by the sea? It ended up warming up not long after. We spent hours puttering around in my grandparent's boat. Don't deny yourself your own sunny day."
An upswell of gratefulness rose up around her, the sentiment echoed back at her like moonlight. Elytra smiled, wriggling into a more comfortable position in her chair. With the weight of Lianshae's presence settling more firmly against her, Elytra drifted back to sleep, to dreams of sunny days at sea.
It was hours later, once everyone had properly woken up, that the Storlayacas insisted that the organics return to the Pelekys proper to tend to their physical needs. Still emotionally raw from the revelations from the day before, none of them wanted to leave, but in their own way the Storlayacas conveyed that they would be alright, that knowing they were close at hand was more than good enough for the time being.
The grief was still fresh, but all of them knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that none of them were alone in it.
Even still, breakfast was a sombre affair.
"I've got no idea how we're supposed to work all that into our narrative," Elytra said quietly, "It feels almost crass to try and wring entertainment value out of what the Hyttan sacrificed of themselves."
Rhea hummed at that, swallowing her mouthful of coffee before she said, "I know what you mean. I know we got copies of the recordings Akav made, but it wouldn't feel right to just post that online for our audience. This is too… personal. I think I'd like to do some kind of tribute, though. We may not have a far reaching audience, but I would like something of the truth of the Hyttan to get out there."
"I trust you to be tactful in what we reveal of this tragedy," Pryseia told her, before her gaze drifted over to Elytra and V'tala, "And truly, how fare the both of you? While emotionally necessary, spending your first sleep after your ordeal within the confines of your Storlayacas was perhaps not the most recuperative of bedding arrangements."
"I woke up for a couple minutes before we all got up, and I don't feel as bad now as I did then," Elytra told her, "It felt more like I was waking up after a night of heavy drinking, but its nowhere near as awful now."
"I'm much the same." V'tala added.
Nodding at that, Rhea said, "That's good to hear. Your psychic cleanses would have take care of the worst of what you experienced on that level, but the pathways of your psychic systems were physically damaged. They're built like nerves, in that there's a protective sheath covering around the actual conduits your psychic energies pass through, so a physical injury usually results in that sheath getting damaged while what it's protecting remains safe. The blowback of psychic frequencies you were both subjected to basically bypassed that protective sheath to damage the tissue inside, and quite badly at that. We more or less had to regrow your entire psychic systems, so you're probably going to be tender for a bit, because they're physically brand new, and so they aren't as flexible as the rest of your body is just yet. Once you rest some more, we'll have you both on a lighter exercise routine to ease that all back into place. And it goes without saying, but try not to use your psychic abilities just yet."
"I take it that's why I had this on when I woke up?" Elytra said as she pulled her psychic dampening necklace from Trowsorab out from beneath her shirt.
Malakh tapped her in the side with her tail, saying, "Your empathic abilities are basically always passively on, so we wanted to make sure that you weren't being inundated as soon as you were up and about."
Elytra frowned at that, saying, "It didn't do anything to muffle the Storlayacas. Like at all."
"Perhaps they are simply too powerful?" Nevara suggested, but even as she said it, she made an expression like she herself didn't believe that was the case.
Across from her, Rhea's eyes suddenly went distant, and she scrambled for her data pad. The others watched in silence while her fingers flew across the screen, her lips twitching as she read whatever it was she was looking at.
"Okay! Look at this!" She said after a few moments, sliding her data pad into the middle of the circular table so everyone could see. On the screen were displayed two pairs of wavelengths. Rhea tapped one side, then the other as she said, "On the right are scans of the psychic wavelengths unique to Elytra and V'tala's systems - I checked my older scans of the both of you scans once you were out of the cleanse, just to make sure everything was back to normal on that front, which thankfully, they are. On the left are the scans I took of Lianshae and Enaruli when I was trying to figure out a way to undo the dlegh. I never compared them side by side like this before , but you can clearly see that your Storlayacas match your own psychic frequencies. I can only assume that your body registers their thoughts as your own, and so they can no more hurt you than your own thoughts can."
Her words trailed off, breathless with wonder, a faint smile on her face.
Next to her, Malakh was leaning forward on her elbows, head propped against her fist as her wide eyes darted in thought, ears pinned back and tail flicking behind her. "We're all components of Storlayacas as a whole, each pair of pilot and machine a unit in and of themselves. Their psychic wavelengths match because they're two halves of the same system."
V'tala let out a breath, leaning back against her chair as she took all this in. After a moment, she looked up at Rhea and said, "Maybe this can be something we work into the narrative."
Barking out a laugh, Rhea replied, "It definitely sounds like bullshit mumbo jumbo enough for our audience to think it's fake, that's for sure! Doubt we're gonna make ourselves a more tempting target for mech hunters with this kinda nonsense!"
"What to you wanna bet that the Storlayacas will reply with something that conveys the sentiment of 'yeah duh' when we bring this up?" Elytra said, her own laugh unbelieving.
"I would be a fool to bet against that," Pryseia told her, whacking her in the back with her tail, "I imagine they will find our own wonder at this discovery to be baffling, for could we not all sense how tied together we were as is?"
The others could only bemusedly mutter in agreement at that.
Their day after that progressed slowly, stranded as they were in the heart of where the Hyttan sacrificed themselves to buy time for the rest of the galaxy to blossom without either their or the Omega's influence.
They updated the Gorgon on their situation. Or rather the lack of change in it. Their own mission was going well, Adyt informed them, so much so that they were already lining up their next job.
Checking in on Viatrix after that, they found that whatever it was she was downloading had finished coming in, and whatever programming it involved was in the process of being installed.
"Already five per- SIX percent, so that's a good sign," Malakh said as she leaned over Viatrix's main console in engineering, "Hopefully that means she'll be back online a lot sooner than the last time."
"I really hope she bounces back to her normal self just the same," was Elytra's quiet reply, voicing the worry that all of them carried in their hearts, "That this isn't going to change her into… someone else."
Fed, washed, and changed, with nothing more they could do to speed along Viatrix's situation, the crew touched base with the pirates guarding them from outside harm.
"A cargo hauler made a pit stop on an ocean world to scoop up water for the next leg of their trip to Apiarian space, but beyond that, we haven't picked up anything in scanner range." T'haye told them over the main view screen on the bridge.
"We appreciate you standing guard for us while we wait for our crew mate to come back online," Pryseia told her, "It was a harrowing experience, the last time we were becalmed so."
"Hey, any way we can offer help for your mission." T'haye replied with a shrug.
Perking up at the gunner station she was sat at, Malakh asked, "You lot mentioned death cultists before, that they had some weird gear. Do you happen to have any scans or pieces we could take a look at?"
"Scans for sure, I can have those sent over to you in a bit," T'haye said, tapping away at something off screen, "I'll have to call around to see if anyone's got anything confiscated at the moment. We haven't been able to figure out what any of it all could do, so we've been destroying whatever we get our hands on in case its the type of tech that can start up on its own."
"Smart thinking, and I'll appreciate anything you can send our way." Malakh replied.
True to her word, T'haye had the pirate's collected scans on the cultist's tech sent over in no time at all, and a few hours later a ship swung by to drop off one of the pilfered devices.
"Made of nightmares is right." Elytra said as the pirates delivering it hoisted it off the cart they'd dragged it in on.
Whatever the purpose of this thing was, it was about waist height, a rough dish shape with articulated points fanning out from it like an abstract representation of a sun. The build of it reminded Elytra uncomfortably of the way the dlegh had manifested in that odd space where they'd pried V'tala and Pryseia off of it, only this one was an oil slick black colour instead of a sickly silver. There was something inexpert about how it was put together - mismatched pieces that looked like they'd been banged out by amateur shop class students rather than via precision machining, the welding sloppy enough that there were almost organic irregularities to the whole contraption, like a perverted mimicry of Hyttan tech, the whole thing covered in scorch marks from whatever unsteady hand that had put it together had zigzagged across the surface of the device.
"I wish you luck in figuring out what this thing does," one of the baithaizan pirates said, giving an elaborate salute with both of their right arms, "Our own people have had little in the way of results."
Partially to keep as much of a buffer between the tear outside and and whatever this device was built to do to it, but mostly because they wanted to check on the Storlayacas, the crew hauled the thing up onto a cart of their own and brought it to the cargo hold once they bid the pirates farewell.
Though there was still a noticeable air of melancholy about them, the Storlayacas had their curiosity piqued by the odd device brought in.
"It seems the anomaly outside has drawn more than the pirates who are currently defending it," Pryseia explained, "They have encountered something of a death cult that seems hellbent on hastening the arrival of the Omega."
Anger at the audacity of that flashed through the Storlayacas like lightning. After what the Hyttan had sacrificed, how could anyone want the same?
Clacking her mandibles together in agitation, Nevara theorized, "There is the potential that they're brainwashed, or otherwise being manipulated by the Omega itself. With how some shade of the Hyttan has been aiding us throughout the course of our journey, it isn't out of the realm of possibility that the Omega is doing something of the same. Of course, it's just as likely that these people are acting out of their own interest, as there have been groups throughout the histories of all our races that have sought universal destruction above all else."
A disgruntled rumble of disbelief at that. Why would anyone want to bring about that level of ruin?!
"Sadly, there's a lot of people out there that don't see any other option but death to improve their lives," Rhea told them sadly, "There's a lot of bad out there, and a lot of people without any kind of support system."
Sadness loomed heavy at that proclamation, dark as storm clouds. Fighting off a being powerful enough to come back from having two suns blown up in its face was one thing, but how were they to solve the problem of a societal failing?
"You can't. None of us can, not on our own. A truth I still struggle to take to heart," Pryseia admitted, "Issues this large will take all the peoples of the galaxy to overcome, and unity, sadly, is not a trait that comes easily. We have our own problems to deal with, one of which is monumental beyond reasoning. We must focus our energies on that, for in taking out the Omega, we will grant the galaxy time enough to hopefully grow out of its selfish single-mindedness. That is my hope, at the very least."
The thunderstorm of their frustration grew distant at that. The Storlayacas knew, as well as the rest of them did, that the Omega was their main priority. The petty antics of the governments of the galaxy wouldn't matter in the slightest in the face of that.
Nudging the strange device with her foot, Malakh said, "To that end, I wanna see what this thing can do, so maybe I can backwards engineer what their plan is with this device in this place. After all the help the pirates have give us, I'd like to return the favour, give them some more information to work with."
Malakh spent the rest of the day teasing apart the strange device, the others drifting in and out when they weren't taking care of other chores throughout the ship, the Storlayacas watching over her and offering what insight they could. So caught up in her tinkering, Rhea had to hoist Malakh over her shoulder to get her to come to dinner, much to the amusement of the Storlayacas.
"That thing, all the scans T'haye sent over, it's all high level stuff," Malakh said around her mouthful of casserole, gesturing vaguely with her fork, her gaze unfocused enough that it was obvious to the others that she was still running through equations in her mind, "Some of this is on a theoretical level, experimental shit that I only know because the Thalatte stole the research from the Zymeth. Segue, but what do any of you know about subspace?"
"Without getting too bogged down in the mathematics of it all, the rules of time and space don't behave the same in subspace as they do in normal space," Nevara replied when no one else offered, "We know how to calculate that difference, and thus calculate how far and fast we would need to travel in subspace in order to reach our destination of choice."
"Right, making it an extra-dimensional space," Malakh said, finally focusing on those gathered in the room, "I'm really oversimplifying things down, but imagine that our reality is like a sheet of paper, and that place we went, the edge of Death? That's another piece of paper on top of it. Subspace is the subatomic gap between those two sheets, and that thing in the cargo hold has been designed to punch a hole from our realm, through subspace, into Death."
"That would certainly speed up the arrival of the Omega." V'tala breathed, the others looking stunned at this revelation.
Malakh nodded, taking another hasty bite before continuing, "The one we have, and from the plans and scans the pirates shared, I don't know how effective these things would be in actually doing that. The programming is solid, but the construction is laughable. They all seem like they were hobbled together in a basement by someone being guided by an expert while they themselves had not even a foundational understanding of what it is they were even doing. The device in the cargo hold is just as likely to explode if we activate it than it is to actually perform the function it was built for."
"Small mercies, I guess, but what does that mean for us?" Rhea asked.
"It means we have more of a reason to share this info with the pirates on guard here," Malakh told her, "They're on the front lines for this bullshit, they deserve to know what kinds of weapons their enemies are bringing to bear."