To Conquer The Stars

AN: Apologies for the delayed chapter, I've been rather busy.

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It had only taken a handful of weeks for things to change even more around the mountain.

What had once been a single chiseled gap in the mountain's northern face had become a graded, spaced-out gap wide enough for two freight trains to pass each other without even thinking of slowing down. Aurelia had trained more people in mining and was running crews in shifts around the clock, leading the maglev tracks to be extended directly into the facility's outer corridor and then deeper still, all the way to the central hub. The upper hub had become the staging point for everything that came in or out, and what came out was, as Marcos had put it, "the entirety of Strathari military doctrine, in pieces."

Mark stood on the elevated observation platform above the hub floor, hands resting on the railing, watching the latest extraction crew work the magnetic lift cables under another mech. This crew had come from the back row of the bay, a row Marcos had ended up labeling "tertiary parking."

The twenty-meter mech lay on its back with its arms folded across its chest like a body laid out for a wake, which was almost exactly what it was. The outer plating had mostly faded over time, but parts of it still held a matte-black finish. But three weeks of careful inspection had revealed what the outer plating hid. Time had eaten the mech from the inside out.

"From what I can tell, all of the cabling on this one is fully calcified," Aurelia said over their comms channel. She was somewhere down on the bay floor, walking the perimeter of the cradle the crew had assembled to take the mech's weight. "It's just like the last six. The sheaths are intact, but the actual conductors have degraded into something that looks like compressed graphite. Marcos says we won't be able to power any of them without rebuilding the entire internal nervous system."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Is there anything of it that's salvageable?" Mark asked.

"Well," Aurelia began, letting out an audible yawn, only to be interrupted by Octavia.

"There's the skeleton, the armor, the joint actuators, and roughly forty percent of the optical systems," Octavia said over the comms. "The fusion cores are dead, obviously, but the housings seem to be in good enough condition, which means we've got eight functional reactor cradles to test new cores against for when we manage to scale up the Helium-3M production. Then there are the cockpit interfaces, which are mostly slag, but the neural couplers are interesting since they aren't anything near what I expected."

The last bit seemed to catch Mark's interest, and he straightened himself on the railing. "How so?"

"They're not direct neural taps," Octavia explained. "There's a contact layer that interfaces with the pilot's skin, and then the actual control runs through what Marcos informed me to be some sort of 'resonance lattice.' Best he can tell, the pilot doesn't just control the mech and move it according to their thoughts, but also shares a sort of operational state with the mech itself. Like riding a horse, but with the horse able to feel what you're feeling."

Mark tried to understand what Octavia had said. "That sounds like it would burn out a normal person in about ten seconds."

"You'd be correct to assume so," Marcos chimed in. "We had a long conversation about the threshold last night. Strathari nervous systems were built to handle the bandwidth and the feedback. Yours and the Elites' could, theoretically, handle most of it, though, unlike the mech loaders, no one on the colony would be able to use one unless we either redesign the interface or turn everyone else into super soldiers."

"Lovely," Mark said.

"Hey, you wanted ancient warrior tech," Marcos said. "Well, as it turns out, ancient warrior tech has its own opinions about the matter."

Below them, the cradle locked into place around the mech's torso, and the maglev train at the far end of the hub began to inch forward, the cargo bed sliding into position beneath the magnetic clamps. Marcos synchronized thirty-six independent lift points, and the mech rose a uniform six inches off the floor before settling onto the cargo bed.

That marked number seven of twelve piloted mechs, mechs that had been found in a bay once they had cracked a second set of vault doors open in what could technically be considered a parade. The twelve mechs had been mounted in upright cradles along the walls, each one held in place by docking arms that had long since locked in place and wouldn't release without power, that is, if the internal wiring was in the same condition as the wiring in the mechs.

Three of the mechs were on the ground, having collapsed when the docking arms let go, the leg actuators lacking the structural integrity to bear the machine's own weight. Two had come down hard enough to crack their own pelvic plating, and the other one appeared to have lost an arm on impact, with its shoulder joint sheared clean off and the limb lying on the ground.

The mechs were being extracted from best to worst condition, with the one they had just finished loading being seventh on the list, which meant the remaining five would be extracted in a process that would resemble archeology.

"Marcos," Mark said, "I'm going to need you to give me an updated count."

"Sure," Marcos replied, his voice settling into the efficient cadence he used during operations. "Of the twelve piloted mechs in the bay, three are catastrophic losses suitable only for material reclamation, four are stable enough to remove with current methods, and five require fabricated bracing before extraction. I have the bracing schematics queued for the printers as soon as they finish the current run of irrigation conduit. I estimate the extraction to be completed in approximately eleven days, assuming there are no further structural surprises."

"With most of the facility being pretty much lost to time, were you able to pull any data from the bay's onboard systems?" Mark asked.

"Ehh, you can say there was some that was salvageable," Marcos said. "Though the data was very limited, it was also illuminating. The bay itself ran on a local backup core that failed about fifteen thousand years ago, taking quite a number of conduits and wiring with it, so the active records are gone. However, each mech identification plate carries a passive engraving of its assigned pilot's house and registry number. Cross-referencing against the genetic archive's index, I have identified all twelve pilots by name. Four of them have surviving DNA samples in the archive itself. I will spare you the detailed lineage charts unless you actually want them."

"Spare me the headache," Mark said, "and just give me the headline."

"The headline is that this facility was not a military depot nor was it a government facility," Marcos explained. "It was a private installation belonging to a single noble house, and the pilots were retainers, sworn to the same family. The genetic archive includes that family's bloodline, along with what appears to be a sample of the planet's biosphere at the time of preservation. Which suggests that whoever built this place was preparing for something far more long-term than a typical war."

Mark filed that away. The picture they had of the Strathari's history was getting clearer week by week. However, clearer wasn't exactly comforting. Just like the gates humanity had discovered, which Anahrin had revealed to have been built by the Strathari as well, someone had built this place to outlast its very own civilization, and the fact that the strategy had nearly worked said something about how seriously they'd taken the threat they were preparing for.

"Anything more on the house of our resident Strathari?" Mark asked.

"Still working on it," Marcos replied. "The matching is slow because the little that has survived of the indexing system the archive uses isn't exactly a tree. Strathari lineage tracked dozens of variables that human genealogy doesn't recognize. However, I can confirm that he is not from the same house as the twelve pilots of the mechs in the bay, which makes his presence here a question I cannot yet answer."

Mark shuffled in his spot. "Well, I guess we can just ask him when he wakes up."

"That appears to be our only choice for the time being," Marcos agreed.

Mark let his eyes drift across the hub one more time, taking in the work inside the cavernous space with multiple lighting arrays set up throughout, then turned and headed for the maglev platform on the far side.

The first thing Mark saw when the maglev pulled into the colony's main station was a wolf the size of a small horse trying to climb up onto the platform.

Snowball had grown quite a bit. She had gone from a fluffy white pup the size of a large dog when she'd first chased after her father out of the forest, to roughly four and a half feet at the shoulder now, with a chest that had broadened into the wedge-shaped frame of an adult wolf with a coat that had thickened into a winter ruff that she didn't strictly need yet. Her paws were still too big for her size, but the rest of her was starting to catch up. Three weeks of consistent meals and running around had stretched her.

She also still had the attitude.

"Snowball," Mark said as he stepped off the train. "Down."

Snowball, who had her front paws up on the platform's edge and her back legs kicking against the side of the maglev car like she was trying to scale a wall, gave him an offended look and didn't move.

"Snowball," Mark threatened.

She let out a whine, and her tail thumped the side of the train hard enough to make the car vibrate slightly. Then she dropped to all fours, padded to the platform stairs, climbed them with dignity, and trotted up to him. Her head came up just shy of his chest, and he could feel her breath against his chestplate.

"Where's Lyra?" Mark asked.

Snowball's ears swiveled, and she turned, padding off down the platform with the clear expectation that he would follow. Unfortunately for Mark, Snowball wasn't a big fan of the translation collars, but she seemed to understand him most of the time. So he followed the wolf, who had developed a route through the colony that took her from the clinic, where she liked to lie on the steps and watch people come and go, to the school, where Lyra spent her mornings, to the kitchens at the central commissary, where she had cultivated an arrangement with one of the cooks involving table scraps, and finally back to Mark's house, where she expected dinner.

Lyra was in the school's outer courtyard with the rest of her class, kneeling in the dirt of one of the small instructional plots. The colony's children had been enrolled in a rotating curriculum that included mathematics, language, sciences, and they spent at least an hour a day actually growing something, fixing something, or learning how a piece of equipment worked. Today, it was a row of root vegetables, and Lyra stood at the front of the line, her hands buried up to her wrists in dark soil.

She saw him at the same moment Snowball saw her. Her face lit up as she shouted "Papa!" loud enough to startle two of the smaller children and cause Snowball to charge. Mark watched his daughter brace for impact like she had done this a hundred times, and Snowball came in low, bumped her shoulder with the side of her head, and proceeded to nearly knock her over while licking her face. Lyra went down laughing, the dirt on her hands smearing across Snowball's white fur.

"You're getting her dirty," Mark said.

"She's already dirty," Lyra said, sitting up with her arms wrapped around the wolf's neck. "She rolled in something this morning. I think it was a bird."

"She rolled in a bird?" Mark asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, a dead one," Lyra confirmed. "It was close to the wall."

"Snowball," Mark said.

Snowball turned her head and gave him another offended look, and licked Lyra's face again. The current teacher, a former biologist who had taken on schooling duties when it became clear the colony's children needed structure, gave Mark a wave from the back of the courtyard and went back to instructing the row of small children.

"What did you do in the mountain?" Lyra asked.

"Nothing much," Mark said with a softening smile. "Just watched Mech Number Seven come out today."

Lyra's eyes lit up with wonder. "Whoa! Are you bringing them all here?"

Mark chuckled and shook his head. "We're not going to be bringing them in here, per se, but once the construction of the covered bay for them is finished, we'll be taking them there. We'll start cataloging the parts that survived."

"Can I see?" Lyra asked with enthusiasm.

"When the bay is done," Mark replied. "But right now, there are too many things lying around that could fall on you."

Lyra accepted that with resignation, as she had heard several variations of the same answer for the last three weeks and was waiting for the conditions to change. She gave Snowball one last hug, wiped her hands on her pants, which transferred most of the dirt rather than removing it, and stood up.

"Have you eaten yet?" Mark asked.

"Yes. I ate at lunch," Lyra said, nodding. "Did you eat?"

Mark smiled and shook his head. "No, but I'm going to."

"Marcos said you skipped breakfast," Lyra said.

"For someone without a physical body, Marcos has some very loose lips," Mark said, raising an eyebrow.

"Marcos can monitor what Mark has been doing almost everywhere," Marcos said dryly through the colony's PA system, his voice coming from a small speaker mounted on the corner of the schoolhouse. "And he has a vested interest in your meals, though you may not need them."

Lyra giggled and then said goodbye to her Papa, who had to go. Mark walked the colony's outer edge on his way back home, taking the long route on foot. Dr. Corven had pushed him to do it at least once a week when his schedule allowed, and he'd come to appreciate its beauty. The city had a different shape than it had even a month ago, and the difference was getting harder to take in from the air alone.

It still maintained the Timgad grid, with its perpendicular streets and its insistence on right angles. However, the city had been planned for people who needed certainty more than comfort. But with certainty and security already established, things began to change.

Three of the original modular homes on the eastern end had been fed back into the nanoprinters the previous week and re-extruded as differently styled homes. The first had come out as a low, sloping single-story house with a wide central atrium that opened to the sky, modeled after a courtyard house Marcos had pulled from a Mediterranean archive. The second was a two-story longhouse with deep eaves and a steeply pitched roof, a shape that owed something to an older Nordic tradition.

The third was the most ambitious of the bunch: a sandstone-textured pueblo of stacked rectangular volumes that climbed from the base in three terraces, finished in a warm hue the residents had voted on after a community meeting that ran for hours.

The architectural diversification had started as a simple question. Although the standard module was efficient and quick to print, it had been designed as a quick means to an end, not a settlement. As more families consolidated their space and relationships formed, tastes began to assert themselves, and people started asking for more.

Since the printers could support customization without slowing the colony's other priorities, the conversion program was born. It only had a simple rule. Any household that wanted a redesign must submit a request, and the existing module was scheduled for reclamation. The family would just go on about their business for about three hours, and when they came back, one of the twenty-five-meter printers would have extruded the new structure in different sections, and a portion of the Peacekeepers would have it arranged already.

The result was a colony that looked like it had been settled for thirty years instead of a few months.

Mark passed a baker's stall set into the front of one of the new courtyard houses, where a man he recognized from a handful of conversations as a former dock worker was pulling flatbread from a wood-fired oven with a long-handled paddle. The smell brought him to a halt for a second. Wheat had been one of the first crops to take root in the colony's outer fields, the soil's mineral profile proving unexpectedly hospitable, and the bakeries had followed the wheat by less than two weeks. The man waved at him, set a fresh loaf on the cooling rack, and went back to the oven.

As he moved closer to the agricultural area, the grid gave way to its linearity and formed a series of arcs. The colony's outer perimeter had been ringed with cultivated land from the first month, but the recent expansion had pushed those fields out by another two kilometers in every direction. Most of the new ground was native flowers and grass rather than row crops, since the longer-cycle plants were going in now and would be productive in two to three years. The pastures created also held the small herd of goat-like animals they had come across while pillaging the mountain.

He made his way back towards the center, passing by the new community hall, which was being remodeled. Having been the first building in the colony designed with vertical expansion in mind, it had what was currently a four-story structure with reinforced foundation pilings dug deep enough to support up to thirty stories, if the colony ever needed the space.

As Mark walked, his comms pinged.

"I'm going to need you to step it up, please," Marcos said. "Dr. Corven has an update."

Mark started walking a bit faster as he spoke. "What is it?"

"Our resident Starthari's left lung scarring is fully resolved," Marcos stated. "The chair has done its magic and rebuilt the alveolar tissue from the bits it had up. His liver function is back to what we believe is the Strathari baseline, though I'm not really sure, since I'm basing it off Anahrin's own physiology, dumbed down to account for all of the evolutions they did on themselves. The cellular markers we've been tracking suggest his body is now operating well within healthy parameters for an adult male of his species, with the obvious exceptions of the missing limbs and the residual damage to the head. Dr. Corven wants to attempt a partial reduction of the chair's sedation protocol tomorrow morning."

Mark slowed his pace as he asked, "How partial are we speaking?"

"About twenty percent," Marcos replied. "It should be enough to begin to allow ascending neural activity into a sleep-wake cycle, rather than the suppressed coma he's been in. Dr. Corven has been observing his neurological responses for the last several days and feels the chair's deeper diagnostics are now exhausted. We'll learn more from a sleeping patient than from a suppressed one."

"Okay..." Mark said. "And what does she think we'll see?"

"She has declined to speculate for the moment," Marcos said. "Which I read as her own way of saying she has theories she isn't comfortable defending yet. The honest answer is that we don't know what a Strathari brain looks like as it emerges from suppression. Anahrin's brain came back online in a matter of seconds, but he was further along the evolution route and had spent about half as much time in stasis, in a more advanced stasis pod with over one hundred thousand years' worth of improvements. Dr. Corven has been spending considerable time in the archive's medical files, cross-referencing what your bloodwork looked like during your own recovery against the older Strathari case studies the archive contains. She's compiled a comparison matrix, and it is, in her very own words, 'humbling.'"

Mark sighed as he spoke. "Marcos, you know I'm a man who likes details. How is it humbling?"

Marcos chuckled over the channel. "Their physicians thought about the brain very differently from how humans do. Less as a single organ and more as a community of overlapping systems, each with its own preferences. Dr. Corven has been particularly fascinated by the parts of the broken data I transcribed, which describe what they called 'resonance susceptibility,' and we don't have a clean human equivalent for it. I'll let her explain it to you when she's ready. For now, I'll only say that it's part of what makes her optimistic about the timeline."

"What if he wakes up tomorrow?" Mark asked.

"Jesus, you and your questions, do they ever end?" Marcos let out an exasperated sigh. "If he wakes up tomorrow, then we'll deal with that tomorrow. She isn't aiming to fully wake him, but to get closer to the surface, which means he may dream and begin to process, or he may not change at all. The point is that we are running out of useful data to gather while he's fully under, and the sooner we begin the gradient, the sooner we'll know more when he opens his eye."

Mark walked the rest of the way home in silence, turning the words over. He'd been preparing himself for this conversation for three weeks, and the preparation hadn't done much. He couldn't rehearse meeting the last being of a race.

His house came into view at the end of the street. The lights were on inside, which meant Lyra had gotten dropped off at home, and through the window, he could see Snowball's bulk sprawled across the sitting room, her tail smacking against the floor. Lyra appeared in the kitchen window, climbed onto the counter to reach a cabinet she shouldn't have been climbing onto, and waved at him as he approached. A wave he returned.

He climbed the front steps, opened the door, and went inside to catch whatever Lyra was about to drop before it hit the floor.

/Crimson_Reapr

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