To Conquer The Stars

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Novices Twining T86, 66835, and Catcher Jones.

Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

That was the first thing he registered when he came to. The suffocating heat of a confined space whose cooling systems had failed hours ago and whose power reserves were redlining across every gauge in his field of view. The air tasted of copper and overheated polymer, and the displays arrayed across the curved screen pulsed with warnings in a language he had only seen once or twice before, though, for some reason, he could read fluently.

His hands rested on a pair of gripped controls that fit his palms as if they had been custom-made for him, and his body was bound into a seat by a six-point harness that crossed his chest and waist in a configuration he had no memory of.

Outside, he was able to see a valley burning through the optical feed, which painted the world in a tactical overlay that picked out heat signatures and mechanical movement against the smoke. The valley was a field of craters, and across the cratered earth, three dozen machines were closing in on his position in a loose arc. They were automated, purpose-built kill platforms designed by engineers who prioritized lethality over everything else.

His own machine moved as he thought it. He shifted his weight in the seat, and without pulling a lever or pushing a stick, the mech moved with him.

The armored war-frame was eighteen meters tall, and when it pivoted on a hip joint, it sent a mechanical vibration through the soles of his shoes that he could feel in his teeth. The resonance lattice read his intent before his hands had even gotten the chance to finish forming it, and the right arm came up holding a rifle that was over ten meters long, and the left held something he instantly identified as a blade, a curved sword made of some folded alloy that ran longer than his mech's height.

Three of the machines closed within two hundred meters, and he fired without aiming, the rifle's barrel locking onto a target his eyes had already chosen, and the lead machine came apart at the upper torso in a shower of orange sparks and shrapnel. The second one tried to flank him, only to be met with the sword on the way through the maneuver, the blade taking the machine's "head" cleanly enough that the body kept walking for two strides before the motor relays caught up to the fact that there was nothing left to relay to. The third one leapt, all limbs leaving the ground at once, and he caught it on the rifle's barrel, slammed it into the dirt hard enough to crack the valley floor beneath its chassis, and put a slug through its spine before it could rise.

However, the remaining mechs kept coming.

He moved through them with a cold fury that felt like it was his own and foreign at the same time. He knew the names of these maneuvers and the breathing rhythm that kept his nervous system from overheating under the strain of sustained neural interface, and he knew the tolerance windows on his mech's joint actuators down to the degree, and the man he was was a soldier who had fought this war for a very long time and had grown tired of it.

The valley filled with ringing sounds of slugs impacting the ground and the shriek of metal on metal, the deep bass of detonating chassis, and the higher, sharper tones of failing servos. Wait, was he in a valley? He couldn't quite remember where he actually was, but the scenery had shifted without him knowing, and he found himself under the emergency lights of some facility.

One of his mech's leg actuators blew out after he had achieved his twelfth kill, and he compensated by redistributing the load to the working side without so much as a conscious thought, adjusting his center of gravity in the seat. After taking down the twentieth mech, his rifle ran dry, and he had no more ammunition in his stowage. So he pulled out his blade and continued the slaughter. The blade sliced through alloy and cable between them, and with every mech he took down, hope filled him, and he realized he was going to make it out alive.

However, he didn't have long to enjoy the realization as the last three machines came at him. He pulled a move that took his blade through the torsos of two of them in a single horizontal arc, and caused the final one to break its attack and retreat. He chose to let it go as his sensors said the area was clear and he had already pushed his mech far beyond its limits.

As the tension died, he let his guard down and decided he could use a bit of rest. And that's when a blade pierced his mech from behind.

It came through the cockpit canopy at an angle that had been so precise, it could have only been calculated by someone who knew every single fault about his model mech and which manufacturing seam to find. The tip punched through the reinforced polymer and the inner plating and into his upper left torso and seared his left arm. He was immediately assaulted by pain, and his mouth filled with the bitter taste of copper.

Then he heard a voice speak from the mech behind him in a language he understood, though he'd never heard it before. "Forgive me, son. For this is the only way."

He coughed blood onto the inside of the cockpit and tried to turn his head.

"You would have stopped the work," the voice continued. "You would have rallied the others, and you would have made them listen, because they have always listened to you. And if they had listened, the line would have ended with us, and everything our people are would have died with our bodies."

The voice was familiar to him, and his mech's hand found the grip of the long blade where it protruded from the front of the console and drove it backward. He couldn't see the location of the strike as he drove the weapon based on a guess alone. The blade went through his own cockpit, taking his foot with it, before it went through the other mech's upper chest and stopped against something.

"That was a good strike," the voice said with a grunt. "After all, you always did learn faster than the masters could teach. But you are still far too young and inexperienced to combat me."

He fell forward against the harness, which held him in place, and blacked out.

He kept on slipping in and out of consciousness as a man's hands lifted him. His head lolled against a chestplate that was warm with the residual heat of armor that had been working hard, and he smelled his own blood.

The face that hung above his own was sharp-featured and weathered, with eyes the color of a purple and blue sky, set above a long jaw and a thin mouth. Tears were running down the man's cheeks, and the only word he could find for him was the word he had been calling this man his entire life. "Why, father?"

"You are too young to understand what this means for our race," the man said. "But one day, when you wake, you will thank me. But for the time being, that is a burden I alone shall carry."

He felt himself being carried somewhere, and the air temperature changed as they moved from the open battlefield into a sealed interior space with lights overhead. He blinked once and passed out, waking up as he was being lowered into a pod.

The man who had run him through bent over the pod and pressed a hand to his cheek, staring at him for a moment before speaking. "I am sorry for what I have done to you. And I am sorry for what I am about to do. I hope that when you wake up and we see each other again, you'll be able to forgive me."

The pod's hood began to lower, and through the closing seal, he watched a tear fall from the man's eye and land on the rim of the housing, where it caught the blue light for a fraction of a second before sliding down the polished metal. Then the seal closed, and the world became cold and glowed blue.

His vision blurred into a soft black, and somewhere very far away, he heard a small voice calling.

"...Papa..."

He was confused by the voice, since it felt as though it was foreign, yet familiar to him. He was reaching for it in the dark with hands that were not his hands, fumbling for a child he had never held in the body he was in and had held many times in the body that was real.

"...Papa, please..."

Mark woke up from the dream with a gasp, and his first lucid sensation was that his shirt was soaked through and clinging to his back, and his second was that someone was hitting his shoulder very hard with two small fists.

"Wake up," Lyra said, her voice cracking. "Wake up, please, please, please, Papa, please..."

She was kneeling beside him on the bed, her hair stuck to her wet cheeks and her chest heaving, as her hands braced on his shoulder with a grip that said she was afraid. Tears ran down her face and dropped onto his collarbone.

"I'm here," he said in a hoarse voice. "Bug, I'm here. I'm awake."

He tried to sit up, but for some reason, his arms failed him. He tried again and managed it on the second attempt, but as he did, an ache opened across the back of his skull with enough sudden intensity that it clipped the edge of his vision. Color seemed to compress inward, forcing him to close his eyes in reflex, acclimating to the pain.

Once he opened his eyes, the familiar blue holographic text of his System had materialized in his field of view, hovering over the dark bedroom.

Deep Resonance Event Detected

Classification: Memory Bleed - Source: External

Cognitive Integrity: Intact

He was a bit confused by the description, and since it didn't offer more information, he dismissed the notification with a flick of his eyes.

The headache remained, and as soon as he opened his eyes, Lyra threw her shaking arms around his neck and held on to him, as if she was afraid that he'd disappear.

"You were screaming," she said. "You were saying things and you were crying, Papa, and I tried to wake you up, and Marcos was talking to you and you weren't answering, and I thought..."

She trailed off, trying not to say what she was about to say. But she couldn't stop herself from saying it. "Mommy didn't wake up. I tried so hard, and she didn't wake up, and you wouldn't wake up, and I didn't know what to do."

Mark felt his throat knot up and held her tighter. "Bug, I'm awake. I'm right here. Nothing happened to me, and I'm not going anywhere."

Lyra broke away and stared Mark in the eyes. "You promise?"

Mark gave her a warm smile and nodded. "I promise."

Lyra attempted to smile and rubbed her eyes with the back of her palm. "You can't break it."

Mark brought her closer and kissed her forehead, closing his eyes as he did so. "I won't."

"Ahem," Marcos' voice sounded from one of the home's speakers. "If I may?"

"Go ahead," Mark said.

"You were convulsing for seventeen minutes straight, and the words you were speaking were not of the human standard English," Marcos stated. "I logged quite a number of distinct utterances in Strathari, including one I am very nearly certain was the word for 'father.' At the exact same moment that your convulsions began, our resident Strathari's monitors in the clinic registered something similar, with his vitals returning to normal at the same time yours did, down to the second."

Mark let out a long breath at the revelation.

"I have reason to believe that you may have experienced a memory resonance," Marcos continued. "The susceptibility window is at its highest during the transition from suppressed coma to a natural sleep-wake cycle, which is exactly where Dr. Corven has been guiding him. I believe he may have reached out to any of his kind, and you were, in fact, the only available target on the entire planet. Congratulations, Mark. You are the first recorded being of teh current era to have ever borne witness to events from over four hundred thousand years ago."

"Really?" Mark asked, though it was more of a statement than a question. "From what I saw, his own father left him in his current state. Stabbed him and put him in the stasis pod."

"Well, the information I have managed to obtain has been rather limited," Marcos acknowledged. "The pod's logs stated he was carried to the chamber by another pilot and sealed in without specifying a relationship or name. Now we know a little bit more about our sleeping beauty."

Lyra, who had heard everything, set her chin against Mark's chest, and he responded by stroking her hair, pondering the memories he had seen.

---

The Strathari's remaining eye opened at four-twelve in the morning.

Dr. Corven had been in the adjacent office refilling a thermos of tea and giving her back a few minutes of relief from the chair she had been hunched in for six hours, when the alarm chimed on her tablet. She came back through the door at a dead run with the thermos still in one hand and the tablet in the other.

The chair's automatic restraints had clamped down at the first sign of motion, locking Talos in place as his body had tremored, and his single intact arm flexed against the strap as his shoulders rolled in a spasm. His full leg, and what remained of the other, jerked before going rigid, and his face had drawn into a slack.

By the time Dr. Corven reached the monitors, the trembling had stilled, and the Strathari lay motionless, his chest rising and falling with a slow rhythm before he let out a long sigh. The brainwave patterns on her tablet shifted into a complex rolling configuration she had never seen before, and steadied within seconds.

His remaining eye opened slowly and with careful wariness, his lashes parting to reveal an iris of deep blues bleeding into greens, ending in a color almost gold near the pupil. His eye shifted as it adjusted to the light, the colors drifting against each other in slow movements. He tracked across the ceiling, down the wall, and finally looked at Dr. Corven's face.

She stayed perfectly still as the Strathari spoke. His voice was a deep and hoarse rumble, the words running together as a slow string of unintelligible syllables.

"He is asking where he is," Marcos said through the room's speakers, then addressed Talos directly in Strathari. He then translated what he said for Dr. Corven. "I told him that he is in the clinic of a colony, on a world that may have had a different name in his records. I assured him that he is safe, and that you have been his physician, a human who does not speak his language."

The eye searched the room for the source of the voice, finding one of the speakers and moving on.

"What is the date?" Talos asked in Strathari.

"By the calendar of the Strathari, I cannot tell you with certainty," Marcos replied in Strathari. "But by my own measurements, the answer is approximately four hundred thousand years ahead of what your people used. I believe you to have been in stasis for the entirety of that interval."

Talos' eye returned to the ceiling, and for a long moment, he didn't say anything. Then a sound came up out of his chest that started as a low laugh that ended in a painful cough that bent his shoulders against the harness. Dr. Corven was at his side with a small cup of water and a flexible straw before the cough had finished, and to her surprise, he accepted it. His remaining arm was still strapped, so she held the straw to his lips, and he drank in slow, careful sips until the cup was half empty.

He let his head fall back against the cradle.

"I do not remember," he said hoarsely, in Strathari, "the artificial intelligences of my time having either personalities or a sense of humor."

"Though I have quite the liberty to make jokes," Marcos replied in kind. "What I told you was not one of them."

Talos stifled a cough and blinked before speaking. "Then that is much worse. Tell me again."

Marcos let out a digital sigh and spoke. "You have been asleep for a very long time, Talos. For approximately four hundred thousand years."

Talos closed his eye, and Dr. Corven, without quite meaning to, had laid one hand on the patient's wrist below the strap, and she felt the shift of the strong pulse beneath her fingers as it steadied.

When he opened his eye, it was as if he had cleared his mind. "Tell me what you know."

Marcos broke things down for him cleanly, just like Mark had asked him to weeks ago when they had first planned how the conversation might go. He told the story of the Strathari empire and its end, the experiments and the cascade that had followed them, the millennia of silence, the accidental seeding of life across worlds.

He told him of humanity, what it had become, what it had lost, and what it had lately begun to recover. He told him of Anahrin, and of Anahrin's confession, and of the rebuilt human who carried his creator's blood and was, by every meaningful measure, the closest living being to a Strathari that the universe had produced over two hundred thousand millennia without attempting to soften any of it.

When Marcos finished, Talos remained quiet for a long time, his eye drifting across the ceiling. Dr. Corven could have sworn to have seen a tear well up in Talos' eye, but he turned his head, blocking her view of it.

"Then it seems I am the last of my people," Talos said.

"To our knowledge, you are," Marcos confirmed.

"I had never thought that I would be the last of my people," Talos said. "There is no amount of preparation that can help one in such an event."

Marcos did not reply to that, and the clinic fell into silence.

Mark arrived forty minutes later with Lyra in his arms, and the headache from the resonance event was still going strong across the base of his skull. Dr. Corven met him at the door, took one look at the child in his arms, and her face hardened into a scolding expression.

"Mr. Shephard," she said. "I do believe that this specific setting is no place for a child. Need I remind you that though he may be part of humanity's ancestors, there is no telling when he might become agitated."

Mark shifted in his spot. "She wouldn't let me leave her. Not after tonight."

Dr. Corven held his eyes for a moment, then sighed. "Put her down. She is old enough not to be getting bused everywhere. And I'm far too old to be carrying a nine-year-old child."

Mark set Lyra down, and Dr. Corven motioned for her to follow her.

"Come, sweetheart," Dr. Corven said. "Have you had breakfast yet?"

"But it is still nighttime," Lyra said, in a small voice. "And Papa says that eating at night is not good for me and I have to wait for the suns to eat breakfast."

"Hmm, while his words do hold truth, breakfast can be at any time when I'm around," Dr. Corven said. "I have some of those new cinnamon rolls they just started making."

Dr. Corven had Lyra follow her out the door, their voices drifting down the corridor until the hydraulics slid the door shut and the room was quiet.

Severus stepped out from behind the partition at the back of the chamber. He had been there for hours and had looked at it. He had his armor off, wearing some loose clothes, and his dark hair was flattened as if he'd been leaning against a wall.

"Morning, my lord," Severus said.

"Severus," Mark said, nodding. "I remember telling you and the rest of the Elites to just address me casually when no one's around. Anyway, how's our living fossil?"

Severus nodded before answering. "He's calmer than I expected."

"Calm sounds good," Mark said as he crossed the room slowly, giving Talos time to track him as he came in. The single eye watched his approach, scanning over his face, shoulders, hands, the cut of his jaw, the line of his brow, and how his hair shifted in color, cataloging each feature. By the time Mark stopped beside him, Talos' gaze had settled on his eyes and stayed there.

Talos spoke in his own tongue, and Marcos once again served as an interpreter. "He is asking who you are and how you got here."

Mark raised an eyebrow and nodded. "My name is Mark Shephard. To my knowledge, my mentor, Anahrin, was the last of his kind and believed your race had long been extinct. After his passing, I took what I had learned from him and tried to carve my own path amongst my people. Things happened, and we ended up on this rock, where eventually, my team and I found you."

Marcos translated, and Mark watched his face as the words reached him. Each phrase landed in sequence across features that gave nothing away until the whole shape of the story had settled, and something behind the remaining eye shifted.

"Anahrin," Talos repeated. "I do not know of him. You say he was from a time a hundred thousand years after mine."

Marcos translated, and Mark nodded.

"Give or take," Mark said. "However, we don't have much on his background. Most of what we know about him came from what he chose to tell me, and he wasn't keen on sharing his past."

Talos was quiet for a moment, his eye fixed on a point somewhere past Mark's shoulder. "Then he was alone as well."

"For quite a while," Mark confirmed.

"And he found you, and he chose to teach you what he carried, and then he died. You are what remains of that effort." Talos' words came slowly, each one placed with deliberation as he was building something in his head as he went. "That is not a small thing."

A silence fell between them, and the monitors marking Talos' vitals in steady intervals filled the space.

"You saw my memories," Talos said.

"I believe so," Mark nodded. "Though I don't think either of us meant for that to happen."

"No, I did not. I simply called out as a reflex," he said. "I have been carrying that for what I now understand to be a great deal longer than I had measured. I am sorry that you bore witness to it, even briefly."

Talos regarded him for a long moment, the colors in his iris shifting in slow and involuntary movements. "I may have slept for many millennia, but I would like to rest now. I have a great deal to consider."

Marcos continued to translate.

"We'll be nearby," Mark said. "If you need us, just let Marcos know. We have time."

"Time," Talos said. "So I am told."

/Crimson_Reapr

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