RE: After The End, A Beginning
11-04-2018, 08:50 AM (This post was last modified: 11-04-2018, 08:51 AM by Matrix Dragon.)
11-04-2018, 08:50 AM (This post was last modified: 11-04-2018, 08:51 AM by Matrix Dragon.)
CHAPTER NINE
Intellectually, I knew that my bond with my Ghost gave me a form of immortality. She’d explained it to me in detail, as had Rebecca. I’d seen Guardians jump off the edge of the Tower, committing temporary suicide as a form of recreation. I knew that as long as the Light was with me, injuries were merely a brief inconvenience, and even death a minor delay.
As I hid behind the remains of an old shipping container, a Fallen patrol less than five feet away on the other side, that intellectual understanding didn’t exactly feel reassuring. Slowly, I moved towards a hole in the container, watching as the aliens made their way down the road leading to the Mothyards.
Four Dregs, all of them as unnaturally thin as the ones I’d encountered before, their lower arms ending in metal caps just below the shoulders. They were at the front of the pack, hissing and barking at each other in their strange language. Two Vandals followed along behind, a least a foot taller than the Dregs, with all four arms intact and some actual bulk on their bodies. They seemed to pay their lower caste colleagues little attention, their own quieter conversation clearly between just the two of them.
However, it was the four machines floating along behind them that really had my interest. Oval shaped things about a foot wide, a pair of tiny engines on the back, and a small cannon mounted underneath. They drifted along at around head height, something inside them making a strange chattering noise that sent a shiver up my spine. “Shanks,” Ghost told me, whispering despite the fact she was inside my head at the moment. “They’re a sort of multi-purpose drone. Combat, accessing computer systems, transmat storage, that sort of thing. Overall, they’re not that dangerous, well, not alone. But there’s never just one Shank,” she noted.
Waiting until the patrol made their way down the road and out of sight, I let out a sigh. “Never just one. And I’m heading towards even more of them. Why did I think this was a good idea again?” I asked.
“You wanted to see what the Fallen were up to.”
“Because I’m too curious for my own good,” I said, standing up and stepping back out onto the road. Glancing to my right, I saw Eliza-4 crawling out from beneath the old fuel tank she’d been hiding under. “We’re both too curious.” Brushing dirt off her tunic, the warlock looked at me, her head tilted to the side in what I assumed was confusion, and I waved a hand. “Nothing important. Let’s keep moving.”
Nodding, she took the lead, continuing down the road. I followed close behind, glancing back in the direction the patrol had left, just in case. There was a part of me that couldn’t help but feel uneasy, letting them wander around behind us, but I clamped down on that surge of paranoia. If we were going to discover why the Fallen were landing in the Steppes, alerting them to our presence by picking a fight with a few at random wasn’t really a good idea.
Besides, while I might not be entirely sure of who I was yet, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the sort of person that went around killing people just because they were there.
Ahead of me, Eliza paused mid-step, turning back to take a second look down a track leading north. Before I could ask, she was running off, waving a hand for me to follow. Making one last sweep for trouble, I jogged after her, even as she came to a halt next to a collection of fuel pipes emerging from the ground. “Found something interesting, I assume?” I asked as she knelt down for a closer look.
Realizing she was blocking my line of sight, the warlock moved to the side, and my breath caught in my throat. A small sphere made entirely of softly glowing Light was lying on the grass, tiny particles spinning around it like electrons in a cartoon atom. Stepping closer, I held out a hand, the tips of my fingers tingling as the Light flickered in response.
Thankfully, Eliza spoke up before I could completely lose myself in the sensation. “An orb of Light,” she said, pulling my attention back to her. “Certain kinds of high intensity Light manipulation by Guardians will leave trace elements behind. They linger in this state for a short time afterwards, allowing any other Guardians to gather the energy for themselves.” As if reacting to her explanation, the Orb suddenly dissolved into a shower of particles which quickly faded, leaving a sudden sensation of warmth deep inside me.
Considering the Warlocks explanation, I frowned. “So, how long is a short time?”
“There is some variation, but on average, the timeframe is between fifteen to eighteen hours.”
Appearing in the air next to me, Ghost spun her panels around in worry. “So that means another Guardian is here? In the Steppes?”
Thinking about it for a moment, I shrugged. “Makes sense really. The Fallen are in the Cosmodrome in force now. Of course there'd be other people here to try and burn them out. And I seriously doubt we're the only people the Vanguard sent in for odd jobs around the edges.”
“That patrol did not seem concerned about an imminent threat,” Eliza said. “Whoever this other Guardian is, I suspect they are longer in the area. For the time being, we should-” Red lights appeared on the edge of my HUDs motion tracker, just before the chittering sounds of Shanks reached my ears. “-Find somewhere to hide again,” she finished with a very slight twitch of her shoulders. Ghost vanished back into my head as I scrambled for cover.
***
By the time we'd avoided the fourth pack of Fallen, my fear had faded somewhat, replaced by a mixture of amusement and annoyance. The amusement mostly came from the fact that these Fallen didn’t really seem to be keeping their eye opens for people hiding. For that matter, they didn’t seem that concerned about being ambushed. If I'd been feeling particularly bloodthirsty, I could have taken out an entire pack with a single well placed grenade. When I mentioned this to Ghost, she found it quite amusing, giggling for a while before saying that most Guardians tended to have little interest in stealth, which had likely influenced the Fallen habits.
At the same time, I couldn't help but be annoyed that we had still ended up going off course. The Fallen skiffs were landing to the east, but avoiding the patrols had ended up putting us on an old road that headed north. If I was being honest, it wasn’t a major problem, as Ghosts maps indicated the road curved around the top of the Steppes, giving us plenty of opportunities to approach the landing site from that direction instead. But as the evening drew closer, I couldn’t help but look up at the darkening sky and remember my partners warnings about how the aliens thrived in the dark.
“You’re worrying about it too much.” I rolled my eyes at the voice in my head. “I saw that. But seriously, you’re worrying too much.”
“You weren’t this casual about it last time we were here.”
“Last time, we didn’t have a jumpship. The only weapon we had was a rusty old rifle we found on a Collapse-era corpse. And you had no idea what was going on. It’s different now. We’re prepared, we know what we’re doing, and if something does go wrong, I can bring you back.” Her voice became somewhat more teasing. “Or are you afraid I’ll get something wrong?”
Grinning, I shook my head. “I have plenty of faith in your ability to bring me back from the dead yet again.” Behind me, Eliza didn’t quite suppress a laugh, clearly guessing at least the context of the conversation. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to make a habit of dying. Or even getting shot, if I can help it. That shit hurts.”
“I cannot help but remember the classes I have seen advertised at the Tower,” Eliza said. “They offer training in mental techniques and Light manipulation. The end purpose of that training is to allow Guardians to completely suppress the pain and fear responses.” Pausing, I turned back towards her, and she merely shrugged at my stare. “Apparently, many Guardians consider such biological responses to be… an impediment, for lack of a better term.”
Considering that statement and just what it implied, I started making my way up the hill again. “I’m gonna add that to my list of things I’m just not ready to process.”
“I have a similar list,” the other recently resurrected woman admitted, and I couldn’t help but smile in shared sympathy. Then the crest of the hill came into view, and my smile faded. About thirty feet away lay the body of a Fallen Vandal, limbs twisted at angles that made it clear death had claimed him. Bringing my rifle back up, I checked our surroundings again, finding nothing else out of place. “No targets,” Eliza muttered behind me after her own check.
When nothing popped up and tried to kill us, I started making my way forward again, coming to a halt near the corpse. Curious, I crouched down next to it, taking a closer look at one of the aliens for the first time. This one was missing its helmet, letting me see that its head was somewhat flatter than a humans, while its face was relatively featureless by our standards, most of it taken up by a row of four blank eyes and a circular mouth filled with needle like teeth. Tapping the mandibles that made up the lower ‘jaw’ with the side of my rifle, I rolled the head to the side, giving me a clear look at the Fallens neck, along with the jagged gash across the front of its throat. “Knife wound,” I said, a little surprised at how confident I was of that fact.
Materializing next to me, Ghost ran her scanner beams across the corpse, humming thoughtfully. “It’s also the only wound I can see. So, you think it’s our mystery Guardian?”
“Almost certainly,” Eliza agreed. “Plus, they are most likely a Hunter. Statistically, they tend to be the class of Guardian that use knives.” That made me glance back up at her, and she let Void Light flow down her arm, tendrils of the purple mist fading into the air as it reached her fingers. “Warlocks are trained to channel the Light in subtle but powerful ways. With it, we are never unarmed.”
“Impressive.” Although I couldn’t help but feel it was kind of showing off for the sake of showing off. Why use fancy magical powers when a simple knife would do just as well? Plus, knives weren’t just weapons. Or did Warlocks use fancy space magic for all that as well? “What about Titans?” I asked, trying to get the image of a Warlock peeling an apple with the Void out of my head.
“They punch things.”
“Fair enough.” Turning my attention back to the Vandal, I frowned as another detail occurred to me. It was wearing the same kind of bodysuit I’d seen all the other Fallen wearing, but that was it. Not only was its helmet missing, so was its weapons, anything it had been wearing over the suit, even its belt was gone. “They stripped it.”
My Ghost twitched its forward top panels in a shrug. “Scavenging from the dead is an unfortunate fact of being a Guardian.”
“A Guardian didn't do it,” I muttered, my mood darkening. Taking ammunition or supplies was one thing, but this was a level beyond that. Remembering the Dregs I'd seen in the Cosmodrome Wall the day before, I felt anger settle in. “The Fallen took everything they wanted, then left him to rot.” Closing my eyes, I made myself take a deep breath. “This world, I swear to God...”
Opening my eyes, I shook my head before reaching down and adjusting the Vandals limbs into a somewhat more dignified pose. I couldn’t do much about the actual body, but I could at least treat the poor guy with some of the respect his own kin denied him. Standing back up, I brushed the dirt off my knees, then turned and set off again, gesturing for the others to follow. Ghost returned to my head with that increasingly familiar tingle across my scalp, but thankfully she decided to remain silent.
Eliza followed several feet behind me, not speaking as we left the Vandal behind. It was only as we reached a small parking lot that she finally spoke up. “I think that ‘lack of respect for the dead’ deserves a place on the list.” Pausing, I opened my mouth, then decided it was probably better for my mood to not follow that topic any further right now.
It was entirely possible I would have kept thinking about modern attitudes to death. I was coming to the conclusion I was the sort of person who would overthink anything if given the opportunity. Fortunately, a distraction soon appeared, as we reached the far side of the parking lot and I caught sight of movement at the bottom of the slope ahead of us. Ducking down behind a concrete divider, Eliza gliding in next to me, I waited for any sign they’d seen us.
Thankfully, nothing came up the hill to try and kill us. Taking a breath, I leaned out of our cover and looked down the hill. Sure enough, there was a small pack of Fallen at the bottom of the hill, although none of them appeared to be looking in our direction. They were paying attention to something far more interesting than the possibility of Guardians wandering up behind them. At the end of a rather short trench, I could see the twisted wreck of a human jumpship partially buried in the dirt, tail end sticking up in the air. Watching as a Dreg tried to pry a panel off the wing with its knife, I couldn’t help but frown. “Well, I think we know where our mystery Guardian came from.”
“Are you certain?” Eliza said as she looked out from over the top of the divider. “This could be an older wreck they’re attempting to salvage.”
From the tone of her voice, I suspected she was simply playing devil's advocate, but I answered anyway. “You see the scorch marks in the grass? They’re too fresh. No, this came down recently. Has to be that Guardian.” Leaning back against the concrete, I sighed. “Of course we’d be going the opposite direction as them.”
“Guardian, there’s been no reports of downed jumpships in this region,” my Ghost told me.
Tapping my fingers against my thigh, I considered that. “Is it safe to try a broadcast?”
Appearing next to me, Ghost shook her optic. “It would have to be an open broadcast. This close to those Fallen? Those Shanks would almost certainly detect it.”
“We need to inspect that ship,” Eliza said, looking over from where she'd been talking to her own Ghost. “Preferably without alerting the entire Steppes to our presence.”
Taking another look down the hill, I did a quick count of the Fallen. “A Vandal, two Dregs and a Shank.” Something on the wing released a small shower of sparks, sending the Dreg that had been trying to pry it off stumbling off the edge with a screech of pain, kicking off strange barking laughter from the other Dreg. “Assuming he doesn't kill himself before we get down there,” I added.
Ghost suppressed a giggle. “If I can get close enough, I can stop them calling for help,” she said, before vanishing in a flicker of blue light. Nodding to Eliza, I checked the Fallen again. Confident they were distracted in mocking their unfortunate colleague, I sprinted out of cover, running down the hill and sliding into cover behind a large rock. Glancing back up to my previous cover, I could just see Eliza keeping watch. After a moment, she gave me a thumbs up, and I felt myself relax ever so slightly.
By now, the Dreg that had been knocked off the jumpship wing was back on his feet, growling at one of his companions. Whatever it was he said, it draw a sharp reaction, the unbruised Dreg hissing back at him, crouching slightly as if he was about to lunge. Sadly, before a fight could break out, the Vandal interrupted with a short, sharp bark, and the two smaller aliens instantly flinched and backed away from each other, climbing back onto the wreck.
Remembering the corpse we'd just seen, I couldn't help but wonder about about how quickly the Dregs obeyed here. Was this Vandal simply more respected in general, or was simply how they treated the dead? Shaking my head, I dismissed the issue for the moment. I could probably find out back in the City anyway.
While I'd been watching the show, Eliza had made her way down the hill, moving around the other side of the crash site. Moving forward again, I ducked down behind an old fuel tank, keeping watch through a gap in the steel frame around it. “They’re all in range,” Ghost said, and I nodded, shifting slightly to check on our Warlock partner. She’d moved forward as well, and was now behind an old car, her body language showing she was more than ready to go.
Taking a breath, I held up a hand for her to see, counting down from five with my fingers. At ‘three’, Ghost appeared next to me, her panels floating away from her core as a gentle blue light appeared around it. At ‘one’, I closed the hand entirely, grabbing a knife as it transmatted out of my storage. And then I was moving, out of cover and down into the trench, making my way up behind the Vandal with long, quick strides.
With surprise on our side, it was over in moments. The first they knew of our presence was when my knife slit the Vandals throat, kicking up a spray of purple blood and greyish ether. As it gasped, dropping its rifle to clutch at its throat, I kicked the creatures legs out from under it and looked around. On top of the jumpship, both the Dregs were turning towards the sound of their superior dying, but Eliza was closing in on them, reaching the top of the wreck in an impossibly long leap that seemed to almost ignore gravity. As the Warlock called the Void down on the unlucky pair, I turned my attention to the last target.
Chittering to itself, the Shank spun towards the noise, only to hesitate, likely thanks to Ghost jamming its communications. Taking the opportunity, and without really thinking about it, I threw the blood coated knife at it. To my surprise, the throw was almost perfect, the blade destroying one of the machines engines, sending the poor machine spinning out of control and into the side of the jumpship. Running forward, I tore the knife free of the engine, then stabbed it through the turret section and into the core. For good measure, I let Solar Light flow through me and into the blade, cooking the circuitry from the inside.
“Clear,” I reported, turning back to check on the Vandal. By this point, the poor bastard was on its back, its flailing looking increasingly sluggish, and I clamped down on a surge of guilt as I watched it die.
“Likewise,” Eliza said, throwing one of the Dreg bodies off the side of the wreck. A quick look showed that the other Guardian had somehow crushed the aliens chest in, leaving it a blood stained mess half I was rather uncomfortable looking at. As for the other Dreg, there was nothing left but a few wisps of Void energy, fading into the afternoon sky.
Flying out from where she’d been taking cover, my Ghost made her way over to the wreck, forward panels twitching. “The Shank tried to send an alert out. Nothing really detailed, just a ‘squad under attack’ sort of thing. No one heard it,” she assured us, before powering up her scanner beams and making a sweep over the top of the jumpship. By the time I’d made absolutely certain the Vandal was dead, and kicked its rifle away from it for good measure, she was making a slower, more careful sweep, lingering near where the cockpit would be. “There’s some parts missing here.”
“That is not exactly unusual in a crash site,” Eliza said.
Ghost shook her optic, still scanning. “Not like that. Internal components are gone, but they’ve been removed without disturbing the sections around them. It wasn’t the Fallen that did it, they’re never that delicate. It must have been our mystery Guardians Ghost. Transmat out what parts they could before the Fallen reached them.” Pausing in her scans, her forward and rear panels spun in opposite directions as she considered the matter. Floating down closer to the engines, she started muttering under her breath. “Time would have been limited, so it would have been a triage approach. Main data core is gone, probably their first or second priority. NLS Drive is missing too, but what about the navicomp…” Dissolving into Light, she phased through the wrecks hull for a closer look.
Knowing very little about the inner workings of Golden Age jumpships, I decided to leave her to her work. She'd let me know when she found something. Instead, I knelt down next to the Vandal and rolled it over onto its back, trying to ignore the sudden spike of guilt. I’d killed more than a few Fallen in the short time since my resurrection, but this one was the first fatality that wasn’t a case of self-defense or defending another. They’d died in an ambush, painfully and without warning, just so we could take a closer look at this crashed jumpship.
Given how, only a few minutes ago, I’d been disgusted at how the Fallen had left the body of one of their own to rot, I was starting to feel like something of a hypocrite.
“Got it!” my Ghost called out from the top of the wreck. She’d reappeared under the jumpships engines and was flying towards me. “So, what’s left of the ships avionics are mostly catatonic, but I did manage to pull a few details out of it. First off, it looks like it came down around seven am local time. Weird thing is, I don’t think they tried to send out a distress signal or anything. There’s parts of the comm array missing, probably salvaged after the crash, so I can’t say for sure why.”
“And then they went south,” Eliza said, standing watch near the edge of the crash site. “That would suggest they were following the roads that lead into the Mothyards.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Ghost replied. “See, one of the other things I found was some maps of the Cosmodrome. They’re damaged, with a lot of gaps in it, but what’s there doesn’t match any of the maps I downloaded from the Cryptarchy Archives either.” That certainly got Eliza’s attention, the Warlocks head snapping around to regard my Ghost with blatant curiosity. “One of the new details it mentions is an information hub, maybe a kilometre east of here. That was the last file accessed before the crash.”
Thinking it over, I nodded as a chain of events settled in my mind. “They were coming here to secure that hub, only to run into whatever anti-air the Fallen had set up on the wall,” I said, waving a hand to the southern edge of the Cosmodrome. “They crash here, start salvaging the ship, but the Fallen start moving in before they’re done.”
Nodding, Eliza picked up the theory I was crafting easily enough. “Moving south may have been more a matter of circumstances than a deliberate choice. But if they were planning on coming to this part of the Cosmodrome before they were intercepted, it would only make sense to turn back to the east.”
“Besides, the hangers for smaller jumpships are all that way,” I added. “Speaking from personal experience, that’s probably the best chance someone might have of finding a ride out of here.”
Glancing up at the sky, Eliza sighed. “At this point, it seems very unlikely we reach the Lunar Complex today,” she said, although thankfully she sounded more amused than anything else. “Such is the nature of our work, I suppose.”
Nodding, I turned away from the crash site. “Come on. Best we not be here when a patrol checks up on these poor bastards.”
***
By the time we reached the building that supposedly contained the information hub, the sun was closing in on the horizon, causing the shadows to stretch out ahead of us. “It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Ghost said, and I nodded in agreement. When I looked at it, I couldn’t help but think of a temporary office on a construction site, a tiny tin shed that was only intended to keep some equipment secure from the elements.
When I gave the matter some more thought however, I realized an office here would actually make sense. The Steppes seemed to be where a lot of the deliveries to the Cosmodrome had arrived, and that meant there had to be somewhere to organise and process everything. Records and inventories of supplies could be priceless, even if they only provided hints about where to look next.
My musing about what might be inside came to a halt as we got closer to the building, and I heard a faint but familiar noise. I stopped, holding up a hand to warn Eliza, and listened closely for a moment. Shank turbines, I was certain of it. At least three of them, getting louder… and then red flickered across the corner of my HUD’s motion tracker. I started moving again, running towards the shed, pointing at the roof. Light flowed through me, I felt a sensation that was a strange mix of instinct and knowledge that wasn’t entirely mine, and I jumped. Higher than a normal human should have been able to jump, but still not enough to reach the roof.
Then my feet kicked off the air underneath me as if it was solid ground, and I cleared the edge easily, landing on the roof and ducking out of sight. Eliza joined me, having reached the roof via her gliding trick, and the two of us waited, listening to the patrol as they passed by.
By this point, I could hear voices as well, the sounds of the Fallen talking among themselves. It was the same as the other patrols we’d avoided, the emotions behind those voices feeling oddly familiar even if the language itself was utterly bizarre. They made their way around the building, then set off west, still seemingly unconcerned, and I took the risk of leaning up over the edge of the roof for a look. I caught sight of at least two Vandals and a trio of Dregs, before they made their way around a rocky outcropping and vanished.
Appearing next to me, Ghosts panels twitched in concern. “They’re heading for the crash site,” she said. “That means it won’t be long before the rest of the Fallen know we’re here. We need to move quickly.”
“Well, if nothing else,” Eliza said, her own voice low but oddly strained, “I think we just completed our original reason for travelling to the Steppes.” Glancing over at her, I realized the Warlock had moved to the far side of the roof, and was now looking out to the east. Frowning, I moved to join her, and nearly felt my heart stop as I saw what had gotten her attention.
Below us, at the bottom of a steep slope, was a large storage yard, filled with old shipping crates, the rusted remains of trucks, and a small army of Fallen. Dozens of Dregs struggled with large supply crates, overseen by Vandals, while Shanks patrolled the perimeter, looking for trouble. And at the center of the yard, a strange cylinder the size of a small car floated above the ground, firing a beam of energy down through the concrete, tearing the soil out of its way.
“Ohhhh crap,” I muttered, giving up on trying to count just how many hostile aliens were down there, sliding back down behind the edge of the roof. “Well. I think we know why all those Skiffs were flying around earlier.”
“Indeed,” Eliza managed. “They’ve apparently decided to use this as a landing zone for their forces.”
Closing my eyes, I tried to clamp down on the sudden terror I was feeling. “So. Lots of Fallen. A lot more Fallen than I expected. What now?”
Intellectually, I knew that my bond with my Ghost gave me a form of immortality. She’d explained it to me in detail, as had Rebecca. I’d seen Guardians jump off the edge of the Tower, committing temporary suicide as a form of recreation. I knew that as long as the Light was with me, injuries were merely a brief inconvenience, and even death a minor delay.
As I hid behind the remains of an old shipping container, a Fallen patrol less than five feet away on the other side, that intellectual understanding didn’t exactly feel reassuring. Slowly, I moved towards a hole in the container, watching as the aliens made their way down the road leading to the Mothyards.
Four Dregs, all of them as unnaturally thin as the ones I’d encountered before, their lower arms ending in metal caps just below the shoulders. They were at the front of the pack, hissing and barking at each other in their strange language. Two Vandals followed along behind, a least a foot taller than the Dregs, with all four arms intact and some actual bulk on their bodies. They seemed to pay their lower caste colleagues little attention, their own quieter conversation clearly between just the two of them.
However, it was the four machines floating along behind them that really had my interest. Oval shaped things about a foot wide, a pair of tiny engines on the back, and a small cannon mounted underneath. They drifted along at around head height, something inside them making a strange chattering noise that sent a shiver up my spine. “Shanks,” Ghost told me, whispering despite the fact she was inside my head at the moment. “They’re a sort of multi-purpose drone. Combat, accessing computer systems, transmat storage, that sort of thing. Overall, they’re not that dangerous, well, not alone. But there’s never just one Shank,” she noted.
Waiting until the patrol made their way down the road and out of sight, I let out a sigh. “Never just one. And I’m heading towards even more of them. Why did I think this was a good idea again?” I asked.
“You wanted to see what the Fallen were up to.”
“Because I’m too curious for my own good,” I said, standing up and stepping back out onto the road. Glancing to my right, I saw Eliza-4 crawling out from beneath the old fuel tank she’d been hiding under. “We’re both too curious.” Brushing dirt off her tunic, the warlock looked at me, her head tilted to the side in what I assumed was confusion, and I waved a hand. “Nothing important. Let’s keep moving.”
Nodding, she took the lead, continuing down the road. I followed close behind, glancing back in the direction the patrol had left, just in case. There was a part of me that couldn’t help but feel uneasy, letting them wander around behind us, but I clamped down on that surge of paranoia. If we were going to discover why the Fallen were landing in the Steppes, alerting them to our presence by picking a fight with a few at random wasn’t really a good idea.
Besides, while I might not be entirely sure of who I was yet, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the sort of person that went around killing people just because they were there.
Ahead of me, Eliza paused mid-step, turning back to take a second look down a track leading north. Before I could ask, she was running off, waving a hand for me to follow. Making one last sweep for trouble, I jogged after her, even as she came to a halt next to a collection of fuel pipes emerging from the ground. “Found something interesting, I assume?” I asked as she knelt down for a closer look.
Realizing she was blocking my line of sight, the warlock moved to the side, and my breath caught in my throat. A small sphere made entirely of softly glowing Light was lying on the grass, tiny particles spinning around it like electrons in a cartoon atom. Stepping closer, I held out a hand, the tips of my fingers tingling as the Light flickered in response.
Thankfully, Eliza spoke up before I could completely lose myself in the sensation. “An orb of Light,” she said, pulling my attention back to her. “Certain kinds of high intensity Light manipulation by Guardians will leave trace elements behind. They linger in this state for a short time afterwards, allowing any other Guardians to gather the energy for themselves.” As if reacting to her explanation, the Orb suddenly dissolved into a shower of particles which quickly faded, leaving a sudden sensation of warmth deep inside me.
Considering the Warlocks explanation, I frowned. “So, how long is a short time?”
“There is some variation, but on average, the timeframe is between fifteen to eighteen hours.”
Appearing in the air next to me, Ghost spun her panels around in worry. “So that means another Guardian is here? In the Steppes?”
Thinking about it for a moment, I shrugged. “Makes sense really. The Fallen are in the Cosmodrome in force now. Of course there'd be other people here to try and burn them out. And I seriously doubt we're the only people the Vanguard sent in for odd jobs around the edges.”
“That patrol did not seem concerned about an imminent threat,” Eliza said. “Whoever this other Guardian is, I suspect they are longer in the area. For the time being, we should-” Red lights appeared on the edge of my HUDs motion tracker, just before the chittering sounds of Shanks reached my ears. “-Find somewhere to hide again,” she finished with a very slight twitch of her shoulders. Ghost vanished back into my head as I scrambled for cover.
***
By the time we'd avoided the fourth pack of Fallen, my fear had faded somewhat, replaced by a mixture of amusement and annoyance. The amusement mostly came from the fact that these Fallen didn’t really seem to be keeping their eye opens for people hiding. For that matter, they didn’t seem that concerned about being ambushed. If I'd been feeling particularly bloodthirsty, I could have taken out an entire pack with a single well placed grenade. When I mentioned this to Ghost, she found it quite amusing, giggling for a while before saying that most Guardians tended to have little interest in stealth, which had likely influenced the Fallen habits.
At the same time, I couldn't help but be annoyed that we had still ended up going off course. The Fallen skiffs were landing to the east, but avoiding the patrols had ended up putting us on an old road that headed north. If I was being honest, it wasn’t a major problem, as Ghosts maps indicated the road curved around the top of the Steppes, giving us plenty of opportunities to approach the landing site from that direction instead. But as the evening drew closer, I couldn’t help but look up at the darkening sky and remember my partners warnings about how the aliens thrived in the dark.
“You’re worrying about it too much.” I rolled my eyes at the voice in my head. “I saw that. But seriously, you’re worrying too much.”
“You weren’t this casual about it last time we were here.”
“Last time, we didn’t have a jumpship. The only weapon we had was a rusty old rifle we found on a Collapse-era corpse. And you had no idea what was going on. It’s different now. We’re prepared, we know what we’re doing, and if something does go wrong, I can bring you back.” Her voice became somewhat more teasing. “Or are you afraid I’ll get something wrong?”
Grinning, I shook my head. “I have plenty of faith in your ability to bring me back from the dead yet again.” Behind me, Eliza didn’t quite suppress a laugh, clearly guessing at least the context of the conversation. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to make a habit of dying. Or even getting shot, if I can help it. That shit hurts.”
“I cannot help but remember the classes I have seen advertised at the Tower,” Eliza said. “They offer training in mental techniques and Light manipulation. The end purpose of that training is to allow Guardians to completely suppress the pain and fear responses.” Pausing, I turned back towards her, and she merely shrugged at my stare. “Apparently, many Guardians consider such biological responses to be… an impediment, for lack of a better term.”
Considering that statement and just what it implied, I started making my way up the hill again. “I’m gonna add that to my list of things I’m just not ready to process.”
“I have a similar list,” the other recently resurrected woman admitted, and I couldn’t help but smile in shared sympathy. Then the crest of the hill came into view, and my smile faded. About thirty feet away lay the body of a Fallen Vandal, limbs twisted at angles that made it clear death had claimed him. Bringing my rifle back up, I checked our surroundings again, finding nothing else out of place. “No targets,” Eliza muttered behind me after her own check.
When nothing popped up and tried to kill us, I started making my way forward again, coming to a halt near the corpse. Curious, I crouched down next to it, taking a closer look at one of the aliens for the first time. This one was missing its helmet, letting me see that its head was somewhat flatter than a humans, while its face was relatively featureless by our standards, most of it taken up by a row of four blank eyes and a circular mouth filled with needle like teeth. Tapping the mandibles that made up the lower ‘jaw’ with the side of my rifle, I rolled the head to the side, giving me a clear look at the Fallens neck, along with the jagged gash across the front of its throat. “Knife wound,” I said, a little surprised at how confident I was of that fact.
Materializing next to me, Ghost ran her scanner beams across the corpse, humming thoughtfully. “It’s also the only wound I can see. So, you think it’s our mystery Guardian?”
“Almost certainly,” Eliza agreed. “Plus, they are most likely a Hunter. Statistically, they tend to be the class of Guardian that use knives.” That made me glance back up at her, and she let Void Light flow down her arm, tendrils of the purple mist fading into the air as it reached her fingers. “Warlocks are trained to channel the Light in subtle but powerful ways. With it, we are never unarmed.”
“Impressive.” Although I couldn’t help but feel it was kind of showing off for the sake of showing off. Why use fancy magical powers when a simple knife would do just as well? Plus, knives weren’t just weapons. Or did Warlocks use fancy space magic for all that as well? “What about Titans?” I asked, trying to get the image of a Warlock peeling an apple with the Void out of my head.
“They punch things.”
“Fair enough.” Turning my attention back to the Vandal, I frowned as another detail occurred to me. It was wearing the same kind of bodysuit I’d seen all the other Fallen wearing, but that was it. Not only was its helmet missing, so was its weapons, anything it had been wearing over the suit, even its belt was gone. “They stripped it.”
My Ghost twitched its forward top panels in a shrug. “Scavenging from the dead is an unfortunate fact of being a Guardian.”
“A Guardian didn't do it,” I muttered, my mood darkening. Taking ammunition or supplies was one thing, but this was a level beyond that. Remembering the Dregs I'd seen in the Cosmodrome Wall the day before, I felt anger settle in. “The Fallen took everything they wanted, then left him to rot.” Closing my eyes, I made myself take a deep breath. “This world, I swear to God...”
Opening my eyes, I shook my head before reaching down and adjusting the Vandals limbs into a somewhat more dignified pose. I couldn’t do much about the actual body, but I could at least treat the poor guy with some of the respect his own kin denied him. Standing back up, I brushed the dirt off my knees, then turned and set off again, gesturing for the others to follow. Ghost returned to my head with that increasingly familiar tingle across my scalp, but thankfully she decided to remain silent.
Eliza followed several feet behind me, not speaking as we left the Vandal behind. It was only as we reached a small parking lot that she finally spoke up. “I think that ‘lack of respect for the dead’ deserves a place on the list.” Pausing, I opened my mouth, then decided it was probably better for my mood to not follow that topic any further right now.
It was entirely possible I would have kept thinking about modern attitudes to death. I was coming to the conclusion I was the sort of person who would overthink anything if given the opportunity. Fortunately, a distraction soon appeared, as we reached the far side of the parking lot and I caught sight of movement at the bottom of the slope ahead of us. Ducking down behind a concrete divider, Eliza gliding in next to me, I waited for any sign they’d seen us.
Thankfully, nothing came up the hill to try and kill us. Taking a breath, I leaned out of our cover and looked down the hill. Sure enough, there was a small pack of Fallen at the bottom of the hill, although none of them appeared to be looking in our direction. They were paying attention to something far more interesting than the possibility of Guardians wandering up behind them. At the end of a rather short trench, I could see the twisted wreck of a human jumpship partially buried in the dirt, tail end sticking up in the air. Watching as a Dreg tried to pry a panel off the wing with its knife, I couldn’t help but frown. “Well, I think we know where our mystery Guardian came from.”
“Are you certain?” Eliza said as she looked out from over the top of the divider. “This could be an older wreck they’re attempting to salvage.”
From the tone of her voice, I suspected she was simply playing devil's advocate, but I answered anyway. “You see the scorch marks in the grass? They’re too fresh. No, this came down recently. Has to be that Guardian.” Leaning back against the concrete, I sighed. “Of course we’d be going the opposite direction as them.”
“Guardian, there’s been no reports of downed jumpships in this region,” my Ghost told me.
Tapping my fingers against my thigh, I considered that. “Is it safe to try a broadcast?”
Appearing next to me, Ghost shook her optic. “It would have to be an open broadcast. This close to those Fallen? Those Shanks would almost certainly detect it.”
“We need to inspect that ship,” Eliza said, looking over from where she'd been talking to her own Ghost. “Preferably without alerting the entire Steppes to our presence.”
Taking another look down the hill, I did a quick count of the Fallen. “A Vandal, two Dregs and a Shank.” Something on the wing released a small shower of sparks, sending the Dreg that had been trying to pry it off stumbling off the edge with a screech of pain, kicking off strange barking laughter from the other Dreg. “Assuming he doesn't kill himself before we get down there,” I added.
Ghost suppressed a giggle. “If I can get close enough, I can stop them calling for help,” she said, before vanishing in a flicker of blue light. Nodding to Eliza, I checked the Fallen again. Confident they were distracted in mocking their unfortunate colleague, I sprinted out of cover, running down the hill and sliding into cover behind a large rock. Glancing back up to my previous cover, I could just see Eliza keeping watch. After a moment, she gave me a thumbs up, and I felt myself relax ever so slightly.
By now, the Dreg that had been knocked off the jumpship wing was back on his feet, growling at one of his companions. Whatever it was he said, it draw a sharp reaction, the unbruised Dreg hissing back at him, crouching slightly as if he was about to lunge. Sadly, before a fight could break out, the Vandal interrupted with a short, sharp bark, and the two smaller aliens instantly flinched and backed away from each other, climbing back onto the wreck.
Remembering the corpse we'd just seen, I couldn't help but wonder about about how quickly the Dregs obeyed here. Was this Vandal simply more respected in general, or was simply how they treated the dead? Shaking my head, I dismissed the issue for the moment. I could probably find out back in the City anyway.
While I'd been watching the show, Eliza had made her way down the hill, moving around the other side of the crash site. Moving forward again, I ducked down behind an old fuel tank, keeping watch through a gap in the steel frame around it. “They’re all in range,” Ghost said, and I nodded, shifting slightly to check on our Warlock partner. She’d moved forward as well, and was now behind an old car, her body language showing she was more than ready to go.
Taking a breath, I held up a hand for her to see, counting down from five with my fingers. At ‘three’, Ghost appeared next to me, her panels floating away from her core as a gentle blue light appeared around it. At ‘one’, I closed the hand entirely, grabbing a knife as it transmatted out of my storage. And then I was moving, out of cover and down into the trench, making my way up behind the Vandal with long, quick strides.
With surprise on our side, it was over in moments. The first they knew of our presence was when my knife slit the Vandals throat, kicking up a spray of purple blood and greyish ether. As it gasped, dropping its rifle to clutch at its throat, I kicked the creatures legs out from under it and looked around. On top of the jumpship, both the Dregs were turning towards the sound of their superior dying, but Eliza was closing in on them, reaching the top of the wreck in an impossibly long leap that seemed to almost ignore gravity. As the Warlock called the Void down on the unlucky pair, I turned my attention to the last target.
Chittering to itself, the Shank spun towards the noise, only to hesitate, likely thanks to Ghost jamming its communications. Taking the opportunity, and without really thinking about it, I threw the blood coated knife at it. To my surprise, the throw was almost perfect, the blade destroying one of the machines engines, sending the poor machine spinning out of control and into the side of the jumpship. Running forward, I tore the knife free of the engine, then stabbed it through the turret section and into the core. For good measure, I let Solar Light flow through me and into the blade, cooking the circuitry from the inside.
“Clear,” I reported, turning back to check on the Vandal. By this point, the poor bastard was on its back, its flailing looking increasingly sluggish, and I clamped down on a surge of guilt as I watched it die.
“Likewise,” Eliza said, throwing one of the Dreg bodies off the side of the wreck. A quick look showed that the other Guardian had somehow crushed the aliens chest in, leaving it a blood stained mess half I was rather uncomfortable looking at. As for the other Dreg, there was nothing left but a few wisps of Void energy, fading into the afternoon sky.
Flying out from where she’d been taking cover, my Ghost made her way over to the wreck, forward panels twitching. “The Shank tried to send an alert out. Nothing really detailed, just a ‘squad under attack’ sort of thing. No one heard it,” she assured us, before powering up her scanner beams and making a sweep over the top of the jumpship. By the time I’d made absolutely certain the Vandal was dead, and kicked its rifle away from it for good measure, she was making a slower, more careful sweep, lingering near where the cockpit would be. “There’s some parts missing here.”
“That is not exactly unusual in a crash site,” Eliza said.
Ghost shook her optic, still scanning. “Not like that. Internal components are gone, but they’ve been removed without disturbing the sections around them. It wasn’t the Fallen that did it, they’re never that delicate. It must have been our mystery Guardians Ghost. Transmat out what parts they could before the Fallen reached them.” Pausing in her scans, her forward and rear panels spun in opposite directions as she considered the matter. Floating down closer to the engines, she started muttering under her breath. “Time would have been limited, so it would have been a triage approach. Main data core is gone, probably their first or second priority. NLS Drive is missing too, but what about the navicomp…” Dissolving into Light, she phased through the wrecks hull for a closer look.
Knowing very little about the inner workings of Golden Age jumpships, I decided to leave her to her work. She'd let me know when she found something. Instead, I knelt down next to the Vandal and rolled it over onto its back, trying to ignore the sudden spike of guilt. I’d killed more than a few Fallen in the short time since my resurrection, but this one was the first fatality that wasn’t a case of self-defense or defending another. They’d died in an ambush, painfully and without warning, just so we could take a closer look at this crashed jumpship.
Given how, only a few minutes ago, I’d been disgusted at how the Fallen had left the body of one of their own to rot, I was starting to feel like something of a hypocrite.
“Got it!” my Ghost called out from the top of the wreck. She’d reappeared under the jumpships engines and was flying towards me. “So, what’s left of the ships avionics are mostly catatonic, but I did manage to pull a few details out of it. First off, it looks like it came down around seven am local time. Weird thing is, I don’t think they tried to send out a distress signal or anything. There’s parts of the comm array missing, probably salvaged after the crash, so I can’t say for sure why.”
“And then they went south,” Eliza said, standing watch near the edge of the crash site. “That would suggest they were following the roads that lead into the Mothyards.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Ghost replied. “See, one of the other things I found was some maps of the Cosmodrome. They’re damaged, with a lot of gaps in it, but what’s there doesn’t match any of the maps I downloaded from the Cryptarchy Archives either.” That certainly got Eliza’s attention, the Warlocks head snapping around to regard my Ghost with blatant curiosity. “One of the new details it mentions is an information hub, maybe a kilometre east of here. That was the last file accessed before the crash.”
Thinking it over, I nodded as a chain of events settled in my mind. “They were coming here to secure that hub, only to run into whatever anti-air the Fallen had set up on the wall,” I said, waving a hand to the southern edge of the Cosmodrome. “They crash here, start salvaging the ship, but the Fallen start moving in before they’re done.”
Nodding, Eliza picked up the theory I was crafting easily enough. “Moving south may have been more a matter of circumstances than a deliberate choice. But if they were planning on coming to this part of the Cosmodrome before they were intercepted, it would only make sense to turn back to the east.”
“Besides, the hangers for smaller jumpships are all that way,” I added. “Speaking from personal experience, that’s probably the best chance someone might have of finding a ride out of here.”
Glancing up at the sky, Eliza sighed. “At this point, it seems very unlikely we reach the Lunar Complex today,” she said, although thankfully she sounded more amused than anything else. “Such is the nature of our work, I suppose.”
Nodding, I turned away from the crash site. “Come on. Best we not be here when a patrol checks up on these poor bastards.”
***
By the time we reached the building that supposedly contained the information hub, the sun was closing in on the horizon, causing the shadows to stretch out ahead of us. “It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Ghost said, and I nodded in agreement. When I looked at it, I couldn’t help but think of a temporary office on a construction site, a tiny tin shed that was only intended to keep some equipment secure from the elements.
When I gave the matter some more thought however, I realized an office here would actually make sense. The Steppes seemed to be where a lot of the deliveries to the Cosmodrome had arrived, and that meant there had to be somewhere to organise and process everything. Records and inventories of supplies could be priceless, even if they only provided hints about where to look next.
My musing about what might be inside came to a halt as we got closer to the building, and I heard a faint but familiar noise. I stopped, holding up a hand to warn Eliza, and listened closely for a moment. Shank turbines, I was certain of it. At least three of them, getting louder… and then red flickered across the corner of my HUD’s motion tracker. I started moving again, running towards the shed, pointing at the roof. Light flowed through me, I felt a sensation that was a strange mix of instinct and knowledge that wasn’t entirely mine, and I jumped. Higher than a normal human should have been able to jump, but still not enough to reach the roof.
Then my feet kicked off the air underneath me as if it was solid ground, and I cleared the edge easily, landing on the roof and ducking out of sight. Eliza joined me, having reached the roof via her gliding trick, and the two of us waited, listening to the patrol as they passed by.
By this point, I could hear voices as well, the sounds of the Fallen talking among themselves. It was the same as the other patrols we’d avoided, the emotions behind those voices feeling oddly familiar even if the language itself was utterly bizarre. They made their way around the building, then set off west, still seemingly unconcerned, and I took the risk of leaning up over the edge of the roof for a look. I caught sight of at least two Vandals and a trio of Dregs, before they made their way around a rocky outcropping and vanished.
Appearing next to me, Ghosts panels twitched in concern. “They’re heading for the crash site,” she said. “That means it won’t be long before the rest of the Fallen know we’re here. We need to move quickly.”
“Well, if nothing else,” Eliza said, her own voice low but oddly strained, “I think we just completed our original reason for travelling to the Steppes.” Glancing over at her, I realized the Warlock had moved to the far side of the roof, and was now looking out to the east. Frowning, I moved to join her, and nearly felt my heart stop as I saw what had gotten her attention.
Below us, at the bottom of a steep slope, was a large storage yard, filled with old shipping crates, the rusted remains of trucks, and a small army of Fallen. Dozens of Dregs struggled with large supply crates, overseen by Vandals, while Shanks patrolled the perimeter, looking for trouble. And at the center of the yard, a strange cylinder the size of a small car floated above the ground, firing a beam of energy down through the concrete, tearing the soil out of its way.
“Ohhhh crap,” I muttered, giving up on trying to count just how many hostile aliens were down there, sliding back down behind the edge of the roof. “Well. I think we know why all those Skiffs were flying around earlier.”
“Indeed,” Eliza managed. “They’ve apparently decided to use this as a landing zone for their forces.”
Closing my eyes, I tried to clamp down on the sudden terror I was feeling. “So. Lots of Fallen. A lot more Fallen than I expected. What now?”