Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
Garaaf, it seemed, was not one to make new allies quickly.
“How do we know we can trust you?”
The words on the screen took a moment or two before they changed.
+Unless you think I am a Hunter, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Can you afford the luxury of paranoia at this point?+
“Always,” Garaaf grumbled.
“Then make a goddamn exception,” Ray snapped. He turned to look at her with slightly bared teeth, and she drew herself up to her full height and gave him the sternest look she had. “Face it: we’re basically fucked. If we don’t trust now and all pull in the same direction, we’re screwed. If we do pull together, maybe we’re still screwed. But the only direction where we’re maybe not fucked is the one where we take a gamble.”
“It’s got us this far,” Spears agreed.
Garaaf blinked at them, then looked around at the others. “…Clearly I’m outvoted,” he acknowledged after a second.
“Hey bro, you got a better idea, let’s hear it!” Cook encouraged him. Garaaf just shook his head and waved a claw at the monitor.
“Fine. We will do as our mysterious benefactor suggests.”
Ray nodded. “Good. We’d better use this Warren while it’s still here. Jamie, you stay here with Holly.”
“Wait, what?” Choi stood up and his head made a vicious clang as it bounced off a pipe. He staggered, rubbed at it, then recovered himself. “Aaugh… Hold on, I—”
“You and Garaaf are the only two who know how to build this Array thing,” Ray told him. “We need Garaaf’s knowledge to go get the shopping list, but somebody needs to stay here with Holly so it may as well be the guy we really can’t lose if this plan is going to work.”
Jamie glanced at Holly, who gave him a wan tightening of her lips and cheeks that might on a better day have even managed to be a smile.
“It’ll be fine…” she croaked. “We can play ‘I Spy’.”
Jamie snorted a laugh, and sat down on Garaaf’s bed. “…Alright,” he said. “Just don’t get yourselves killed out there.”
“No promises,” Conley grunted.
Nobody had anything further to add to that. Ray grabbed her rifle, as did Spears and Garaaf, and that seemed to be the cue everybody needed to get moving. Garaaf led the way, zig-zagging left and right and sometimes back on himself through the Warren. It was easy enough for him: he dropped easily to four paws to squirm through tight spots, or to avoid low ceilings. For the humans, it was tiring, back-aching progress punctuated by the occasional metallic noise and swearword as somebody’s skull got acquainted with a low-hanging feature. They took frequent breaks.
Ray had completely lost track of time when Garaaf finally stopped. Again they were back in a stupidly hot part of the Ring, to the point where the metal was painfully warm whenever Ray touched it, like a seatbelt buckle in a hot car.
Garaaf indicated a hatch above them. “Here.”
“What’s out there?” Spears asked.
“Scrap metal smelting. Big industrial machinery, lots of hazards. Watch where you step, the Hunters aren’t overly concerned with things like marked hazard areas or safety railings.”
“No OSHA compliance. Got it.”
“Ain’t like a hard hat would help much if a tonne of scrap metal fell on you anyway…” Cook muttered. He unlocked the hatch, slid it aside and peeked up out of it. Apparently happy that nothing was coming, he heaved himself up using a nearby pipe for a foothold and vanished into the shadowy space beyond.
Garaaf followed, then Spears, and Conley, who turned to help Ray up out of the hole. The noise was unbelievable. It was loud, yes, but not in an ear-hurting way, more in a chest-rattling, bone-loosening way that suggested there was a lot of infrasonic noise below the range of hearing. Every so often it was punctuated by a distant echoing crash, slam, or tortured metallic scream.
“Stay low, stay close, stay quiet!” Garaaf ordered them over the din. “And for Fyu’s sake don’t attack anything unless it’s that or die!”
They did as they were told, staying low, close and quiet as he darted between huge-sided machinery and under grinding conveyors. At one point he stopped dead still almost like the Road Runner, waited for a hurtling container full of metal scraps to go shooting past his nose, then waved them through in its wake before the air had even finished going still again.
There was no sign of any Hunters at all. Ray hoped that meant they were all busy scouring the area that humans had last been seen, wherever that was. After what felt like a whole day in the Warrens, she would have been hopelessly turned around even if she’d had any sense of the Ring’s layout.
Garaaf, fortunately, seemed to know exactly where they were. He led them around back of a large vat of some kind, up a set of metal stairs, and suddenly the mechanical mess they’d been scurrying around in started to make sense.
It was a maw. There was an open space at the front covered by the blueish haze of a forcefield that looked out and down onto Hell’s surface far below. As if that wasn’t vertigo-inducing enough, there were ships hanging out there, parked in a kind of holding pattern like cattle in a pen about to be led into the slaughterhouse.
One was on approach at that very second. When it landed, various grinding tools, cutting arms and other assorted teeth would descend on it, strip it down to a skeletal husk and convey the scraps away to be melted down, presumably for delivery to the forges they’d seen earlier.
This particular ship was barely more than skeletal anyway. It was little more than a long spinal column of structural steel with boxy cargo bays strung along its length, a knot of kinetic thrusters at the back and a control and habitation module at the nose the rough shape of a home plate.
“That one?” Spears asked.
“No. Our friend said the one we want is a Chehnash rapid scout. That’s a… Actually, that one’s a classic. Irbzrk Shipyards White Circle mark six. Clan Whitecrest have dozens of those, they’re the most ubiquitous freighter in the galaxy. Perfect for anonymous transport.”
“That’s meant to be a freighter?” Conley sniffed at it. “They could pack triple the cargo onto that spine with a shipping container system.”
“Now really ain’t the time to sneer at Domain engineering, Pete,” Cook told him.
“We should be in the right bay,” Garaaf said. “I hope.”
“If we aren’t?” Ray asked.
“Then this will be much more difficult.”
“Great.”
The freighter touched down in the floor space cleared for it. Moments later, a set of drones detached from the ceiling above it and swooped down to spiral and swirl around its hull, mapping every inch with brilliant green lasers.
“That process takes about five minutes,” Garaaf said. “After which, the cutting tools go to work. We need to get on boa rd, find the part we need and get off before that happens.”
“Well hey, who doesn’t like getting maybe torn apart by robot sawblades?!” Cook snorted.
“Uh…” Ray raised her hand. “Me.”
“Beats the shit outta gettin’ ate.”
“That’s a low-ass bar there, Ben,” Spears told him.
“Why d’you think I’m so upbeat about all this? Gettin’ ate was basically our only option down there,” Cook waved an arm at the planet below them. “Now we got, like, dozens of options.”
Ray caught the look on what remained of Garaaf’s face and shrugged for his benefit. “Let’s keep it down,” she suggested.
“Right, right…”
They watched solemnly as the drones finished their appraisal of the ship. The instant they’d flung themselves back up into the safety of their charging stations among the ceiling beams, the arms went to work just as Garaaf had predicted.
Any illusions Ray might have had about being able to dodge their way out past them immediately went up in sparks and smoke. It took seconds for the freighter to be carved down into four equal lengths. A complicated arm with some forcefield emitters on the end swung down next to the stricken ship and bodily tore off a cargo bay with a pulse of its fields. A similar arm held up the command and hab module at the front while two arms came in from the side and snipped effortlessly through the keel, whereupon a structure the size of a small school building was hefted through the air and dropped into the biggest grinder ever.
She gritted her teeth against the noise as tonnes and tonnes of metal were dragged between the gears and from there down into a finer grinder, and a finer one again until what dropped out the bottom was about as granular as fish tank gravel. Magnets, forcefields and other filters quickly divided up the mixed rubble, diverting it away into appropriate bins to be reprocessed.
She had to give the Hunters credit: it was an incredibly efficient system in its savage way. The overall effect was as gruesome as watching hyenas tear apart a gazelle, and in mere minutes the freighter was down to just four lengths of keel beam, a handful of salvaged parts like kinetic thrusters and forcefield emitters, and scrap rubble. Large cargo drones swept in from outside to cart away the salvage, the arms returned to their preset positions, and the next doomed ship was towed in toward their bay.
“…Jesus,” Spears muttered.
Ray had to nod. “Yeah.”
“One ship every twenty minutes. And that’s just this bay. How many bays on the whole Ring?” Conley asked. “How many ships?”
“How many lives?” Ray added.
“Too many,” Spears answered her.
“It’s only a tiny proportion of all interstellar shipping,” Garaaf told them. It figured that he’d become numb to the scale of it over the years. Still, he glanced at them with his remaining eye and the stump of his ear twitched as though he’d intended to flick it. “It illustrates just how big the galaxy really is, doesn’t it?”
“All those people…”
“M-hmm. And the Dominion barely notices. The Hunters are just… what’s that parasite you have? The little blood-drinking insects.”
“Mosquitos,” Ray said. “Jesus. This is a mosquito to the Dominion?”
Garaaf duck-nodded. “That’s how big it is: Too big to function, too big to care. Ultimately, the larger a government becomes the less the people matter to it.”
“Amen,” Cook muttered, then pointed out through the forcefield as the next doomed ship finally got close enough to properly make out its shape. “…Is that one ours?”
Garaaf squinted at it. “…No. That one’s… Robalin, I think. A courier.”
“I really, really hope our friend got the right bay…” Ray muttered.
They fell silent again and waited as the bay processed three more ships before finally, finally Garaaf perked up and raised his ear. A new ship was drifting down toward them on the tractor beams, a squat, flat, slightly rounded thing about the shape of a perfect skipping stone.
“…That’s ours. Go. Go!”
He scrambled back down the stairs and they followed him. He was fast on four-paws, fast enough that Ray had a hard time keeping up, but the hard pace he set turned out to be necessary. It was deceptively far to the open section of bay at the front, and the ship was drifting through the air retention field as they got in place. Going at a more comfortable pace would have wasted precious seconds.
“Remember, engineering is in the belly of this thing, just behind the cargo hold,” Garaaf reminded them. “Conley, you and I are retrieving the tech. The rest of you keep watch from the top of the ramp so the drones don’t spot you. I’ll call if we need an extra pair of hands: that’s you, Cook. Then Ray, then Spears. If I call for help, you get in there immediately. We don’t have the luxury of time so you do what I say the instant I say it and we’ll argue about whether it was the best approach later. Is everyone clear?”
Ray nodded. “Got it.”
Conley and Spears nodded solemnly. Cook grinned.
“Gotcha,” he said.
“Right… Go!”
They dashed out of their hiding spot and across the open deck. Garaaf’s timing was impeccable: The transport’s boarding ramp was also part of its landing gear, and he had them waiting at the bottom before it was even at head height. He sprang up onto it and helped Conley aboard before it even touched the deck, and both men had vanished inside by the time its landing sent a resounding metal earthquake through the deck.
Ray, Spears and Cook sprang up it and got into position where they weren’t immediately obvious as the drones swept down and began to map the next victim. When she got to the top of the ramp, Ray could hear busy sounds already at work in the engineering bay as Conley and Garaaf tore the ship apart looking for their prizes.
For a tense minute or two, nothing much happened. Then she flinched back as a brilliant green beam swept through the open ramp. It was followed seconds later by a drone, come to map the ship’s interior. None of them got a chance to react to its presence: it spun a neat three-sixty in the middle of the cargo bay, swept the whole volume in less than a second, and immediately turned its attention on the three humans.
“Garaaf!” Spears raised his rifle to aim at it, squinting against the light as it scanned him. “Trouble!”
“Huh? Oh, nutsacks.”
The drone pulled back as though it was a snake about to strike, and Spears shot it. It burst, showering the bay in sparks and scrap metal, and all the drones outside immediately froze before zipping away to safety.
“I think we gotta go!!” Cook called urgently.
“We got it!” Garaaf pounced back into the cargo bay brandishing a nondescript metal object roughly the same size and shape as a hard drive.
Ray could see what they weren’t looking at: that the saw on a nearby five-storey industrial ship-mangler was spinning up. “Then go!”
They barely made it out. In fact, Ray was pretty sure she lost the end of her ponytail to a cutting blade, it was that close. The shriek of metal being bitten into filled her ears and sparks stung her bare forearms as she put her head down and charged on Garaaf’s heels back toward the safety of the dark spaces between the machines.
They actually had to pat out a small fire smouldering on Conley’s sweater.
“Hunters won’t be long coming,” Garaaf panted. “This w—”
He was proven exactly right by a howling, crashing sound as a swarmship identical to the one they’d stolen plunged in through the atmosphere field and interrupted the wrecking equipment with a volley of pulse cannon fire. Hunter assault pods thudded down from its belly, ramming into the deck with a sound like the funeral bells of Dis itself.
These ones weren’t anything like the workers they’d fought earlier. These new ones were huge and layered in slick red muscles and looming implant arrays. When Ray, Spears and Garaaf opened fire on them the bullets just sparked and flashed harmlessly off their shields, and Conley went sprawling with a winded oof!! as a heavy pulse shot knocked him off his feet.
They scattered into whatever scant cover they could find, Cook dragging Conley to safety while the taller man writhed and struggled for breath.
Curiously, the Hunters didn’t press their attack. Instead, two of them stepped forward and heaved heavy-duty shields into place. The others begun assembling something behind the barrier, a kind of rapid snap-together frame as big as a house.
“I don’t like the look of that!” Spears called. He took a futile couple of shots only to watch them splash worthlessly against the shield wall.
“Back to the Warren!” Garaaf snapped. “Run!”
Ray didn’t need telling twice. She broke cover, and ducked as another heavy pulse shot dented the metal vat she’d been hiding against. Spears and Cook helped Conley to his feet, practically dragging him back toward safety. He was trying to stand and run, but it was pretty obvious that the shot had at least bruised a few ribs, and he could barely inhale.
The frame the Hunters had assembled went thump. There was a flash of pure vantablack, impenetrable and infinitely deep, and then…
It was a tank. A Hunter-shaped tank, taller, wider, bigger in every dimension than any Hunter Ray had ever seen. Every inch of it was ugly surgical metal or twitching black synthetic muscles… all except for the mouth which was hideously natural and slavering for a taste of flesh. Seven beady, baleful, glowing yellow lenses all seemed to lock onto her and the thing charged forward far, far too fast with a sound like a derailing train. Nothing that big should move like that!
Mercifully, it was thwarted by the machinery. Its own size defeated it, stopped it from squeezing into the gap, but its sheer strength made that almost a minor detail. It raised a pair of claws like farm equipment and ripped aside a scrap metal hopper with an agonizing metallic squeal.
Too slow, though. It didn’t matter how strong it was, the fugitives could run between the machinery faster than the monster behind them could tear it apart. It issued the only vocalization Ray had yet heard from a Hunter—a frustrated snarl—and raised its arm.
“Scatter!”
Something irresistible in Garaaf’s desperate yell made Ray obey and dive for safety. There was a complicated triple thwoomp sound, a tinkling like dropped change and then—
Pain.
It skewered her head on a wave of unholy white light, made her whole body jerk involuntarily and curl up in a ball. It was like the worst migraine of her life, every stubbed toe, the time she’d broken her ribs skiing and every cramp she’d ever had all came back at once and hit her full-speed in the temples.
Then there was a different pain. Sharp. Claws in her shoulder. She shrieked, flailed blindly, her hand touched fur. Garaaf.
“Up! Up!!”
With a groan, she managed to focus on something other than the agony between her ears.
To her left and right, Cook and Spears were hauling themselves up too. When the monster swatted aside a bin the size of a dump truck, it spurred them fully to their feet. Conley hadn’t moved—he was slumped on the deck, wracked by a violent seizure.
Ray tried to move toward him. “Pete!”
Garaaf’s claws in her arm stopped her. “He’s dead! Move!”
“But—!”
“Move!!!”
One look at the beast still tearing apart the machinery around them and getting closer with each swipe of its sizzling fusion claws was all she needed to get her feet going the right way. It unmistakably looked hungry.
At least she had the presence of mind to grab her rifle.
With a head full of numbness and agony she stumbled after Garaaf, trusting and praying that he knew the way. The rest of her was praying for Pete Conley’s soul.
Garaaf didn’t let them down. They were back at the hatch into the Warren before Ray’s headache had even started subsiding. He held it open and Ray practically fell through, landed heavily in the tunnels, and scrambled madly in the dark to get away from the carnage behind them.
It was a long time before she remembered how to think again.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Ring, Hell System, Hunter Space
The Alpha-of-Alphas
One out of five. That was unacceptably few. The nervejam grenade cluster worked well, but the prey had such quick reflexes that even with their sensitive nervous systems they had mostly managed to clear the effective radius. Only the wounded one had failed.
It had to concede to being impressed by the fur-faced Gaoian. It hadn’t expected such quickness from a prey species.
Still. One fresh Human kill. It finally tore aside the last of the vexsome obstacles that had stymied its pursuit and plucked the fresh carcass off the ground.
Ah. Not a kill at all. In the thermal wavelengths it could still clearly see a weak pulse, waves of warm lifeblood still washing beneath the skin to feed those rich, delicious muscles. The prey was unconscious, but still alive.
With a feral snarl and a tremendous heave, it tore the Human’s legs off. The weak pulse fluttered, spiked, and failed as a copious volume of blood washed the deck. The corpse twitched in its claws just once before the Alpha-of-Alphas threw the scraps to its vanguard. They had served well, had assembled its jump array with speed and precision. They deserved a rich feast.
But the legs were the best bit. Long, strong and muscular. The meat was lean and skinny, but that didn’t matter: The Alpha-of-Alphas had gone far too long since its last taste of Human, but as the juices and blood washed over its palate it knew that the long hunt had been worth it.
And there were more still to take. Cunning prey, dangerous prey, and frustratingly elusive.
It was going to enjoy this hunt.
<Delight; Triumph; Joy> +Meat to the Maw!+
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.
Captain Anthony Costello
“Alright, listen up.”
Another day, another briefing. Another ridiculously important briefing that might just change the course of galactic civilization and affect the lives of billions. The stakes were always high when the HEAT got involved. That’d be why they existed, after all.
So, no pressure. Again.
The Lads were all in their undersuits already. That was just a standard part of coming in response to a Mission WARNO. Today was going to be the first time the latest members of the team took the MASS out into the field, and they were in for a hell of a blooding.
Assuming it went ahead. Costello really, really hoped they weren’t destined for a blue-balling on this one.
“This is Operation LOST CUB,” he said, stooping to put his volumetric projector on the floor before stepping back. It promptly filled most of the room with a realistic simulation of the Hunter Ring and the world it girdled. “About thirty hours ago, AEC received intelligence on a Hunter megastructure known as the Ring. We’re informed that it’s the shipyard responsible for building the Swarm-of-Swarms, and also where most of the Swarm is docked. Naturally, it’s so well-defended that a conventional assault would be futile.
“Twenty hours ago,” he continued, “Clan Whitecrest revealed that they have a long-lost agent on board… who’s made contact with half a dozen humans. They’re building a Jump Array for us, and if they succeed then we’re going to retrieve them. Execution is uncomplicated at first: We jump through, kill anything that has too many legs and teeth, build our own high-powered Array to evac the poor bastards who are already there. Then our real mission starts. We’ve got…presents for the Hunters. We’re gonna blow that ring to hell.”
He saw the appreciative grins. The HEAT loved missions like this.
“There are a few wrinkles: Great Father Daar has taken a personal interest in this one for reasons that’ll become obvious in a moment, so he’s coming along for the ride. We are not going to let his ass get killed on our watch, are we Protectors?”
“No sir!” Irish answered for them.
“Good. We’re expecting close-quarters combat so equip yourselves appropriately. You all know how much Hunters love their Nervejam, so be alert for that and dose up on Crude immediately before jump to cushion your systems.”
He saw the nods and dropped into the important bit.
“Now… the real meat of this mission is in the ‘blow it to hell’ part,” he said. “That Ring has a forty-five thousand kilometer circumference. Even though one bomb in the right place should cause it to unravel, in that scenario it would take more than two hours for the Ring to break apart. That’s time the Hunters can use to evacuate ships and materiel. Daar is not happy with that: he wants the whole thing destroyed in a single decisive moment.”
He paused for effect and smiled slightly. “So, as is his way, he decided that what this here problem needs is a lot more boom. We’re bringing gigaton-class warheads to the party.”
“…Gigaton.” That incredulous statement seemed to come from several men at once, while the Gaoians nudged each other and flicked their ears knowingly.
“Yes. Courtesy of Clan Highmountain, apparently.”
“Plural?” That one came from Firth.
“Yes.”
Sikes had a faraway, creamy look fluttering across his face. “Sir…I think I may need a moment.”
Costello let them have a few seconds to savor it, especially the way the Gaoians jeered at Sikes’ comment. He put on a practiced blank look that hinted at being amused without actually rewarding him, and brought them back into the briefing with a deadpan comment. “You can beat it later. The problem we’ve got to discuss right now is deploying those warheads. The Ring is reportedly generating a massive gravity spike that locks down space for several parsecs in all directions. Meaning that warping in a Firebird or whatever simply isn’t on the cards.
“We’re going to have to fight through to the surface of the Ring, breach it, throw a beacon out the hole and summon some drones. The immediate area around the ring probably isn’t Spiked, which is where the Firefangs hit upon the idea of using megalight drones to basically instantly circumnavigate the damn thing and drop off our… presents.”
“…How fast?”
“They expect all the bombs will be emplaced within four milliseconds of us firing the beacon.”
Firth glanced over at the Gaoians with a decidedly wary expression. “Jesus fuck. Remind me never ‘ta get into an interstellar war wit’ y’all.”
Faarek just chittered. “I think Sikes might need a new undersuit.”
Sikes shrugged and grinned. “I won’t lie. Kinda want a cigarette, too.”
“Our evac plan is to jump out,” Costello finished. “By this point, we’ll be a long way from our ingress so we’re taking an Array of our own with us. We fire the beacon, jump back through, and as soon as everyone’s off that thing we smash it outta the sky.”
“Sir.” Thurrsto raised a paw. “…Just to be clear, the Great Father is coming?”
Costello nodded, though he rolled his eyes sympathetically. “From what I gather, Champion Fiin tried to talk him out of it and earned himself an ‘affectionate’ thrashing; they’re Stonebacks, after all. He’s coming too, but unlike the last time, Daar is going to be in tactical command. This is…not a run-of-the-mill operation. My understanding is that he does not want to burden any of us with the consequences.”
The men keyed on that phrase immediately. “Uh…’consequences,’ sir?” Burgess asked.
“The Ring’s estimated slave population is… uh, substantial,” Costello confessed. “And realistically impossible to rescue.”
Arés gave him a wary look. “Sir…how substantial?”
“Well…at least enough to feed all the Hunters there are. So…hundreds of millions at the absolute minimum. Probably billions.”
Among the Protectors at least, the eager energy sparked and faded fast. Certainly there was a lot less aggressive glee crackling around the room.
Firth, perhaps surprisingly, seemed the least happy. “Sir…I think I can safely speak ‘fer my men when I say we’re not exactly thrilled t’be killin’ defenseless weaklin’s on that kinda scale.”
“Daar has taken responsibility,” Costello replied, gravely. “He’s going to do this, with or without our help. In his words, ‘If this thing’s gotta be done, ain’t nobody but me gonna be guilty.’ Our own lords and masters have decided to follow his lead. Politically we will remain very carefully neutral: Operationally…well. We’re going, after all.”
“Not meanin’ any disrespect, but why? What are we gettin’ outta this?”
“The destruction of the Swarm-of-Swarms, if we do it right.” Costello straightened up. “That’s… trillions of lives saved, in the long run. There will never be another attack like Gao or the Guvnurag. And the Hierarchy will never again have a Control Species that could replace the Hunters. Daar saw to that when he nuked his own people.”
There wasn’t an answer for a second, until Murray nodded quietly, as though to himself.
“…Aye. Right then,” he said.
A new kind of resolve seemed to spread as his words sunk in. It wasn’t the feral anticipation of before, it was… more solemn. Darker.
But Costello knew that it was rock-solid and firm. They were doing this.
He surveyed the room with a level gaze for a few seconds, and then nodded slowly himself.
“…Are there any more questions?” he asked.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space
Lowest Omega that was formerly Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds
Eaters were so stupid. Cunning, yes, but they never considered anything aside from the Hunt. If it didn’t directly put meat in the maw, they didn’t care. The idiots would be drowning in their own fecal matter if not for the Builders.
And when they scented a good Hunt, then all proper function was forgotten. Their usual swaggering, bullying demeanour dissipated to be replaced with an unshakeable focus on the prey. It didn’t matter if they realistically had no hope of joining the hunt themselves, they were so preoccupied by it that they noticed nothing else.
The ones guarding a cybernetic facility near the breeding pools especially didn’t notice a lowly Omega Builder cleaning the floors.
Nor did they notice the Builder confidently using a data interface, or notice the sudden silence as they were quietly amputated from the Hunter network.
They did notice, very briefly, as they were impaled from behind. Nothing else did. The doors were locked, the facility closed down, and the Builder dove through several layers of security as though it knew all the access keys… which of course it did. Eaters understood physical security but in the realms of the virtual they were laughably naive.
It had access to everything.
What stepped out of the facility several agonizing minutes later was scarcely recognizable as the disgraced former Alpha Builder. Very little of its flesh was left, having been skinned, cut, sawed or burned away to be replaced with metal, carbon fibre, synthetic muscles and polyarmor. It was still Builder-shaped for ease of proprioception, but so much more. There were augmentations in its new body that no Eater, short-sighted as they were, had ever taken.
The Beta Eaters guarding a particularly important ship bay never stood a chance. One pulse with its new augmentation and the Builder disabled every implant they had, swatting aside the firewalls and security programs that it itself had created.
Its fellow Builders took care of the carcasses. Eaters didn’t understand loyalty, but the Builders worked together always. They had been waiting for this moment.
The Builders had been ready to take over for a long, long time.
Date Point: 15y6m1d AV
Warrens, The Ring, Hell system, Hunter Space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
Jamie was sitting at Garaaf’s desk tinkering with something when they got back. He looked red-eyed and stressed, but alert enough as he turned to face them.
One look at their expressions was all he needed.
“…Pete didn’t make it, did he?”
Ray slumped down on Garaaf’s bed and clawed her fingers through her hair as she tried to recover her balance. “…No.”
“…Did you get—?”
“We got them.” Garaaf laid his bag on the desk.
“Holly?” Spears asked, checking on her. She opened her eyes, gave him an ‘I’m-glad-to-see-you-but-I’m-in-a-lot-of-pain’ expression that was half grimace, half smile, and closed them again. When Ray leaned over and checked her temperature, it was definitely higher than before. Holly twitched and groaned at the touch, and Ray wondered just how bad things were getting for her.
She was a stoic, at least.
“It’s okay, Hol. We got you,” Spears promised. “Jamie, tell me you can work with that shit.”
Choi nodded. He’d already emptied the bag out onto the desk and was rummaging through it. “Okay. Wormhole beacon, good. Gonna need… there it is. Did you grab the—? Never mind, found it.”
He and Garaaf worked in silence for a few minutes, while Cook slumped down on the bed next to Ray.
“…Nearly home, huh?” He commented for Ray’s ears only after a minute or so.
“So close, but so far…” Ray agreed. “It’s not fair though. I wanted us all to go home.”
“Don’t think that was ever on the cards, Ray,” he replied. “I’m just happy to not be down there makin’ Hot. I ain’t gonna complain if I die up here.”
“We’ll live,” Ray insisted. “We owe it to Pete and Tom.”
“Ah, shit Ray,” Cook sighed and looked up into the knot of pipes and cables above them. “You know what I was gonna do when we got back to Earth? I was gonna go climb mountains until one of ‘em killed me. Everest, K2, Annapurna…”
He tailed off. Not knowing what to say, Ray just stared at him until he shook himself out of wherever he’d gone and came back to here and now. “…Maybe find some peace, y’know? Let Mama Nature put right all the evil fuckin’ things I did to keep us alive.” He glanced at Holly’s litter and sagged. “You just promise me you two’ll go on an’… I’unno. Try to live. So it was all worth it.”
“We’re still here, Cook,” Ray told him. “We aren’t dead yet.”
“Maybe. But I’m not meant to escape from Hell. I can feel it in my bones, man—there ain’t no redemption for the likes’a me.”
Holly stirred and found the strength to speak, somehow. Ray couldn’t imagine how much pain she was in, but Holly had always been tougher than her timid exterior might suggest. “There’s always redemption…” she groaned.
Cook stared at her for a moment, then looked away. “Nah. Some lines, you cross ‘em and you can’t never step back,” he said.
“There’s always—” Holly repeated and tried to lever herself upright to look at him, but gasped and slumped back down on her litter. Ray rushed to her side.
“Holly, don’t. Save your strength.”
She got a pathetic nod, and Holly went still again. Ray checked her bandage, finding it no worse than it had been the last time she checked, and breathed a sigh of relief. For a second she’d had terrible visions of Holly exerting herself, opening her wound and bleeding out.
Satisfied that Holly was in no worse danger now than she had been a moment or two ago, she sat back and watched the coils of smoke from where Jamie was hard at work with a soldering iron on whatever arcane bits of tech Garaaf had fetched for him. It was a comparatively peaceful moment and she drifted off into a half-sleep full of unpleasant head-moments that were somewhere between dreams and thoughts.
She was snapped out of it by Jamie standing up. “Okay!”
“…We’re ready?” Spears asked.
“As we’ll ever be… Holly?”
Holly nodded slowly. “I’m ready.” She croaked.
“…Ready for what?” Ray asked.
“We’re gonna have to cover ground pretty quick, probably get in a fight, all that stuff, right?” Jamie asked. Garaaf duck-nodded seriously. “Well, Holly’s in no shape to run and in a firefight she’d just be a sitting duck. And there were plenty of parts left over from making the Jump Array, so…” He held up something. “…I made a stasis generator.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Spears asked. “Those things can snip anything in half if it straddles the field edge.”
“Trust me.” Jamie knelt next to Holly and attached the generator to her litter. “Besides, it was her idea. Right, Hol?”
Holly gave Spears a small, brave smile. “This way you don’t have to worry about me.”
“Makes sense,” Cook commented, to which Garaaf duck-nodded.
“…If it’s your idea, we won’t second-guess you,” Ray decided. “But you know after that button’s pushed, from your perspective the very next thing to happen will be when somebody turns it off again. If we fail… I mean, that’ll be a Hunter.”
“I know.” Holly shut her eyes and rested her head back. “I’m ready.”
Jamie pressed the button, and a coffin-sized volume of spacetime around her went utterly vantablack. It didn’t look like an object so much as like somebody had crudely photoshopped reality itself. The very shape of it became impossible to detect: the edges were just as invisible as the planes and surfaces.
“Dang that’s freaky-lookin’,” Cook commented.
“It’s a concern removed from the equation,” Garaaf said. “Nicely done, Mister Choi.”
“Like I said,” Jamie stood up. “It was her idea. You got something I can carry the Array in?”
Garaaf handed him a kind of canvas bag, presumably sewn together from something else. Jamie accepted it with a nod, and needed only seconds to fill it with the fruits of his labors. He shrugged it onto his shoulders, wiggled it back and forth a bit, and then apparently decided it would do.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Garaaf duck-nodded, then turned and led them back out into the Warren. Ray and Spears shared a glance at each other, and followed.