To Walk the Constellations Pt. 04

Her eyes widened. "M-Markus? He's been doing a shift in the tertiary level and hasn't reported in - but...but he..." She whimpered, tears brimming. "I...I'm sorry!" She clapped her hand to her face.

Adoran stepped over to comfort her, sliding his arm around her shoulder. As he murmured sweet words to her, Quah slipped over to narrow her eye at Drak. Drak spent a few moments trying to ignore her attention. When he realized he couldn't, he looked at her. "What, Quah?" he asked, quietly.

"You and Adoran are lovers," Quah said.

Drak tensed, his eyes darting to the monk. But the monk was too busy fawning over Adoran as he fawned over her, consoling her with the standard line of 'oh, how terrible this must be for you' and 'I am so sorry for your loss.' Her eyes were practically glowing. Drak hissed, quietly.

"Do not speak of that outside of the barracks," he growled.

Quah snorted. "It's not like Elthas is worried about homolove," she muttered, quietly. "Adoran is a genefixed clone of two women. It's not like they're hetquired."

Drak shook his head. "Quah, do you remember the prefix of the Hegemony?"

"...Gentek..." Quah said. Then, softly. "But you're getting retrovirals once you become a true Knight." She spoke with utter assurance - an assurance that almost made Drak want to wrap her into a tight, bone crunching hug. He repressed the urge with some trouble.

"If I become a Knight," he said, quietly. "If."

Quah shrugged. "Still. The question stands: Adoran is your lover. But he's practically got her robes off."

"We're..." Drak shook his head. "It's not your business."

"Polylove!" Quah exclaimed, so loudly that it echoed.

"I, I, what?" the monk asked.

"We're going," Drak snarled.

***

The medtech who tended to Thale's chest clicked his tongue as he sprayed medical nano along the latest set of scars. His voice was dry: "You have fun running into a blender, sire?"

Thale glared at him.

The medical nano frothed on his chest and then solidified into greyish sheet that flowed up against his skin, making him look merely patchy, rather than torn up. Without a word, Thale stood and grabbed his gambeson off the chair he had hung it on. The medtech watched him walk away wordlessly, while Thale tugged his gambeson back on - his tail lashing from side to side.

There were several work annexes in the AI temple - places where trainees and the knights could meditate or work on their own spells and magic. Most were occupied, but Thale was able to find a annex that had only a single other knight within, perched on a small balancing sphere, his head ducked forward in intensive meditation. He didn't even glance up as Thale formatted the chair before the desk into something approximating comfortable. He sat on it and set the hard drives down next to the comptech.

He closed his eyes and breathed in. He reached out with his perceptions and felt the sluggish hard drives, the ancient magnetic encoding, the laser etched disks. He felt the creaking machines that would drive the spinning disks, the laser readers. He felt the connections and the ports. He set down his threshold blade and coaxed the connections to form - fabricating the wires and attaching blade to drive, then formatting blade to transmit. Raw data transmissions, to be picked up by the comptech in the annex.

It was slow, intensive work - work that caused sweat to bead on his forehead, his jaw to tighten.

And yet...

Every time he came close to completion, his mind would flash to another, similar moment of careful connection - the memory of driving wire and cabling into the fat, gas-adapted human on Stumble. What had his name been? Tiar something. His wild, piggish eyes, terrified as the nanotech blade reached into his mind and began to decode what he knew. Thale felt a swelling of disgust in his breast - disgust at what he had needed to do. But...without the Forge...

Without the Forge, an entire year away from Adoran would have been wasted.

His dreams of humanity, dashed.

-So, does that excuse brutality?-

The voiceless voice within his mind came to him like a lightning bolt out of a clear sky. For so long, the djinn that had whispered in his mind had been tinged with blood and madness - with scheming whispers of destruction and vengeance. To hear the cold, condemnatory tone from the Machine...

It shook him. It shook him to the core.

Thale opened his eyes and drew his hand away from the hilt of his blade. The glowing cables that led from it to the hard drive winked with a pale blue light, crackling and flashing. Thale saw that his claws had snicked out of his fingertips, trembling. He set his hand down on the hilt and breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. Calmness. Focus. His eyes closed and he tried to cast aside all thoughts of Adoran and Venn and the mysterious 101g. He instead thought only of the sensorium data within the hard-drive.

Ancient programming languages - echoes of what current comptech used. The similarities bridged the gap - a change here, an alteration here, all while keeping the network of data and interrelationships the same.

The ancient hard drives whirred and clicked. Chuffed and hummed.

Then...

Data.

She was seated in a sleek cockpit, surrounded by lacquered wood and black metal. The joystick before her was made of carved femur and skull, with silver eyes set into the sockets - glaring up at her. The buttons of the console were bright red and plastic, with a dizzying juxtaposition between their ornate finishing and the primitive nature of the toggles, switches, and capped buttons. The floor had a pair of peddles. Looking around, she could see that she was but one of many in similar cockpits - each teardrop shaped vehicle situated in a grid. But while hers looked like a stagecoach as designed by the ancient geniuses of Lockheed, the others were in a multitude of forms and shapes.

There, a coffin with bat-wing stabilizers, lashed to a pair of glowing nacelles that snorted and purrfe with some kind of internal combustion engine.

There, a skull with flaming eye sockets, the pilot seated in the opened mouth, feet propped against the curved, overly long canines. The whole thing rested on a platform of glowing light, rippling and buzzing.

There, a chariot with a man as burly and well built as a genejacked space marine, his shoulders covered with articulated spider-limbs, each one adjusting a different lever that thrust from the curved copula of the charito's structure.

And to either side of the grid, curved rows of chairs, dominated by men and women in ornate masks. None were the same as any other - but the skin beneath many was pallorous and pale. The fashion was of the high baroque period across a thousand thousand worlds and a thousand generations - frilled gowns, frocks, corsets, fingerless gloves and spiked collars. Some held operatic viewing binoculars to their faces at the end of long poles, while many simply watched. One held a woman in her hands, but the woman looked even more deathly pale than the rest - her neck was exposed and bright red rivuleted from two tiny puncture holes. The mask shifted back to settle over the noble gripping the commoner - but did not hide the fangs that had done the deed.

At the fore of the grid stood a man in a flowing red robe, his face concealed behind a peacock mask. He read from a cue card. "Let the Hippodromics...begin!"

The sensoria snapped shut and Thale shook his head, blinking. The phantom feeling of being a four armed woman with gills - the feeling of the filtration collar around his throat - all of it took some time to fade. He blinked until he could feel himself as Drak Thale once more. Then he stood.

"Huh," Adoran said, after hearing the description. "I have no idea what planet that might be."

"There are eight hundred and ninety two known worlds in the Chain," Quah said, cheerfully. "Though there are two hundred dead worlds, maybe more, maybe less, and who knows how many undiscovered ones beyond Stumble."

"Stumble?" Adoran asked. "Isn't that where you were, Thale?"

Thale nodded. "It was the worst planet I'd ever set foot on."

"Well, there are worse places than Stumble," Quah said, cheerfully.

"I am aware of that, Quah," Thale snapped. "But if none of you recognize the place...then that whole search in the directory was useless." He snarled. "Fucking useless."

"Not so," Quah said, patting his shoulder. "You've narrowed it down to eight hundred and ninety two known worlds - well, eight hundred and ninety one worlds, since we know that it's not this one." She nodded. "Unless there's a secret cabal that runs something called the Hippodromics here..."

"I doubt it," Adoran said, shaking his head. "Not with that mutation you said you saw." He smiled at Thale. "And masks aren't exactly huge on-" He stopped himself, but not before Thale started to glare at him. Adoran looked abashed, kicking at the ground and sliding his arms behind his back. "Sorry."

"But that's just it," Quah said. "We simply need to run a search spell with a focus on masks. How many worlds can be based around masks on the Chain?"

Thale nodded, slowly. "True..."

"Come on!" Quah said. "I have the basic program already worked out in my head. Together, we can knock it out in a day, or less."

Following her, the two other knights came back to the annex that Thale had just vacated. Once they were seated, Quah crossed her legs, closed her eyes, then placed her palms on her knees. She bit her lip. AS she focused, Thale shifted in his own seat, formatting the chair from the ground with a single thought. But he found himself unable to focus on the program that she reached out towards him - and within a few seconds, Quah had opened her eyes and asked: "What?"

"I get the feeling that I'm missing something obvious," Thale said. "My djinn has to know where Venn is. That's how it sent the message, right? Machines can't tell the future, can they?"

"Nothing can see the future," Adoran said.

"That's not entirely true..." Quah said. "There is spooky action at a distance. Q-bits can communicate faster than the speed of light. That can circumvent the action-consequence requirements." She chewed her lower lip. "Uh, uh, uh, uhhh..." She cocked her head. "There's a rumor. Well, a myth. Well, a speculation. Well, technically, it's more of a conspiracy theory..."

"Stop defining it and start describing it," Thale snapped.

Quah nodded. "Right! The story goes that Emperor Nebuchadnezzar formed the Hegemony, right? But some stories say that the impetus for that was a prophecy, handed down from the Liminal Knight...Wotan Hohman."

"Wotan Hohman!?" Adoran asked. "The traitor?"

"He was the first Hegemonic Knight and the first to betray the Hegemony," Quah murmured, softly. "But you know what they say about him, right? That he's still alive."

"How?" Thale asked.

"Oh, there can be dozens of ways," Quah said. "Genetic sequencing to reverse aging. Nanotech medicine to enhance and prolong life. Cryogenic storage with Machine oversight to prevent crystallic damage from ice in the bloodstream." She was ticking the options off on her hands. "Relativistic spinship traveling at 99% C for the past few centuries? Clones!"

"Quah," Adoran said, holding his hand out. "What was the prophecy?"

"No idea!" Quah sang.

Thale groaned and rolled his eyes. "Quah, lets focus on the search program and leave conspiracy theories about prophecies to drunk astros in sundiver bars."

"Fair enough!" Quah sang - kicking off the floor with her hair, sending her formatted chair spinning in a slow, steady circle. She closed her eyes - and Thale closed his. Adoran's hand found his, squeezing, and the comforting feeling of his strength centered Thale as Quah's mind filled the space between them with the program that they were working on. It was simplicity to describe and utter hell to actually create: Search for any planet where masks were a major cultural touchstone. But that required searching through multiple media types across thousands of different codecs and encoding techniques - and the program gained new complexities, new quirks by the hour.

When, at last, they had a malformed monstrosity that was more bug than program, Thale's stomach was knotted with hunger and the night had turned dark and splotchy with orbital satellites.

Quah grinned. "She's beautiful."

Adoran rubbed grit from his eyes. "Should we bugtest it?"

"Nah!" Quah said, her brow furrowing.

Ten minutes of agonizing waiting later, there came a chime.

And they had a name.

Masque Macabre.

Thale stood. His shoulders rolled and he growled. "I need a sundiver with a spindrive."

"Or you could just use the Q-bit transmission method you used to arrive to get here from the Victrix to return to the Victrix. Which would be right near Masque Macabre!" Quah said, nodding and clapping.

Thale slowly glared at her.

Adoran gripped his shoulder, tightly. "Thale..." He said. "Would it be too much to offer...to..." He gulped. "You're going after a rogue Liminal Knight and a mysterious target of prophecy." He paused. "You need backup."

Thale hung his head forward. A nervous tension prickled along his spine - and he knew that if he chose wrong here, his future would be utterly damned. What if he accepted help...and the Emperor sneered at his efforts. Lord Drak, I want a Knight, not a mollycoddled child. And the retrovirus injector, tossed onto the floor, shattering. His hopes, shattering. But then he thought of weeks...months on the Victrix. Alone.

"Please..." Thale whispered.

Quah and Adoran tensed up.

"Please," Thale lifted his head. "Come with me."

Adoran smiled. His hand squeezed tighter on Thale's shoulder. Quah stepped up and slid her arm around Thale's shoulder as well. The moment of closeness stretched - and then Thale stepped back, sliding away.

"Come on," he said, his voice soft. "We need to send the message to the Victrix...to expect three."

And he turned, back straight. Head held high.

TO BE CONTINUED