To Walk the Constellations Pt. 06

Adoran chuckled. "Glass houses, huh?"

"Throwing stones should only be from orbit, Adoran," she said.

Adoran sighed and stepped into the coffin. He closed his eyes and let the autocar close and fly him up to the megacity. The time that followed was made of many slivers of moments strung between a long, gray slurry of mundanity. The Hegemony trained their knights to be warriors and operatives par excellence -- as the unique powers of a Liminal Knight made them fit for singular purposes. They didn't serve as generals or warleaders -- their powers rarely could lead a battle, though some astounding Knights had shown the ability to influence tech across entire battlefields. In the close in, personal world of espionage and single combat, though? They could never be stopped.

Adoran slipped through the megacity, invisible to cameras and seen as nothing more than a maskless tourist. He kept his threshold blade concealed and drew only when lowlives tried to corner him in an allyway. And even railpistols and lasarms couldn't do much against a trained Liminal Knight. All Adoran had to do was focus and cause the guns to jam, their firing mechanisms failing, then step forward into the confused mass of hooligans. Lop off an arm or two and let them bleed out from shock. Then, hurry on before he could be found and questioned.

Other than engagements like that, what Adoran found was clear: The whole world had been taken and shook, like a dog with its jaws on a toy. He heard rumors and whispers about some great upheaval, a freedom from an ancient curse. He heard stories of vampires freed from playacting and allowed to use their powers for more than simple aggrandizement. Names were shared: Arthur F and Omega and, finally, someone named Venn. Venn...

Why was that name so familiar?

"I don't know," Swift said to him through his hand comp as he ducked into an alleyway. "She..." She paused. "One of my brothers may have heard of her."

Adoran frowned. "Didn't you say most of your brothers are mad? That's why they don't speak to their chosen Knights?"

"Mad is...an extreme word," Swift said, her voice quiet. "And...we all speak to our Knights. We just do so differently. I chose this method because, well, I like teasing you."

"Thanks," Adoran said, his lips quirking in a smile. He glanced at the end of the alleyway, to make sure no one had come up to listen in. He looked back at the hand comp. "But can you ask your fellows?"

"I can," she said. Then, sounding disgusted, she added: "But don't get your hopes up."

"Ahh..." Adoran sighed, then pocketed his handcomp.

A day later, Adoran found another such moment -- he tracked down the mysterious Omega via isolating his holovid interviews with local newsnets. He was some kind of celebrity -- a recently freed gladiator or race-car driver. The distinction seemed murky and Adoran didn't have the time or the inclination to puzzle out the difference. He was living in an apartment in one of the central towers of the megacity, and Adoran came to the door without showing up on a single camera. He rapped on the door casually, and when the door opened, he found that Omega was a pasty faced teenager with a really terrible mustache. Interesting -- considering the fact the images had shown a middle aged man with a fearsome mustache.

"Yeah?" the teen asked.

Adoran smiled. "You're not Omega."

The teen's eyes widened. "I...w-what!?" He looked shocked -- and Adoran narrowed his eyes. Looking past the teen, he could see the room was stuffed with comptech, wired together in the crude way that non-Knights did when they tried to recreate a miracle. He could see holographic projectors and communication systems, wired into the wall grid. He smirked, looking at the teen.

"You're scamming people, aren't you?" he asked.

"I never said Omega lives here!" the teen squeaked. Adoran noticed that he actually had fangs, making his actual age somewhat hard to place.

Adoran shook his head. "Listen, I don't care if you're scamming people or not. I'm leaving this planet once I get my information," he shifted his robes, showing his dangling threshold blade. The teen's eyes widened and he squeaked.

"W-What do you need to know? Sir? Sire?" He whispered.

"I need to know: Where is the Threshold Knight who helped Omega blow all this open," Adoran murmured. "I know that there was a Liminl Knight involved. Does anyone know where she was gone -- how much ice her ship got?"

"I...I can get that information!" The teen said. "I'm the best hacker on the planet! I can get the registry up! Everything!" He bobbed his head.

Adoran smiled.

In his head, Swift whispered: Oh, I could have done that.

The teen turned as Adoran whispered. "Would you?"

You have to work for some things, Adoran, honestly.

***

The Stiletto emerged from it's jump on fire and bleeding. Quah screamed, holding a fire extinguisher up to the bit of console that poured smoke. "Ahhhh!" She kicked at the floor, trying to stamp out more fires at her feet.

So. Okay. She had maybe overestimated her ice armor and efficiency routines slightly.

This was fine. Everything was fine.

Two sooty, smoke choked hours later, Quah waved her hand under her nose and squirted some water down her throat with a drink bulb. "Okay! We're good!" she said, nodding. A shower of sparks exploded from the console above her head and she squeaked, lifting her arm to try and block it all. She glared at the console. In the back of her head, she heard the thundering baseline of a song coming up. She hummed and bobbed from side to side. Was it a dramatic song? A scary song? Or was it going to be that smooth baseline that came with fucking?

The song pitched into the quiet dun dunnn of drama.

Quah winced.

She didn't like dramatic music.

Her fingers and her hair and her toes tapped buttons as she contorted herself into a pretzel, trying to get every system she could get back online...well, online. She held her threshold blade in her teeth, fabricating what spare parts she could see she replaced wires, slammed motherboards back into place, yanked out slagged actuators. She had just finished bringing the forward scanner's back online when the detection apparatus pinged -- a pair of sleek, dart-like ships were approaching on an open burn.

"Friends?" Quah asked.

The music switched to the mournful base of eminent action.

"Okay, I guess it's not," she said, shaking her head. Thanks to her observations of Adoran and Thale and other Knights, she knew that every Knight communed with the Machine differently. She also knew that most of them didn't seem to realize that the others did. Everyone had a subconscious drive towards secrecy and mysticism. She'd been wondering for a while if it had something to do with how the Machines interacted with one another. Maybe they-

The music got more intense and she saw that the com light was blinking. She shook her head, then tapped it on.

"...to unidentified ship," a stern female voice came through the coms. "Turn your IFF on and explain where the fuck you're from."

Quah grinned. These two ships were intrasystem cutters -- designed to never leave their solar system. They had to be so confused to see a corvette like her appearing seemingly from nowhere. She wondered how long it'd take them to recognize that she'd come from the sun -- that she was in an FTL capable stealth corvette. She focused and the scanners fed information directly into her brain. She knew, as certainty as she knew every inch of Thale's glorious cock, that both ships were painted green and had the six headed snake on the gold field of the Parliamentarian Monarchy of Hydra.

"Repeat, this is the PMHN Barracuda to unidentified ship. Turn your IFF on and explain yourself or we will be forced to disable you, board you and interrogate you face to face."

Quah made a little tisking sound. "This is the HSS or...HSN...I can't remember, it's a Hegemonic ship. Uh, I'm Enriquah. Hegemonic Knight." She looked for the IFF. Then she frowned. She didn't have an IFF that worked after that multi-jump. The music got more tense.

"Hegemonic ship? Hegemonic Knight? Are you expecting us to buy that story?" The PMHN Barracuda's captain's voice was filled with so much sheer scorn that Quah felt her paint blistering. "Here's what I think. You're a smuggler from the Belt trying to bring in an untaxed load of monopoles and you think you can brazen your way past their majesty's navy!"

"Absolutely not!" Quah said. "I really actually am a Hegemonic Knight."

A targeting laser bounced off the hull and the music went from dramatic to dangerous. Quah realized, suddenly, that the Parlimentarian Monarchy of Hydra, nominal ally, had a very trigger happy navy. They, after all, sat between a tombworld and Atom -- and that wasn't even getting into their own healthy in-cluster criminal elements. And here was Quah: Appearing from nowhere in a ship without IFF, with a hull that was designed to reflect away laser light and radar. She looked an awful lot like a smuggler.

Quah hit the thrust.

The distant Barracuda's nose flared with a pinprick of light. The railgun slug that shot past Quah's ass was invisible and would never be picked up on scanners again -- zipping merrily into the great black yonder. But Quah felt her hair prickling. And she snarled. "You fired on a Hegemonic ship. Big fucking mistake!" She started to flip switches and grabbed onto the forward controls. The Stiletto burned forward and she felt the internal magazines siphoning antiprotons into some fabbed up torpedoes. She flicked her thumbs along the backs of the joysticks.

Acceleration slammed her into her couch as she burned and, with a thought, focused the agrav systems in her ship to create a gravity well to the zenith of her ship. This gave her an erratic, curving course that would throw the targeting computers of the Hydra ships for just enough of a loop for her to place her nose flush with the other Hydra ship -- the unnamed one. Her thumbs stabbed down on the triggers and the coaxial claveguns opened up. While they lacked the range and accuracy of a railgun, their mass reactive shells were far more effective at what astros called 'misting.'

The shells stitched across the ship. Their impact sites were tiny holes -- but the real damage came when they exploded inside the ship. The Hydra naval vessel came apart like a can of tinfoil tossed into the Grinder.

The music got triumphant.

Quah laughed, cutting acceleration and shifting the gravity well to above her, changing her trajectory as the Barracuda tried to bring her nose to bear. The Barracuda stopped trying for an engine shot or anything remotely elegant. Instead, they dropped a quartet of MIAVs. Each one was basically a hundred thrusters, each with a micro-nuke tip, in a huge can. The cans opened and space became rich with thrust plumes as the missiles shot towards Quah's ship.

Quah shook her head. "Shoulda listened," she muttered. Her mind reached out and she triggered each nuclear device. The micro-nukes were made to be tamperproof and dirt simple. But they were good against human hackers, human infosec attacks, human malware. They didn't have a chance against a Liminal Knight. Each micro-nuke exploded while only a few hundred meters from the Barracuda. Normally, a nuke in space was as dangerous as a buzz saw. In that you had to mash your face into it for it to be a risk. Most of the energy was lost in the hard vacuum, burning off into the wild yonder without having an atmosphere to transmit the shockwave.

But four hundred micro-nukes, even if each was barely a quarter of the old city scorchers used in the Dawn Age's big war, was still enough energy to leave the Barracuda glowing a cherry red and bubbling into slag.

The music slowly became somber as Quah leaned back in her seat. She bit her lip.

"...could I have handled that better?" She muttered to herself. "Ugh!" She slapped her palm to her face. "I didn't even get to use the frigging torpedoes!"

Sneaking to the surface of Hydra's main planet took Quah an annoying amount of time. The PMH Navy didn't take the destruction of two of their ships nor the deaths of twenty four of their servicewomen laying down. They sent their battleships -- such as they were -- out to begin beating space. Normally, detecting anything in space was as easy as looking. But by the time they started to sweep for Quah, she was deep in a meditative trance. Her mind felt the thrumming, spiked comnets that stretched throughout the solar system, coordinating ground tracking radar, LADAR stations, sniffer sat, and the various telescopes and detectors of the battleships and skiffs and cutters and carriers and drone ships.

It took every iota of her concentration to subtly edit their perceptions. Her ship? Just a standard rockhopper, cruising through the system towards the primary habitable planet of Mycenaea. By the time her corvette was actually cruising through the upper atmosphere, she was soaked in sweat and her bones ached. But she had done it. She landed without getting any more heat on her.

Of course, she had also landed in a frigging swamp.

"Uuuuuugh!" Quah groaned as she stood at the edge of the Stiletto's cockpit, her hair wiggling to keep herself balanced. The swamp wasn't the worst swamp she had ever seen. It just stank like old socks and was a few hundred miles from any kind of civilization. She put her hands on her hips and scowled as she considered taking off, risking being spotted, and flew to an actual starport. As she put that thought in her head, a small raft, poled by a pair of men in reed vests and loincloths, started to float by the wing. The water had to be less than a foot, maybe two feet, deep, but that was enough distance for the two to pole on by as if they were floating.

"That's a big rock," one said, in a drawling accent.

"Hey!" the other said, waving at Quah.

Quah waved. "Hello, hayseeds! Is there a fast, clandestine way to get out of the swamp and to the capital? To, uh..." She wracked her head. "Argo?"

"We don't do much with the Argofolks," the one who had greeted her said.

"Where'd that rock come from?" the other asked, scratching his head.

"It's not a rock, Fiko," the more intelligent one said. "That there's a spaceship."

"Ahhh!" Fiko nodded. "Why's it not in space?"

Quah seriously considered stealing the raft.

In the end, the two rafters pointed her in the direction of guided boat tours of the swamps. There, Quah borrowed a hoverboat and promised to the terrified tourists and stunned tour guide that she'd radio in their location later. She waved, sheathed her threshold blade, and then kicked the engine on. The boat wasn't the best out there, but it could handle the mostly flat plains that stretched between Argo and the swamps. Quah admired the towns she flew past -- the Parliamentarian Monarchy of Hydra had done a fairly good job with their planet.

Considering the human track record with functioning ecosystems and long term inhabitation, that was no mean feat. She flew past large farms, tended to by men and women and automatons. She flew past towns and villages set on railroad lines, and occasionally saw the high speed trains that transported goods and people across the world. She sometimes saw areoplanes flying by overhead, but none seemed particularly interested in a hover skiff.

As she let her own powers control the vehicle, she practiced with her blade. She twirled. She thrust. She tried to get her surprise to work.

All in all, it was a nice trip!

And when she came to Argo, she took a moment to admire the city. It was situated on the banks of two massive rivers, which cut through the delta valley towards the oceans that bracketed Mycenaea's primary continent. The edge of the city had seven large castles, each one looking like it had been done in a different Dawn Age style. European fortifications, old American esoterica, Japanese woodwork, Chinese earthen forts. The works. The city itself was all deliberately futurist. It hearkened to a kind of optimistic curvature that hadn't ever really existed in anything save imagination and deliberate callback. The buildings were arrayed on grids, and the traffic was mostly foot and public -- maglev trains ran through the whole place.

"Nice planet," Quah said, cheerfully.

And, as if she had timed it deliberately, she saw the shuttle breaking through the clouds. Her eyes narrowed as a wan, ominous tune began to play in the back of her head. The shuttle roared past where she was standing, about three kilometers above her head. It zipped by so fast that she barely had time to read the lettering on the wings.

Her teeth skimmed back.

The Tiamat's shuttle landed in the central spaceport of Argo.

"And there we go," she murmured, stepping off the skiff. She drew her threshold blade and twirled it slowly in her hands. Then she turned and started to hack the skiff apart. She needed one of the agrav engines, a battery, one of the com-cams. She lashed them all together with some simple adhesive, then loaded a program in. She had the rough build and shape of 101g from Thale's helmet camera. While the girl had been in a mask, she still had a specific body type. And she threw in a few other identification marks she knew that her drone could look for. A recently implanted acceleration shunt. A haze of remedial medical nano.

And...

Of course...

A threshold blade.

The makeshift drone buzzed as it zoomed towards the city and Quah rolled her shoulder. She stepped away from the skiff, twirling her threshold blade in a slow, steady loop. She let it grow to staff sized, loading up the most recent iteration of her program. She had a feeling. This would work. She knew it. She twirled the staff around her, then swung it towards the skiff, holding it tight. She felt heat pulse through the blade -- and then the skiff flipped into the air, as if it had been kicked by a giant. It didn't quite leave the ground, but it did smash onto its back with a roar of twisted metal.

Quah's grin was fierce.

The miniaturized agrav emitters fucking worked! She checked her staff's power supply and saw it was nearly tapped. She began to swing it around and saw that the movement was building the batteries back up. She nodded. "Perfect!"

She walked towards the city, humming happily as she recharged her staff. Now she just needed to pick one last thing. Hegemonic standard coloration was so boring. But she'd abandoned the midnight black coloration while Thale fucked her, and it felt equally as boring to rush back to that. She clicked her tongue -- and then an idea struck her.

"Red!" She crooned. "Red and black! Everyone loves red and black!"

TO BE CONTINUED