To Walk the Constellations Pt. 08

"Praetor Theodosius, you have made the grave mistake of assuming my utter and complete contempt for you is some kind of weakness." Thale shoved him up more, using the wall to support a great deal of Theodosius weight. "Do not make that mistake again, or I will snap your neck, take your ship, and I promise you. The Emperor would not give a single, solitary blink before promoting First Officer Galliard to your place."

Theodosius clutched at his throat, his eyes bugging. The crew gaped at him. Even the shocktroopers were frozen in place.

"Do. You. Understand?" Thale growled.

Theodosius nodded, making a mute, gabbling noise.

Thale opened his fingers. Theodosius collapsed onto the still smoking communications console. Thale turned and stalked from the room, drawing his threshold blade. The shocktrooper snapped attention to when he walked past. Thale focused – and the elevator system of the ship shifted. People who were waiting for their elevators blinked in confusion as their ETA arrivals slewed and shifted, numbers changing as he rerouted every shaft and connection junction. He stepped into one of the high speed tubes, normally reserved for damage control teams, and cricked his neck as the elevator door shut and the tube whined, electromagnetic accelerators kicking on, emergency agrav generators smoothing the inertia.

The doors hissed open with a click and whirr and Thale stepped out, yanking his cape from his shoulders. He walked past a tech, who blinked at him, then came to the railing that looked out over the hotlab that contained the Quantum Forge. He grabbed onto the railing, then hooked his threshold blade on the edge. Programmer-Archaeologist Ho, who had been standing on the catwalk and was holding a tablet in his hands, looked over at him. "Uh, Lord Drak?" he asked.

Thale swung himself over the railing and zipped down to the floor of the hot lab. He jerked the cable that he had spooled out back into his blade, then turned to face the Quantum Forge. He strode towards it, his feet stomping on the ground. He snarled as he slammed the blade into the Forge – the interface physical and direct. He let the blade hook into his nerves – nanites sliding into his body, attaching to him, squeezing to him. The connection was not as muffled and pillow-like as the first connection had been. Instead, it was as fierce and intense as if he was the Forge. His nerves burned as he felt the DRM burning and blazing through his body as he touched the programming. Before, he had used his force of will.

Now?

He used every bit of anger he had. Every iota of pure fury. It exploded through him and he twisted, then jerked backwards. It was a nearly physical motion as he gripped onto the programming language – which shattered under his fingertips, turning into a powdered mass of bits and bytes. He staggered away from the Forge, panting heavily. The Forge glowed and then settled into a pale blue color. Thale snarled.

"Lock functionality to my genecode and voice print," Drak said, his voice husky. "Use personal Machine ciphers, with secondary functionality locked to Programmer-Archaeologist Gibson Ho." He looked back up at the hanging catwalk. "You can explore those secondary functions. But replication functions are mine. Tell Theodosius that. Tell him that when he bitches to you."

"I-" Ho stammered.

"I liked you Ho," Thale said, turning and then firing his grappling hook – formatting his blade to fire it. It whisked him back up to the catwalk. He landed with a click and clatter of metal. He rolled his shoulder, then sheathed his blade. "This should mean that Theodosius won't throw you out an airlock to spite me."

Ho gaped at him.

Thale walked past him and, once more, the security systems of the Victrix responded to him. The ship had been made to resist a Liminal Knight's powers – but Thale had lived aboard the Victrix for years. And he knew how to speak to each of the individual components, rather than simply try to work through the entire apparatus of the comptech that threaded through the ship. Doors hissed open and he emerged into the yawning shuttle bay that was located in the belly of the Victrix.

Thale was greeted by two dozen Shocktroops.

And...

He shook his head slowly.

"Theodosius really has no idea, does he?" he asked, his voice a soft rumble as he looked at the squads of Shocktroopers. They had their rifles cradled in their arms – and their power armor gleamed brightly in the shuttlebay lights. He waved his hand and every suit of armor whirred and clanked as the artificial muscle fibers and servos triggered at once. They went soaring off to the side, skidding and crashing onto the ground. They tumbled. They rolled. They cried out in fear and shock as Thale strode forward, his cape snapping behind him.

A shocktrooper managed to get to his feet, dragging his rifle up. It fired and the frangible slug buried itself in the far wall of the room - missing Thale by a good two feet. Adjusting the aim had been pathetically easy.

The ship he approached was his – the grav slipship. It required the least amount of preparation, and as Thale sat in it, he heard a communication, crackling through the console.

"Thale, you little mutant shit!" Theodosius growled. "I will have you shot for this! I will railgun your ship into shreds. I will-"

Thale shut off the communication with a thought, then leaned back. He closed his eyes as he adjusted the acceleration curve of his shuttle. He knew the upper limits of his tolerance. He'd get to Mycenaea within a few days, with plenty of time to spare before his shuttle's water and rations ran out. Then it was a simple matter of sweeping the planet and finding Quah's corvette. A corvette with stealth systems and a FTL drive. A corvette that could get him to Atom.

Only once the shuttle was in motion did he allow himself to grieve. Only once he was accelerating, when the tears were whisked away by G-forces, did he allow himself to cry. But he knew, smoldering in his breast...

He was going to find Quah's killer. And he was going to butcher them.

And there wasn't a damn thing Theodosius could do about it.

***

Theodosius rubbed at his throat.

He smirked, slightly.

"When will communication be online again soon?" he asked, his voice raspy. The techs that had hurried onto the bridge were looking at the console, clucking under their breath as they leaned forward. One of them rapped the edge of the console.

"I have no idea how, in De's name, this fucker managed that," he said. "I've heard Liminal Knights are nearly magic, but I had no idea. Every single safety feature on this thing exploded at the same second, you know?"

"How long before we can resume communications with the damn Hydra fleet!" Theodosius snapped, then reached down and adjusted his collar. He tried to stand a bit straighter, but the impact of his back against his own bridge's screen left his whole spine feeling like it was one huge bruise. He winced slightly and fought through the pain.

"Back up communications should be online in five minutes," the tech said, nodding.

The elevator leading onto the bridge hissed open and Ho emerged. As usual, Ho looked like a pathetic waste of flesh who disgraced his uniform every day he wasn't slaving away in the ice-gangs. Theo's lips curled as he watched Ho sidling onto the bridge. "Sergeant Matoi's entire platoon have at least one broken bone each," Ho said, sounding a bit uncertain. "But Lord Drak has managed to utterly rip apart a DRM created by one of the Machines. So." He coughed. "What exactly happened?"

Theo's eyes gleamed. "Exactly as planned," he said, casually, turning to face the screen. "I knew all that spoiled brat needed was the proper motivation. Now, once he's done with his tant-" He stopped as a silvery sphere shot out of the shuttle bay. It vanished at the ludicrous speed that all objects in space did, especially when accelerating rapidly. He blinked slightly. "Where the bloody hell is he going?"

"I don't know," Ho said. "B-But he, uh, he locked the higher level functionality of the Quantum Forge to himself."

Theo felt his sense of confidence shake slightly. "He..." He turned to face Ho. "He did what?"

"We're not going to be able to access any functions beyond what we've unlocked with my permissions," Ho said, nervously.

Theo's eyes widened. "That little shit." He snarled.

"Captain," the ensign at the astrosensory array spoke up. "We've charted Lord Drak's course. He's heading for Mycenaea."

Theo frowned. "This..." His eyes widened. Then he grabbed onto the tech who was hunched over the console. "Get the damn communication tightbeam online! Now! Now!"

The tech blinked at him. "A-Aye, sir," he said, sounding a bit uncertain. But he bent over the task and began working at roughly the same speed he had before. Ho watched this little exchange – and Theo could see him trying to piece the plot together. He scowled at Ho.

"Back to your lab, Ho," he said.

Ho shrugged, then turned to go.

After an agonizing length of time later, the tightbeam was brought back online. Theo retired to his offices. He pulled each camera from the wall, fishing out even the secret cameras that the Intelligence Service had placed under the bed. Once he was certain that every comptech in the room was blind, deaf and mute, he picked up his communication transmitter and unfolded the targeting system. He felt sweat bead on his forehead.

If that mutant freak heard even a whisper of this...

Impossible. It was a tightbeam. Not even a Liminal Knight could snoop on a tightbeam laser, not without being between the laser and its target.

Even so, Theo let out a soft prayer to the Emperor, to the true god that he worshiped, before he spoke into the communicator. It took every iota of his willpower to not speak in a whisper, as if he was afraid of being overheard. He, instead, declared his intentions. Loudly. Without shame.

"Tie off the loose end, Magistrate Kells. Praetor Theodosius out."

***

Pain.

Darkness.

Irritation.

Danger – the music was low and throbbing and beat with a constant pulse. The music spoke of danger and hunters.

Quah opened her eye a crack and hissed softly. Her head pounded in time with the music, and her eyes opened in a quiet room, lit only by the wan light of a green moon. This cast everything in a sickly hue – a sickly hue for a sickly mood. Her toes were numb. So were her legs. So was her entire bottom half. She half closed one eye, then swung her head around – and heard the soft sound of a voice murmuring beyond the door.

"Seriously? We can't use a gun?"

"Haven't you seen the movies?" the other voice hissed.

Ah.

Someone was coming to kill her. Quah closed her eyes and felt the comptech of the hospital. She peered through a camera and saw the two men who had come to kill her were in hospital scrubs and nurse uniforms. They had the bracelet computers that nurses used, but their faces immediately popped up on the Hydraese facial recognition server as being two members of the Hydra Special Forces. Which meant they were highly loyal, highly trained, and likely operating under the orders of some mucky muck a few chains higher than their precious Queens.

Which meant the Hegemony had sent someone to kill her.

Uuuugh.

That was so fucking annoying. Quah sighed and swam through the compnets and found one of the automated robots that was being used to run maint on the systems in the hospital. She merged to it with her mind and found that it had a multitool that could be used to administer emergency drugs. The locomotion system was a simple set of ducted fans and the poor man's version of an agrav emitter: Hyperlight construction and micro-vac balloons. It couldn't do ninety degree turns as sharply as an agrav drone could.

But it'd work.

"Those are just movies, man," the other operator hissed back.

"Liminal Knights can make a gun explode in your hand. We're doing this how we were told, and that's final," the first operative said, holding up a small awl, which he gripped with the casual ease of someone who had used it to bore out someone's brain more than once. He didn't even notice the drone whisking along at floor level until it slammed a lethal level of sedatives into his veins with the multitool. He opened his mouth – then crumpled. The other man drew his pistol. Quah was seriously considering jamming it, but...honestly, the two could have done with less movies. Their pistols were all solid components, without a single bit of comptech in them. She couldn't have influenced them with her powers.

So, instead, she just shot the drone forward and injected the next jolt of sedatives into him. The drone was built to handle dozens of patients before being reloaded. It had been a little tricky to get the safety systems to not stop her from injecting the amount required to take the two operatives out...but there wasn't much a Liminal Knight couldn't do with a program made by humans.

She opened her eyes and then accessed the computers. And there was her threshold blade – locked up in a vault, three blocks away in a secure hot lab. She turned off several cameras, simulated a call to a security desk, and had just enough time to trigger her threshold blade. The blade sliced through the vault with a monomolecular tip and, normally, she'd have grown little spiderlegs to get it running over.

But that new Liminal Knight had had a neat trick.

Five minutes later, her sword smashed through the window with a clatter of crunching glass. Quah caught it with her hair, then dragged herself to a sitting position. She pressed the tip of the threshold blade into her belly. She found the wound and closed her eyes. Formatting the threshold blade to emit nano. She trusted her own sword to Hydra's useless backwards tech. She hissed as she felt sensation buzzing through her. Her toes came to life, first. She wriggled them, then leaned slowly back into her hair.

"Okay," she said, trying to sound chipper.

She dragged herself to her feet...and in the end, needed to keep her hair hooked on the ceiling light fixture. She walked/swung to the door, then hit on the idea to use her threshold blade's charge to drop her weight to half its current state with a bubble of agrav fields. This let her walk/swing a bit faster. She got to the end of the corridor of the hospital before she slapped the side of her head. "Right!" She said – then immediately shut down the power grid to everything but the emergency life support gear. Then she triggered police alerts across the entire city of Argo.

In the chaos, getting out of the hospital was child's play.

The best thing?

Her hoverskiff was where she had parked it. The fact she had blanked it out of the security network did help, and Quah could rest as the skiff hovered into the air, then emerged from the shadows of the dock on the port side of Argo. She lapsed in and out of sleep as her skiff cut through the night. The stars swirled overhead. She felt dizzy. She throbbed. And then, suddenly, a roar exploded through her ears, jerking her upright. She blinked, then saw that a bright light was sweeping over head. Hot air blew against her face and the skiff shuddered to the left.

In the haze of confusion that followed being awakened, Quah spent a few moments looking up, even as the streak drew itself through the sky, then faded, and her ears stopped ringing.

Then it hit her.

"...some asshole..." She whispered, her voice raspy. "Stole my fucking ship."