To Walk the Constellations Pt. 09

"You fucking what!?" Techne spluttered.

"You're not allowed to be shock, considering how you got your ship, Techne," the gold girl said.

"How'd she get the ship?" I asked.

"She stole it. From me." The gold girl looked right at me. Then she blinked, her camera eyes whirring. "Welly welly welly well, who is this?"

Techne gestured to me. "Lady Venn of Stumble," she said. Then she swung her hand to the girl. "This is my sister, Arete VonDynne."

Arete swept her arm out in a bow and ducked her head down. "Baron Administrator Arete VonDynne. For the past three years, I've been running Atom City and a member of the Alliance of Free Planets." She stood and smiled. "Now, lets get you a tour."

SISTERS

"Wait, your name is VonDynne?" I asked, hissing to Techne as Arete led us through the grand promenades. The sky overhead looked blue and cloudy. No idea how, but it did make it easier to forget I was in a bubble of contained oxygen in the pocket of a magnetosphere created by two volcanic moons orbiting a planet big enough to wrestle Jove.

"Yeah, course it is," Techne said.

"I didn't know you had a last name," I whispered.

"Uh, why wouldn't I?" Techne asked. "I'm a person, aren't I?"

"I don't!" I felt a bit whiny, flushing as I looked at my feet. We were walking along cobblestones, past green fields. A discus flew through the air, to be caught by a exigenic canind's back tentacles, then carried excitedly back to the silver man who had tossed it.

"Sure you do, Venn," Techne said, patting my shoulder. "Venn of Stumble."

"That's not a name," I said.

"Well, maybe we'll find out who your parents were," she said, shrugging a shoulder. "Someone had to leave you at the Machine Temple back on Stumble."

I felt an excited hitch in my guts at that thought. I sat up and walked a bit more perky, smiling as Arete gestured with one hand. "And that's the forum, where we debate, discuss things. There's the Talon – that's where the AP ship captains are trained. Ever seen a flight of Talon frigates on fast burn maneuvers through a solar system, Knight Venn?"

"No," I said, stumbling a bit. "Wait, you know I'm a...uh..."

"I've heard of you," she said, cheerfully. "At least three sundivers brought word of your adventures on Masque Macabre. It was like the legends of Wotan Hohmann. You even have the same blade color, don't you?"

My remaining hand drifted to the hilt of my threshold blade and I nodded a bit. "Yeah," I said. "Red as ruby."

"I must see it later," Arete said. "And...can I ask..." She turned, her cape swishing. She chewed her gold knuckle, then pointed at my stump. "Was that lost in a duel?" Her eye shone with excitement and I felt my guts turn over as a tiny, sheepish smile spread across my face. Now that the duel was over and the red faced Hegemonic Knight was splattered at the bottom of a bottomless pit, her double-edged blade could be thought about with excitement, not fear-sweat. My hand reached up, touching the rim of my arm, not quite grazing into the fuzzy nanite cloud that had gotten about three inches away from the old stump's starting point.

I was the legend now, huh? Not just listening to them. I was making them.

A PRINCELY OFFER

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "I won."

"Well, we can't allow you to simply regrow a flesh arm," Arete said, shaking her head. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

I blanched. "What's wrong with a flesh arm?"

"They take days to regrow, lose their strength as you age, lack augmentations, are full of pain receptors you can't turn off, have joints that bend in only one direction. They're dreadful," Arete said, shaking her head. "Please, consider it a gift." Seeing my expression, she smiled. "At least consider it?"

But she was wrong. I wasn't hesitant because the idea of being part machine made me squirming and icky. It meant I was just that much closer to being what the legends said Knights were – the best of them were auged to hell, right? But did I deserve that kind of step? I had gotten my arm sliced off in a fight I'd barely won because of tricks and good luck. I chewed my lip, but before I could say one way or the other, Techne slid her arm around my shoulders.

"Venn, Atom City has some of the best augmentations out there," she said.

"It's true," Mal said, nodding. "I mean, their bioscience is great as well, if you don't mind me tooting my own horn."

He puffed up his great big barrel chest and, behind him, Rossk made a quick jerking off gesture, which made me clap my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling hard. I nodded, then smiled at Arete, who swept us off with a long legged stride. In a whirl of a moment, we'd all arrived at a sleek building that she described as their primary medtech center. We were ushered past an awed front desk, and I peeked through door after door as Arete strutted along. The rooms were full of tanks of blue liquid, and they seemed to be mostly treating people riddled with cancers – popping them off with lasers and regrowing flesh with focused medichines.

Seeing my wondering look, Arete said: "Most of them are the naval crews – our engines burn hard and hot and, well, some of them soak down a lot of rads during orbital transference. The best solution for our Van Allen belts is speed – but patrolling for pirates and Hegemonic infiltration makes speed only half the help it ought to be. So, we have some very good cancer wards."

In the transition of a single corridor, we went from cancer wards to augmentation labs. Here, people without legs and without arms and without entire organs were recovering, with shining chrome. I could feel the ping of their tech, echoing to me. It made my stump tingle.

Finally, we got to an empty room – and I swear, Arete had called ahead, because there was a doctor waiting for me.

He was a fish.

DR. SEASONG AND THE CABINET OF SINISTER ARMS

"Dr. Seasong," the fish squeaked, his own augmented arm reaching out for a shake. I looked at him with wide, wide eyes. His kind of fish had gone extinct on Stumble – choked on plastics and boiled in acid water. But I'd seen pictures and heard old stories. He was about as long as I was tall, narrow and curved like a banana, with a bottle shaped nose, and bright, intelligent eyes. There were no gills, and he seemed to breathe just fine as he was – slung in a harness that had four doggy legs and four human arms attached to it at various points, allowing him to move and operate with ease. "And you are Lady Venn of Stumble. I've never met a Liminal Knight before."

I tried to bow, curtsy, and shake his hand all at once and ended up headbutting him.

When I got seated, Dr. Seasong – still chittering his laughter – swung a cabinet over as Mel, Rossk and Techne craned their heads around. The cabinet opened up and revealed itself to be a projection system. "Baron Administrator VonDynne has authorized a full suite of militarized arms – as full as we can offer. Several of the Domain era arms that we have loaded in the river of mana are locked behind DRM – but, well, that's nothing we can do anything about!" He said, tapping the button, showing a black and gold arm that looked as elegant as it was deadly – specifications spooling off on the side. "Now, all augmentations are going to be limited by the attach point..."

I leaned forward, my brow furrowing. There were at least five arms that were locked off from the list – buried under deep cryptography. Dr. Seasong started to chitter out details about the ten arms that I could select from the list – and his chitter sunk into the background. I breathed in, settled myself, then reached out with my free hand. My palms flared and Dr. Seasong paused in his speaking. "Uh, what-" he started.

The screen flickered. Sparks flew from the side of the cabinet. I clenched my hand, then yanked back – physically. I grunted and felt sweat beading on my forehead as I felt the crypto programs in my palm, fizzling and turning to dust. I grinned and slumped a bit.

"There," I said, panting. "I want the D9-0A agrav impeller syntharm with the 1.2 gigawatt battery and the laser finger."

The entire room gaped at me.

"What?" I asked.

RE-ARMED

Watching a river of mana go was something new for me. I'd heard about the tiny factories stuffed of nanomachines, but I'd never seen one working. The mana flowed in brilliant orange flows, glowing red along the edges as they layered and folded material at lightning fast speed. Laser light flickered, providing directed power to the more juice-chugging nanites. They flickered and popped in glittering patterns, sweeping up. Down. Up. Down. It was hypnotic. And in a shockingly short time, the river had printed out my new arm.

I'd customized it to look like my arm. So, the final paint job looked squishy and soft, and settled with a slick, squelching noise that might have been entirely imaginary. While the river worked, Dr. Seasong did his work. The view wasn't physical, see.

Dr. Seasong had put me under.

But I wasn't under.

I was floating through the hospital security systems. I wasn't sure how I'd done it – just...I'd just...done it. I could peer through the cameras. Watching my own surgery wasn't fun – especially not after Dr. Seasong started to strap on bone enhancements and muscle growth and deeper rooted attachments into the shoulder, so I'd be able to use the enhanced strength of the chosen arm without, um, dying.

The operation took an hour, followed up by a rapid healing process – hastened by nanites and Dr. Seasong's expertise.

Over that hour, I'd tried a few explorations of the comptech that I had found myself in, but I hadn't wanted to go beyond the hospital. But just being in the hospital had given me so many interesting things to peer through. Old systems, long left dormant, existed. There were medichines designed to alter brain chemistry and neural pathways – to prune someone into a monomaniac focused on a singular task – that hadn't been used for centuries. Their code had laid in the vault of storage that felt musty and aged and locked away, and peering into it felt like opening up a corpse storage. There were programs for autophagic memetic viruses someone had stashed in a wall vault, which were coded for use in 'the war' with date codes even older than the focusing medichines. And there were tools for anagathic drugs that were running at 0.5% efficiency due to the hackwork program the medtechs were running. I tried teasing that rate up, but had only gotten to 0.8% before I'd gotten tugged back to my body.

When I opened my eyes, I could immediately feel the arm.

It wasn't just a weight on my shoulder.

It was also a HUD on my eyeballs.

SYNTHTECH WELCOMES YOU, NEW USER!

Blipping before my iris was bright, green text: Synthtech Welcomes you, new user, to the first day of the rest of your militech life!

A chip tune played in my ear and my brow furrowed as a cheerful, feminine voice said: "Welcome [Venn of Stumble] to the interface of your Synthtech D9-0A agrav impeller combat syntharm! I am your helpful tutorial sprite. You may refer to me as [Thale]! This name has been picked from your neural patterns. Do you like it?"

"Absolutely unnot!" I squeaked.

"Understood!" The infuriating voice said. "Moving on: Your Synthtech Class 4 Combat Arm has the following important specifications. The grip strength is on par with a Yalenet 908 suit of combat powered armor. In lay terms, you are now capable of bending high tensile steel, punching through diamondplast glass, and arm wrestling every ogre type genetrooper! Quite remarkable!"

I lifted my hand. It looked normal. My HUD shifted, circling my pointer finger.

"This is your combat laser finger, loaded with a high energy UV laser, with a fifty kilometer range in a vacuum. Within an atmosphere, range can be between five hundred to five meters, depending upon particulate conditions. It can be fired in pulsed or beam modes, and will draw power from the implanted power source here." A circle appeared near my breast. "This power source uses zero point energy field manipulations – sourcing infinite clean energy, limited only by local space time fluctuations. Now, on to the agrav impeller shield array-"

The door to my recovery ward opened and Techne and Mal and Rossk bustled in. I hissed, mentally: Shut the fuck up!

"Shutting tutorial systems down. Have a nice day and enjoy your Synthtech appendage!" The chipper voice chirruped. Then I felt the voice shutting down, closing up, and vanishing. I mentally groaned. I had wanted it to shut up for now.

Then Mal was leaning forward, his eyes wide behind his glasses. "Good heavens!" he said. "That arm looks identical to your old one!"

I wiggled the fingers, then grinned, trying to focus on the positive. "Yeah." I gulped. "Uh, it can bend high tensile steel, though."

Mal and Rossk, who had both looked like they had wanted to shake my hand, or prod it, or something, all leaned back a bit. Techne, though, grinned and grabbed a metal fork off the small tray of food I'd completely missed – too distracted by chipper voices in my hand – and placed it on my palm. I squeezed the fork in half with a soft squeak.

"Awesome!" Techne laughed.

"This is going to make..." I stopped. Immediately. I was not going to mention the first thing I'd thought of. The thing involving Thale. And. Um. Bits. And. Uh. I shook my head, then scrambled to my feet. My hand, I noticed, didn't actually squeeze the edge of my metal bed apart as I stood. It just acted like a normal human hand – like I had a mental switch I could flick to move it between strength settings. That was a good thing to have. Once I was on my feet, I adjusted my lab coat. "Lets tour more!"

NICE THINGS

Here's the thing about nice things.

They're languid and they're slow and they're relaxing. But they zoom by. It was as if I had blinked and the tour was over. Arete had shown us where the gardens were, showed us where the zero gravity spinball courts were. She'd taken us to a spinball game and we had all cheered as the balls were shot through the hoops and the automated attack-sphere had knocked armored players about like pins. She'd taken us to the dinner, where the 0.1% of the native Atom ecology that could be eaten was cooked for us and brought out in miniature agrav bowls that simulated the cloudy upper atmosphere of the gas giant. We plucked fried flight-balls out of the holographically projected environment and crunched them and tasted the exotic flavor of animals that had evolved on a world of endless wind and an eternal drop below them.

And then Arete had taken us to the great big apartments – the mushroom shaped spires that thrust from the side of Atom City, with windows that looked out at Atom itself, shaded in violets and ochers and thrumming lightning from their borealis. There, we'd gotten to lounge around and delay meeting with the Alliance representative – a representative that Techne clearly didn't want to talk about.

Before I knew it, the two days of nice things had gone.

And I got woke by the dream.

THE WAKING

It wasn't a dream like the times with Thale.

It was...more like a flash. A single, terrifying flash. A lightning bolt in the darkness. A shadow, then a golden sweep, then pain, and then I sat up, gasping heavily. My heart hammered a million miles an hour in the gloriously appointed apartment. The window showed the moonlet of Romulus, and I could see several of the equatorial volcanoes were spewing thin streamers of sulfur – thin because of distance, immense because of scale.

I couldn't sleep.

I tried. I tried every trick I could. I laid back and closed my eyes. I meditated. I paced. The only thing I didn't try was jilling myself – if only because there was no mood for it. There was just the creepy, crawling sense of something being wrong.

Finally, I shook my head. "Fuck this."

I threw on a white tunic, strapped my threshold blade to my hip, and tugged on my shoes, then crept out. The door opened with a silent whisper, and I focused – and the house security didn't chime or alert anyone. No need to wake anyone up.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

I let my feet carry me through the night life of Atom City. The apartment's front door led to an elevator that led to the green topside. Here, the sky showed the true night above Atom City, and the stars and the gas giant both loomed above me. Vast. I shivered as I walked, my feet pressing to grass that seemed damp with dew. There were a few people out – several astronomers lugging a telescope for peeping up at the heavens. A student, hand in hand with another student. Two older gentlepeople walking their exigenic felines on leashes, the felines' heads flaring open like flowers, exposing their scent receptors and whuffling up the night air.

My feet led me past all them and to the gazebo that sat outside of the Talon training facility. I'd planned to walk past it – but I saw that there was someone standing in the center of the gazebo. Their palms were pressed together and they wore a flowing robe. Their hair was purple and tied back in a long ponytail – but their face and their body hovered somewhere between masculine and feminine. Somehow, looking at them, the only pronoun that came to mind was...they. Them. Their.

They were beautiful. But...looking at them from a distance, I could also feel a deep, abiding sadness. It almost started to hurt me, even from a distance.

"Can I help you?" They asked – their voice was smooth.

I blanched. "I, uh, no. Yes. No!" I shook my head.

They turned to face me. Then, smiling, they said: "Ah...Knight Venn."

I blinked, feeling real dumb. "You know me?" I asked.

"To be quite fair, I believe most people on Atom City would know you by now," they said, then gestured me forward. "Come into the light. I want to see your face without needing augmentations."

I gulped. This was feeling sketchy...but...

I stepped into the pool of light projected by the gazebo. The androgene nodded as she looked me over, their lips pursed. "I can see why Captain VonDynne wanted to keep you away from me..." They shook their head. That sadness in their eyes grew deeper. My eyes widened.

"Y...you're the Butcher of Malachite..." I breathed.

The Butcher inclined their head.

THE BUTCHER

I sat down on the steps that led from the edge of the gazebo to the middle of it. My arm looped around my knees and I shook my head slowly. "Y-You don't look like someone I'd call the Butcher of...anything..." I bit my lip. I wanted to say they looked pretty. Soft. They smiled at me.

"You can call me Meetra Haro," they said.

I nodded. "Meetra. Haro! General Haro!" I stood up, then, fumbling and trying to salute as best as I know.

"Please, please. I'm not in uniform," Meetra said. Then, with a smile, they added. "And it's...Admiral Haro."

I closed my eyes, then slapped my palm over my face. Fucking smooth, Venn. Smooth.

Meetra sat next to me. Their lips quirked up in a smile – but even while smiling, they still seemed so sad. "So, you're the last, best hope of the resistance," she said, shaking her head. "A single liminal knight seems a small thing. But I have seen what the Hegemonic Knights can do, when they are not resisted..."

I gulped, my hand going to my new left arm. I rubbed it. "Yeah. But there have to be others who resist. There are other Liminal Knights who hate the Hegemony."

Meetra shook her head. "I've never heard of any. But the Chain is long, and the Hegemony does try to keep a great deal of secrets locked away."