To Walk the Constellations Pt. 13

"Well, this is just overkill," the Hegemonic Knight said.

Techne shook her head, her arms tucked over her chest as she stood next to Meetra, with Rossk and Mal both crouched over a set of controls. The controls were all analog -- and they were of Mal's design, which was why several of them were located considerably lower than many humans would have put them. The control system, via simple copper cables and vacuum tubes that had been fabricated for this purpose, would send the command to fill the room with tanks of pressurized industrial waste byproducts.

Within the room, contained in two sets of chains and a straitjacket of solid steel, was the Hegemonic Knight. Several soldiers in primitive filter-masks , wearing dumb armor and holding weapons that might as well have been bolt action rifles, aimed weapons at her, their bodies crouched, their elbows resting on firing stoops. Their faces, behind the thick rubber and transparent plastic, were set and focused.

Techne tore her eyes from the secure room to Meetra. "What now?"

"We've got a hell of a bargaining chip in our hands," the Butcher of Malachite said, their voice soft. They rubbed their chin. "With the Praetor and the surviving Hegemonic troopers, and the Quantum Forge and now this woman? We can make some real demands of the Hegemony. Assuming, of course, they give a shit about their people."

"They don't," the Hegemonic Knight said, her voice only faintly muffled by the glass.

Meetra frowned. "How the fuck can she hear us, we're-" they snapped their head to glare at Techne.

Techne felt a creeping, crawling sensation tingle along her back. She scowled and stepped closer to the class. "Hey!" she said. "Get the fuck out of my head, you clown faced bitch!"

"Uh, you're the guy who chained up a perfectly valuable defector, so, I don't know why you're thinking I'm rude," the Hegemonic Knight said. "Also, stop thinking of me as 'the Hegemonic Knight.' My name is Enriquah. And I'm not a Hegemonic Knight anymore."

Mal shook his head. "That whole room should be a Faraday cage. Do you think a Faraday cage would stop her talents?"

"Maybe?" Rossk muttered. "But Venn was living with us for months, and I had the sensor suite on pretty much constantly, and I detected jack and shit." He shrugged. "Even when she was doing really, really, really spooky stuff. It just emerges from nothing."

Mal reached up to rub his jaw with one of his feet. "It has to be some kind of a quantum effect -- entanglement without contact. The same miracle that powers the Quantum Forge, but imprinted on a human being." He shook his head. "Jesus Christ."

"This is all very interesting, but it doesn't tell us if we can trust her," Meetra muttered.

"We could check her story," Rossk said, spinning on his chair and looking back at Meetra. "She says that the Hydra navy tried to kill her -- and tried to kill her real hard. Do we have any agents on Hydra?"

Meetra nodded. "Aye, we do. But their QE coms are down -- they used up the last of their kilobytes sending us the message about the Hydra fleet movement. It's gonna take us months to smuggle the reservoirs in." They scowled. "And the Quantum Forge will take even longer."

"I can help!" Enriquah called out.

Meetra closed their eyes. "Techne..."

Techne gritted her teeth. She wanted to help. She needed to help. Every second, Venn was being pushed closer and closer to Eudaimonia -- and who knew what torments those fuckers were doing to her on their stealth corvette. Two Hegemonic Knights, with every nasty tool and trick the Hegemony could provide, for months. Months! She started to pace back and forth in the room, shaking her head slowly. Enriquah cocked her head.

"You love her, don't you?" she asked, curiously.

Techne's cheeks heated. "She's my friend. I know that might be hard for you to get, you fucking fascist, but sometimes, people are friends," she said, turning to point her finger at Enriquah through the glass.

Enriquah opened her mouth -- as if to refute the point. Techne felt her stomach lurch as she realized just how naked she was before Enriquah. If she poked, who knew what fantasies she'd find on Techne's harddrive. Techne crossed her arms over her chest again and glared at her. She tried to think, as loudly as she could, about exactly what a bunch of industrial pollutants and clhroine would do to an organic set of lungs. Enriquah didn't flinch, but she did make a face. "Listen," she said. "You need to prove I'm not a spy. I need to not be chained up and get to see what my friend Thale's done to the QF. These are not mutually exclusive goals. You let me turn the QF on, and I can refill your agent's Q-bit tank in literal seconds." She wriggled in her restraints. "And we can get to the Venn rescuing!"

Meetra chewed their lip.

Mal glanced back at them, his hand resting on one of the controls to vent gas into the room. Just in case. Techne started to pace. But she was barely done with half of a set before Meetra gave a curt little nod. "Cut her loose," they said.

Enriquah dropped out of the restraints, which fell open with a clatter and clunk. As she stood, her incredibly long hair, which had been caught up in the chains as well, fanned outwards as if it was a set of tentacles, revealing that the tips of her hair had been gripping several sets of spindles -- and suspended between each spindle was the unmistakable, nearly invisible glimmer of monomolecular wire. The chains gleamed as they fell, mirror smooth surfaces shining where the monowire had cut. The soldiers stood, their weapons clattering as they angled their guns. Mal grabbed onto the control with both feet.

"Hold!" Meetra said, lifting their hand.

Enriquah blinked, dropping the spindles on the ground and stretching like a cat, her arms lifting above her head. "What?" she asked. "It'd have taken friggin' ages for you to cut me out. I was bored."

"Fucking Liminal Knights," Rossck muttered.

***

Meetra stepped between Techne and the door leading into the Quantum Forge. Techne knew what they were going to say before they said it. Somehow, it still cut like razor-wire. Meetra put their hand on Techne's shoulder and said: "Techne."

That was it. Just...Techne.

Techne scowled, then brushed their hand off. "Fine. Fine. I get it." She turned and started to stalk off. Meetra sighed -- then turned and headed back into the warren of tunnels that made up the base on Gem. The base had been crowded before, and busy before. But now it was positively abandoned. Most of the technicians and support staff were outside with their one river of mana, using the nanite forge to manufacture cheap habitats and food processing units for their sudden influx of prisoners. The Hegemony might have been experts at running prison camps -- and worse -- but the Alliance of Free Worlds had never needed to take care of this many prisoners before.

To call it a shit reward after the most significant victory that the Alliance had ever won was an understatement. Techne came to the small niche cabin that she had been given, then settled down inside of it. She looked up at the ceiling and brooded. And the quiet, whispering thoughts came back into her mind. Venn hadn't exactly been captured, had she? She'd been taken. Literally. In the Biblical sense. Taken by Thale.

Techne felt her guts -- simulated, mechanical guts, but guts none the less -- tighten. The feeling was so unsettling and alien that she had to toss and turn on the bed for a few moments before the name came to her mind.

She was jealous.

Techne scowled and grabbed onto her pillow, pressing her face into it. Her eyes closed and she tried to shut out the rest of the world. But her sleep cycles refused to engage. Human beings often had trouble sleeping -- it was a mark of good design that she could stay up, worrying. Worrying. Worrying. And when the worrying got too much, she tossed the pillow against the cave wall and stood. She might not be able to help Venn.

But she did have one other lady she loved who she could help.

***

The Tiamat hadn't landed gently on Gem. In fact, it had smeared itself across a hundred clicks of flat, silty ground. The only reason why there was a Tiamat at all was that her hull had been signed to survive plunging nose first into a star with nothing but gravitational shielding and ice armor to protect it. The ice armor had been ablated away during their pell mell rush to reach Gem -- even with the spindrive to make things a bit safer and a bit faster -- which meant the Tiamat had struck with nothing but her hull plating to protect her.

Several layers on the nose and nadier of the ship had been scraped completely apart by the friction of the last hundred kilometers of descent. Electrical scouring from the feedback cycles created by the gravitational wings and the atmosphere burned the edges of several sections of hull plating. The sublight engine nozzles had each fared the worst: Sheered by winds so fast and so hot that they made the metal glow a cherry red, they had been crumpled and compressed into jagged, metal flowers. They were normally retracted during the final plunge into most stars.

All in all, the kilometer long, conical sundiver looked like she'd never fly again.

But Techne knew better.

She sent the com request for a cargo hauler and, after a short check in with the Alliance's command structure, got it. The hauler arrived on autopilot a few minutes later, trundling up to the side of the Tiamat in the vast, baking desert of Gem. Techne stood from where she had been sheltering under the shade cast by her mighty ship, and hopped into the hauler, then set a course for the Victrix Imperiata.

White and red dust kicked up behind the hauler as it picked up speed. The wheels translated every rock and divot in the plains into a light rocking motion in the rectangular cabin that Techne perched in, her feet resting on the dash. She wiggled her silvery toes and focused only on the nitty gritty of the next few days of hard work. That made it easier to not think about Enriquah. Or Thale. Or Venn.

Past her toes, she saw it: The heaping mountain of the downed Victrix. Through the pitted and dust smeared windshield of the cargo hauler, the Victrix looked like nothing more than a pyramid built to some ancient, pagan god. Ants swarmed across it -- hundreds of Alliance techs, with laser cutters and plasma drills and shaped charges. Cranes and moving machines were beginning to sprout out of the desert like some kind of techno-organic growth too hard to be killed by salt and the scouring wind. Her hauler parked next to a set of other haulers. Each hauler was stuffed to the brim with guns and armor pieces, and techs on break sat in the shade cast by their haulers, with drinks and rations, laughing and chatting.

Techne stepped out of her hauler and got a wolf whistle from one of the haulers -- a girl with hair the color of deep space, complete with nebula highlights. Techne flipped her off with a grin, walking backwards towards the salvage sites.

The foreman was easy enough to find. She just needed to see which tech was yelling the loudest. That proved to be man with pale green skin and a large, industrial looking cybernetic arm that had been attached right to the trunk of his spine. The arm itself was currently holding a large sheet of metal which served as a makeshift sunshade, and the foreman was bellowing into a com unit. "I don't care how much antimatter you think you can safely get. We're not here to fuck around with a half smashed antimatter storage tank. I want you to get the whole tank out of there so we can fucking jet it into space and detonate it five AU from the planet. Or do you want this whole work site to become a glassy crater, you stupid piece of shit?" He paused. "Yeah, I know what antimatter goes for, but we can't spend the credits if we're dead."

He closed the com with a flick of his wrist, then pocketed it -- turning to face Techne. "What do-" he blinked. "Oh! You're Techne, right? The girl who brought us the Liminal Knight?" he grinned, showing off metal plated teeth. "Good fucking work with that. We're gonna be hacking this fucker to pieces for years." He nodded to the Victrix.

Techne chuckled. "About that..." She grinned. "Think I can borrow the secondary thrust nozzles?"

Two dozen kilometers away, a single miscalculation in thrust had left three micrograms of antiprotons from Atom City in the tanks of the Tiamat. The whole idea behind their hasty landing was to leave the tanks completely empty, so that when the ship landed and dragged itself across the deserts of Gem, it wouldn't run the risk of a tank breach. Even with the crash, the tanks had held up remarkably well. Situated in the core of the ship, the magnetic bottles were powered by nearly solid-state batteries with a shelf life measured in decades. They could take and had taken a pounding.

But there were limits.

"There are some that should fit your diver," the foreman said, nodding. "I'll detatch some of my free techs on it. You're going after Lady Venn, huh?"

Techne grinned. A shiver of pride ran along her back -- like being associated with Venn left a bit of that nobleness shining off on her. "Damn straight," she said, quietly.

The foreman started bellowing out names. Techs sprang to their feet.

A single component of the Tiamat's magnetic bottle, stressed beyond what anything the designers had expected, gave way. A cascade failure that would have been prevented by secondary systems run off the primary power reactor shot by in a single second. When the cascade hit its climax, the sliver of antiprotons left in the tank were released.

Techne was plotting out which systems to overhaul when she gained her second shadow. The white flare of light exploded in the corner of her eye, and then hot wind that came blowing to her kicked up dust throughout the entire worksite. Crane cables bowed and twisted, while a nearly subliminal rumble buzzed through the soles of her silvery feet. She turned and gaped at the mushroom cloud that billowed above her precious ship. The sound faded, but the cloud continued to roil up into the sky.

The foreman put it as succinctly as Techne could imagine.

"Fuck."

***

Techne was getting drunk in the Alliance commissary when Mal found her. Techne didn't and couldn't drink liquors made for humans, but she could accept hits from a narcoalgorithm generator. The bartender, a grizzled human with sandy blond hair and a trifecta of ocular implants, had raised three eyebrows at her when she'd requested a simmed whiskey. But now, she was feeling nicely sloshed and melancholic.

What was her life?

Two centuries of whoring, smuggling, shipping freight, and the most important thing in her life had been finding some backwoods bumpkin who was the Chosen One. Then everything can go up in smoke because of a single cracked capacitor and now she was...what? Barely better than a groundling. No. Worse. Groundlings didn't know what they were missing. She glared at her hands and wished she had a half-full glass to imagine.

Mal thumped slowly up behind her -- she could see him in the mirror set behind the bottles that lined the crude shelves of the rough cut cavern that was the Alliance bar on gem. Techne sullenly lifted a finger. "Hit me," she said.

"Haven't you had enough, Techne?" the bartender asked.

"I ain't flyin again today," Techne said, scowling.

The bartender thumbed down the toggle on the narcoalgorthm generator and the simulated whiskey went down her throat with all the pleasure of a sandpaper that was on fire. Mal hesitated, then leaned over the counter. His thoughtful brows furrowed. "Captain, this isn't even good whiskey!"

"I don't deserve good whiskey..." Techne mumbled, laying her head down on the counter.

Mal swung himself into the seat next to her and patted her shoulder with one broad hand. "That's not so," he said, gently. "There was nothing you could have done. I'm just glad she decided to blow while you were twenty clicks away and Rossck and I were underground."

Techne whimpered. "My ship..." She whispered. "First Venn, now my ship..." She closed her eyes. "You should just...leave me here, Mal, before I lose you too..." She mumbled.

"Okay, that's enough of that." Mal said, reaching across the counter. He snatched the narcoalgorithm generator from the bartender's hands, which provoked a quick 'hey!' from the three eyed man. Mal worked with a hand and a foot as his other hand continued to pat Techne's shoulder. He ran the next program and Techne's back jolted straight upright. Her eyes widened and then she clapped her hands onto her temples.

"Jesus Christ's tits, what the fuck was that?" She gasped out.

"A cure," Mal said, his voice dry. "Listen, Techne, we need you on deck for this."

Techne scowled at him. "For what?"

"For an absolutely insane plan to rescue Venn, kill the Emperor, and defeat the Hegemony in one blow," Mal said, casually.

Techne slid her tongue along the inside of her teeth. The throbbing in her head faded and her simulated migraine slipped into memory, then faded. She nodded. "All right. I'm in." She grinned at Mal, then grabbed his hand and squeezed.

***

Meetra, Rossk, Mal, Techne, and several members of the Alliance's upper echelon all sat in one room with a Liminal Knight who, until very recently, had been working for the Hegemony. Techne glanced at the several soldiers in low tech gear and wished that she could trust them to have any chance against a Liminal Knight. Even one without their threshold blade. Enriquah didn't help Techne's nerves, since she seemed entirely unconcerned about the high caliber, fully automatic rifles that weren't quite aimed at her.

"Okay," she said, spreading her red and black fingers wide, her hair coiling up behind her head like four restive snakes. "Currently, the problem is that you guys want to rescue your Liminal Knight from Lord Drak's ship. But Lord Drak is on a stealth corvette with a spindrive and the entire logistic apparatus of the Hegemony at his beck and call. Worse, the only FLT capable ships on this planet are your fast pass attack force, which are all aging sundivers with jackdrives, the Victrix Imperiata, which is crashed and currently being hacked into pieces by your techs, and the Tiamat, which is a crater!"

Techne growled softly. Enriquah coughed. "Uh, right! You could hop onto your fast pass ships and go up the Chain. But your jackdrives mean each jump is a solo jump and you'll have to re-ice and re-fuel with your own credits and time and, oh, every other world along the way has a Hegemonic naval staging post with at least one or two worldkillers, and the Hydra Navy is moving in to support, so they'll have plenty of smaller ships that are all expert smuggler catchers and..." She trailed off. "Well, basically, it'll be like climbing an actual Chain, but people are shooting at you and the chain is made of snakes."

"What's the plan, Quah?" Meetra asked, their voice tight.

"Right!" Enriquah snapped her fingers. "You have a river of mana. Or, in other words, a Domain era nanotech fabrication system with most of the DRM ripped out. It can produce basically anything you guys need, with the limiting factor being intake and output. You also have the Quantum Forge, a Domain era machine that...honestly, I don't even begin to know how it works. What it does do though, is create entangled quantum bits without requiring locality. Meaning..." She tilted her head and the holographic projector in the center of the room turned on, displaying the Chain. Gem and Eudaimonia both flared on the long line of interconnected worlds. "You can create a Q-bit here, and a Q-bit here, without needing to walk the whole Chain."