“So the big one is Fenrothyne, and the other one is Thenrothyne?” Elara asked over her shoulder as her and Voy moved through a different set of service tunnels on their way back from seeing Undahiil.
“Yep. Had those names before ascension too, so not a House Bolund tradition as far as I’m aware,” Voy thought back to a number of similar conversations he’d had on Anitora. The two Bolunds never gave the same story on why their names were like that. Thenrothyne talked back then and seemed to get a kick out of the confusion.
True to her word Elara had waited to start bombarding him with questions until after the visit with Undahiil. With that single criteria met, she began her questions in earnest. Voy expected a pointed series of hard hitters, things meant to chip away at the impediments to trust between them. Instead it had been largely conversational topics, if he didn’t know better it almost seemed lighthearted.
In turn he’d been able to ask her some of his own until the two were simply talking without any apparent higher objective. Neither objected to the slowing of their pace through the back routes and dark tunnels of the Auric’s innards, occasionally stopping and lowering their voices to avoid detection from one of Hembrandt’s men. Elara explained that he’d been hot tempered since the attack and that it would be far wiser to wait until he cooled off. Thus they continued their game of cat-and-mouse, slinking through the hidden portions of the ship in a less than direct route back to their quarters.
“You weren’t part of any cohort?” Voy asked her while they waited in a ventilation tunnel for a group to pass by in the corridor below. She’d been talking about growing up on Allodoa.
“I didn’t even know what a ‘cohort’ was until I was, like, ten,” she grinned playfully, “you might say I was a ‘one woman band’.” Voy laughed through his nose.
“So how’d you end up here? On the Auric Wind, I mean,” Voy gestured to the air around him as he spoke. Elara leaned just over the edge of a vent grate to check the space below.
“Admiral Hembrandt offered to take me on for a few weeks once I was old enough to behave myself,” she eased back out of view. “I loved it. It was the first time I’d been off Allodoa and the first time I got to do something as a kartorim instead of hiding all the time.” Voy nodded sympathetically, his own heart echoed a similar sentiment when he read Avaron’s orders.
“Alright they’re gone lets drop,” needles ran down Voy’s spine as she kicked the grate open and hopped down, there was no way that went unheard. With a resigned shrug Voy leapt down from the vent after her. He landed in a crouch and made a note of how they’d entered the vent through a floor grate a ways back. Now, from the same ventilation duct, they fell from the ceiling. Engineering was never Voy’s primary interest, Samuine was the tinkerer between them, but he was gaining a level of unexpected appreciation for the interconnectivity of the Auric Wind’s systems.
Breaking the hold the ship briefly held on his attention Voy noticed Elara had not led them back to the quarters section of the ship. Surrounding him now was the most ornately furnished marble and gold cafeteria kitchen he’d ever seen, which meant something considering he grew up on Thurgia’s capitol world. Darkness enveloped the space, it was ‘night’ time on the ship and as such most nonessential facilities were dormant and would remain so until artificial sunlight poured through the halls as gave rise to fabricated daytime.
Rumbling surfaced in Voy’s stomach the moment he realized that one; he was in in a kitchen, and two; he’d not eaten since coming aboard from Treffel. This was not as much an issue for a kartorim as it was for a baseline human, to varying degrees kartorim were able to fuel their metabolisms by drawing from the same well that powered their energy lances and carapace comms, but it was not pleasant and it had ill-defined limits. Surging hunger pangs told Voy he’d arrived at his.
“Oh good, I was worried you might not be hungry,” Voy looked over to Elara as she spoke, and not a moment to soon. In a blur of motion he swung his hand out and caught an orange she had tossed his way. It squished slightly in his hand without it’s skin breaking. Peeling it one handed proved inconvenient, but not impossible. The food in his hand amplified hunger’s already growing sway on him. Scarfing it down was an almost instinctive reaction. It was the best orange he’d ever eaten, in that moment he may have ranked it as once of the best foods he’d ever had the privilege of consuming.
“Didn’t realize how hungry I was,” Voy said as he licked the last of the orange off his finger. His cheeks reddened when he noticed Elara leaned back against one of the kitchen counters looking toward him. Her own orange was barely tapped. “Thanks,” he offered sheepishly. She giggled and popped an orange slice into her mouth.
“Regen hunger sucks, be glad you only had one witness,” she threw him another orange, which he caught readily. He repeated the same process as before, slowed only slightly now that he was aware he had an audience. “I woke up around first meal time, threw down a full plate in a couple seconds with the whole dining area watching on,” she paused to chew, “couple of newer guys think kartorim eat like that all the time now. Who knows, maybe they do.”
“Some do, depends on how busy they are. Avaron made time to eat with me at a normal pace most days,” Voy finished the last of his second orange and tossed the peels into a nearby organic waste chute. Elara’s face soured and she looked down at her orange before her eyes narrowed and she snapped back up to him.
“What do you mean Avaron ate with you?” There was venom in her tone, but to Voy it didn’t seem to be meant for him. Then again, he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t.
“I mean we both sat down and ate food at the same time, what are you getting at?” Voy tried to disarm the brewing tension with a smile. She scowled at him.
“Avaron is the reason we’re running from thurgians on our way to save thurgians!” she raised her voice and gestured to Voy’s missing left arm. “The guy who cut off your arm did so on his order! The people who died on this ship are dead because that tyrant refuses to handle the Apoctillon himself and refuses to let anyone else do it for him because Redeemer forbid anyone do anything without big red’s freaking stamp of approval on their forehead!” She was shouting now, her chest heaving not from exertion but resentment left too long without release. “And you’re telling me you know him personally!”
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Her words were hammer blows to the calm that had begun to settle over him. Voy’s mouth hung open, his chest grew tight. He swallowed, but his mouth and throat remained dry and rigid. He was here on Avaron’s orders, they were legitimate. They had to be, Samuine had withdrawn when he saw them.
“How can you say that? Avaron is our protector, our leader! He built Thurgia to keep everyone, us included, safe from the madness beyond the Buffer! He rules because no one else can, I’ve stood beside him when the burden of his station wore him down, when lives were a currency he alone had the authority to spend or save!” Voy pleaded with surprised desperation. “He raised me into what I am! I know better than anyone how good a man he is! I’m here because of his orders, they were in his handwriting! Whatever is going on with thurgian forces chasing us has nothing to do with him, there’s something else going on!”
Elara’s green eyes drilled into him. Voy wasn’t sure what to say, what to do. How could she hold such sentiments about the High Marshall and yet be on a ship serving his will? How could she not see the absurdity in claiming he was trying to stop them from saving the nation he built? Several seconds of silence passed between them.
“I’ll prove it to you. When Samuine retreated it was because I gave him the orders I had from Avaron. He’s going to get proof that Avaron wouldn’t try to stop us, that its someone else. You’ll see, I promise.” Elara softened her gaze and leaned back against the kitchen counter and let out a tired sigh.
“Whatever,” she finished her orange and threw the peel into the disposal chute. “I’m going to bed. I trust you can get back to your room?” Voy nodded somberly. “Sleep tight, and pray that you and your murderous friend are right.” She walked out of the kitchen and into the dining space before finally heading out into the corridor where some of Hembrandt’s men were passing by. There was a brief exchange about Hembrandt wanting to see her before she walked out of view and earshot with them.
Voy hopped back into the vent, no longer unwilling to talk to Hembrandt but feeling acutely unwelcome around Elara at the moment. He figured he knew the way back well enough, but he prepared mentally for a few wrong turns along the way back to his quarters.
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Samuine sat alone in the Merriment’s captain’s quarters. The unarmored kartorim hunched over a workbench he’d had delivered up from one of the vessel’s on board machine shops so he could work in the solitude of his own room. This was done both for secrecy regarding the nature of his labors and the respite of a quiet moment to himself. His carapace was fully retracted and he sat in loose fitting sleepwear.
It was the middle of the ship’s night cycle and the only noise was the distance hum of the star shackle generators toward the ship’s rear. The only illumination in the room was the desk lamp that cast a cone of light down onto his work. He’d tied his hair back into a bun to keep it free of his tools. A set of adjustable zoom goggles clicked automatically as they synchronized their zoom level with his neurological activity, aiding his eyes intuitively to magnify whatever he focused on.
A bundled mess of wires, screws, plates, gears, and circuit boards sat suspended from the tabletop by a narrow frame vice. Small dexterity filaments worked out from the fingers of specialized gloves Samuine wore on his hands. The tiny metal prehensile cables acted as extreme finger extensions and allowed him to work directly on and in spaces far too small for his fleshy digits to reach.
The object in question was an assemblage of random bits and pieces scavenged from around the ship, largely spare parts no one would miss. He had the lay and command of the ship and could’ve acquired everything legitimately, save for one part he did not have the legal right to interfere with. At the center of the tangle of various components sat an oblong, onyx colored oval of polished stone. It was suspended by dozens of small spindly supports with two wire ports drilled into it that remained yet vacant.
Samuine worked tirelessly, his dexfils whipped around the workbench grabbing and rearranging parts before affixing them to the device he was building. Some of the filaments were dedicated to singular tasks, soldering or screwing things into place with inhuman precision and speed. A smile graced his face as he worked, satisfaction bubbling up as the machine on his worktable transformed from clutter and concept into physical being.
This was what it meant to be a member of House Tyvess. War and battle were a part of any kartorim’s existence, but for the apex craftsmen of Thurgia the battle ground was the assessment of their work more so than the work they strove for innately. His wings had been born from that type of thinking, and they sat on a rack in his room freshly polished and repaired from the damage Voy had inflicted on them.
What lay before him now was an altogether different machine, one he could never be openly proud of, but he nonetheless gleaned joy from its gradual manifestation. It almost offset the dire news he was about to deliver to Voy. He tried not to dwell too heavily upon it or its ramifications. Voy was loyal, if misguided, and that would surely be enough to set things right.
Scans had been taken of the order scroll Voy passed to him on the Auric Wind. These scans were then sent over high-net directly to Donsayette, the crown world for House Tyvess, for review. Given the importance of its author it came as no surprise to Samuine that Braem quickly became involved. Samuine had braced himself for all the eventualities he could think of, from forged documents to inter-house plotting, but he had not expected the information Braem relayed back to him.
Aesthetics had been forgone for this device given its nature, he needed it done as quickly as he could manage. The Merriment was designed for pursuit and it hadn’t taken long for the chase to be resumed once the other kartorim heard Braem’s findings. At last he came upon the final step of his creation’s assembly; plugging the delicate low mass wiring into the gravitic lens at the device’s center.
The task was an extremely delicate one. A single misstep would see the lens sullied and no better than an unusually heavy rock. The difficulty in finding a replacement notwithstanding, he’d have a whole new mess of problems if it came to light he was performing unauthorized work with a gravitic lens. The onicium that bestowed their unique properties was an entirely synthetic element and as such was immensely expensive to produce. Luckily dexfils were designed with such tasks in mind. Remaining absolutely still Samuine willed the tendrils at the ends of his fingers forward, guiding impossibly thin lines of silky cable from the contraption’s innards toward the cable ports in the stone.
Sweat beaded on his forehead but he remained still as he connected the first threads into the ports, then again with the next ones, and the ones after until reflective strands by their dozens were seated into specific locations in the stone’s wire ports. A small indicator bulb on the device’s exterior began to blink orange, then green as the machine powered on for the first time. Samuine released the breath he’d been holding in and withdrew his dexfils. It was ready. He fastened a protective plate over the device’s remaining opening, clicking it into place before the dexfils in his gloves raced out and tightened it with screws.
Removing his gloves and goggles, Samuine picked up his finished high-net amplifier, a device that could make use of the un-space that bladeships dipped into for travel as a communication medium. Though fraught with risk to devices involved, it allowed for faster than light communication with nearly limitless range. Used in tandem with his helm comm it meant he could re-establish his link with Voy and talk through his helm as though they were on the same planet.
Equal measures of dread and joy washed over him. Catching up with his long lost friend was soured by the news he held about his supposed orders. Samuine extended his helm only and placed his hand on the smooth surface of the machine on his workbench.
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Voy had over-estimated his knowledge of the Auric’s hidden pathways. He’d managed to spin himself around in a pointless circle for nearly half an hour, but dammit he wasn’t going to just give up and take a normal route now. Besides, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to sleep. The nightmare he’d endured during his regen coma hung over him like a specter, every thought not distracted conjured up images of a world he didn’t know and a battle he had to prevent.
The living data he’d taken into himself from the vault was persistent in reminding him of the projection it had treated him to on the edge of death. In the darkness of a dusty vent shaft his mind seemed eager to play tricks on him, decorating the darkness in his peripheral vision with glimpses of the monster he’d seen, barely distinguished from the shadows save for its piercing red eyes. Perhaps it meant to strike fear into him, to spur him into action or inaction accordingly, but all it did was make him mad.
The command protocols were within him now, the mechanical army that marched behind the black kartorim couldn’t come to be unless Voy allowed it. He hadn’t even met this ‘Raikon’ yet, and he was already in a position of bargaining power. We shall see indeed, he thought as another phantom was dispelled by his direct gaze.
Suddenly a dull buzzing sensation began in the base of his neck. Voy hadn’t ever experienced it, but the same way one knows where to scratch to relieve an itch Voy knew he needed to extend his helm. He winced as the tide of razors crawled over his head and saw the green status indicator flash into being.
Samuine was contacting him.
