"We'll just continue. We need to get to the first chamber"
"But this place is all broken"
"Don't worry, it still works." She managed to extract a system status log from the ER-Madec. It was functional; this was critical infrastructure built with many redundancies. It should be self-repairing with its builder swarm, but that showed up as unavailable.
Liera hovered above the hole, then propelled her battle-frame across to the opposite side. The rest of the corridor appeared undamaged.
"I can fly now! This is nice!" Calan enjoyed this weightlessness. The average citizen born in a colony never had a reason to leave their planet unless their career necessitated it. Space travel was expensive, and visiting the orbit for fun was a privilege only a few enjoyed.
"It's better to walk" She engaged the mag pads. "You have more control that way"
As they reached the end of the corridor, it opened up to a massive room with pillars. Lights turned on as they stepped inside, and it was a complete mess yet again. All sorts of plates, wires, blocks, and pipes idled weightlessly. For every pillar that was standing, at least one other lay broken in several places.
“This place is just trash. Look how much there is”
“It is, we have to clear a path if we want to get through”
It was best not to make any sudden decisions. All the trash here seemed to be in the most stable state it could be in; the size of debris varied from a few centimeters to pillar chunks as heavy and large as a vehicle. This would be a nightmare to traverse through without a battle-frame.
Her intuition proved correct in the next second as Calan yelled out.
“There’s a dead man! Oh no!”
He noticed it as Liera cleared a hole through this mess as carefully as possible. There was a corpse nearby; a man wearing a spacesuit had been slammed to a pulp with a large metal chunk that came from a pillar. His dried blood colored all the nearby debris with a rusty red.
"What if that happens to me?" Calan exclaimed, horrified.
“It won't, you’re very heavy right now. You’re strong enough to just walk through" Liera used a huge metal plate to push all the debris ahead with the barrel of the gun. While they couldn't be crushed, the real risk was getting stuck. She picked the path with the least distribution of large debris. Towards the center of the room, the debris was smaller. Another man lay on the ground with a huge weapon next to him. His mag boots still held him to the floor, but his body was twisted in a spiral.
“EW!!”
“Close your eyes Calan” Liera told him.
This body was in a bad state, twisted in ways that broke most of the bones.
“What happened here? Why is everyone dead!” Calan cried.
“It’s fine, don't be afraid. Just give me a minute. Don't look, you're going to be upset about it”
Liera grabbed the body and rearranged it. She uprooted the man from his mag boots and flipped him toward her.
“It’s horrible!” Calan sneaked a peek and was jump-scared by the dead man's face in front of him. Liera checked his weapon as well. It was a cylinder as large as their own weapon—a shard launcher. That explained why the room was such a mess. This place was too confined to use such a shoulder-mounted weapon.
“Why is he looking at me like that!”
“You have to keep your eyes closed, Calan,” she warned him as she grabbed the man’s head with the battle-frame's claws. She saw something here that she needed a closer look to confirm. She made sure Calan closed his eyes and then bent the dead man’s head backward, opening his mouth. All his blood had dried and frozen while the resonator remained shut down.
While she didn't have any tools to differentiate blood from anything else, some of the stains were darker than blood. It was as black as tar.
In addition to that, small grey dots were frozen on the inner walls of his mouth.
Vervid
Commander Brenvalo's ship was crippled by a Klin shield pulse just past the Resonator, leaving him with only a single working thruster. Now caught in an uncontrollable spin, he could only hope his fleet would dispatch a rescue party, though it could take hours, or even years. Pinned beneath the collapsed debris of the command bridge, with his leg twisted and broken at the knee, he knew he wouldn't survive. The rapid rotation had also caused his gravity generator to malfunction, gluing him to the floor and preventing him from standing.
Those were his orders. He had four children with three different wives. His oldest children had birthed their own children just two years before. Disobeying orders because of his faith would destroy all their futures. Red Priestess or not, once he received the order, it was just another target to destroy. He was assured she would be vulnerable.
He knew enough about her. He knew she was on that cursed planet for repairs, and he knew she had her valuable biologics in the ship. If he destroyed her in this weakened state, it could take centuries for her to recover, and he would be long dead by the time she restarted from another soul backup. He had guarantees that he would face no immediate retribution. He also received a large sum of money and a property far from all this trouble to retire as soon as he played his part.
Even though he now lay pinned under rubble, he did everything right. This was the best strategy that he could come up with. He couldn't approach her with a large fleet. That would've made her actions even more unpredictable. He was in bigger trouble if she managed to escape the system. With his careful plan, he managed to separate her from her ship, making her that much weaker. The ship still had several of her backup souls; he had to get rid of it as fast as possible. The active soul in the battle-frame wasn't as big a threat if it was confined to the Resonator. They could take their time killing her there.
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Her ship decimated his interceptors by itself, leaving him in this deadly predicament. He'd underestimated what it could do even in its Priestess' absence.
He grabbed his sidearm from the hip holster. He had to end this painlessly before he lost consciousness and spun to eternity. His crushed leg would bleed him dry sooner rather than later, and he could already feel the numbness crawling up his spine. He didn't have hours to wait for rescue. At best, he had only minutes left to live.
Just when he placed the barrel of the gun on his temple, something loud crashed into his ship.
Almost instantly, the ship's rotation ceased. A chorus of groaning metal surrounded him as his ship came to a halt. Then the last few lights blinked out, plunging him into absolute darkness.
“H-help!” He screamed. “Help! I’m bleeding out!”
“Are you now?” The voice came from above. “That’s not the worst way to go”
A small ball with three spindly arms appeared before him. All three arms pointed glowing emitters at him, while a third circle on its face shined a flashlight on him.
“Welcome abroad again, High Commander” the ball sang. “You didn’t die when I killed you, this is so very unfortunate for you”
Brenvalo swung his sidearm wildly at the ball and missed every shot. Upon failing to kill this threat, he turned the gun back on his head and pulled the trigger.
“It’s too late for that" The ball mocked him from a dark corner as two laser beams decimated the shooting mechanism of the gun.
In the resonator, Liera made her way through the room full of debris and reached the terminal where different doors led to different chambers. All along the way, she found more and more evidence of vervid. Frozen tar with grey eggs stained the debris, the floor, and the walls.
“It looks like the fighting started here,” she told Calan. “This is the same thing that happened in your world"
"It's scary here too!” Calan agreed. He had inadvertently snuck some glances and saw the black tar on several corpses back in the room they came from. He remembered seeing that inside Linan’s mouth. He remembered the way that black paint stained his wound where he bit. “Is it going to come back!?"
“Looks like it can’t live when it’s too cold. It's all frozen and dead”
> L98 BFrame: movement detected
Liera turned to the direction the movement signature was detected. In heat vision, she saw a faint outline of a figure. The heat signature was much lower than that of a living person.
“Someone’s there!” Calan whispered, his heart racing.
”Show yourself!” Liera pointed the gun at the outline. “I can see you!”
The figure moved upon hearing her distorted voice. She noticed the twitching of its outline before it came into view.
"Please don't kill me!" The voice came from a man. He was down to his undergarments and mag boots and he walked with a slight limp. "Please don't kill me" he repeated, raising his hands.
The man was entirely blackened with tar. There was no part of his body that still retained any color that could be human. Even his sclera was black, and his eyes were dead and empty, grey circles without pupils.
"What's wrong with this guy!" Calan was instantly repulsed by what he saw before him. "He's crazy!"
"Please don't kill me!" the man said for the third time with no change in pitch, in the same pleading tone as before.
Liera knew he was gone and long dead, but she also knew how someone who knew him might struggle to finish him off. She placed the gun barrel on his chest. She could finish what his colleagues couldn't.
"Are you going to kill me?"
That was a question and he changed his tone.
Liera lowered her weapon, unsure if it was part of the mimicking or a genuine question from whatever was left of him.
"Tell me your name" She demanded, the simplest verbal test.
"Are you going to kill me?"
"I-is he stupid?" Calan whispered apprehensively.
"Please don't kill me"
"Tell me your name, or I will kill you" She placed the gun barrel on his chest again.
"I don't know my name" he replied. "Are you going to kill me?" he asked. "Please don't kill me"
This was beyond mimicking but less than human. She could kill him at any moment. She decided to test him further. Had the vervid evolved here much further than it had on the planet? The Resonator was abandoned for a long time. Brenvalo mentioned that it was only finished six years ago. This could be what happened to the crew that worked here.
"Where did you come from?" she asked. She kept her questions purposefully vague and simple.
"Please don't kill me. I was here. Are you going to kill me? I don't know my name"
"But how is he not frozen?" Calan asked. "He's not wearing any suit!"
"Good question, Calan"
"I was sleeping. I don't know my name. Are you going to kill me-"
Sleeping? Was he in some sort of stasis? That could be it. The resonator didn't have any life support systems. It only turned on when they arrived, and it hasn't even been long enough for the gradual increase in temperature to thaw the ice on corpses.
"Is there anyone else here?" She asked, pushing him with the gun. He was gradually moving forward with a blank expression.
"There is a tall man. I was sleeping. Are you going to kill me?"
Liera pushed the man with her gun. "Show me where"
"Are you going to kill me? I can take you. I was here. I was sleeping. Please don’t kill me"
Sineul dragged the helpless man along the corridors to the command bridge. He didn’t bother with any first aid. He didn’t intend to make his life any better. His flattened leg was cut off with the laser and cauterized. Brenvalo screamed until his voice cracked, and his face remained in a permanent expression of shock.
“Wh-why did you bring me here” He asked, trying to catch his breath as his amputated leg sent unbearable pain up his body.
“I’m trying to take down your big ship. I just needed a second opinion" Sineul dropped him at the screen. It displayed a zoomed-in picture of the destroyer that jumped here.
“Why aren’t they attacking? Why!!!” Brenvalo screamed, unable to contain his frustration.
“If you can’t be polite, I’ll take your other leg” Sineul pointed a low-powered laser at his good leg, just below the ankle. “….Slice by slice”
“No, wait! I apologize, please. I was just—” He pointed a trembling finger at the destroyer. “If you can see it like this, you’re in range, aren’t you?”
“I’m invisible”
“C-cloaking?” His face twisted.
“No, It's something else” Sineul dismissed him. “I want your opinion on this firing solution”
A new overlay fell over the image of the destroyer. It marked eight targets all across the middle section.
“I’m not telling you how to kill my people!”
“I think you will,” Sineul turned to him, this time without the threat of a laser. “Because each one of those targets has a warhead prepared for them. As it stands, they’re spread evenly. If I fire now, I don't know what will cause a chain reaction. At a minimum, everyone will die. You can change that if you can give me its layout"
“W-wait!” Brenvalo proceeded to hurriedly point out the thrusters and the command bridge of the destroyer. He circled three more points for disabling the weapon systems. This would still kill hundreds, but it was better than losing all.
“There is one more thing,” Sineul came up to him and placed an arm on the back of his neck. The other two arms held lasers trained on him. “This is the most unusual request. I want you to commission the manufacturing of a small boy”
“WHAT IS TH-“
“You will use your own identity, your own money. I’ve provided you the extracted genome, the manufacturing parameters and where to deliver it for pickup”
“Make a c-child!? What ungodly…!” Cloning was illegal as per AUM charter unless it was for organs for proven medical procedures. It fell under the controlled technology list with an 8+ severity rating. A full clone of a person was completely illegal and carried harsh sentences for all parties involved. Naturally, trafficking was a lucrative business, second only to illegal drugs. “They’ll destroy me! I-can’t! I won’t!”
Manufacturing a full clone of a child was as bad as it could get. There were very few good reasons to ever do it, and the reputation it carried was categorically worse than committing murder. This had the potential to end his career, ruin his life and soil the name of his entire lineage.
“W-what for! What is this for!” He yelled.
“You don’t need to know that. All 578 of your people will die if you refuse”
“A-aren’t you Red Sect Illuviets! This is against God!”
“That’s why you’re doing it. You acted against God when you decided to kill his Priestess. What’s one more? You’re going to hell anyway”