Chapter 65: Chips And Lies

The white bandage hid Aoi’s swollen left eye, but her good one looked straight down into Ren’s hollow unblinking face.

She looked at the sharp line of his jaw, the jaw he’d gotten from their father, the same face that used to grin at her across the tatami in their grandmother’s house in Kyoto before the world burned away.

She looked at the pomade still holding his hair in place even now, and the tailored collar of his tunic soaked black, and the hand flung out beside him with its fingers curled around nothing.

The tears she’d shed on the deck of the Wanderer-7 had all been cried out of her.

What was left was dry and cold, burned down to the bitter truth of what the two of them had built between them over ten years of neglect and guilt and pride.

’You were my little brother,’ she thought. ’And you would have sold every one of us...’

She remembered him at seven, crying because a crow had stolen his rice ball, and at fifteen, slamming the door of their apartment so hard the calendar fell off the wall.

She stood there long enough that Camila whispered her name over the comm-link, very softly.

Her hand lifted toward his face to close his eyes... and stopped a few centimeters short before slowly coming back down to her side.

"Goodbye, Ren," Aoi whispered into her helmet, her voice flat and steady and final as a spade striking dirt.

She turned her back on him and faced the forward viewports with her boots clicking across the deck, and she didn’t look down at him again.

Behind them all stood Chloe.

She held the composite crowbar loosely in her right hand, her black suit pristine and her green eyes bright and clear behind her visor, and she looked at Ren’s floating intestines and Voss’s shredded neck and the back of Dekker’s skull sticking out of the deck with the calm indifference of someone looking at broken furniture.

To her they were dangerous pests that had tried to hurt Leo, and she had crushed them under her heel like roaches in a hallway, and that was all there was to it.

She stepped over a floating droplet of blood without breaking stride, and her attention was already drifting toward the darker corridors beyond the bridge.

"We didn’t come here to mourn carcasses," Elena said, her high clipped voice cutting through the heavy silence on the comm-link.

She stepped around the crushed pilot’s chair toward the main structural bulkhead that separated the command deck from the raider’s spinal corridor.

She knelt on one knee and pressed both gloved palms flat against the cold unpainted slate of the floor plates.

CLANK!

Elena closed her eyes.

She let go of the room around her, slowing her breathing and letting the refined frequency of her Mechanical Attunement surge down through the fibers of her gloves into the metal.

HUMMMMM!

A thin line creased between her brows as the strain of it climbed up her arms, and the slate under her hands woke up.

It bloomed open in her mind as a vast sprawling web of resonance, hundreds of overlapping frequencies racing through the raider’s ninety-meter skeleton, and through her talent the whole ship became a living metal organism where every broken weld and severed line and warped beam sang its own distinct note of pain.

...To her left, the port drive was a shattered silent hole, humming with the cold dead stillness of sheared titanium.

Forward, the bow frames rang with the high tight strain of unvented pressure, and somewhere after the starboard drive turned over in a slow sleepy rumble.

She could feel the rest of it too, the lathes in a machine shop on the deck below humming clean and true, the heavy fuel vats aft still sloshing with a leftover reserve, the cold dense mass of the armor plates clamped along the ventral flank... all of it waiting to be taken.

Then, deep in the lower mid-deck, three levels down along the central keel... she felt it.

It was a deep magnetic thrum, a heavy pulse that ran through the main longitudinal frames with the steady artificial feeling of a logic manifold, still beating in the dark like a second heart.

’There you are,’ she thought.

Elena opened her eyes, and her pale blue irises gleamed with cold focused certainty behind her visor.

"The intelligence core is on Sub-Deck Three," she reported as she rose smoothly to her feet. "Directly under the main avionics junction along the keel... Its network took heavy feedback when Chloe smashed the consoles up here, but the chassis is intact. Its power relay is stuck in an emergency loop."

"Starboard drive?" Harper asked.

"Idling and undamaged." Elena glanced at her. "The port drive is scrap."

"Turrets?" Jin-Ah asked quietly. "Anything armed?"

"Nothing live," Elena said. "Everything with a trigger on this ship is cold..."

"Lead the way," Harper grunted, shifting the torch in her grip.

They moved off the bridge in a tight cautious formation through the narrow low-ceilinged corridors of the Black Kite.

The raider’s insides were harsher and more brutal than the clean blue lines of the Wanderer-7.

The bulkheads were made of unpolished slate-composite plates scarred with rough field welds and exposed hydraulic lines that dripped pale yellow lubricant into the dark, and the bare metal floors and dim red lighting and complete absence of anything personal made it feel like walking through the inside of a gun.

Harper ran her glove along one of the seams as they passed and grimaced at the lumpy bead of metal.

’Who welded this, a drunk with a candle?’ she thought. ’Leo would’ve ground this whole seam out and done it again...’

Camila kept close to Harper’s shoulder the whole way down. Jin-Ah’s lamp kept catching scratched markings on the bulkheads, old stencils painted over and new ones sprayed crookedly on top, and she frowned at every one of them. Somewhere above them a loose panel ticked steadily as the hull cooled, like a clock counting down.

...They reached the engineering access hatch on Sub-Deck Three.

Elena pointed at the center of the reinforced door, where a manual bypass wheel had rusted solid into the steel.

Chloe stepped forward without a word, wedged the tip of her crowbar into the locking seam and heaved.

SCREEECH... BANG!

All four locking bolts sheared in half with a deafening metallic report, and the hatch swung open squealing on its hinges.

Inside the small compartment, lit by the faint flickering amber of an auxiliary terminal, stood the Black Kite’s central processing core.

It was a tall rectangular tower of matte-black carbon composite nearly two meters high, anchored to the keel on eight heavy shock-dampeners, with bundles of fiber-optic cable as thick as a woman’s wrist plunging into its top and rows of cooling fins lining its sides.

Its main breakers had tripped the moment Chloe smashed the command displays above, and it sat there dark and silent except for that faint stubborn pulse Elena had felt through the floor.

Elena stepped up to the front maintenance panel and ran her fingers along the seam of the access door.

CLICK!

CLICK!

She unlatched the magnetic service hatch and swung it open.

Inside the chassis, cradled between four liquid-helium cooling jackets, sat the ship’s primary processing drive.

It was a cylinder of dense translucent bio-synthetic crystal, glowing with a faint dying inner light that was slowly fading to a dull opaque grey.

Elena’s hands froze on the frame.

Her breath caught sharply in her throat as she stared at the familiar pale facets and the delicate veins of light running through the core of it.

Jin-Ah leaned in over her shoulder while Harper, Camila and Aoi crowded around the narrow opening behind them, their beams all converging on the cylinder in paralyzed silence.

"That’s a seeded core," Jin-Ah said quietly. "The same architecture as ours."

"So he really was a Captain," Harper muttered over the comms. "He didn’t lie about everything, then."

’The same system that woke us up on that dead moon and put Leo in his chair,’ Jin-Ah thought, her eyes tracing the veins of light. ’It built this ship for someone as well, and if Ren was the Captain, why wasn’t he piloting it...?’

Elena angled her shoulder lamp down along the base of the drive, and the beam caught on something red.

Four data ports ringed the bottom of the crystal where it met its mounting collar, and a red module had been rammed into every one of them by force.

Their casings were scorched black at the edges and their wiring had been spliced straight into the crystal’s conduits with ugly lumps of field solder, and all around each port the crystal had clouded over like frostbite with grey veins creeping upward through the light.

Harper’s voice went flat.

"Those chips... that’s the same thing he jammed into our wall."

Jin-Ah unsealed the thigh pocket of her suit with stiff fingers and pulled out the frozen chip she’d carried since the bridge.

It was still cold enough to bite through her glove, and she held it up beside the ones buried in the core.

...The same dark casing, the same twisted pin layout and the same scorched stamp on the shell matched down to the last detail.

"A seeded ship answers to one person," she said, and her clinical cadence cracked straight down the middle. "Ours obeys Leo and nobody else... the Foundry won’t even move without him. A real Captain would never need to plug a single one of these into his own ship."

"He chained it," Elena whispered. "Every time this ship moved, he was forcing it to..."

She stared at the grey veins spreading through the crystal.

"The core has been fighting them," she said. "That’s why it’s dying from what I can see."

The truth settled over the little room like an iron slab.

The Black Kite had never belonged to Ren. It had been a seeded ship, exactly like the Wanderer-7... and somewhere out in the void, another human captain from Earth had woken up in its cold command throne with their hands in two crystal cradles, terrified and desperate to keep their crew alive then Ren had come aboard with a handful of red chips.

’Ah,’ Camila thought, her hands shaking against her helmet. ’They were just like us. They were exactly like us...’

’And he tried to do it to us,’ Harper thought, staring at the chips. ’One of those in our wall, and that’d be our drive chained up in a box like this... That’d be Leo’s throne with some pirate’s ass in it.’

Elena said nothing more.

She stood with one hand still on the frame and her eyes locked on the crystal, and the engineer in her ached at the sight of a seeded core sitting there chained and suffocating, while the rest of her felt sick to her stomach.

Chloe tilted her head at the drive from the doorway.

’Somebody else sat in a big chair like Leo’s,’ she thought slowly. ’Somebody else held the wheel for their people... and the bad men put those red things in it.’

Aoi looked at the dying crystal, and her good eye burned with cold scalding grief.

"Destroy it," she said, her voice dropping into an iron register that allowed no debate. "Tear it out... Don’t leave a single trace of this thing alive."

Elena’s fingers twitched on the frame, one last instinct to protect something that rare, and then she pulled her hand back and stepped aside while Jin-Ah closed her fist around the frozen chip and pressed it back into her thigh pocket.

Chloe didn’t wait for a second order.

"GRRR!"

A feral snarl vibrated in her throat as she stepped into the narrow space between the dampeners.

She dropped the crowbar, threw both gloved hands forward and drove her fingers straight through the outer casing of the processing tower.

CRUNCH!

The reinforced composite crumpled under her grip like foil!

Her arms were buried to the wrist in the machine, and the metal screamed around them as she closed her fists.

She hooked her small hands around the central titanium framing, twisted her boots against the deck plates and hauled backward with all the terrifying strength of her Blood Sovereign talent.

SCREEEEEECH... SNAP!

The main mounts sheared clean out of the keel.

Chloe ripped the entire housing out of its foundation, tearing dozens of fiber-optic trunk lines out of their sockets in a blinding shower of blue sparks, and she hurled the two-meter tower across the compartment.

CRASH!

It slammed into the opposite bulkhead, and before the shattered frame could even bounce off the steel, Chloe blurred across the room and drove her heel dead center into the exposed crystal.

KRA-SHATTER!

The drive exploded into thousands of tiny glittering shards that sprayed across the floor like crushed ice, the red chips cracking apart under her heel along with it, and its dying light went out in a last thin wisp of white smoke.

Chloe looked down at the glittering dust on her glove and brushed it off against her thigh like crumbs as the raider shuddered around them.

The deck under their boots gave one long groan... Through every bulkhead, the faint hum of the Black Kite’s remaining systems died away completely, and the whole ship dropped into total airless blackness.

Their shoulder lamps were the only light left in the universe as a red line flashed across the bottom of every visor.

[WARNING: EXTERNAL POWER LOST]

[ Ambient Temperature: 4°C / Falling]

[Please return to Vessel immediately]

Camila’s hand found Harper’s glove in the dark and squeezed it hard, Jin-Ah’s breathing went fast and shallow over the comm-link and Elena backed up until her shoulders touched the bulkhead.

Only Chloe stayed where she was in the middle of the glittering wreckage, her head tilted, listening to the dark.

"Nobody move," Aoi said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Check your oxygen and stay together."

They all looked down at their readouts at once, and Camila’s breath shook over the comm-link as she read her own numbers twice.

’Please come back on,’ she begged the dark silently. ’Please, please, I can’t do this in the dark with them lying upstairs.’

For two seconds there was nothing but the sound of their own breathing inside their helmets and the tiny crystal shards drifting slowly down through the beams like snow.

Then...