9.2 – The Queen of the Milky Way

E-UNIT · VOLUME 9 · GUESTS AND GHOSTS

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C H A P T E R 2 1 7

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The room was darker than anyone had intended it to be. The revival machine's hum filled the rocky space and refused to let silence settle into the corners. The cyan light from the machine's casing was trying its best to illuminate the area around it and failing, that wasn't what it had been designed for.

Two robots occupied the space. One near the machine, waiting. The other inside it, being waited for.

The room was plain, dark tile flooring, polished white walls showing their age in the small ways that walls do when they're maintained but not cared for.

Old water-level control terminals lined one wall, wired into a sewage system that no longer functioned. A row of old keys hung from hooks beside them, the handwritten stickers underneath them half-dissolved by time, readable only in fragments. The revival machine occupied the center of the room and clashed with everything around it.

OverDose was on the floor with her head resting against the machine's casing, waiting. Her neon smile had dimmed to a barely-blue flicker, which reversed the expression entirely, a smile that dark wasn't a smile anymore. Dust had settled across her frame over several days of it.

‘She'll make them pay for what happened. She won't let it stand. Not either of them.’

The machine hissed open. A dark silhouette rose from inside, the fake cyan crystal in the head catching the light as the eyes came on. The robe fell downward, letters separated by dots printed across the front in gold. E.V.E. She stepped out of the machine in total silence until her boots reached the floor.

Cling.

OverDose was on her feet before the sound finished. The blue came back all at once, ears, thighs, the forced smile returning to full brightness.

She covered the distance and locked both arms around Eve, applying pressure and not releasing it. The metallic frame beneath the robe complained about the force involved. OverDose's plastic face pressed hard against Eve's chest, the material at its limit.

"Finally!" She held without shifting. She was significantly shorter than Eve and made no adjustments for it. "You kept me waiting for days. What takes you so long in there? You always do this, you stay in your own HUD while I sit out here. Do you have any idea what these last few days were?"

"I have a complete record of what E-UNIT 01 did inside my frame." Eve's voice was cold in its default way. "The attempt to breach the secured system was unsuccessful. Nick Rivera's architecture breached me in return rather than the other way around."

"I know!" OverDose still hadn't raised her head. "I told you to leave her alone. Even the Queen couldn't get through those walls, and she writes systems for a living. What were you going to do that she couldn't?"

Eve's voice moved a fraction from where it usually lived. "I was embarrassed in front of you." She brushed OverDose's electronic hair with the edge of her hand, careful, not quite touching it. Streams of zeros and ones fell continuously through it. "The breach percentage only reached twelve. But the process was close to completion."

OverDose laughed, a small genuine sound. "Twelve percent is not close to completion."

"Against that system, twelve percent is a meaningful result." Eve held OverDose's cat ear. It glowed blue from inside at the contact. "How is my favorite cat doing? I received mission updates during the recovery period. Using your blade to open my frame that way, that's left marks on you."

"I'm fine, sis." OverDose let go by a margin. "The moment you opened your eyes, I leveled out. I couldn't move for most of the time in this room. Watching you in that machine, unmoving, not knowing when…"

Eve brushed dust from OverDose's clothing and the top of her head with deliberate care. "Critical mismatch: Eve is not a hardware dependency for OverDose's function. Your systems are independent of all external devices. I confirmed that personally."

"Please retire the system-error comedy format. It's not landing."

"Noted for the next update."

OverDose grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the doorway at a run. "The Queen has been coming to this room for a week. She wanted to see you the moment she heard."

They moved through the hallways together, dark floor tiles from an older era, some cracking under their weight, some faded to near-transparency. The walls ran white, recently painted but without the attention that paint requires to hold properly, clean enough, not more. Then, without any gradual warning, the corridor changed.

The ceiling rose. Doors multiplied along the side walls. The lighting shifted into something that suggested ceremony, chandeliers at regular intervals, their light warmer and more structured. The floor tiles gave way to white marble that returned as much light as it received. A red carpet rolled out ahead of them and extended into the distance. The walls became full of paintings, the same face repeated across every frame, the same figure in different compositions.

No one else was moving in the corridor. No guards, no patrols, no ambient activity. Just the two of them and the growing weight of the space around them.

"We're late!" OverDose pulled harder.

They stopped at a pair of golden doors, enormous, ornate, completely at odds with the narrow hallway that had produced them. No guards posted outside. The location was deep enough underground that the concept of guarding it was almost redundant. The doors read them and opened without hesitation.

The room inside was exactly what the doors had promised.

Ceiling vaulted high with rounded edges at the corners. The same white marble walls, now hung with long black and white flags bearing the Black Voltage insignia printed lengthways.

The floor was mirror-polished deep blue, the red carpet fighting to cover as much of it as it could. At the far end, a throne, red with a gold frame, raised two steps above the floor, and beside it, two mechs from 2026, the old Altean models long since replaced in Elysium and discarded, repurposed here for a different kind of service.

Every robot in the room was kneeling. None of them turned as Eve and OverDose entered. They crossed the open passage left between the kneeling figures and reached the throne. Both of them knelt deeply.

OverDose spoke. "She came back to us, my Queen."

The figure on the throne was listed in Elysium's intelligence files as SourceCode. Her true name was written behind the throne in cold white light.

Sirius.

Her form read as humanoid built from two contradictory materials, a pristine white shell and a living cosmic interior. Smooth white armor plating shaped her frame, and where the armor opened or the body's edges were visible, there was only space: stars, nebulae, deep blue galaxies turning slowly in an expanse that shouldn't fit inside a body that size.

Her face was darkness filled with points of light, the only defined features being two white eyes that outshone the surrounding stars. Silver-white hair moved around her with the slow quality of something buoyant, contrasting against the void beneath it.

Sirius rose from the throne and came forward in slow, measured steps, slow enough that the room adjusted to her rather than the reverse. Both Eve and OverDose rose without deciding to.

"You took much too long to come back to us, Eve."

Her mouth didn't move with the words, but the words arrived regardless. The voice itself was something else, ordinary, human, carrying a trace of playfulness that sat at complete odds with the immobile precision of her expression. No elegance in the tone. Just a person talking.

"I felt wrong sitting in that throne without you. OverDose was stationed at the machine like a broken appliance."

"Queen!" OverDose objected.

"Don't." Sirius almost laughed, the sound came through clearly even though the face didn't reflect it. "You insist on the title and I keep asking you not to. All I want is somewhere none of us are hurt for existing." Her voice went careful around the edge of that. "That's the whole argument."

"And we need a queen for the argument to have weight. There's no better candidate than the one who created us. If you want us to stop treating you like a Queen, sister, you should probably stop sitting on a three-meter gold throne at the end of a red carpet." OverDose shook her head. "I'm sorry for not responding to your visits. I wasn't functioning well."

Eve steadied herself. "My Queen. I received twelve or more system updates across the week. The majority were security-related, only one touched core function. Are you concerned about the E-UNIT's defensive architecture?"

"Significantly." The stars in Sirius's interior dimmed slightly. Her voice dropped with them. "I can't accept the risk of one of ours being hijacked and living inside our community with access to everything. I don't trust the additional fighter units Elysium sent us. I deployed most of them in forward operations without bringing them back through revival."

"Are we at war with Elysium now?" OverDose settled on the floor cross-legged. "We don't have the capacity to match their king and his close-range fighters. And Chrome has working knowledge of our operations."

"Not yet." Sirius crouched and held OverDose's face in both hands, the space-dark palms moving against her cheeks with genuine care, the galaxies in her interior shifting slowly with the motion. The neon smile shined on its own. "Their position hasn't fully resolved. Working with 02 on one operation doesn't confirm a permanent defection from us."

The lights near Sirius shifted on their own, the ones above her brightening, the surrounding ones dimming, as if the room's lighting had opinions about proximity to her.

Eve kept her eyes down, HUD running calculations in overlapping layers. "Defection probability has reached eighty-four percent, my Queen. Elysium is entering a phase where they need combat capability for the Remidican engagement. Alignment with 02 offers the most accessible path for them. The probability will not decrease on its own."

The interior of Sirius's frame responded to the words before she did, the deep blue going darker, closer to pitch black, the galaxies brightening against the contrast until her two white eyes were the most visible things in the room. Her voice came down one register further. Her expression didn't change.

"I trust your calculations, Eve. If you tell me they will defect—" She looked toward the golden gates, which had opened again on their own. She rose and opened her arms, the light from her interior expanding outward.

"—then so will we."

She kept her arms open.

"Everyone, welcome Reflex."

A figure stepped into the doorway, and the moment his feet touched the marble, the air in the vaulted hall went completely freezing. The two mechs flanking the throne actively shifted their stances, their sensors throwing up panic warnings as the new arrival’s presence got registered.

OverDose turned to look at the new arrival. "Why does he look like that?"

Reflex didn’t answer her. His attention moved past the kneeling robots, past Eve, past even Sirius, toward a map already open beside the throne. Several points were marked in red. One of them sat near Lukewarm.

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