18:00 / 24:37, Rotation 519 / 687, 231 AE, 23.860902, 139.785521, Aryss
The first few rotes of her ranging had been uneventful. Vilithe would kick her legs up to the dashboard as the reaver rolled along its predetermined path, without any need for Vilithe to steer, and she took big gulps directly from the rim of a thick bowl of gruel held in both hands. She relished this, the psionic silence. She didn’t have to block the endless droning chatter of psionic bureaucracy that constantly crisscrossed her mind like it was caught in the sticky threads of a web while she was in the hive.
On the second rote, the psionic encryption had been undone, and she wept, curled up in a corner much like Kwandriss had in her cell, trying to push out the traumas of guilt, shame, and anguish: guilt that she had done such unspeakable things to fellow vassals, shame that she had wavered and almost fully succumbed to the will of Clan Amallark, and the anguish of knowing that there was nothing she could do no matter how much she wanted to be free, the same anguish that rocked her on the night of the 518th.
On the third rote, a passing dust storm rained fine grains of Aryssal stone on the reaver’s gryphantene carapace, creating a pleasant sibilation that drifted Vilithe to a drowse, her mind undulating through spindly theta waves, and slow rolling, deep amplitude delta waves, every so often emerging into an eye-shuddering dream, one that she snapped awake from soaked in sweat, but couldn’t for her life remember.
But, by the fourth and fifth rotes, she was starting to feel a little bored, having had sufficient rest. To pass the time she imagined different shapes and creatures from the formations of rocks: snaky, serpentine dragons slicing through the void, or a blindly grazing meatmutt flock of a shapeshifter shephard. She tried counting them down to sleep, and sometimes it worked, but she would always wake up sooner than she’d like.
Eventually, restless as she was, she summoned Malevolent. Just to have some company. Before she knew it, she was modifying its coding, so far away from his creator Zitra that she could pull the spirit apart and put it back together again however she liked.
malevolent.personality.OCEAN(
openness: 0.15,
conscientiousness: 1,
extroversion: .89,
agreeability: 0.21,
neuroticism: 1,
);
No, no, no. Conscientious to bug her about her ‘duty to Clan Amallark’? Pass. And no wonder it was so annoying, the extroversion and agreeability factors were switched the other way around from Vilithe’s liking. Then again, everybody loves agreeable. And neuroticism? Why would anyone want to be neurotic? She pondered the thought for a moment- because it kept you alive, after all. Anxiety keeps you alive. Without anxiety it would be very easy to make fatal decisions by accident, they would be impossible to see coming without worry. She herself was quite neurotic. But what did a spirit need to worry about?
malevolent.personality.OCEAN.update(
openness: 1
conscientiousness: 0
extroversion: .25
agreeability: 1
neuroticism: 0
);
She was too lazy to do any unit testing and give any fine-tuned variables. This would be an experiment, a hack. She was getting a little excited about what might compile.
It still had no visual form. Vilithe always wanted a pet, and no, this gross reaver that she was living in right now did not count. She was struck with sudden creativity. Now she knew exactly what Malevolent should be.
A longhair cryptic felid, with the sharp pointy ears of elvans, edited oversized, a fuzzy coat of violet fur, and just oh so adorable tiny coal black eyes, hallucinated itself before her.
Hey, Vilithe! Now Malevolent was chipper and pleasant.
Hey there, Mal! Vilithe immediately felt happier.
Can I cuddle up to you? Malevolent purred as it stalked gracefully about in a circle, its flickering tail curling up in the air.
Sure thing.
She lay back on the little cot, and Mal the cat pounced up to her neck, bunting his fuzzy little face up against her cheek. This was awesome! Could she bargain for more of this conduit work? It was dope!
It wasn’t very long before she dozed off to sleep – she’d gotten so much sleep recently, more than she’d had in entire Aryssal revolutions. So how did she end up falling asleep again? From boredom and comfort alone? Well that she could work with – when a soldier’s thought-voice echoed inside her, rousing her.
Conduit, we need a tremorsense pulse.
Immediately the optical stream of their reaver’s many compound eyes, placed evenly along its body so that Vilithe had three-sixty-degree vision of everything around it, flooded her, for they had arrived at their first target for assault. Their reaver was much bigger than hers, more menacing and equipped.
Therys, her handler, had unlocked the psionic link to the knights she reached to, but Therys could not hear the knight leader’s thoughts, they were too far away from her - only Vilithe could. She was the link in the chain. A Conduit. It was up to her whether or not information should be relayed to Therys, but of course if Therys suspected anything was being hidden, she could also reach into Vilithe’s mind to root it out. Presently, she had no reason to, so the senses of the reaver streamed through her mind and into Therys’, just like the passing of an electrical signal from neuron to neuron.
It was a small transparent polymer dome, some spider plants growing in the soil underneath, with a hatch that led into a cave, a lava tube cooled eons ago, but an exact map of the layout was unavailable.
Like flickering motes all flaring up in a row, her psionic senses wrapped themselves around the knights of the ranging, giving her awareness of their heart rate, their body temperature, their metabolic rate, and the structural integrity of their physical bodies. They were badly worn down, having only just completed an escort of an ice caravan.
There were four elite Talauthian knights, captured twenty-one rotes ago, and the Leader stood out to Vilithe’s mind. There was something vibrant about touching his mind, it was like the humming potency of static charge in the air, portending a lightning strike.
They were supported by eight more soldiers in power armor, but to call them knights would be a misnomer. None of them had any clue how to properly fight in their suits, much less fight at all, as six of them were mere miners, though not lobotomized – only Clan Amallark stooped to such grisly lows for soldier labor – and the rest mating drones, former members of Clan Boucher.
Back when it was just Clan Talauth and Clan Boucher left to their rivalry on Aryss by the other clans, it was the Talauthians that were frequently the aggressors, and now she realized that these Boucherans were soldiers twice captured. Queen Talauth had flayed their minds once already to induct them to her forces. They had fought for her, only to fall once again, now inducted into the Amallarkean ranks. She wondered if their fragile psyches, never properly prepared for the travails of war, would hold up.
Incoming, she responded.
Knowing that the knights’ reaver’s preset commands had run out, and now the only one who can control it, she commanded it to unfold the vibration sensing plates from its undercarriage, and to press them against the ground before unleashing a shockwave that would reveal the structure of the cave through echolocation.
Reaver(6D7D).tremorsensePulse(
depth: 100 meters,
radius: 100 meters
);
The daemons in the reaver let her know that the instruction was received. The reaver emitted a rumbling tremor, roaring across the empty landscape.
In Vilithe’s mind, the empty form of the cavern – but exactly what inside remained blurry and indistinct – crystallized itself.
A straight drop down, likely using a ladder.
A large sloping tunnel – the lava tube itself – that continued in both directions, long past the range of the pulse.
Two branching passageways on either side that went deep into the Aryssal earth at a forty-five-degree angle slope, likely stairs.
One led to a small network of ever smaller tunnels, likely a mine, its tendrils fading at the edges of the pulse, the other staircase led to a tight bundle of rooms - likely where these rogues slept - also at the edges of the pulse, so that the exact layout was unclear.
She relayed the map into the minds of the knights, overlaying the projected twisting passages into an ethereal hallucination that she overlaid upon their vision.
Conduit.
It was the Knight Leader. Vilithe grasped the coarse polyester sleeves of her psion’s fatigues with both hands as she folded her arms together. She got goosebumps from that thought-voice, but why? She had kept a bunch of thought-tabs open to assemble the map, but now she closed all addenda, any nonessential information all in the margin, or rather, bottom margin. This was her first sortie. She needed to focus and pay attention.
Yes, Knight Leader.
Let’s try a Belly Bomb to start.
Vilithe may be the conduit, but the Knight Leader had far more ground combat experience, indeed his entire life revolved around leading ground infantry across the wastes of Aryss. While a clan psion might micromanage, unwilling to trust vassals to complete the goals of the clan, Vilithe was happy to accept the Knight Leader’s tactical assessment. She scanned the ordnance available. Napalm? No, that would harm the knights too when they entered the small central chamber. White phosphorus? No, that would produce too much hot smoke, it would interfere with their infrared visors. Best to just use good old C4.
Reaver(6D7D).dropBellyBomb(
ordnance: cyclonite,
quantity: 500g
);
The spirits responded, Breaching. which she relayed to the Knight Leader.
Thank you, Conduit.
Vilithe was taken aback. She had never been psionically thanked by a soldier, nor even a labor worker, it was something only other psions did. Long range telepathy did not come easily enough to non-psions for them to strain their effort with such needless niceties.
Who was he? How did a mere soldier have such psionic ability?
A high-pitched groan, and furious, grinding creaks, as twitchy legs sprouted out of the reaver’s open belly, clawing into the hatch, sinking drills into it.
In Vilithe’s mind’s eye she looked through the reaver’s eyes mounted on its underside, mentally manipulating the reaver’s little spinning drill claws to tear into the steel hatch, setting off a cascade of sparks, which entranced Vilithe. The spirits in the reaver stored the spare scrap for later use and gnawed the steel into small pieces before folding it into side carriages.
Dropping Belly Bomb. The spirits had already initiated the command to reverse for her. The spirits knew to protect their charges inside. The reaver had a mind of its own. Indeed, the structural similarity between a dragon and a reaver was, at the foundation, the same, it was just that the reaver had a much less sophisticated organic neural control center.
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The belly bomb exploded, the shockwave rolled over the knights in their reaver, and it ripped a jagged maw into the Aryssal earth.
She assessed what stray thoughts emanated out, using the reaver’s psionic receptors as extensions of herself. There wasn’t much, just motes of emotion. Anger. Hate. Fear. …and Shock.
Knight Leader, I can sense that before the blast they knew of your approach, but did not expect the Belly Bomb. I recommend you take advantage of the element of surprise.
Noted, Conduit.
She was used to psionically mute compliance, but for some reason just a simple acknowledgement of her advice compelled her to- to what? She didn’t quite know yet, she had never felt this way about a psionic presence before. She knew for sure though that his psionic response put her at ease, as polite as the word ‘noted’ could be. Certainly, when she was still not yet vassal, she felt connection, and trust. But this was different, she had grown up in Clan Callethe for all her youth, she knew each worker intimately - Clan Callethe had few to no soldiers, for they never thought that anyone would dare attack their hard-scrounged home on desolate Phyros. But this soldier, he was a stranger to her! Why did thinking with him feel so- so natural?
He reminds me of you a little bit, Mal meowed. I think you like this soldier.
Shush, Mal.
While normally felids couldn’t laugh, Mal could and laughed a psionic laughter that was playful and musical. They quite enjoyed each other’s banter now.
The Knight Leader commanded his squad to roll out. She felt her stomach flip, and she considered the strangeness of her reaction. The cool way he thought the command, the absolute certainty that the command would be the right one emanating from the other three Talauthian knights, the fluidity with which all twelve, even the drones and miners, knew what to do almost immediately. Which position they held in formation and what purpose, which angle they had to protect. Which soldier in the chain of command they must support or rely on. As if perfectly choreographed.
Second, Third, Fourth, you’re with me, down the tube.
She had never witnessed such psionic synchrony in vassal soldiers before. While clan squads were deadly efficient, vassal soldier squads were often a chaotic, ragtag cluster of meatshields, unable to fight with their full faculties because fundamentally their minds rebelled against their vassalship, still subconsciously aware that they weren’t truly fighting for themselves or their clan. But this vassal squad looked like they would fight like they were fighting for their own, even if eight of them were greenhorns. But why? They weren’t even all from the same clan in the first place. The deepening mystery of this special squad piqued Vilithe’s curiosity.
Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, secure the upper tube, they may bring more through the rille.
Vilithe was compelled to push her psionic ability a bit further. Most conduits merely let the knights do their work. They were not meant to care whether the soldiers lived or died. But all this was elementary to a dragonrider, she knew she could do more to help. She used the information acquired from the tremorsense pulse, and then asked Malevolent,
Do you think you can help me reconstruct more?
The hallucinatory cat flashed away – no sense in wasting processing power now – and Malevolent got to business. It flooded her mind with a series of images. Rivers of lava long ago left legacies upon the Aryssal geology, fissures upon the earth called rilles formed by erosive forces.
As the lava flowed, they melted through lesser rock to carve out these channels, and once the flow of lava dipped below the ground it created a cave structure called a lava tube, and the place where the tube dipped underground was what was called the rille entrance. But of course, as the eons passed, weak rock could erode and collapse to the tubal cave directly below, in a vertical opening called a skylight, which was the structure which the rogues had used as the spine of their secret compound hidden deep in the earth.
Malevolent worked hard and quickly. Using known patterns of erosion and simulating them, calculating fluid dynamics of lava melting its way through this tube possibly thousands of revolutions ago, and collating as much information that they could scry of the surrounding geology, it returned a simple calculus, which she relayed to the Knight Leader:
Algorithmic reconstruction of the tremorsense pulse gives me strong certainty that the rille has collapsed. Malevolent added a quick meow after that, which she had to chuckle at.
She also felt a wave of relief flow through her, an alien relief, a feeling that was distinctly not her own.
Curiouser and curiouser. Soldiers were supposed to obey their orders blindly, even if their own experience would be appalled by the suicidal orders given them these feelings would simply be forcefully suppressed with imprinting. But – and she couldn’t be sure because it shouldn’t have been possible – she suspected that, somehow, this Knight Leader, on some subconscious level, really did care about the safety of the other soldiers under his command.
Goddess, you’re totally crushing on him.
She didn’t think to shush the cat up, because Mal was kind of right.
The knights leapt into the darkness. When they landed, they stood and leveled their combustion rifles in unison.
All they could see was cold, unmoving rock.
Hold position.
They held. As the dust cleared, they could see thick mats of lichen and moss growing all over the walls of the lava tube, clearly cultivated.
A Boucheran miner and a Boucheran drone – Eleventh and Twelfth – held their ground to protect their escape route and trained their guns at the narrow staircases to either side of them. Four Talauthian knights descended deeper into the lava tube, while the remaining six Boucheran miners and drones pressed their bodies against the walls, marching painfully slowly up the lava tube to secure the collapsed rille dead end.
Fourth, take point position.
The trailing Talauthian knight strode forward, ahead of the Knight Leader.
Vilithe felt a strange sensation of danger, maledictory anticipation, but she simply did not have enough time to relay it back to the squad as psionic signals at this distance still had some latency. She tried, though. Wait-
The Fourth knight stepped on something moving.
A gangly worker whose stomach had been filled to the brim by spirits restructuring the organic compounds in her body into nitroglycerin, white phosphorus, and aluminum naphthenate – a sticking agent and the key ingredient in an explosive cocktail that could actually hurt a knight in power armor – exploded. A worker who had sacrificed herself to turn her body into a weapon - a banshee. Before the Banshee blew up, she screamed in wailing laughter, “A-HAHAHA!”
Spla-at.
AAH! AAH- This mote, the fourth from the left, immediately warped to a spiky, pulsating garnet before imploding, snuffed. She felt the heartbeat within the mote spike to over 105 beats per minute before suddenly seizing to a flatline. The spirits monitored the spiking temperature in the body, 200 degrees, 350 degrees, 500 degrees, before even the spirits embedded in the body themselves started failing and unraveling. The Fourth’s body was over 95% covered in deep fourth degree burns, the sensory nerves had been burned right off so at least he felt little pain when he perished, but the motor nerves, still intact, caused his body to jerk and twitch uncontrollably.
Malevolent preemptively shut off any empathetic link with the Fourth knight as fast as possible, but it was still not fast enough to prevent Vilithe from feeling an instant of hot, blinding, searing pain flood into her.
“Gah!”, and then Vilithe clutched her chest, as she felt more conflagrating, electric pain ruptured out and radiated through to the tips of her fingers. The fifth to seventh motes flickered one last time before blinking out of existence.
Contact!
The Rogue has a railgun!
Panic seemed to seize Vilithe’s mind from multiple directions, as if multiple voices exploded inside her voice at once, it was disorienting, nauseating:
What was that?! What- another mote flickered out, instantly.
Where did they come from?! What’s happening?!
No, no, no I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! Please! Please!
There’s a… I’m hurt! …I’m bleeding out! No, no, NO! No… no …
What the f- gurgle.
So… cold… can’t fall asleep… can’t let it… can’t…
We’ve been flanked! Damn it! Damn it, get off me! Damn it!
Contact! Contact!
The knights had all closed their psionic links to each other, so as not to feed upon each other’s fears, and pains, and panics, but Vilithe, who herself had never been a conduit for a knight ranging, did not know that rule number one was: do not be inside the soldier’s minds at all when they were about to engage in combat. It was a rookie mistake.
“?Mierda!” she put her fingers to her temples and tried to shake off the feelings of doom, dread, terror, pure paralytic fear, sensations of sticky black ooze clinging to her hand, oozing out of her chest, oozing out of her neck, feelings of coldness, blackness, and emptiness. Malevolent was helpless to stop it. She supported herself with both hands pressed against the wall of her reaver, and opened her mouth and retched sour, viscous, half-digested gruel, it splattered all over the wall. A bead of sweat fell to the corner of her eye, stinging it, and she winced it away.
I’m surrounded!
GET OFF! Crunch.
Clang! Heh. Bang.
I’ll cover.
Give me suppressing fire!
These pieces of garbage don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with!
It was all happening so fast, and she didn’t have a clear mental image of the battle, it was all just a confusing, discombobulated mosaic. She had to close off her senses entirely from the psionic link to the knights. Now, it was just spirit-mediated information, just numbers - heart rates and body temperatures, read off one by one by Malevolent:
Knight Leader, 88 bpm, 36.5 degrees. Hairline fracture (sixth true rib, right) detected. Hairline fracture (wrist, left) detected.
Knight Second, 91 bpm, 36.8 degrees, disoriented.
Knight Third, 95 bpm, 36.9 degrees, disoriented.
Knight Fourth, 0 bpm, ??? degrees, deceased.
Knight Fifth, 0 bpm, 33.9 degrees and dropping fast, deceased.
Knight Sixth, 0 bpm, 33.8 degrees and dropping fast, deceased.
Knight Seventh, 112 bpm, 35.2 degrees and dropping fast, right lung collapse detected, attention, very low blood pressure, 87 systolic, 19.28 liters of blood left before lethal exsanguination, intervention needed immediately!
Knight Eighth, 97 bpm, 36.1 degrees, amygdala activity spiking.
Knight Ninth, 83 bpm, 36.0 degrees, unconscious.
Knight Tenth, 84 bpm, 35.9 degrees, unconscious.
Knight Eleventh, 99 bpm, 35.3 degrees celsius, concussion detected, hairline fracture (skull) detected, spiral fracture (left tibia) detected, right shoulder dislocated, left anterior cruciate ligament completely severed, intervention needed immediately!
Knight Twelfth, 0 bpm, 34.2 degrees and dropping fast, deceased.
Vilithe wiped the sweat from her brow, swept the sick down the grill of a drainage duct on the side of the reaver’s compartment with a bare hand. She steadied herself with deep breaths. She was completely unlinked now, but Malevolent and a chorus of once silent daemons were now screaming into her mind, intervention needed immediately! Intervention needed immediately!
She took a long swig of water. The knights should have been able to handle themselves, and she didn’t know why, but she felt a great need to reconnect to the knights. She took one more deep breath, exhaled slowly, and then closed her eyes to delve back in.
The initial skirmish had ended as quickly as it began. Silent, now. Seventh had died by the time her psionic presence returned to the battlefield, Eighth had finally succumbed to repeated mind blasts and he too was now unconscious as well. Scattered about the cave were the dead bodies of eleven elvans, twelve if you count the still burning and still glowing sticky goo all over Fourth’s body and all on the walls.
Second, Third, take Eleventh to the reaver, treat his wounds. Then cover me.
But- the railgun!
I’ll not risk three knights to a railgun when I can just risk myself. They only have time for one more shot, I’ll dodge it.
Vilithe gasped audibly. And there was just something deeply attractive about the cocksure way the Knight Leader thought- I’ll dodge it.
This Knight Leader was proposing that he sacrifice himself for the sake of his subordinates! This was not only completely unorthodox, but totally foreign to elvan logic. Even when soldiers were not expendable, when they were clanners and not vassals, knight leaders never sacrificed themselves for their squad. The Queen simply valued their experience on the field too much. Only the strong survived this Darwinian hellscape, and it took a lot of sorties to get promoted. Like everything else in elvan society, soldiers were simply valued for only as much as they could deliver as a capital asset.
Conduit, what are the Princess’s order?
Vilithe still didn’t know how to react. It had all happened so fast!
Conduit!
The urgency pounded her like a wave of psionic force.
She felt an observer now, something that could sense her hesitation. Therys. Her handler.
Vassal, report.
Vilithe was flustered, incessant pressure mounting from two different sides of her mind, crushing her head like a vice. She shook it off quickly. Get a grip, Vilithe! First, to Therys:
The squad has been ambushed, five casualties, three captured.
Therys responded succinctly, the Princess doesn’t care to rehabilitate failures. Abandon them. This mission is over. Another squad will be sent later to mop up the surviving rogues.
Then Therys’ psionic presence faded away. She had thought the job was done and no longer cared about the knights anymore.
The reaver felt a little bad so Vilithe apologized to it, thanking it for being the monstrous and impenetrable war machine that it was and for keeping her safe. The reaver daemon happily nodded away back to the background frequencies of the psionic web.
Malevolent built the base visual form off of an image of just the cutest little Siberian.
It was less dangerous to self-hallucinate when mediated by a refined spirit.
Malevolent, taking Vilithe’s cue for a ‘purple cat’, but finding no instance of any cryptic felid actually being purple, even when digging through the psionic legacy, it settled on basing the generative form on Yuumi the Magical Cat of Runeterra, one of Mal’s all-time favorite cat stories.
Malevolent also took inspiration from the Cheshire Cat. But this Alice was in no Wonderland.
Her own reaver watched with her, a little envious.
Choosing to take manual control, she deftly incised the hatch in a perfect circle, she hadn’t had a task so straightforward and simple – unstained by cruelty – in a long time. She felt a thrill of satisfaction at a job well done. She had found Dasein.
With Malevolent so attuned to Vilithe’s mind, in truth, even Malevolent itself was starting to feel an uncanny admiration for this soldier. He hoped the random-access memory of Vilithe’s brain that he was drawing upon to make this thought wouldn’t be caught by the garbage collector. Vilithe was getting distracted, so the edges of her mind began to bubble with thoughts that had absolutely no bearing on the urgency of the present moment. She was losing mindfulness, and she was forgetting to remember where her thoughts were coming from. It was just too long since she felt this type of emotion, it was foreign now.
Malevolent was able to detect the banshee before the psion, so immersed in her infatuations was she, and tried desperately to warn her. This elvan! Beyond help!
And here’s when you enter the suck, Vilithe, Malevolent thought.
His name was Einstein Talauth.
The God Empress would put it herself thus: forbid empathy.
Half cognizant of her own words, she knew what this meant, but forgot why she knew this, how she knew this, or why. Not that she particularly cared, in the moment.
