Cecilia activated the shielding serving as a makeshift airlock in the rear of the Nightshade's hold, taking a deep breath as she tied her hair into a bun, putting her helmet on and engaging the pressure seal. Bast remained in the cockpit, though she had turned off the comlink in her helmet, having quickly fled into the hold after leaving orbit. The ship had landed on the surface of Luna, Cecilia having lost count of the minutes she had remained in the cargo hold with her guilt. Closing her eyes and sighing, she pulled the lever to her left and lowered the landing ramp, her thoughts interrupted as she was met with Kai wrapped inside of his own armor.
"Something wrong? You were in there a while," Cecilia was glad she couldn't see Kai's face, not needing someone else making her feel guilty. Azul hovered in the space above his right shoulder, equally as unreadable. "And Bast is on the ship?"
Cecilia nodded, moving past Kai and making her way across the lunar surface, her view almost empty in every direction, the horizon not even encompassing one twentieth of the plain. The low gravity on the lunar surface was something to get used to, the Traveler not having terraformed the satellite like it had Mars. She turned her helmet comlink on again, hoping Kai and Azul would not notice that she had cut Bast out of their line of communication, though either Azul would ask questions or Bast herself would likely intrude eventually.
"There's a bunker of some sort not far from here โ BrayTech, as far as I can tell. It could have what you're looking for, without the danger of a Warmind obliterating you from orbit. Depending on whether or not its domain extends here." Kai explained, double-checked the ammunition on his automatic rifle and keeping a safe distance behind Cecilia.
"You don't exactly sound confident." Cecilia said apprehensively, slowing her pace so she didn't track too far ahead of Kai.
"We don't know how much control the Warminds have over the system. The rest of the Consensus doesn't believe they truly exist, so there haven't been many sanctioned operations regarding them or their true locations."
"Seems a little unrelated to Osiris's obsession with the Vex. Speaking of, why do you spend so much time doing jobs for him instead of Ikora? I know she likes the Crucible, but she is his student." She was annoyed Kai spent so much time away from them, especially since the Vex appeared to mostly keep to themselves.
"I know you don't pay a lot of attention to politics, but the factions think Osiris is abandoning his duties as Warlock Vanguard. I, like him, understand the threat the Vex posed. You saw what they were trying to do on Venus, what they tried to do with me. Ikora has been taking over a lot of his administrative duties and the Consensus is waiting for an opportunity to formally impeach him." He sighed, tapping an input into an interface on his left gauntlet Cecilia could not see. "Get to the ship, low-light surveillance." Azul disappeared with a shimmering transmat signature without a word.
"Can't exactly say I'm surprised considering how much time he's dedicated to all of these goose chases. You should count yourself lucky you're invisible enough to not get banished." Cecilia's tone was cynical, hoping Kai was not going to get himself killed chasing after the Vex.
Azul transmatted into Kai's jumpship, the Arc Runner, deactivating all nonessential systems โ life support, gravity generators (though she had to take the extra time to secure the equipment outside of the cockpit), antimatter drive and others. She left the communications array active, however, opening a line to the Nightshade.
"Done already?" Bast's voice came through the channel, a veneer of fear coating her words โ quite unusual for the other Ghost.
"No, Kai only ordered me back to the ship for a recon scan. You?" Azul waited for a response, her worry growing every second Bast was silent. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, everything's fine." Bast answered.
"We're the only ones on the line; you can trust me, Bast." The short response from the other Ghost worried Azul, not knowing what she could say to coax a proper answer out of her.
"Is your transmat working?" Bast asked, talking as if she was scared someone was listening.
"I was about to temporarily shut it down-"
"Could I come aboard?" Bast cut Azul off, very uncharacteristic of her.
"Of course." Azul answered uneasily, tracing Bast's communications signal to the Nightshade's location and sending a narrow transmat signature through. She was at a loss for words when she saw the cracks splintering across her shell, the damage having spread to her core, as well. "What happened to you?"
"I'm not sure I should say." Bast said timidly, trying to ignore the pain that was the Light spilling from the cracks like open wounds.
"This isn't the first time this has happened, is it?" Azul wanted to scan Bast and assess the full extent of the damage, but it seemed like an invasion of privacy given her state.
"I haven't told either you or Trinity about Giselle." A statement, not a question. She had never told anyone what had happened in Lyndfield, letting Cecilia tell who she wanted when she was ready.
"I know she doesn't talk much about her days before the City, but I think Kai survived the Collapse in his former life. His body didn't have many signs of deterioration when I found him."
"We spent months wandering Europe before we crashed a jumpship and found Lyndfield. I never managed to convince her to leave before she got too attached to them โto Giselle. She spent years there it was eventually destroyed; we still don't know whether it was a Warlord or the Fallen." Bast sighed. "I don't really like talking about what happened after we found it."
"Kaiโฆ never stayed in one place for too long, made it easier not to form any attachments. We bounced around Earth for more than a thousand years and around the system for a couple of hundred. He's always been interested in the Golden Age, though."
"Sometimes I wish she was more like Kai." Bast said, thinking that Cecilia would not be so broken if she had chosen to move on from Lyndfield far earlier. "The Speaker says we're supposed to complement our Guardians, but I'm not so sure."
"Have you tried repairing your shell?" Azul asked, concern growing.
"This damage was from earlier, after you and Kai had left Mars. I think sometimes she sees me as a curse." Small pieces of Bast's shell chipped off from the cracks, the energy needed to keep all of herself together being too much.
"Come on, we can look in the cargo bay for something. I'm sure Kai must have something with how long we've been around." Azul nudged her shell in the direction of the cargo bay, but allowed Bast to follow her on her own terms.
The lunar terrain sloped down through the crater, Kai pointing out a blemish darker and more geometrical than the regolith it was embedded in.
"You have a way to get in there without us getting vaporized?" Cecilia remarked semi-sarcastically.
"Azul, I need one of our forged Bray authentication codes." No response. "Azul?"
"Does 'low-light surveillance' include shutting off your comms?" Cecilia crouched down, brushing across the ground and the hatch, the electrically charged dust sticking to her armor.
"Azul?" Kai spoke more directly, concerned.
"Sorry!" Azul's voice suddenly popped up through the communications channel. "Sending an ID. Should work for both terran and lunar complexes."
"Set the ship into an automated patrol pattern and get down here. I would do some seismic scans, but the bombs would probably piss off the old man." Kai keyed in a sequence from a screen on his left wrist, relaying the signal from the Arc Runner to the underground facility.
"What was that about?" Cecilia asked, her gaze flicking towards Kai as the millennia old hatch opened despite the ravages of time. She followed Kai down the flights of stairs, trying to figure out how the lights were still working without anyone to maintain them.
"Don't know." Kai answered, looking over the railing, the underground cavity extending far past what he could see. "Azul, I'm going to need you down here. Where are you?" He descended one last flight of stairs with Cecilia, emerging into an almost featureless room, four supporting pillars near its corners and the rear wall embellished with "02".
"And there's nothing here," Cecilia said flatly, tilting her head towards Kai. "What was the point of bringing me here?"
"That's why I'm here." Azul said, transmatting into the bunker and accessing the sectioned off portion of the floor in the room's center.
"It's an elevator to the actual facilities. I guess Clovis Bray really didn't want anyone touching their stuff.' Kai explained, waiting for Cecilia to join him on the lift.
Cecilia sighed, glaring at Kai beneath her helmet. "I'm killing you if we get trapped down there without a transmat signal." The elevator rumbled as he appeared to ignore her, Cecilia rolling her eyes during the slow and silent descent.
"You'll still need me in that case," Kai chuckled, stretching an arm over his head and glancing over at her. "Or at least Azul."
"Yeah, yeah," Cecilia replied, her eyes jumping around from place to place as the elevator approached the bottom and finally settled into place. A short corridor leading to a larger entrance room. "What would you have done if this 'Warmind' had killed us when we tried to access this place?"
"Which is why I never use the same ID on different planets or moons. Slightly less suspicious than the same person accessing every facility in the system." Kai motioned for Azul to move, the Ghost tapping into the domed cluster of screens on the ceiling.
"Or it could be learning your patterns and planning to kill you for good." Cecilia shot back, turning her attention to a display of the entire system on the room's left wall, the names all in a language she couldn't read โ presumably Russian considering the preferred language of the Warmind. "You know how to make sense of this aside from the obvious?"
"Don't know, if I'm being honest. It could have a readout of other BrayTech facilities in the system, but if it does, I haven't found it." Kai proeeded through the diamond-shaped door as Azul was able to access more of the bunker's systems, giving Cecilia only a few seconds to keep up within him. There were a handful of bulky computers in the following room, the path further into the bunker diverging in two. The door behind them closed, air automatically cycling through the facility as pressure restabilized.
Azul moved ahead of the two Guardians, patching herself into the computers and attempting to access what remained of their storage drives. "There are logs that indicate this bunker is connected to a series of WarSat launch tubes โ electromagnetic drivers. We could probably scavenge sensor components if there any left unfired or in storage."
"We should split up." Cecilia suggested, sighing as she was finally able to take off her helmet. There had to be a central command center somewhere deeper in the facility; computers with more specific data.
"I'm not sure that's such a good idea without Bast," Kai retorted. "We can go together."
"This place hasn't been accessed since the Collapse; there's nothing here but computers." Cecilia pointed out in turn, not waiting for Kai to object further before walking through the door sectioning off the right hallway. The architecture of the bunker was far different than other Golden Age installations, even the other BrayTech sites she had visited during her time as a Lightbearer. Unlike the entrance into the bunker, the hallway was blanketed with dust, only the entrance being exposed to near vacuum and evacuating anything not fixed to the ground. Grumbling, she moved her ponytail to the side and put her helmet back on, her armor repressurizing and filtering the dust from the air.
She descended down a set of stairs through the side halls, making another right turn and descending further. The halls themselves were mostly barren, simply appearing to be another obstacle to protect the heart of the facility. She continued onward, a surge of Arc energy barely missing passing through her as she came upon a straight level passage. Sighing, she jumped across to the room's median before another surge could continue along the circuits in the ground and ceiling. She wondered if the energy surges were part of the facility's mechanisms to maintain power over the course of millennia, but it was just as likely to be the consequences of time destabilizing the energy grid. More Arc energy flowed past her as she made her way across the median, jumping across the circuit into the open hallway when she reached the end.
"What took you so long?" Kai asked as Cecilia emerged from the final hallway, earning a scowl from beneath her helmet.
"Did you have to dodge lightning?" Cecilia retorted sarcastically, looking across the large central chamber at the servers and monitors splayed throughout the room. "Find anything yet?" She spied Azul working at one of the consoles in the back of the room, though she doubted it had been for very long.
"No," Kai responded, somewhat smugly, as he moved to a console at the opposite end of the room. "You know, this would go faster if we had Bast with us." he pointed out.
Cecilia didn't answer, flexing her hands and taking a position in front of one of the monitors. She tried to make sense of the text on the screen, suddenly wishing the Warmind had been trained on German instead of Russian, though she might have had issues even if it did. She leveraged the similarities between the two languages to decode the equivalent of a few lines, but not given enough context to understand the contents.
Azul popped up over Cecilia's shoulder, plugging a script into the system to translate the files, her work proceeding much faster. She remained silent, not acknowledging Azul, much to the Ghost's relief. Navigating the systems proved somewhat difficult, the technology available to Golden Age being almost imperceptible even given her technical knowledge of her own jumpship.
"You able to get any schematics?" She finally asked, directed towards Kai. She knew what she would need to see through Venus's cloud cover; it was just a matter of whether or not the parts were available.
"Partial," He answered, his tone betraying his divided attention. "And I've got some bad news โ the launch tubes don't appear to have a maintenance entrance. It appears like the Warmind had a way of automating things with little need for any humans to repair its facilities."
"Well, you're probably going to hate my idea." Cecilia answered, rolling her shoulders as she started moving back the way she came.
"I'm going to assume you mean dropping down the launch cannons to get to the WarSats," Kai sighed, not surprised at his fireteam member's antics. "Should we have Bast on standby in case the Warmind doesn't like it?"
"Very funny," Cecilia answered drily. "If it was going to do something about us, it would have done it already. I didn't even break the ice on Mars before it decided it wanted me dead. I think it's hiding something there."
"Considering how much you generalize Titans, you sure are acting like one yourself." Kai pointed out, running a command through the console he had engulfed himself in. A new door opened above and in front of them, a staircase sliding down to lead them back to the bunker's entrance.
"Ha ha," Cecilia mocked, leading the way back to the elevator. "Just lead us to one of the cannons when we get back to the surface and I'll do my work since I doubt all of your armor would be able to squeeze in there."
"I'll laugh if you get stuck. Besides, it won't be a fall more than it'll be a crawl. You don't get satellites โ or anything โ into orbit by going straight up." Kai pointed out.
Cecilia mimed a mouth speaking with her hand before putting her helmet back on in preparation for reentering Luna's near vacuum, Kai ignoring her antics. She only hoped the walk to the launch tubes was far less awkward than the walk from her jumpship.
Cecilia stabbed her sword through the lunar surface, the blade glowing white with Solar Light, the rock around it softening as it progressed farther in. They were supposedly at the correct location, yet they were met with nothing aside from electrical indications of systems buried beneath the surface.
Kai gently moved her out of the way as she pulled her sword out of the ground, his fists crackling with Arc Light. He stretched his arms and directed as much force as he could through the stressed rock.
"There's really not a more efficient way to dig through this?" Cecilia asked, her words coated with frustration.
"I don't suppose you packed a shovel?" Kai asked in return, drawing his fist back again and impacting the ground.
"How would these have been buried anyway? There's no wind on Luna to do that." Cecilia willed her hand to engulf in flame, the fire unable to spread past what she was directly created in due to the near vacuum.
"Luna also isn't supposed to generate 10 meters of gravitational acceleration, but here we are." Kai pointed out.
"Is that you rounding up or is the gravity actually stronger than Earth's?" Cecilia asked teasingly, priming her sword with Light again.
"It'sโฆ slightly stronger, but I don't think it was caused by the Traveler. I don't know if the Traveler can change the gravity of celestial bodies due to how it could affect the mass, not to mention the risk of creating a singularity." Kai thought for a moment, waiting for Cecilia to to superheat the rock again before discharging more of his Arc Light through the ground.
Cecilia stopped mid-thrust, her anxiety rapidly growing as she took all of the information in. "Wait, what does that mean for Earth?"
"Earth and Luna already orbit a point between their respective cores, but before now, that point was inside of Earth," Kai explained. "They're not going to collide โ probably, but they will start orbiting each other more directly." He continued with his attempts to excavate the site, more lunar rock cast to the side, with each punch, alternating with Cecilia to stress the material with repeated periods of intense heat.
"Wait, I feel something," Kai eventually said, blocking Cecilia from stabbing her sword into the rock again. "There's something metal here."
Cecilia sighed, the strain of channeling so much Light without Bast starting to get to her. "You sure you don't have a shovel?"
"Nope." Kai answered simply.
If she did not know any better, she would say that he was trying to mess with her.
Cecilia set her sword and guns on the ground, groaning as she stretched her back. They had managed to uncover an opening, possibly buried by seismic activity or a product of the Collapse. She was not expecting it to be a comfortable fit, but the passageways throughout launch operations still needed to be at least as large as a WarSat. "Can I borrow Azul?"
"Do you know what you're looking for?" Kai asked, nodding and motioning his Ghost over, apprehensive about what Bast was doing.
"Tear apart the WarSats and hope I don't get vaporized again. There's bound to be sensor components I can use โ probably some gyroscopics, too." Cecilia crouched down, sliding against lunar rock and then emerging into one of the lunar complexes launch tunnels. She looked around at the walls, hoping the electromagnets in the tube would not suddenly activate and glue part of her armor to the walls. Azul floated in front of her, illuminating the path through.
She followed the slope down until it leveled out, finding a single unlaunched WarSat and rolling her eyes. If there wasn't a storage room for the satellites adjacent to the launch tube, she was going to be quite upset.
"Found one WarSat." She called over comms to Kai, removing one of her knives from its holster and approaching the satellite. She jammed the knife into one of its vertices, letting Solar energy flow into the blade and sink into the metal. Having Azul focus her flashlight, she dragged the knife down, the work going slowly until she deemed the hole large enough and drew her sword. She jammed her sword into the wedge as far she could, drawing her Light into her muscles to create the leverage she needed. "Azul, I need you to go inside and look for anything we need for a couple of probes. Engine components would be useful, if it has any. When you find something, see if you can create a localized transmat zone in case I can't get this entire panel off."
Without saying a word, Azul disappeared into the internal workings of the WarSat, Cecilia sighing as she relaxed herself and let her sword fall to the floor. She stretched her fingers, steadying her breathing and gathering her energy. Her armored hands began to subtly glow as she placed them on the panel, the panel starting to deform.
"Stop!" Azul cried out suddenly, Cecilia jumping back at the sudden disturbance. "Your Light might damage the WarSat's systems."
Cecilia grumbled under her breath, reaching down for her sword again and attempting to wedge the panel off of the satellite.
"Be careful with that, too," Azul added. "We don't need you cutting any wires and wasting the entire trip."
"I'm plenty careful," Cecilia retorted, her voice tight as the panel was marginally forced open.
"Like how you were careful with Bast?" Azul replied, her voice level.
"Howโฆ do you know about thatโฆ?" Cecilia stumbled back, her sword left in its place between the WarSat's panels, vaguely aware Kai was still listening in to their exchange.
"Because she reached out to me. She's worried about you, but she's also scared of you. Scared of what you'll do to her, what you've done to her already."
Azul's voice rang through Cecilia's head as she tried to block it out. She was not like that โ at least, that was what she told herself. Her breathing quickened, her vision defocusing as she tried to keep herself together. Her armor suddenly felt claustrophobic, a precarious layer of atmosphere between her and decompression. Reaching a hand up, she abruptly turned her comlink off, her breathing slowing in the silence, but not enough to calm her. She had completely forgotten about the task at hand, not even registering that Kai would be wondering what Azul meant about Bast anymore.
The aforementioned Titan emerged from the surface soon after, probably saying something to Azul that she could not hear through the closed comlink. Her suspicions were partially confirmed when Kai walked over and grabbed her shoulders, trying to jog her out of her spiral. He gently eased her to the floor, leaving her comlink turned off so as to not overstimulate her. All she could do was watch as Kai stretched and proceeded to remove her sword and slowly peel the panel off of the WarSat, working with Azul and carefully taking out its internal systems. He motioned for Azul to move to the other side of the satellite and start decoupling the thrusters. Her hands balled into fists, trying to grip loose rock that was not there in an attempt to ground herself. She tried to visually focus on something, her eyes only finding the WarSat in front of her, her breath finally slowing and her sensations slowly returning to her. She shakily raised her right hand up and turned her comlink on again, unsure if she wanted to hear what Azul and Kai were discussing, but she hated being left in the dark.
"โsee if we can repurpose them into ion engines. We're not going to need much fuel for orbital corrections since these won't be staying up for very long, what with geostationary orbit being pretty impossible for Venus. I'll scrounge as best I can for some signal boosters." Kai's voice came through over the comms, lying on the ground and isolating specific systems to remove them intact.
"Got it; I'll transmat them aboard when I'm sure they won't explode." Azul flitted around one half of the WarSat, focusing only on the primary thrusters.
Cecilia's feet silently scraped along the floor as she struggled to push herself back up, eager to escape the confinement of the launch tube. She stumbled forward to the WarSat, stabilizing herself as she rested a hand on the exterior panel to the right of Kai.
"Are you okay?" Was all Kai said when he noticed her, at last, his tone not indicating any malice toward her. She did not know how to feel about that considering what he heard from Azul over the comms.
"I'mโฆ fine," Cecilia lied, taking a glance at the internal workings of the WarSat. "Anything good in there?"
"That depends on how many of those probes you wanted to make. The Warmind had hundreds of WarSats orbiting any given planet, but we only have the one."
"How many would we need for just the Ishtar Terra and the surrounding mountains?" Cecilia asked for clarification's sake.
"Technically, one. But we should probably make two or three for good measure." Kai confirmed.
"We should probably remove all of the communications antennae, too. We're going to need them so the sensors can actually get back to us."
"Yeah, got it." Kai responded, reaching further into the Warsat, Arc Light subtly sparking from his fingers as he disconnected an antenna from the rest of the satellite. "What do you even need these for, anyway?"
"The Vanguard is working with the Reef in hunting creatures called Ahamkara. Intel places them primarily on Venus, so I'm being proactive. We just need to alter the scanners to prioritize biological signatures." Cecilia explained.
"I see," Kai said simply, disconnecting the other antennae and preparing to remove the WarSat's sensor array. "Is this your way of asking if I would like to tag along?"
"Yes," Cecilia answered, rolling her eyes behind her visor. "If you can find the time between 'research'." She added, with poorly hidden sarcasm.
"I can always find the time if it will be worth my while. What exactly are the Ahamkara doing?" Kai grunted as he moved outside of his normal range of motion to disconnect a sensor for transportation.
"They're responsible for the final deaths of Guardians," Cecilia pointed out. "Something about wishes, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around that myself."
"They could be paracausal in nature," Kai theorized. "Would explain how they're able to permanently kill Guardians. Maybe some condition of the deals they strike?"
"We don't even know if those reports are actually true." Cecilia sighed, carefully cutting the external components off one of the WarSat's antennae with a charged knife.
"How else do you explain wild animals causing a problem large enough to warrant extermination?" Kai retorted.
Cecilia did not answer as she continued to work, not having a better hypothesis. It was the only thing that really made sense, assuming her own ideas about the Ahamkara were also correct.
Kai chuckled, interpreting her silence as a concession of victory, sliding from his position with a bundle of instruments. "We should probably also take one or more of these panels to use as radiation shields for the more sensitive pieces. We'll only get a couple of hour's worth of data, but better to be sage rather than sorry."
Cecilia nodded in agreement, still partially stuck in her own head as she worked.
"Azul, transmat the parts to the ship when you're done with those thrusters," Kai said to his Ghost, the latter silently acknowledging him. He sat up, turning to focus on Cecilia. "Soโฆ is there anything you wanted to talk about?"
"What is there to talk about?" Cecilia asked in return, hoping to dodge further questions.
"You know what. About Bast." Kai said directly, his gaze not deviating from her helmet.
Cecilia refused to answer, setting her collection of antennae aside for transport. She reached up and turned her comlink off again, turning on her heel and making her way back to the surface through the launch tube. She imagined she would be on her own again soon enough with Kai knowing about her issues. Luscinia would probably leave, as well. Climbing through the launch tube was more difficult than entering, not many holds being present to pull herself up. Her breathing slowed as she saw the blackness of space again, not enough atmosphere present to focus the light of the sun and other stars. She started making her way back across the Ocean of Storms, the Nightshade a long walk away.
Cecilia's breath heaved through her throat as the Nightshade's interior pressurized, finally able to take off her helmet, feeling like she was being suffocated by her armor. She said nothing as she entered the Nightshade's cockpit, running through her mental checklist of the jumpship's systems by herself. Kai had left a message in her communications array, presumably about the satellite parts, though they would have plenty of time to discuss specifics back at the City. Bast remained out of sight, performing maintenance on the engines despite them being in acceptable condition, not wanting to risk further antagonizing Cecilia. Allowing a few minutes to collect herself, Cecilia activated the ion engines, pulling away from Luna and finally returning to the Last City.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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