“Well, that’s certainly not one of the usual suspects. Might even say it’s a strange suspect.”
“Gonna tell me about it?”
“You ever think about the Vault?”
“The Vault? Of Glass? I try not to. It was weird in there.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t just not think about it. That place, what we saw in there… it’s always haunted me. Some of the loot we took out of there… I ended up wishing we hadn’t. Got rid of a lot of it—almost everything, actually. But there was one thing I couldn’t part with.”
“You mean that pulse? Is this that one?”
“Yes, that pulse rifle. The one that might’ve belonged to… that other Guardian.”
“You used to love that thing.”
“Yeah, but I was also afraid of it.”
“Not of the gun itself. What it might carry. What it might mean. I had this creeping sense, somewhere way back, like… deep behind my eyes… that something terrible could happen if I let it go.”
“Behind your eyes? What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, just… listen. I’d stored it away for a long time, and after the Red Legion knocked over the old Tower, I figured it was gone for good.”
“I left some good weapons in there too. That Hunter was right… should’ve stashed things in the wilds… But if this is it, how’d you get it back?”
“I don’t think I did. I think it got me back.”
“Found it in my jumpship’s stowage after we cleared out the Cabal. I don’t remember transferring it.”
“I forget about transferring things all the time.”
“I didn’t forget. Ghost doesn’t have a record of my doing it, or of doing it for me. Either it transferred itself without leaving any trace in any logs, or something… changed.”
“So that it was always there. In my ship’s transmat stowage, rather than where I left it stored.”
“You mean… like… the timeline changed or something?”
“It came from the Vault. You know how things in there could… change.”
“Yeah, the operative words being ‘in there.’ The Vex don’t have that kind of control outside the Vault.”
“I don’t know. I just knew I had to keep the gun close, to look after it, and that I should try to… alter it, maybe turn it into something else, you know? Something that couldn’t change things like it had.”
“You think the gun itself changed time?”
“…I don’t know, but I changed it. Swapped all the parts I could. New firing mechanism, new receiver. Replaced the casing. Switched the sights. Tried to remake it, take it apart while keeping it together, right?”
“And I think I’ve answered the old riddle about the ship of Theseus.”
“An old, old question about replacing parts of something: if you eventually replace every element of a thing, one at a time, is it still the same thing once every piece has been changed?”
“Oh. Well, isn’t it, more or less?”
“It isn’t… and it is. The gun’s changed, with all the work I put into it, and it doesn’t behave like it used to… but it still changes things. Makes its own rules, sometimes. Decides it’ll fire faster than it can—but the parts don’t get blown out like they should from that kind of overclocking. It doesn’t do what it used to do, but… it has some of the same eagerness for the kill.”
“That… sounds troubling.”
“What troubles me is I still don’t know… what it wants.”
(Redrix’s Broadsword w/ Descendant Vex Chrome)
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