The Dark Forest

Spoiler: AN

-Sorry about the long hiatus. When I said irregular updates I didn't mean *this* irregular. I'll try to do better on that front, if there's still interest in this quest of course.

The LEV glided over the eerily still lake at speed, short lived rainbows scattering under its shadow. Even in late noon the red dwarf's light seemed anemic, a sepia blanket cast over tall green trees that clustered the distant shoreline.

Optics, switch to infrared.

You manually scan the crater-lake's coastline as you see with eyes not your own, the LEV's turret traversing above you with a smooth whirl as sepia turns to blue and violet. A slight twitch of the stick sends the LEV banking left, its silent prowl aiming north. Radiological?

-All Levels Nominal.

You sigh, leaning back on the seat. The explosion had been decades, maybe centuries ago for it to have left this level of radiation. You aim the LEV towards the eastern shoreline of the crater, a dull grey scar overrun with moss.

You hum thoughtfully as the LEV's antigrav takes the slope effortlessly, gliding a meter above the surface as mud replaced water and your seat tilts back. A significant portion of metal debris had ended up around this area of the valley, and you nod to yourself as you inch the LEV to a stop over a small clearing.

Fire Brigade, set up a perimeter, you think as you look back to the LEV's passenger seats.

Far from the slender forms of base lalibots, the Secbots behind you looked sharp and dangerous in their armor plating, standing up in unison and bringing up their lectro carbines as one. The rear ramp swishes open with a thought, and they trundle down the LEV in two files, trotting smoothly into a semi-circle around the back of the vehicle and using rocks and fallen trees as cover.

-Perimeter clear of hostiles.

The Valkyrie's reactor thrums over your chest, going from standby to low power as you climb down the rear ramp as well, sinking to your shins in the mud as you touch another celestial body for the first time in…

A damn long while, you think, drinking in the various conifers around the clearing and their robust melon-sized seeds. The bots spread out in two's, initiating a search pattern as you bid the LEV's VI to stay on overwatch, its turret sliding with a tiny hiss as it scans the clearing. A sudden desire seizes you as the NBC sensors glow green.

Your helmet disassembles, nanites and rigid plates sliding down your neck as you take a deep breath of frigid air, the wind picking up again and tugging at your eyelashes. By midnight the winds would turn lethally cold, but for now they were an invigorating tonic; burning streaks that blew away cobwebs deep within.

Your own search takes you deeper into the forest, Jonston following close behind with a multi-loadout and a carbine. VES-551-5 barely fit into the unassisted habitable zone, but its flora had thrived against all odds. It embraces you as you vault over fallen trees with spindly leaves; collapsed titans with craggy barks like corrugated steel, armored for the cold and the sudden storms that could sweep through the land at any moment. You pass a gauntlet over one still standing, and though your own skin lies armored in gravsteel you still feel the rigid texture through the suit's haptic sensors connected to your cortex.

Here, at least, life survived. A surge of irrational relief wracks your body, and though you'd always been a city girl you can't help but feel a strong kinship to the tall conifer and its spindly leaves, distant seeds swaying under another gust of cold wind.

You leave your fellow survivor behind as you keep to your heading, and before long find the first signs of human habitation; torn intruders made of steel or plasticard sticking up from the dirt, long dead and spread over a wide area. You jerk one up from the mud and the still clinging moss –a piece of wall or roof from some sort of prefabricated dwelling- and bring it closer for inspection.

A light fab made this, you think, thumping it with an armored finger. It didn't feel tough enough to resist the strain of the planet's storms for years on end and remain whole at the same time, even if a nuke hadn't torn the original building to shreds.


A temporary base perhaps? You keep finding bits and pieces as you explore, managing to pin point an area where a heftier piece of the building must have fallen. The suit's servo-muscles are a frightening thing to behold when wielding a shovel, and between you and Jonston you manage to dig up a decent amount of dirt before striking a section which seemed larger than most, almost a third of a room or hub of some sort. The Hard Anarchist's fist-and-cog had faded little over the years, its imprint on the metal chipped but whole.


A Hard Anarchist Base? With an Outpost up in the northern reaches of the sector, the local cell would have liked to have early warning of any naval presence in the vicinity of their operations. You were still too far away from the northern reaches of the Viridian Expanse, so this couldn't be the remnants of the Outpost itself. In truth it was too far away to even serve as a meaningful early-warning station, even though some of the pieces looked an awful lot like the remnants of a long-distance sensor array…

So what was it guarding then? Mineral analysis hadn't revealed anything noteworthy in the planet nor in the belt. There hadn't been any regular naval patrol routes which crossed the system or those it connected to. It didn't even make a good transit hub, as its few hyperspace connections were unstable, and one of them was so bad that anything larger than a corvette was liable to be torn… to pieces…

Your eyes narrow in suspicion. Unstable hyperspace connections were almost always avoided like the plague, but some could prove useful… in fact, some of them were so unstable precisely because they connected to faraway systems.

Maybe we're not so far removed from that Outpost after all…

It was an intriguing possibility, least of all because such a connection might shave weeks or months off your time to the Scatelli Sector, if you dared take it. You put the issue out of your mind for now as you pace around more debris, pondering another question.

Namely, why had a Hard Anarchists nuke exploded in their own base? Later, you find what might be the remains of a large dish antenna of the kind used to aid vessels making hyperspace transits, further cementing the shortcut hypothesis, but the answer to that question still eludes you.

You keep exploring till the late afternoon, which under the planet's rotation makes for a good seven hours. It's why you're caught off-guard.

-Several life-signs approaching, small-sized, transmits one of the Secbots.

You take a knee as you level your pistol, your escort doing the same as they duck or go prone on the dirt with smooth efficiency, carbines on the forest around you as they prepare to defend the camp. Sets of eyes glow eerily within the darkness, each pair accompanied by a third glow swaying just above. Your HUD displays a red reticule on the middle of the strange eyes as you lean forward and brush the trigger.

The creature you were aiming at prowls ahead of the rest with the easy grace of a hunter; a sleek, midnight-furred cat just shy the length of your unarmored arm. "Meow?" it asks as it sits back on its haunches, the tip of its bioluminescent tail glowing green, then blue.

A Glowcat? If the sight of vegetation had lifted your spirits, the sight of another animal unleashes a swirl of emotions you cannot begin to discern, and you clear your throat as you holster the plasma pistol.

-Stand down, you transmit.

The cat eyes the Secbots dubiously as they retake their positions as if nothing had happened, but its phosphorescent green stare soon settles back on you. "Heg-" you cough, and clear your throat again- "Hey there," you rasp, trying to set it at ease. Glowcats were tutorial-tier bioforms as far as expertise went; a relatively simple gene edit using jellyfish and fungi DNA, long figured out by the time humanity invented the hyperdrive.

It mewls impertinently, sniffing and circling around you before it jumps to your shoulder.

"Hey!" You grab it carefully, mindful of the strength of your armor, and examine it at length. It was a she, it turns out, relatively well fed and with a thick coat of black fur to withstand the fierce cold that fell by nightfall.

Scans detected small, burrowing local wildlife. Maybe she's been feeding on those. You frown, she had abnormally sharp claws, you notice as you examine the tiny line she left on your shoulder pad.

She protests your ministrations strenuously, twisting and squirming within your grasp. "Should treat you like an enemy combatant," you tell her, a smile forming on your lips, "Your ancestors must have arrived with the Hard Anarchist team."

The thought of rebels and terrorists tending to their pets seemed alien for a moment, before you shook your head. Of course they'd had pets. Husbands too. Friends and family. It was easy to forget when the months crawled by and the stars remained mute.

Still, shouldn't you be a bit more skittish? You must've grown in the wild, no way you were a gleam in your mother's eye when that nuke detonated.
She's purring now, and with a start you realize you'd been scratching her silly, practically covering her entire tummy with your gauntlet. She straightens as she meets your eyes again, and meows solemnly.


"You're not really a Glowcat, are you?"

She meows again, swaying her tail as its tip glows red. Her entire flank ripples with color like a neon tiger, but you shake your head.

"Glowcat genes for sure. What else though?" You peer at her suspiciously, and she returns it without revealing a bit. Sadly, a biologist you were not.

"Maybe your ancestors were enemy combatants after all," you muse as you pet her head and she preens. Of all the marvels bequeathed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution centuries ago, biotech had been one of the most democratizing. Relatively cheap and with low infrastructure needs, its requirements had only gone down since then.

I wonder what they cooked into your ancestors. Nothing too horrible, you think. Terrorist and rebels they may be, but all in all the Hard Anarchists were one of the more levelheaded factions of the Compact.

"You… should get back to your friends," you say as you look up, but there was not a single light in the darkness. Infrared was dark as well. "They just left you here with me?" you ask with a raised eyebrow.

It meows again, jumping down from your hands and sniffing around the temporal encampment you'd set up around the LEV. Mostly tarps to keep the recovered wreckage safe and a couple of trenches the Secbots had dug up. It mewls at Jonston, and the bot tilts its head in consideration.

"He's not going to pet you," you call out, holding back another smile.

***

The cat takes to following you during the next few days as you explore the planet, even bunkering with you inside the LEV during the furious storms that sweep the surface at night. Truth be told you were hesitant to let her go, though she makes matters simple by squatting atop Jonston's head and refusing to come near the reach of your arms when she senses your intentions.

You yawn as you come to a stop, stretching for a moment as a tiny spigot emerges from the neck of the armor. The recycled water tasted as stale as ever. You take a look at the dark waters of the crater-lake, following the marks left by your footsteps on the craggy beach.

"I'm wasting my time by now," you mutter, and Jonston's toupee meows appreciatively at the words. "I am. There's not much here left to wring answers from."

Her midnight black fur glows cyan as she jumps from Jonston's head and lands atop your armored shoulder.

"Oh, showing off?" Your cheek ticks as you shift your hair cyan as well, and frown when it comes up dry-looking. The cat is not impressed, and a phosphorescent sheen strengthens her cyan as she meows again, tail swirling languidly.

"Hrm." You close your eyes and take a deep breath. It had always felt like standing on the tip of your toes and stretching out to grab something where the eye doesn't quite reach… like feeling for a can above the cupboard. "How about… this?" Your hair shifts to pink, and the cat does a double take as she leans back, tilting her head inquisitively. She glows blue, then red, then ripples to orange, then back to cyan.

"Meow," she complains.

"Don't 'meow' me. Bow before your superior," you say with a smirk as you tilt your head and brush her with your pink ponytail. She dodges it, but extends a clawed paw and soon she's hanging by your hair as you yelp and Jonston sways its head in consternation.

A brief scuffle later, the walk alongside the shore resumes, though it turns a bit aimless as you check your HUD. Should probably wrap it up for today. Be back in the LEV before the next storm. You spot a chair-sized rock just ahead though, perfectly situated to watch the sundown over the lake. A fitting vista to end the day with, you remember her words wistfully. When you still lived together, Sarah had loved ending a good day atop the tower, watching the neon blips travel the Silkenway at night.

The cat mewls in your ear as you walk near the edge of the crater-lake, nudging you insistently. She had an insatiable addiction to cheek-scratching, and truth be told you'd been all too eager to enable her. "Alright, alright!" You laugh as you hold her at bay with a finger, "Wait till I'm seated at least!"

She insists, hissing and puffing up into a ball of blood-red fur as you reach the rock.


"Cat? What's wrong?"

She's all but nailed to the shoulder pad, claws scratching the surface as her fur keeps glowing scarlet and she hisses at the rock. "Something wrong with that?" you half-ask, taking a moment to examine it more carefully.

A chilling thought settles on your mind like mist, and you calculate the distance before the next breath. Two meters, more or less. What if it's another mine? Ordinance detecting bioforms were relatively cheap and useful. Mate it with a Glowcat chassis and it could serve dual purpose as a pet for the kids.

Taking care not to move a muscle, you scan the rock in infrared and then in ultraviolet, tense as you search for something active, anything that could suggest the presence of another Semetri Mine or heck, anything metallic at all.

Nothing.

It was just a rock, perfectly placed to watch the coming sundown and the stars that would soon dominate the skies, their light a twinkling mosaic. You cross your arms and stare at it, visually checking for wires or sensors, but it looked free of tampering as well.

You huff in relief, but the cat does not budge. She crouches low, hissing like a broken spigot. I suppose the location is a bit suspicious, you think, grasping for straws. It couldn't be denied, it really was a prime spot for sightseeing, and the rock made for a perfect bench from which to do so. The red dwarf's meek warmth was abating, its distant sullen form dipping its toes into the lake. A tired sigh escapes your lips as you look up; already the stars were blinking above, a solemn sequence beating beneath them all, at a tempo with the steadily darkening horizon.

The waters of the lake were still no longer; now they lapped gently against the shore, preceding the storm soon to come. Those tiny, uniform waves were another piece of the puzzle, splayed at the feet of the rock but never touching it. It was not the only thing converging on it. The wind and the rustle of the swaying trees behind you gave it weight, and the lengthening shadow behind the rock counterbalanced the sun's stare. Far from coincidence, the rock had been strategically placed here, you realize. Before, this place had been like any other, but the rock had been so brilliantly positioned it was like a master key, a slip left on a knot for easier unraveling.

With its addition, the entire landscape made sense; the wind, the light, the trees, the shore, the stars, all a unified whole working as one. You could feel with intrinsic understanding the force of the wind caressing your face, how it built gust upon gust, how it descended from the upper atmosphere and clashed and merged with the currents below until it reached you. You could feel in your bones how such emergent complexity would give birth to the coming storm, and awed at the repeating patterns built atop each other that together made something greater than its parts. You could feel it so clearly you could imagine it right now, feel how the wind and the rain would soon buffet your armor, your exposed head. You could count every drop of water that would touch your skin until the clouds broke and the sun was up once more. But why stop there? Rain, wind, storm; all were arbitrary definitions. They were all in turn part of something underlying, an emergence out of deeper principles.

A distant growl makes you blink, an eternal purr like a luxury motorjet on idle. You gaze down, mildly surprised at the trickle of blood flowing down your chest. You tilt your head, and stare into the cat's green eyes. She lays flat on your shoulder, clawing the side of your neck, the distant pain a lifeline as she purrs with reassuring consistency.

"I've been Patterned," you whisper, dead horror clawing at your throat with such force that the cat's mauling seems gentle by comparison.

Every moment you still think about it, you're entranced by the deeper understanding unfolding before your very self. In an instant this very continent feels like your own body, full of veiny cracks and minerals and natural cave systems and one that was modified; a bolt hole dug into the earth fifteen kilometers south of here made by a man named Feldon Pierce. His stash of supplies and his last words lay there now.

The cat stares right into you, pleading, begging you to come back. She's not the only one. Fort-9 kicks in instinctively, and you fall into her sharp green eyes until your entire existence is of a tone with them; an eternal green, immutable, unchangeable, forever. But still that corrosive curiosity grips you hard, answers taunting you just beyond your sight. Feldon Pierce was Patterned by the stars themselves. He just looked up one night and NO-

You flinch from that sight and peer ahead of it. Even the past was part of the emergent phenomena, as part of the whole as the wind or the earth, and you hear snatches of conversation from Feldon's Hard Anarchist comrades pouring over a signals intercept. "Why? Why would they do this?!" says one.

"It's genocide pure and simple and they ain't even hiding it! Even the Core Worlds will revolt when they see this!" says another.

"Something's not right-"

"Of course it's not right! They're nuking our people!!!"

"I know that! But it's the biggest piece of propaganda they've ever handed us-"

"Propaganda?! Our families are being incinerated and you think of propaganda?!"

"Stop the hysterics! Both of you! Focus. Look at these tactical readings."

"I- It doesn't make any sense… how could they know? They're not even communicating with each other."

"And yet they're clearly coordinating."

"Without FTL comms? Impossible."

"You doubt your own eyes?"

"Well then how are they doing it?"

"Maybe… maybe through some other… way."

"You… you can't be serious…"

"I'm perfectly serious. I'm a hundred fucking percent serious. We've yet to recieve word on this from Jotun, but they've been... uneasy with the rumors coming out of Republican Space. The—Feldon? What are you doing here-"

You clasp hands over your mouth as Feldon closes the door and opens fire with a submachinegun, riddling the walls with supersonic flechettes and splattering his comrades over the consoles. He walks to the armory as if nothing had happened, putting his code on the door. They slide open to reveal two chest-sized eggs held up by spider-like legs, their grey shells the color of unvarnished gravsteel. The past was as easy to understand as the wind or the blood trickling down your armor. All it needed was attention. Could you go further back?

The purr. Focus on the purr, you think. You try Fort-9 again as you teeter on the edge of something vast. You could keep going back. You could see… you could see your sister again… you could see the thing which underlays… everything… but the purr is all that exists, a constant thrum of being. How can it be part of something bigger, if the purr is all that is?

You don't know how long you spend hanging by that purr, your entire mind an acolyte of its existence, but you gradually become aware of your breathing again, armored back leaning on the rock as you take deep gulps, the cat's green eyes still holding you. You hug her tight, muffling your sob with her cyan fur as that terrible understanding flees from your mind like mist. You'd endured.

But something remains, you think, the tremors hitting you then, something always remains. The storm had arrived; a dark and furious tempest of ice-cold water falling from the night sky and hiding the stars. Every raindrop on your face felt exactly like you knew it would.


***

Feldon's Cave was exactly where you'd known it would be. Inside that rugged cave system you found Feldon himself, or rather the odd moldy bone in a generic hard suit corroded by the strain of time. You burned him under the stars he'd so loved, and threw the pistol he'd used to kill himself into the pyre. For some reason you couldn't articulate you'd had an iron-clad certainty that the lake-rock had been the only Pattern Feldon had ever created. A monument of sorts after the explosion he'd rigged… You shake your head, avoiding that line of thought. It's all too raw, too fresh. Leave it be.

You look up at the words he scribbled into the stone with a power tool: Here lies Feldon Pierce, Comrade Officer, Compact Marine. He looked up and saw eternity. – 12,384 HE.

He'd retained enough lucidity to carve his own tombstone at least.

One year after I was put to sleep. You turn around and survey the Cave one last time, illuminating the darkness with your chest-piece's twin lamps; a light fab that'd seen better days, a plasticard cot, a heater, a pantry filled with non-perishables, and a few others odds and ends. A 4x4 unarmed utility prowler lay backed up near the exit. It seemed functional enough but for the dead batteries, if you'd had a mind to take it and the space for it.

The real item of interest was inside the prowler though. A gravsteel sphere the size of your armored chest, multiple legs emerging from its core at every angle and holding it aloft inside the vehicle like a spider in the midst of its web. 'SEMETRI-II' it spells in bold, squat letters half hidden by the deployed spikelegs, the tiny symbol for radioactive material printed by its side. You'd been watching from far away when Jonston found it, but thankfully your precautions weren't needed. The nuclear mine had never been activated; it was still factory-new as far as you could tell, the twin brother of the one Feldon used to destroy his own Listening Station… It begged the question; what you'd do with it? A functional, variable yield nuclear mine was some serious firepower, though unusable from the Iris unless you opened the ramp and kicked it overboard. And to make it do anything beyond retracting its legs you'd have to hack it first, not exactly a quick and easy proposition. Maybe it could be useful. Or it could just turn out to be dead weight.

[] Take the Semetri Nuclear Mine.
[] Leave the Semetri Nuclear Mine.
[] Destroy the Semetri Nuclear Mine.

You walk outside the cave and find yourself lingering by the ashes near the entrance. Goodbye, Comrade Officer.

It was time to leave this place.

The lake-rock Pattern was harmless to you now, but still lethal to any sentient mind capable of understanding it. I'll do an attack run with the Iris' plasma mortars, shouldn't be much left of it by the end of that, you think as you take the ramp up the parked gunship. It was overkill in a way; a good kick would have the same effect. It's exact placement had been as much of the Pattern as the rock's composition-

Stop.

You take a deep breath, and walk the rest of the ramp up the Iris.

"Meow!"

You turn and see a ball of glowing cyan looking up at you with begging eyes.

"Cat!? But-" You blink, confused, "But I left you back at the clearing!"

"Meow."

"I… thank you. Again. I don't know how you knew, I don't know why you did it, but you were a lifeline back there," you say, resisting the urge to scratch the long scar by the side of your neck. A small price to pay for getting out with your mind relatively intact. "Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you."

She preens, then tries to dart up the Iris' ramp. "Hey!" you yell, barely grabbing her.

She meows laconically in your grip as you raise her to your face, cyan toning down to midnight black, the color of the Iris' surface.

I can't believe this cat. "I can't take you! I'm heading into a warzone… or a graveyard!"

"Meow."

"You've got a family here. I think."

"Meow."

"Incoherent words to see if you really understand what I'm saying."

She narrows her eyes. "Meow?"

You narrow your eyes, "You aren't a violation of the Intelligence Gradient… are you?"

"Meow." She blinks twice, tucking her tail close as she stares up in silent supplication. You'd find the sight adorable if you didn't know her claws could scratch the nanopaint off power armor.

"I- I can't in good conscience-" you falter, looking back at the dark maw of the Iris, then back to her green eyes.

"Meow?"

I guess I could feed you pills. I'd bet the gunship you're engineered to eat grass if you have to... Am I seriously considering this?

"I-"

[] Fine. You'll need a name though.
-[] Name the cat.

[] No. I'm sorry.

***

One attack run later and you're on a sharp ascent out of VES-551-5, a weight lifting off your back even though the g's should say otherwise. You'd been glad to set foot on land after so long, but now… now you're glad you're racing to leave this system behind. You never thought you'd miss the growl of the reactor, and yet here you are, toying with the power throttle just so you can hear it louder. On that note, you could stick with your planned route, or you could take the unstable hyperspace connection and maybe save months off your time to the Scatelli Sector.

[] Take the unstable connection.
-Seems safe enough for corvette sized vessels and below. Might encounter a bit of 'turbulence', but in all likelihood nothing lethal if the Hard Anarchists were using it as a regular supply route.
-Will take 2-3 months off time to the Scatelli Sector (current ETA: 6 months, 2 weeks).
-Will mean bypassing the Intelligence FARS and probably Solovid-IV as well.

[] Keep the course.

Transition in ten, you think, your back tingling. Back when you saw that rock, there was a moment when you'd almost felt… watched. Like- no. Let it go. Straps secure you to the seat in a moment, and you lean back with a long breath. Those seconds can't come fast enough.

Transition.


***
OOC:
-All Stress Boxes Recovered.
-Vehicle Bay completed. Light Encounter Vehicle is fully armed and operational. Can now be deployed into hot landing zones at a moment's notice.
-Fire Brigade is now composed of 6 Secbots + Jonston with his multiloadout. They're now actually fairly useful in a firefight, and their frames are now more menacing than gangly. Just don't expect them to get creative.
-Star Lieutenant Fredrikson's pod is practically ready. A vote about how to handle his awakening will come up the next update.


Votes for the update:

You find a nuke on the backseat of a car:

[] Take the Semetri Nuclear Mine.
[] Leave the Semetri Nuclear Mine.
[] Destroy the Semetri Nuclear Mine.

To cat or not to cat?

[] Fine. You'll need a name though.
-[] Name the cat (I reserve veto power over this).

[] No. I'm sorry.

On the one hand, Scatelli Sector sooner. On the other hand, you'll miss on two possible detours:

[] Take the unstable connection.

[] Keep the course.