I. THE YOU YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN
You fill the dronesuit like a second skin as the flight deck's catapult alarm starts to sound. Settings flash and eye-trackers settle in as you click systems on, arms and legs wrapped into neural string-violins. Thrusters flare and weapon flaps extend. Mass accelerator loaded, lightsword charged, kinetic shields activated.
Arachne Weaver, operational.
The launch of the catapult propels the taste of gravity to the back of your throat, pushes you up against your seat. The superheated plasma bloom of your suit's thrusters keeps it there, as you embrace the g-force with an exhilarating scream.
The indicators creep upwards and your vision shrinks. 5g/s. Your two hearts pump faster to discipline the blood fleeing to your limbs. 10g/s. Internal bladders inflate to cut the arterial escape routes to your feet. 20g/s. Reinforcing vertebrae brace against the deepening stress. 30g/s. Your reinforced rib cage starts to creak.
Peak jolt. You ease off with a throttling gasp, artificial ducts absorbing the welling tears within your eyes. Shaking yourself focused, you turn your shining blue eight-pupil eyes towards the view.
Illuminating the blackmetal surface of your dronesuit is a technicolor light eerily projecting from the Fractal Aureole. A rainbow pulsar of miraculous design, its harmless, mystic radiation still beyond scientific description. Everywhere nearby, asteroid surfaces reflected in the glow, drawn to the pulsar's alluring orbit.
You break from the moment's reverie, reminding yourself you're not here to sight-see. Screeching pings and distant thruster flashes indicate your targets, and Celeste pops up on your viewscreen, posh accent and robotic intonation alerting you to danger.
"Thirty hostiles, at six-point-eight-five Imperial klicks. Approaching Hive H rapidly," she indicates the exofortress on an abstract map with projected enemy vectors, "engage with formation."
"Catalogue," you identify with a sigh as you swerve your dronesuit to the approaching horde, darting irises mechanically analyzing target trajectories, shoulders slouched in practiced boredom. There's just no fun in killing insects.
"Affirmative," Celeste confirms your assessment. "Take point, flight-leader."
You click orders in flight-language to your two wingwomen, then punch it recklessly towards the Catalogue's formation. You swat away their viral missile volleys with point-perfect countermeasure spoofs, fingers pulling at the neural strings of your controls in practiced musician's motions, almost outraged at the crude simplicity of their mass-attack.
As you close you visualize them better, spot the outlines of their inappropriate grotesqueries defiling the light of the aureole. Inarticulated, gross, misshapen pale miscolored lumps with malformed appendages, they deploy in shoals to mask their individual weakness. Today, to take down thirty, you will need just three. With a relish that shows itself on the excited pursing of your lips, you turn on your kill counter.
One. Smart-missile launches ejected from your shoulder collide in the center of formation and destroy a drone, scattering the rest. You wedge yourself into their collapsing formation, a wolf among sheep.
Two, three, four as you snipe a trio with aimed shots of your accelerator.
Five, six, seven, as a group make the mistake of thinking your back is a blindspot before you swerve, turn, and fire three more, headshots piercing through their exploding chests. Narrowly, a laser-lance bounces off your arm, kinetic shield-hacks glowing red, and you reward the near-miss with a direct hit.
Earlier boredom is forgotten as you sink into the moment. Even insects can be fun to play with, you decide, as you pick off a drone's weapon appendage with an accelerator round then ignite your lightsword, gripped in both arms, prepping your thrusters for a charge. Weaving through the drone's countermeasure spoofs and electronic attacks, you dodge through asteroids you use as impromptu cover, and you idly wonder if it feels anything at all as you bring the lightsword down, bisecting it and kicking off its corpse as it detonates.
Nine.
You survey the battlefield, hunting for a new target, when a blinding pain erupts in your skull, forcing you to double forward, neural link temporarily failing. From deep inside, a voice you cannot place but recognize:
<:: Why do you enjoy this so much?
Too late, you shake off the battlefield distraction to see a Catalogue drone hurtling at you, fleshy tusk extended from their arm. Panic shoots through your system as you scramble to move out of the way, but you don't have
time -
A sleek blur rams into the charging drone, the glow of a lightsaber emerging out the other side before it explodes. As the smoke of the explosion clears, a dusted dronesuit twirls around you and an elegant android appears on your viewscreen. Her skin is immaculate bonewhite porcelain, her hair a ghostly green, the matching lime of her pupils contrasted against the pitch-black sclera of her artificial eye-lenses. Her thin neck is framed by her high collar-ruff, an extendable emergency helmet and archaic fashion item. A doll with gentle, artisan's soft angles, she takes two delicately crafted fingers, makes a 'v' up against her mouth, and performs an unspeakable motion with her tongue as she gets the kill.
Love you too, Diana.
"You malfunctioning , Ari?" Diana tries to bark, her silken voice poorly suited for the tone. "Wake the
fuck up, sweetheart."
You open up your viewscreen, run a hand through your pink hair, glower dramatically. "Just distracted, Dy. Thanks."
Diana pivots as the two of you start a deadly dance, intercept an incoming missile. "Yeah, okay. I'm sure the Catalogue understands. Oh, you're distracted? Then I suppose we'll come back tomorrow to absorb you into the machine. Get well soon."
Offering only an irritated puff of air as a reply, you lead the ballet and Diana follows, a rotation around a central invisible point, moving forward, then up, then back, evading hostile interceptions and covering each other's lines of sight, herding the Catalogue's drones apart to isolated positions where they cannot benefit from force of numbers. The two of you carefully in sync, racking up the hits, watching one another's moves and responding without even a word needed to pass between you now. But Diana is too impatient and as she notices you're racking up too many kills for her to regain the lead, she starts to break formation, aiming for more risky prey.
"Careful," you caution, "they're pulling to an asteroid cluster, may be preparing an ambush." Diana ignores the warning, surges forward, and you follow, switching the tenor of formation.
"This is the Imperial way," Diana responds with lecturer's confidence, "always flexible, always changing, always bold."
"The problem is," you point out, as she pushes too far ahead for you to fully support her, "you're changing it to do something stupid."
You hear her snort across the comms link, but then from a nearby asteroid a swarm of five that'd dug themselves into the ground appear, and another two from behind a shadow cast by the Aureole, their positions invisible thanks to sensor jammers. You speed up, immediate vindication turning to real worry as one gets glancing hit and Diana makes a flight-language click for help. You're a bit too far away, though, and you see one coming straight for her, preparing its own beam-rifle, and a chill runs down your spine as Diana flails to intercept it-
An array of piercing lasers perforate the armor of each of the Catalogue ambushers, their bodies taking a moment to recognize the fatal damage before exploding. A third dronesuit appears, bulkier and holding onto a heavy prism-cannon in one hand an a circular shield in another. Next to Diana on your viewscreen appears a painted warrior with patterns turquoise and black around her gas-scarred cloudy eyes. She wears a ceremonial respirator that covers up her mouth and nose, a toothy bioluminscent smile carved between its tubes.
She moves her hands smoothly, the sign-words translated into sigil glyphs and then fed through as transmitted poetry to your neural link.
'Spider, distracted
hunter, reckless to a fault
water, flows just right'
"Very clever, Ix-Chel," you praise with exasperated sarcasm. Teaching her about haikus was the worst mistake you've ever made, given that on her homeworld poetic speech was a form of trade language bridging between isolated vaults. She has taken to it far too well.
Her eyes shine with awful and adorable smugness at her newest hobby that eases as her body language turns stern and stiff and she moves her hands more rapidly. 'Seriously, though, Dy, don't be so reckless. Please. We don't have our backups.'
"Miss Fussy Buns is at it again," Diana drawls as the three of you form into concerted formation, "I was...I was
fine, Ix." Ix-Chel rolls her eyes and shrugs her shoulders, seemingly accepting Diana's graceless face-save, but a second later you receive a private message from Ix-Chel:
'she says she is fine
probably she shit herself
cleanup for the flight crew'
You mute your comms link with Diana so she doesn't hear your choking laugh, as Ix-Chel blocks an accelerator round with her dronesuit's massive shield, taking point for the three of you. It's an easy dance to swing into at this point, each of you able to expose yourself even in the heat of battle knowing that the others can catch you when you inevitably slip. Counters tick up and up and up as you wipe out the remainder of the Catalogue's encroaching swarm. A smarter enemy might have adapted to your tactics by now, but the Catalogue is dumb, and half the time doesn't even seem to be sure what they're doing here, as if their drones never learned to truly fight in this environment.
It's a strange thought, and one that disappears from your mind immediately. Of course they're bad at this - they're the antagonists.
Twenty-nine, the counter ticks, as the final drone tries to flee to transmit combat information back towards its home carrier. Diana is the one that gets last blood, as she fires off a fusion missile far towards the disappearing dot, and the three of you float amid the void admiring the diamond nova of the Xenoarchate-designed warhead as the last kill is confirmed.
"I think I finally understand the alien tardigrades," Diana whispers, awestruck, over comms as the nova's eerie blue light temporarily overwhelms the rainbow of the Aureole, "when they speak of the beauty of the bomb."
'Maybe you could join them as an Imperial liaison after the war,' Ix-Chel signs as the three of you begin your return to the Exofortress, pinging Celeste with a mission success notifier and the combat stats, 'you'd fit right in'.
Diana makes an affronted noise with her mouth and you giggle. You imagine the slender droid trying to keep her composure surrounded by a group of eight-foot long water-bear Orellans, each with a fission warhead launcher strapped to their back, as they gleefully explain their passion for nuclear weapons and why they just had to detonate that moon.
The idea is almost enough to shake your persistent and creeping anxiety, as the exofortress comes back into view, its wounded eight-point star configuration visible even from this far away. A successful sortie is good news, but you're running out of time, and there were too many close calls. The three of you keep your spirits up, but you're informed enough on matters of strategy and logistics to know the true state of your lines. You are running out of everything, cut off from Imperial lines, backup bunkers overrun. The three of you are the only pilots left, running yourselves ragged, starting to slip up from the endless sorties.
As one of your thrusters sputter and almost unbalances you on your landing approach, you're reminded that even your advanced Legionary dronesuits are starting to give out. Force Commander Ishtar is dull to your pleas for a surprise attack on the Illusion's cardcruisers before they can make their approach, and seems intent instead to watch and wait for them to come for you. Don't you ever
hate that woman (and ignore the sudden snap of pain within your head as you think as much). The prototype the eggheads are working on doesn't seem quite ready and you're not sure if it will be in time. You're locked in pirate territory and who knows if they'll take advantage of your weakness to try and attack the fortress. The situation is, as Ishtar might put it in that 'don't fucking question me or I'll have my lion hologram eat you' tone, not optimal.
Your tilt your face-visor back to the rest of your drone formation. It would be a shame to lose now before you can receive your accolades for the role you've played in the war. How much you've given back. You all owe so much to the Emperor and Their grand design. To your left, Diana, freed from slavery as some submissive ornament and made into an exquisite weapon. To your right, Ix-Chel, exiled from the vaults of her post-apocalyptic world and left to die, only for the Emperor to save her planet and her life from the man-made poisons choking them to death.
And -
<:: And you. What do you owe to the Empire, that you like so much?
The voice returns, but it hurts less this time, and doesn't throw you off completely. Its question is curious, inquisitive, but not accusatory, as if it genuinely wishes to know. Leaving aside the clear malfunctions in your neural implants causing you to hallucinate a second person inside yourself, it's not a bad question to ask, and you decide it's better to accept it for now until you can get to the infirmary.
What
about you?
---
How did you find your way here, as a FORCE dronepilot, fighting for this system that calls itself The Empire? Choose one origin.
[]
Exalted Among Refuse. Born to a world that saw you as trash, detritus, excrement of society, you cower from the light. The Emperor thinks differently, and as they reach out Their hand and offer you a dream of true potential, they whisper a single sharp command: Rise.
[]
Traitor to Her Class. Against abject monstrosity, against a society that places you in a position of power only if you will suppress the serfs that rise against it, the Emperor offers you a different path: Turn, and say together to the masters and the hand that holds the whip: No.
[]
Built for Different Purpose. Crafted for a caste, made to fulfill a role, reduced to fit your task. But the Emperor sees your dreams, offers you the sensation of the new, asks what it is you want. Against the rules of your stifling clade, you break from tradition. And you answer: More.
[]
Maverick Climbing High. Hero, legend, monster, riding on a confidence that takes you to the top, utterly relentless, superiors split on whether you should be elevated or executed. The Emperor asks: Who among my subjects can truly face the dark? Without hesitation, you respond: I.
[]
Heir Aberrant. Cruel responsibilities, dull stock reports, moronic decisions, all weighing down on the princess' crown. Wouldn't it be nice, you ruminate, to just run away? The Emperor turns fantasies of escape real, whispers in your ear as you stand at the corporate castle's edge: Fly.
A/N: This choice is not just for Arachne Weaver's background in the context of the scenario, but will loosely reflect her actual origin and background in the pre-Collapse High Empire. Don't sweat too much on speculating exactly how the scenario choice maps to the real choice, and instead pick whatever option you think best resonates with you. Note that the Emperor's presence here is more metaphorical, and does not imply Arachne has a direct line to the Big E themselves.
