[x] (Bait and Switch): Mirareki passes the room while the Luyus wait in ambush. As soon as she's there, she conducts her plan to minimise the effect of the things countermeasures and then runs, hopefully luring it out into a corridor kill zone.
The team begins to set up. Reizay looks up at the cameras and frowns and you see her stab quick commands into her pad. The feed cuts. You scream in frustration and search desperately for some other clear input amid the chaos. The cameras are dead to you now, Reizay was thorough, a global lockout. You feel instead the thrum of the craft, the heat of its drive and the pulse of the antimatter vessels, the overwhelming sensation of every part of the vessel poured into you. It's too much, too big, you have to find something.
And then you find it.
You realise what it is at once. The beast, coiling in its geometries. You're seeing through the Snatcher's eyes. All of them, there are so many. Its whole surface is sensors, heat and light and sound and more besides, an illegible polyphony. You have to narrow your focus to a thread to make any sense of it. You understand the world as a set of vibrations. Footsteps. Mirareki's footsteps. As you grow able to tolerate it you open yourself up to light, and see.
The creature shifts, the sensation disgustingly gigantic, as it readies itself to spring. You can feel Mirareki's footsteps as she moves forward towards the door. The snatcher hunches into itself, building up energy in its movement organs, and you shiver at the heat of it. Then she throws something through the door.
There's a boom and the air fills with dust. Mirareki placed the grenade carefully. It bursts and a spray of some kind of dust fills the air. It pricks the beast's sensors with a flicker of low level radiation, far too little to hurt it, even as it adheres across the Snatcher's shimmering dark and light hide.
The thing erupts through the wall at her, coming free of the cloud of irradiated material, glowing with it, the air around it buzzing with the stuff. On the internal view its radiation sense is blind in several bands. Externally the creature is illuminated, the radiation blanketing it perfectly visible to the sensors of the ambush team.
Mirareki's plot succeeded, now she just has to fight for her life. Geometries lash out at her, even as she leaps through a door, and one hits home, slapping across her stomach, breaking her defence aura and tearing a long rent in her hazard suit. You feel sudden terror that she's hit, but it's not flesh under the tight suit, but gleaming silver. Mirareki jumps back, turning a desperate somersault in the air to gain distance from the slashing extentions. They whip all around, an instant too short and she kicks off the wall, a desperate vector change that takes her over the rippling tentacle, and all the while it's shouting out the rhythm of its countermeasures.
But coated in radiation as it is, those countermeasures are insufficient. It is visible to the firepower Luyu and her drone have down the corridor.
Fire is already coming in. There's a noise like a metallic boom as the drone's hypervelocity gun tears through the wall and hits the creature in the side. It blows a hole straight through it, spraying the room with bright blue internal fluids. The slower rounds of Luyu's carbines and catapults arrive an instant later, and the creature writhes under the assault, letting out an awful discordant noise.
Mirareki rolls to one side, firing her own weapons, and the thing's smooth geometry disintegrates into a mass of reaching, far more organic tentacles. She kicks to one side frantically, firing, her silver coating becoming blades as they reach for her in an overwhelming mass.
A pair of anti-tank drones arrive, and you feel a jolt of incredible pain go through the thing's system. Mirareki is painted blue with a gush of some kind of blood equivalent, and you see a look of consternation on her silver face, then the view fades out, leaving you gasping and whimpering.
There's another long unknown depth of time and sensation. You try to endure, unmoored. Then you don't try to do anything.
When the end comes, it's incredibly abrupt. One moment chaos, the next incredible relief. It's better than anything you can even imagine remembering. The flower drops suddenly off your face and you collapse to the floor, boneless.
For the first time you get a good look at the thing that was holding you. It's about the same colour asf the snatcher, bright silver skin with fractal patches of dark, and bleeds the same bright blue. It's drooping now, pouring fluid from the holes the hypervelocity gun has punched through it. Dust dances in the light beams from where the rounds penetrated the wall. Luyu and Mirareki move in, sweeping the room. Mirareki's outfit is shredded to reveal gleaming quicksilver nanoarmour. The drone walks at Luyu's side, locked onto the tree thing.
You glance over at the other woman. She's clad in a torn medical catsuit whose pink-accented white draws instinctive first aid associations in your head. But she's in no better shape than you to offer help..
"Is it dead?" Reizay calls.
"I think so."
"It's dead." The woman looks up, taking a deep breath. "Thank Isis and all the Gods it's dead." She looks at you all. "You're the team. Do any of you remember anything? Did they brief you?"
"Apart from Stella here, we all remember everything except how we got here." Luyu looks down at her. "Who are you exactly, you work for the people who took us?"
"I'm not one of them." The Medic raises a hasty hand. "My name is Atet 281773, I'm a Doctor of Xenobiology and a Medician. I'm not–" she rubs her eyes. "I wasn't one of them. They took me just like you. That's what they do. They take people and force them to work. They wanted a specialist and I was easy to kidnap, I just–"
"Hey, easy there." One of Luyu opens her visor and kneels down next to her. "Tell us what you know."
"I don't know that much. They didn't tell us much." she glances at the dead thing. "We were doing experiments on the immotile here. Only it wasn't just an immotile. When the ship's systems went down, the motile broke loose, it–" she takes a deep breath. "It killed everyone. I think it was trying to– I think it was trying to communicate with us. That's what they do. They communicate with things, only it didn't know how so it just–." she lets out a little sob. "It didn't understand how to talk. It just killed them."
"What is it?" Mirareki asks.
"I don't know really. Something they found in some posthuman site. We called it 'the Diplomat.' Everything was compartmentalised. I just– I didn't– I didn't–"
Luyu reaches down and squeezes her shoulder. "Hey. It's okay. It's over now, and we can bring your colleagues back later. Once the ship is secure. Everyone can be resurrected, right?"
Atet begins to sob, and Luyu holds her close. Aletta walks over and you see Minetta's affect come to the surface as she kneels down to provide comfort. At least neither of you appear physically injured.
Mirareki, Reizay and a Luyu gather around you for a short conference. "What do we do now?" Mirareki asks. "We're still in the same problem as before. The Quiet on the outside, and that Crown of Thorns on its way in. The ship is basically non-functional."
"If this is what's attached to the ship's systems–" Reizay looks back at the shattered form of the immotile. "Then I think I can maybe figure a way to fix things. It looks like whatever happened basically tripped a bunch of the secondary cutouts on the ship's nervous system, and then the– the Diplomat or whatever has cut out the primary trunks. I've got some ideas but I need time."
"Well, we're secure enough here. You reactivated the internal defences right?" Mirareki says.
"Yeah."
"Well then, you work on that." Mirareki looks over at Luyu. "I think I saw an equipment tree down there. I'm going to get Stella a new shell, and me a new suit." she pokes a finger under the ragged edge of her hazard suit, now showing a glimpse of muscular ivory flesh below.
"Right. I'll see what else I can get out of Doctor Numbers here. Keep your link open okay?"
"Yeah." Mirareki waves.
"I heard you talking." You say as you walk towards the equipment tree. You should have brought ship slippers, as the hospital's floors are uncomfortably full of debris. None of it can break your skin, but it's not what you want to be walking on. "I know I'm possessed."
"You were watching the camera feeds?"
"It linked me into them. It was trying to do– something to the posthuman inside me."
"And you have no idea which posthuman it is?"
You feel a strong urge not to reveal what you know, a desire born of your vague memories and the ghosts of Alex's desire. For now, you decide to obey the urge. "I don't even know what posthumans are. Or why people are afraid of them."
"At the base of it, they're machines. Very complex machines that build on and improve themselves, and that once, long ago used to be people like us. That doesn't really do them justice though. Comparing them and our machines is like comparing a steel gladius to a whip sword. That much intelligence and power makes them all but incomprehensible to us." Mirareki isn't quite moving tactically but she picks her way forward with some caution, even though you can feel the telemetry coming off her drone screen. She's obviously much more used to moving without it. "There have been incidents where posthumans have done things to population centres, turned them into art, or made them components of elaborate machines. Nobody wants to get near that. Then there are ones like Dasein or Everdancing Flame that are really bad news. Interested in humanity, but not with any interest in the welfare of humanity, or have objectives so far from ours that there's almost no way to appease or negotiate." She shrugs. "There are others who are nicer. Some of them are like gods, you can appease them. I've met people who say they have more claim to being like the true gods than the AIs that some cults engineer to hold their doctrine, but I've always thought of them more like fae. Strange and capricious, and following rules you don't understand."
You arrive at the equipment tree. It's mostly medical, but there's tactical gear too. A ping of your gear shows most of it survived. You're going to need a new boarding shell though, and some stuff was dropped in the shaft.
"But what are they?"
"We came here in exile, right? You must remember that much?" She glances at you and sees that you don't. "Alright. The actual history here is very spotty, but tradition and academic consensus agree that we were exiles. Fleeing from slavery, both human and alien. There's some other confirmation that this is true. The River's ideas at what roles humanity best fills aren't something they drew from us as far as we can tell, and we've never found humanity's homeworld in our space—" she cuts herself off, realising she's sidetracked. "Anyhow, supposedly, significant self modification was banned before the exile. The exiles fled for many reasons, but that was a major motivation for many. The Posthumans were one such group, committed to radical transformation even at the cost of continuity of self. Over generations others have joined them, or devised their own ascensions. Sometimes you need to god build, you think it's the only way to deal with something like the Benedicts, or you just feel like divinity, but it's dangerous, to yourself and others. That's why groups like Firewatch exist."
"What are–"
Reizay comes in, a bit out of breath. One of Luyu saunters in after her, "I've got it. I've got the system mapped." She pulls up a 3D into the air showing the whole ship. The areas of Diplomat are clear red, but now the ship's primary and secondary nervous systems are overlaid in green and blue respectively.
"Okay, there's three ways we can do this–" Reizay says.
[ ] "First, we can go down ship and reset the ship's secondary nervous system at the hub here. This should bring engines and counter space weapons back online, but the main shuttle bay is in the way, and that seems to be where the Quiet are getting in."
[ ] "Second, we could move up to the ship's spine. There's only one piece of Diplomat corruption blocking it, and if we can find a way to remove it, then that would also get primary systems online and let us run or fight."
[ ] "Third, this would be a lot easier without the Quiet. There's a large weapon citadel up here on top of the hull. We could go there and fire on the Quiet ship. Maybe we could get them to leave."
