[Preview]Renegade Ravager Vol. 3 -- Chapter 12

Chapter 12 – 01738.106 AA

Entering the vast, circular room, I was nearly blinded until my HUD compensated. The crystal column housing Aggy’s consciousness was filled with bright, brilliant blue light. I could hear the three reactors in the adjacent holds churning at full power as the AI pulled on all her processing power.

“Aggy?” I called.

“She’s draining the ship’s power dry,” Elspeth complained as she slunk into the room from behind. “I’ve been forced to reroute power and even blackout sections of the ship.”

Once, Aggy had been completely isolated from the rest of the Liens Lumineux, an effort by her creators to protect her should something happen to the flagship. Since her liberation though, she had insisted her systems be fully integrated with the rest of the vessel. She could draw on the flagship’s massive reactors to essentially overclock her systems.

She swore it was completely safe.

“What is she doing?” I asked.

“I’m running genetic analysis on the tissue samples you retrieve, resequencing it piece by piece,” Aggy answered, her voice booming from the column.

Elspeth rolled her eyes. “It’s the third time, Aggy. I don’t think you’re going to get different results. Give it a break – before the Liens Lumineux burns out like an old lightbulb.”

I had no idea what had agitated the former empress to such a degree. She had seemed fine after our last evening together.

But something had changed. I wondered if she had made a breakthrough in her research on the deformed corpse. What horrifying insights did it contain to upset the normally unflappable AI?

Normally Aggy was so self-assured, so confident, but I could hear an element of fear in her voice. She continued to run the analysis, even as Josefine, Iuno, and Xarl came to join us.

“No Victor?” I guessed.

The old légionnaire shook his head. “He totally got sucked in by one of the books he stole from Valeur Mineure. Some kind of pulpy adventure novel or something – The Maltese Falcon?”

“What’s a Maltese?” Iuno wondered.

Holographic projections around the chamber displayed the progress of Aggy’s analysis in real-time. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the data.

“Don’t ask me,” Josefine replied when I asked her about it. “My knowledge of genetics is a lot more – instinctual?”

Zoto barked in agreement.

“I just know the change I want to make, and how to make it happen, using the genetic material my buddies have found for me” the Yord woman continued. “There’s nothing scientific about it, at least from my point of view. It’s a lot more like – cultivating a garden?”

One of the displays showed a looping replay from my cybernetics, recording my foray into the hidden tomb. I couldn’t help but pause the footage as it panned over the strange glyphs and characters painted on the walls and floor. The characters continued to shift and morph, the lines blurring and changing.

It reminded me of my investigation into the Esprit de Liberté and the cryptic writings that had covered Saint Charlotte’s cabin. We had never deciphered their meaning, but the xenos origin was obvious.

No sane human had ever crafted such disturbing symbology. It felt paranoid, to tie every bit of corruption and malice in the Republic to the alien Outriders, but considering the horrors we had seen, it felt like the truth to me.

The footage froze on the deformed corpse.

Aggy appeared a moment later, rising from the tank used to store her pseudo-body. A troubled expression hung across her face.

“What’s the emergency?” Iuno looked as perplexed as I was by the sudden summons.

The holograms disappeared, converging into a single image showing the body.

“This,” Aggy said dramatically, “was a human being – a man, approximately thirty years old – at least at one point.”

We looked at her blankly.

“Well, duh.” Elspeth sighed. “It doesn’t look like any xeno species I’m familiar with. I honestly figured it was a mutated human, maybe due to disease or radiation exposure.”

Despite her light tone, I imagined the topic was a painful one for her. Elspeth’s status as a mutant – an albino – had caused her no end of suffering. Mutants were persecuted in the Republic, treated as heretics who dared sully the mortal form.

Aggy’s expression looked even more brittle. “He was a human – from Earth.”

At that announcement, we were all stunned silent.

“How do you know?” I asked.

The screen flicked behind her as it brought up a sprawl of medical data. “Toxicology reports. When humanity left Earth, the planet had been reduced to a wasteland unable to sustain life. The corpse’s tissue was riddled with heavy metals, carcinogens, and other toxins found in Earth’s atmosphere.”

“And,” she continued before we could interrupt with more questions, “there are other trace chemicals present, along with unique pathogen markers, that lead me to believe without a shadow of a doubt that the dead man grew up on Earth.”

We glanced back and forth. I knew Aggy had a love for dramatics, but her anxiety and apprehension seemed real.

“What’s the bombshell then?” Xarl asked. “If Valeur Mineure was constructed shortly after your mortal death, it’s likely this man died around the same time. He might have even been an ally of yours, or maybe just some poor fool that fell on the wrong side of the Saints?”

“And he just so happened to sprout a bunch of extra limbs and tentacles?” Iuno snorted.

Aggy shook her head. “I can’t state exactly how he died. It appeared the grafted tissue just –broke down, killing him. I can approximate when he died though. Based on my rough estimates, he died eight hundred years ago.

That gave us pause.

“Aggy, are you sure?” I asked.

She gave me an anxious look. “As sure as I can be. This man was born and raised on Earth, but somehow died and was interred on Valeur Mineure almost a millennia after we fled our home planet.”

“That’s impossible,” Iuno argued. “Earth – Vieille Terre – has been lost for millennia, since humanity was forced to the stars.”

“But we know that’s not true.” Elspeth sighed. “It’s virtual right next door to Alpha Centauri – the Divin System. I’m actually more surprised that the Saints managed to keep it hidden.”

Aggy had tried to dispatch several long-range probes to the Sol System, to see the state of Earth, but they had vanished, never reporting back. The entire region of space was impassible, apparently impossible to reach. Ramon hadn’t come up with anything either – he had thought our first queries on the subject were a joke.

“So, they’ve been back to Vieille Terre?” Josefine asked.

“The UTG had completely collapsed by the time of our flight,” Aggy said. “They had hoped to use the resources from Mars and the outer planets to support and eventually restore Earth, but The Final War crushed those plans. Earth’s ecosystem suffered a series of cascading disasters, rendering it inhabitable. The various colonies and planetary fiefdoms, who had been so certain of their self-reliance, quickly followed, unable to support their population. In a matter of a few short years, it appeared humanity was doomed for extinction.”

“But there could have been survivors,” Xarl pressed.

“Maybe,” Aggy admitted. “We took everyone we could with us, all those willing to abandon Earth and the Sol System, to strike out for the unknown. There had been flights before – the so-called First Exodus of the Hegemony – but I was determined to leave no one behind.”

She looked back toward the screen.

“There’s something else,” I pressed.

“This man has suffered extensive genetic and surgical alterations, beyond simple mutations,” she answered. “Someone grafted xeno tissue onto his body and edited his genes to support the sacrilege.”

Balan shifted uneasily. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Aggy replied. “I can’t identify the xeno source either, it’s not one of the known alien species we’ve encountered. The material defies understanding. It doesn’t appear to share any known commonalities with lifeforms from the Milky Way.”

That gave me pause.

I thought of Saint Charlotte and the many-limbed horror that had emerged from under her porcelain mask.

“Aggy, are you telling us this man was – infected with flesh harvested from an Outrider?”

The look she gave me was full of devastation confusion, anger, and regret. “I believe so.”

=======================

There was no question of what we had to do next. We had to go to Vieille Terre.

The Outriders weren’t just a threat to us, but to all sane life in the galaxy. Their very presence warped reality and threshed sanity. The Saints had already fallen to their malign influence, but Aggy hoped to still save humanity from the extra-galactic invaders.

For my part, I knew destroying them would destroy the Saints, those that had ultimately betrayed the Star Ravagers. In truth, saving the galaxy was still a distant second goal to my ultimate vengeance, but I wasn’t an idiot.

If the Outriders completed their invasion – all else was meaningless, dissolved into anarchy and madness.

The real question was, how would we do it? Aggy wanted to charge in with Liens Lumineux, guns blazing, obliterating anything that stood in our way. Elspeth and Josefine recommended a more patient approach.

“We don’t even know if we can get into the Sol System,” the albino engineer pushed. “Our long-range probes failed, likely destroyed by their picket or interdiction systems. We need to scout our approach, find a weakness we can exploit.”

Victor eventually joined our meeting, drawn out of seclusion by Iuno’s goading. The remaining Star Ravagers privately discussed our options and then decided to stay out of the argument.

“We’re the grunts,” Iuno snorted. “We’re going to Vieille Terre, let the navy fucks figure out the specifics. Either way, you know we’ll be the first boots on the ground and the first to bleed.”

I had my own ideas, but I agreed with Iuno’s general assessment. I thought Aggy’s idea was best, but I had no problem differing to the expertise of others, especially if it meant we survived what sounded like a suicide mission.

Balan sat to the side with us as we watched my three lovers argue amongst themselves. I asked her what she knew of Section V. Their symbol had been on the tomb alongside Section X’s, but she swore ignorance.

“Section X has countless subordinate sections, each dedicated to a given theater, operation, or project,” she explained. “I was a disposable assassin, I didn’t need to know more than what my handlers told me.”

Balan looked pensive. “But their symbol – a scalpel and a syringe – maybe they were involved in xeno medical research?”

That matched what we had seen in Admiral Copper’s logs. It was a chilling conclusion.

It took an hour, but ultimately Aggy, Elspeth, and Josefine came to an agreement. We would sub-reality travel to the gulf of galactic space adjacent to the Sol System, then begin long-range scans.

Consulting with Captain Fernandez, she confirmed we could set out immediately. The Prométhée, guarded by a skeleton crew, would stay behind in the Albrecht System to continue rebuilding our autonomous fleet. We had lost all our ships on the strike against Valeur Mineure, but Elspeth and Aggy had already come up with new, improved designs for the next generation.

Our course set, we broke up the meeting to prepare. Aggy beckoned me aside, pulling me out into a side chamber.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded. “You’re not acting like yourself.”

She wilted, leaning against me. “I know. I’m not used to being so unsure, so blind. The gaps in my memory loom around me like dark gulfs threatening to swallow us whole.”

I just held her, hoping to comfort her with my presence.

Looking around the room, I saw we were in the hold she had used to quarantine the corrupted memory modules we had retrieved from Saint Charlotte’s ship.

Each crystalline sheet was held in a reinforced brace surrounded by containment shields. The equipment in the hold was completely isolated from the rest of the ship.

Find Aggy’s Missing Memory Modules (24/128)

The crystas seemed to drip with some kind of black ichor. The channels and circuits carved into the material were slick with unnatural corruption. Aggy had done her best to read them, but whatever the Saint had done had scrambled the contents.

Aggy stood back and rubbed her face. “I want to show you something. Elspeth wasn’t entirely right, I wasn’t diverting the ship’s power just to run analysis on that unfortunate corpse.”

“You were trying to retrieve more data – more memories – from these modules?”

She led me over to a console, manually entering a series of commands.

A pixelated, damaged image appeared.

“This was the only thing I was able to retrieve,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, my algorithms couldn’t come up with a conclusive answer –”

Her voice hitched.

“But I can almost remember it, James, and it scares me beyond belief.”

The image was a black-and-white render of some sort of object floating through space. The shape was indistinct, the edges pixellated by damaged data. I thought it was some kind of asteroid or interstellar debris, but the silhouette was too regular for that. Some intelligent hand had touched the object, changing it.

Whatever it was, I had to agree with Aggy. There was just something wrong about the object, something that frayed the edge of my sanity, like a rasp. I had to look away as pain blooming behind my eyes.

“We encountered it, escaping the Sol System. It was sitting there, hidden, invisible, just outside Pluto’s orbit,” Aggy suddenly said, her eyes unfocused. “Charlotte was thrilled, she claimed it –”

The AI shook her head. “Why can’t I remember!”

Holding her again, I hoped the answers we found when we returned to Earth wouldn’t break her.