Work Text:
this is the clock upon the wall;
this is the story of us all.
Beginnings
And then there was light.
Well. Metaphorically speaking, you understand. Physics weren't entirely settled for the first .0002 nanoseconds. Light was, as of yet, an idea that mightn't yet exist. Things were a bit unstable - undecided, in a way. Not that anyone was deciding anything - not that anyone could have been, just then. The universe was a rebellious teen, in its nanosecond-long youth.
What did exist was space. And time. No time without space; no space without time. This was a peculiar thing indeed, as universes go. Time, in and of itself, was a curious concept. You mean things could be, and then cease to be? New things could replace the things that had ceased? Preposterous.
But that was the state of things, and there was no stopping this wild child.
An infinite fractal of eyes watched the universe grow from the quark they had generated, fascinated by this concept of time. And space, but mostly time. The future and all its infinite possibilities lay before them. Not that they had words for these things - not that there was language at that point. At least not any that the teenaged universe's future children could comprehend.
All the same, the centerpoint of the fractal consciousness watched in amazement, and confusion, and more than a little sheepishness.
"Oh dear," Orvus said. "That's not what I meant to do at all."
Empire
They say the Cragmite Empire is unstoppable. They're probably right. Dozens of worlds razed to oblivion; dozens more fighting for their survival. Hundreds more awaiting the inevitable.
They say Fastoon will fall, like all the others. They're probably right. They only discovered hyperspace forty years ago, they're no match for an Empire that spans a galaxy.
"Not today, you Craggy bastards!" Veronica Azimuth roars at the Cragmites closing in on her, and slams her wrench into the drive core's containment module.
The destruction of the Cragmite capital ship wins the Lombaxes the battle. For the first time, they begin to whisper that maybe Fastoon will survive.
Work
Kaden hasn't slept in three days.
Rayna has no idea what he's working on. Some muttering about Keepers and space-time and she'd assumed it had something to do with the Dimensionator that she wasn't supposed to know he was taking care of.
Of course, she's the unofficial keeper of the Keeper. Being his babysitter was apparently a prerequisite to having any sort of close relationship with him.
"It's been exactly seventy-two hours since you last slept. Go to bed."
She gets a distracted 'uh-huh' as a reply. Oh well. Time to pull out the big guns. So to speak.
She drapes herself over his back. She's naked from the waist up, of course; one time he'd sleep-drunkenly told her that her abs plus her breasts were basically the hottest thing he'd seen in his life. While she doubted that, it was a tried and true method to have 150% of his attention.
"Go to bed," she whispers, and bites his ear. "Or do I have to carry you?"
"Please do, Major," he whispers back. "I've been very bad, haven't I?"
Sleep deprived and horny. Quintessential Kaden. "Yep. I should probably punish you..."
"Please do, Major," he replies, and nips her finger.
Rayna laughs and heaves him out of the chair. All work and no play never made Kaden a dull boy, that was for sure.
Semantics
"So what you're saying is... I'm going to be a father." It comes out a bit more... accusing than Alister had strictly intended. But really, it was an idea he'd long ago given up entertaining, a little warning would have been nice. Something more gentle than 'by the way, my cohort is creating a new life and I want you to be the one to raise them'.
Cepheid throws an arm around Alister's shoulders. It's a bit weird, because the man was generally not given to public displays of camaraderie, or affection, or whatever his exact feelings were. "More like a caretaker. A particularly beloved uncle."
"Ceph."
He laughs. "Okay. You're going to be a dad, Azimuth."
...Dear god. At least AIs didn't require diaper changes.
Honour
Erica Azimuth has worked hard to get where she is. Her detractors say that it's her great-grandmother's name that brought her recognition, and her mother's that brought her first promotion. Maybe they're even right. But her mother's been dead for forty years and her great-grandmother for two hundred and they never commanded battalions or cruisers or ran a city. She's built her own path, and her family name might be part of her but it doesn't define her.
With what her little brother's done, she's not sure she ever wants to hear the name Azimuth again.
Cepheid and Hailey are to her right, Ackerley and Duke and Andromeda to her left, and Aphelion's whipcrack voice calls for the exile of the traitor.
Her little brother falls to his knees and a wordless keen escapes his throat. He looks to Cepheid, first, but the AI's face shows nothing but barely contained contempt and rage. Then he looks to her.
Erica holds his gaze, and seconds Aphelion's motion. Her family name may not define her, but a betrayal of all it stands for cannot be tolerated.
Threat
Kaden's bruised and covered in dirt and a thin line of blood trickles down from his temple. He holds Rayna's broken wrench in one hand, and something wrapped in a blanket is held to his chest with the other. It's very small and very, very still.
"If I ever see your face again, I'll kill you," Kaden snarls, and Alister believes it.
Falter
Kaden digs into the door's control panel with shaking hands. He barely manages to lock the door without electrocuting himself, and falls to his knees as the shaking worsens.
He hasn't slept in three days. He hasn't eaten in four. He's pretty sure he could cut someone with his cheekbones.
He rests his head against the door and tries to dredge up the willpower to stand. This wasn't somewhere he could afford to let his guard down. Station security would notice the rewired door within eight hours. Maybe twelve, if he was particularly lucky.
Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it would be nice, to just lay down and die....
Kaden stands. It's shaky, and his vision blurs, but he stands. Then he puts one foot in front of the other, and walks.
Work
For the first several years after... after everything, Alister tries his best to save as many stragglers as he can. Then Tachyon blockades him on Torren IV but refuses to kill him, and Pangaea doesn't have the specs to evade Tachyon's ships. And so he's forced to watch and listen as Tachyon captures one Lombax after another. The organics he just kills. The AIs he sometimes kills too, but more often their fate is... worse.
Alister spends two years working for the Vullards of Molonoth Fields. Not to plan, but to forget. They're difficult, and they never consider him anything more than an outsider. But it's hard work and most nights he's so exhausted that the nightmares don't bother him. Entire days go by where he doesn't even remember what his real name is.
Then, one day, a visiting Terachnoid offhandedly mentions something called the Keeper of Time.
Alister lays awake for hours that night, turning the phrase over and over in his head. Eventually he repeats it out loud, too; only Pan's there to judge him, and she certainly doesn't care. He's heard it before. Once, a long time ago....
It comes to him in the early hours of the morning, just before his shift is due to start. Kaden knew what it was. He'd been researching it. The Keeper of Time, the Great Clock, the heartbeat that drove the universe. It was said that it could rewind all of spacetime to a specific moment...
Alister hands in his resignation on the spot and corners the Terachnoid who'd brought it up. He has a lot of work ahead of him.
Quarrel
"Long time no see, huh, Alister?"
The Markazian is immediately forgotten. Alister turns, and Kaden stands on the upper level of the cargo bay. Missing half an ear and looking about as old as Alister feels - god, he'd be ... fifty? And still carrying Rayna's broken wrench. His armor is battered, and looks like it's been pieced together from a dozen different sources. It's still functional, though, not that Alister would expect anything less from Kaden.
"Kaden! I... I thought you were dead!" Alister replies, hardly daring to believe his eyes.
Kaden laughs. It... doesn't sound like him. It sounds cruel. "No thanks to you."
Alister feels his hands clench into fists. This wasn't how he wanted things to go. He'd have expected Kaden to be changed, if he'd survived, but not like this. But hey, nothing ever went how he wanted, right? "Kaden... I didn't...."
"Unlike the rest of them," Kaden interrupts. He shifts his grip on Rayna's wrench. "My parents. Your sisters. Rayna."
"You killed them all, you bastard," Kaden snarls, and leaps from the second floor.
Alister barely has time to swing his wrench out of its clasp to block the blow. Kaden tumbles away with more grace than Alister had expected, and whirls back to attack again. There's real fury behind Kaden's blows, and after the second barely-deflected strike Alister begins to worry that one of them might be seriously injured.
"Kaden - Kay, please, stop this!"
Kaden ignores him. The end of Rayna's wrench glows a dim blue - it still worked? - of course it worked, this was Kaden - and Alister swings his own wrench down and to the side to deflect the bolt of plasma. It bounces away and something explodes, but Alister's too busy watching his opponent to check the extent of the damage.
Kaden wasn't a trained fighter, he telegraphed most of his moves, but to use the energy bolts... this wasn't a training fight. This was serious. He has to end this now, lest one of them wind up dead.
The next attack comes head-on, with all of Kaden's weight behind it, and Alister is forced to absorb it head-on too. His teeth rattle as their wrenches connect. Just as soon as Kaden's regained his feet he's on the attack again, and Alister skips backwards across the floor as he blocks blow after blow.
Alister sees an opening, and lunges for it. Rayna's wrench goes skidding across the floor when Alister smacks Kaden's hand with the flat of his wrench, and Kaden turns on Alister with nothing but his fists and mad fury in his eyes.
Alister tosses his own wrench aside and grabs Kaden in a lock-grip, forcing their chests together and trapping Kaden's hands between them where all he can do is scrape against Alister's breastplate. Kaden tries to fight anyway, but Alister's both taller and stronger. Now that he's got Kaden held against him he's pretty sure that Kaden is very underweight too.
Slowly, Kaden quiets. His struggling slowly tapers off, until the only sound is their heavy breathing.
"Kay," Alister whispers. His lips come to rest on Kaden's helmet. "Please."
Kaden starts to tremble. "Ali, I...." He sucks in a deep breath, and his knees abruptly give out. Alister goes down with him, and Kaden searches for purchase on Alister's breastplate.
Kaden heaves out a shuddering sob, and begins to cry in earnest. Alister tightens his hold as though he'll lose Kaden forever if he lets go, and follows.
Jealous
"I know this guy," Kaden had said. "We can trust him."
Alister had decided to trust Kaden's judgement. Kaden knew the galaxy and its inhabitants better than he did, and he'd avoided Tachyon for eighteen years. If Kaden trusted the guy, then the guy was trustworthy.
What Alister hadn't expected was the easy familiarity between the two of them. They had their own fistbump, for god's sake, and Alister may be sixty-eight years old and far too old for such things but by god his inner ten-year-old is vibrating in rage at such presumption with his best friend.
His somewhat more rational adult self follows right along when Kaden brushes his hand down the skeevy smuggler's thigh, because Kaden had promised he'd stop sleeping around, the bastard, and...
...And that had been eighteen years ago and Alister has since committed what might just be the biggest mistake in the universe, and it's really a miracle that Kaden allows Alister to talk to him at all.
So Alister swallows the resentment and puts on a fake smile (grimace) and greets the smuggler with as much civility as he can manage.
Neglect
"Aphelion? Can I talk to you for a sec?"
"Of course! You don't have to ask, you know."
Ratchet smiles crookedly down at her and climbs down the ladder to the lower half of the cargo bay. She doesn't materialize her holoform, because she isn't yet sure of his thoughts on the matter. She's sure he doesn't mind it, and in fact probably enjoys seeing it... it's simply that he isn't used to seeing her as anything more than a ship.
Her pilot fidgets a bit near her nose, and she obligingly tilts forward to allow him to sit, if he so desires. He stares at her in surprise for several moments, and then gingerly perches right on the edge. She purrs, a subsonic hum, hoping to maybe relax him a little bit. She hasn't seen him this tense outside of battle situations.
"I just... I just wanted to say I'm sorry for treating you how I have been. I know I've said that already, but I just wanted to repeat it, you know? And... and to explain."
He rubs the back of his neck. Aphelion waits, patiently. The apology is accepted, of course, not that he ever needed to in the first place. But it's accepted all the same.
"It's just... when I grew up on Veldin... well, I didn't have the greatest life when I was a kid. Didn't really have parents. I was pretty sick for a long time, nobody wanted to adopt me... anyway. My point is, I was alone. Never felt like anyone cared about me. I got kind of... er, rebellious."
You turned into a little shit, is what you're saying, Aphelion thinks fondly.
"So... I feel like I'm continuing the cycle. I did it with Clank, before, and... now you. Except I thought you were a dumbot. I didn't even think you were alive! And I hurt you really badly because I was dumb and too fixated on other stuff. I'm so sorry, Aphelion."
Aphelion is quiet for several seconds as she organizes her thoughts. She still isn't sure where they stand with each other - it's all so new still. But... she thinks he prefers her assertive. Confident and outgoing, at the very least. "Ratchet... I think you misunderstand. We're fundamentally different. From what General Azimuth has told me, and what I know of myself, my thought processes are very different from yours."
Ratchet tries to find something to focus on, some kind of face-equivalent, then gives up and looks at the far wall. At Pangaea, maybe. He doesn't reply, so she assumes permission to continue.
"Please don't get the wrong idea, the sentiment is very much appreciated! However, because of the manner in which I was programmed, I change my personality to suit my pilot. You didn't hurt me, I promise. I can remember two distinct pilots in my past, perhaps more. I changed my behaviour to suit their desires - it's simply how I exist. I misjudged your wishes, and that is why I became the way I did. The fault is mine for failing to communicate."
"But..." Ratchet shakes his head. "It was me. I was too focused on fighting Tachyon, on finding the Lombaxes... never even noticed that there was one with me the whole damn time. And not just anyone, but an Admiral! Tachyon must have recognized you, he must have been laughing at the idiot kid who couldn't find the Lombax he was flying around like some... some mindless drone!" He puts his head in his hands and groans.
Aphelion sighs, but it's fond. Of course he was going to completely ignore everything she'd said. Sometimes she wishes she'd known him longer when Clank was still with him; she knows he was much more stable and less self-deprecating, and it was almost physically painful knowing that she could never be to him what Clank was.
She materializes her holoform. Ratchet jumps when she sits beside him and puts an arm around his shoulders, but he does not push her away.
"Ratchet. Please don't worry about me. It's my job to worry about you. I know this is... unusual for you, and still very new. For both of us. I'll let you know if you're doing something to hurt me. I promise, but only if you promise to do the same for me."
He stares at the floor between his legs, still tense, for several long moments. She begins to wonder if maybe she misjudged again, if he'll refuse or push her away or worse. Then he sighs and leans into her.
"...Alright. Thanks, Aphelion."
It's like the last missing piece clicks into place. This is right, this is how it should be. Pilot and ship, together against the world.
"You're quite welcome, Ratchet."
Compliment
"Your technique's not bad, but it needs a little work," Alister tells Ratchet, and adjusts his posture accordingly. Ratchet attacks the wrenchwork lessons with the kind of single-minded determination that Kaden's never really seen from anyone other than himself.
"Good!" Alister beams at Ratchet, and the younger Lombax soaks up the praise. Kaden hasn't seen Alister smile for twenty-two years, not really. It's alien on his face. Makes him look thirty years older. Makes him look... fatherly.
Kaden leaves them to it. Ratchet only needs one father, and he's definitely not it.
Innocence
The first time it happens, Aphelion has no idea what's going on.
She recognizes Angela's change in behaviour - she's the first to enter the phase, as the healthiest of the four Lombaxes - and she thinks she ought to know what's happening. There's some dim recollection at the back of her mind, but she can't quite figure out what it's of.
The other three follow Angela quickly thereafter. Kaden is next, despite Alister and Ratchet's relatively better health. There is a minor altercation between Angela and Kaden, after which Angela locks herself in a closet. Kaden, similarly, drags Alister to the engine room and locks the both of them in there. Dan disappears just as abruptly, which is quite unusual.
It leaves Ratchet in the cargo bay with herself and Pangaea's silent shell. And Clank, whom Aphelion still isn't sure how to act around. He's warm enough, certainly, but she isn't yet sure of his relationship with her pilot, and therefore with her.
Ratchet paces up and down the short length of the cargo bay. On the side opposite Pangaea, because no one wants to get closer to her than they have to. Clank sits on a crate and follows him with his optics. Aphelion does the same with her scanners. He's not usually this restless. Not like this. His temperature is elevated by 2.3 degrees; not quite feverish but certainly cause for concern. His breathing and heartrate are likewise both elevated, and he's tense from ear to tail. His hands repeatedly curl into fists, and then uncurl.
"Ratchet," Clank eventually says, gently, after they have watched Ratchet pace for half an hour.
Ratchet heaves out a frustrated sigh. "This didn't happen last year, when you were gone. I thought maybe it was done with...."
"You were also ten kilograms underweight," Clank chastises. "And very stressed. Did you even eat, or did you rely on nanotech to keep you alive?"
Ratchet briefly looks guilty, and then returns to his frustrated pacing. He tugs on his ears once, and then growls and folds his arms.
"Ratchet," Clank repeats, and slides off of the crate. "Let me help you." He grabs at Ratchet's pant leg as he passes, and Ratchet lets him. He stops, closes his eyes, and shudders at the contact.
Some fragment of a memory surfaces in Aphelion's mind: another pilot, a long time ago, bigger and bulkier than Ratchet, pressed against her own holoform, her name on his lips, panting in want, need -
"I... I may be able to help," Aphelion says, shyly.
Both Lombax and robot jump at her voice, though to their credit neither of them jump very far. "Aphelion! I - I'm sorry, I totally forgot, I'm just really distracted right now, I promise I won't do it again."
Aphelion considers a moment. Well, it was obvious that talking wasn't going to get her much of anywhere. She materializes her holoform, standing beside her nose. Ratchet's eyes immediately go to her chest, and he tenses with the effort required to stop himself from moving. "Let me help," she says, mimicking Clank's tone. She steps forward, and some instinct tells her to brush her hand along his ear.
His whole body seizes up, his eyes close, and a clipped moan forces its way out. "Aphelion...."
"I've done this before, I think," she says, running her thumb along the top of his ear. "You're my pilot, and my friend. Let me help you."
Ratchet stands there and shudders for several long seconds. Aphelion pets his ear, and she watches Clank run his hand down Ratchet's leg.
Ratchet forces out a hoarse okay.
She helps. It's just as amazing as she thought it'd be.
Glass
They find the white fighter buried in debris. Also partially jammed into the side of a building with its entire front end presumably crushed. Its engines still flicker weakly when they try to jumpstart it. Lombax technology: apocalypse proof.
It takes an hour to unfuse the ship from the wall. It turns out that its canopy is shattered, which results in all of them picking shards out of their hands for another half hour. Alister finds a wing several meters away, buried in the sand. It bears the sigil that used to adorn Aphelion's wings.
Clank calls the Zoni, in the end. The canopy's a lost cause, the nose isn't much better, and they never do find the other wing. The Zoni can fix the shell, and they do, but they can't fix whatever mind the ship might have had.
Aphelion wonders who it was, who it might still be, and they can all hear the wistfulness in her voice. All eyes turn to Alister, and he admits that he only knew Aphelion in passing. Whoever this ship was, he's just as in the dark as the rest of them are.
They power up the ship, and the engines work just fine. The AI still doesn't wake up. Kaden recalls some hazy memory of the internal nanotech generator maybe being able to fix things they can't otherwise get to, and so they wait.
The AI onlines an hour later mid-thought and mid-sentence, and they all dive for cover as it promptly blasts a hole in the wall.
"-bash yer fuckin' 'ead in, cheeky cunt - oh, what? You ain't Drophyds, 'ello there!"
Brood
Zephyr knows he should probably try and interact with the rest of the crew he's been forced to join. It'd be the polite thing to do. And he's inevitably going to have to fight for them, it'd pay to know their abilities and strategies.
He should at least try to talk with the two ships he's docked with. They're his wingmates now, really. The white one never speaks. Zephyr might have thought they had no AI, but sometimes they'll bob or dip a wing like they're alive. Azimuth talks to them like they're alive. Nobody else talks to them, ever. Nobody else even goes near them. So that one was a mystery he didn't exactly want to pry into.
The blue one was chattier. She'd strike up a conversation with most anyone who entered the cargo bay. She sounded like Aphelion. Didn't look it, didn't act it. Didn't remember a fucking thing.
"...Red?"
"I... I'm sorry, my name is Aphelion. Did we know each other?"
At first she'd tried to talk to him. Then when he hadn't responded she'd stopped. That wasn't like Red either. Red would have yelled til he told her what she wanted to know.
Sometimes one of the organic Lombaxes comes down to the cargo bay and talks to her in quiet tones. Usually his robotic partner (friend? lover? mate? Zephyr has no idea) is with him. The two of them usually sit in her cockpit, for privacy he supposes. He wonders what the Lombax and robot are to Aphelion. He has an uncomfortable feeling that the Lombax is her pilot. Red had tried so hard to fight the addiction, and in the end she'd failed simply because she didn't know to resist.
Sometimes, a Markazian comes down to the cargo bay. Zephyr hadn't liked him, at first. He was nosy, babbled a lot about technical things, and didn't know when to take a hint.
Dispose
All things produce waste eventually, and protopets are no different. Megacorp modified the second strain to have a hyper-efficient digestive tract, to the point of only needing to pass fecal matter once every standard Bogonian month. Liquid waste was nonexistent, unless it came out of the mouth as bile, usually only in the case of illness or consuming the few substances that were indigestible.
With Henry's age and non-standard diet, it fluctuates a little. More throw-up, less poop. Angela likes to think she's a pro at cleaning up weird half-digested things smeared on floors or furniture. Or walls, on one memorable occasion.
This, however, is the first time she's had to clean up a mess in an unfamiliar ship. That also happens to be sentient. At least it's just puke this time.
Mira's crew quarters aren't exactly well-stocked after twenty-two years of being abandoned on a moon. Thankfully her chosen room has a cleaning cloth that's only slightly rotted, which she tries her best to mop up everything with. Could Lombax ships feel things? Aphelion and Zephyr seemed to be able to sense pressure at the very least, were bigger ones like Mira the same way? Having puke on your deck couldn't be pleasant...
"I'm really sorry about this," Angela finally says when she can't restrain herself any longer. "I'm usually good at predicting when he's going to throw up, but I guess the excitement upset his schedule. Um, you can't feel this, can you? And do you have somewhere where I can throw this out? The cloth, I mean. I think it's a lost cause."
Mira doesn't reply. Angela's left wondering if the AI has sensors in crew quarters. Maybe she didn't for privacy reasons? Kaden was pretty fucking shameless and Alister could have his moments as well, but she knew better than to profile an entire planet's worth of people based on two not-all-there specimens.
She's about ready to go out into the corridor and try again, or just look for some kind of trash chute or something on her own, when Mira abruptly replies. "Sorry, I - I wasn't sure what to say. Ah, but, yes. There is an incinerator in the wall, two meters to your right, allow me to op - ah, this will take a moment, it is stuck. My apologies."
By Goddess. The ship has an accent. A fucking adorably thick accent with rolling R's and th's that sound more like Z's and she's pretty much swooning over a disembodied voice, fuck.
"It's alright, I can wait. So, um, I didn't notice the accent before?" Real smooth, Angela.
"You were perhaps... slightly preoccupied at the time, yes?" Mira replies quietly. The incinerator chute makes an ominous click-thud-whir and creaks open. A little puff of ash flutters gently down to the floor.
"Yeah," Angela admits. There had been a lot of fighting, a lot of screaming. Then later it'd been mostly Dan and Zephyr trying to coax the AI into responding. She'd barely heard its voice, to be honest. At least it sounded nothing like the other voices she'd heard from this ship. The hivemind, or the voice of Alister's dead sister...
"I am sorry," Mira blurts out again, and Angela blinks. She'd somehow expected the AI to be more... mature? than she actually seemed to be. "I have not... I have not recovered from what has occurred. So I will not be as helpful as I usually am. I apologize for that."
Angela nearly starts playing with the cloth in her hand before remembering what's all over it, and settles for walking to the incinerator instead. A distant, warm glow obligingly lights from deep within. "I... no, it's okay. You went through a lot of shit. Hard to bounce back from all that. With the... undead crew and all... look, if you want to talk, I'm here, alright? I'm not very good at it, but I'll probably be better than the rest of them."
The cloth disappears down the chute and presumably goes up in smoke; thankfully Mira snaps the door shut before any kind of smell can escape into the room. "You may be correct," the AI replies, the first curl of humor creeping into her voice. "Thank you... ah. What do you prefer I call you? I do not know your credentials or family name."
Well, she definitely didn't want to be called 'Miss Cross', and she had a feeling that her Bogonian credentials probably weren't applicable to a ship belonging to a society dead for twenty-two years. "Just Angela is good. And I mean it, okay? Talk to me whenever."
"Thank you. Angela."
Quake
Mira has ten seconds to recognize and catalogue the anomaly. The first two seconds are simply gawking and trying to figure out what the flying fuck is going on. There was a star - K-class, blue supergiant, minor fluctuations on the M-bands but otherwise your garden variety star.
Now there is a ... well. The star is still there, but it's... exploded. Kind of. Like someone did the equivalent of smashing a moon into a rocky planet, or someone had taken an enormous bite out of it. White plasma arcs into space, briefly, before curling back into the star itself.
She would think that the star was collapsing into a singularity, but the star is too young and there had been no prior evidence that it was undergoing premature nova. It's almost like it's ejecting its photosphere in a single massive starquake. Like a full-bodied shiver.
Under the halo of plasma, something else is happening. Something she can't categorize or begin to define. Some anomaly, maybe some independently-formed singularity interacting with the star in unexpected ways. It gives off exotic emissions the likes of which she's never seen before and she hardly has time to do a full database search.
The star goes dark, which is as surreal as it is impossible. Then it... collapses. Not in the way that a star might collapse into a black hole or neutron star. It's as though an invisible hand poked it with the universe's largest pin.
Her long-range sensors detect the incoming shockwave 5.5 seconds before it will hit her. Not enough time to jump to hyperspace unscathed, so she'll have to ride it out. She barks a warning to her crew, and encases them all in forcefields anyway. Thankfully none of them are doing anything other than walking or lounging, so at least they'll be safe-ish even if some of her systems fail.
2.5 seconds before the shockwave hits, she detects the radiation. It's a kind she's never encountered before, which is not surprising considering that nothing else about this star is normal in the slightest. It's energetic, like gamma radiation but worse, and her hull is not graded to shield from it, and it will destroy organic matter.
Then she gets smacked in the side with a shockwave of two-parts star matter and one-part shit-that's-probably-from-another-dimension. Things go dark for a little while.
----
{There is a very urgent problem,} Mira informs the other AIs. {The radiation from the anomaly will kill the organics within two hours. They may already be badly damaged by it; I do not know how long the nanotech can repair it. Also, I cannot jump to hyperspace. I think that this area of space has been damaged by the shockwave; thus we must travel at sublight speeds until we leave the area that it has affected. This will take much longer than two hours.}
None of them are scientists like she is, of course, but they're not stupid either. Unless they figure something out now, only four of them will pull through this.
Mira doesn't have high hopes. They aren't stupid, yes, but if she with all her knowledge can't think of anything... two flyboys and a civilian won't be able to either. Digitizing them is out of the question; she still doesn't know how to make it work properly, and she refuses to make a best guess like she did with her original crew. Better death than that.
{I believe I may have a solution,} Clank replies. {We must gather them all in a single room. Quickly, please.}
----
"I believe I may be able to contain you all in a temporal lock," Clank explains to the assembled organics, and to the AIs listening remotely. "A... bubble of suspended animation. I do not know how long I will be able to maintain it, but it is our only hope right now. We do not have any other ideas, nor the time to implement them. This, at least, will allow Mira to perhaps devise a more stable solution."
"Okay," Ratchet agrees, immediately. "How do you wanna do this?"
The others look at each other over Ratchet's head, but no one protests. Not even Kaden, but then he seems... out of it. She wonders if the radiation is affecting him faster than the others, due to his general poor health. It's too early to tell; her sensors reveal nothing beyond what the others are experiencing.
"You will need to be grouped into as small of a space as possible," Clank instructs. "I will admit I have little experience with this and would like to keep potential complications to a minimum."
They sit in a circle in the end, backs pressed together. Dan is practically sitting in Kaden's lap and looks rather faint, but Mira's sensors reveal that it's fear rather than advanced radiation poisoning. Angela strokes Henry, who is chewing on a piece of scrap metal and is blissfully unaware of his potential doom.
Clank ends up in Ratchet's lap. It's not something that either of them seem to plan, but Clank wanted as small of a distance as possible and it's the best way to obtain that, really. Mira watches as Clank surreptitiously takes hold of Ratchet's pant leg.
"Mira. I will likely remain in a meditative state for the duration of the journey. I will not move physically, but I will be able to receive transmissions if needed."
Mira suddenly realizes that she's in charge. Aphelion should be, technically, but Aphelion couldn't command a bitlet in her current state. Zephyr was far too hot-headed for this, and had even less experience than she did. And forget about Pangaea.
Angela looks up from Henry and smiles. 'I can do this,' Mira thinks. 'For them. For her.'
"Of course. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you need something."
Clank nods, the actuators in his hand grip that much tighter, and he... stops time. It's very, very surreal to see, and to sense. There is a sphere of space that... isn't. A hole in reality as far as her sensors are concerned, because they cannot sense inside it. And yet it moves relative to her position and touches nothing that Clank doesn't want it to touch. It's scarier than the anomaly, to be honest, mostly because it's inside her.
Angela continues to smile, frozen in time.
Mira counts to five in fractions of one thousand. She can do this. She has to.
"...Well. I suppose I will see what I can do about boosting the power to the sublight drive core. If either of you have suggestions... please let me know. This is going to be a very long trip."
Effort
"Dad!" Ratchet finally snaps, in a last-ditch effort to get his father's attention.
It works. Kaden stops in his tracks. He doesn't turn around, but at least he's not leaving.
"Kaden... dad. I just - I want to know you. I know there's Alister, and I know what you are to each other, and what he would've been to me. But I just... I want to talk to you. I want to get to know you. Please?"
Kaden doesn't move. Not even a tail twitch. Ratchet waits with baited breath. Half a year of his own father avoiding him, and he has no idea why. Maybe now he'll finally get some answers.
"I'm so sorry, Ratchet," Kaden chokes out, and disappears down the corridor. He doesn't look back.
Ratchet can do nothing but stare after him. Clank eventually comes to stand beside him, and holds tight to his pant leg.
"That could have gone a lot better," Ratchet mutters, in a pitiful attempt at humor. Clank makes a sympathetic noise of agreement.
Guess
Kaden turns his intense gaze on Clank, and Clank is forced to admit he does not know the answer.
Kaden makes him uncomfortable. He looks so like Ratchet, and yet the two of them could not be more different. He is what Ratchet could have become: a shadow of a person with no care but for his own whims. Clank knows that he is largely responsible for this not coming to pass, and shudders to think of what might have happened if they had never met.
And this... this is what Kaden asks of him. To rewrite history. To give Ratchet a happy childhood with his own kind. To save the Lombaxes, and Polaris.
To condemn Solana and Bogon to the whims of madmen. To lose his best friend. To, perhaps, never exist at all.
Kaden asks Clank to give his best guess. Clank is not in the habit of guessing. This is also not a matter that should ever be guessed at. To alter the very fabric of the universe based upon a guess - to potentially destroy the universe based upon a guess....
He tells Kaden he will see what he can learn from Sigmund. The intense gaze finally leaves him, and Clank feels a tenseness leave him that he was not entirely aware was there. At least Ratchet and his father have one thing in common: they expect the impossible.
This is not a decision he is equipped to make. He cannot weigh an action that will affect countless lives.
'I wish you were still alive, father. I cannot do this alone.'
Later he realizes he does not have to; he has Sigmund, and the Clock itself is far more aware of the intricacies of time than he or anyone else will ever be. Even his wayward clone contributes, and the Zoni themselves, in their limited fashion. Until one day Clank can feel the possibilities shift, and he realizes that he no longer has to guess.
It can be done.
Blaze
"I am afraid we may not survive this, Dan," Clank admits. There's a barely perceptible tremble in his voice.
Dan grips the control yoke, his hands white, and desperately blinks back tears. They were the last ones left. Zephyr had been shot down not two minutes ago. Mira was on fire. Half of the ship was ablaze, and her efforts to stop it had been useless in the end when the AI core went up in smoke too.
All this for nothing?
"Ratchet and I are withdrawing to regroup. I do not -"
And Clank, too, goes silent.
Dan does start crying at that point. No one was left. ...No one except one Markazian with a burning ship under his very limited command. Enough to point it at Tachyon's ship and make it go...
Dan jams the throttle to full, prays that he has that much control, and waits for the end.
Now
The days following the betrayal of Percival Tachyon are the strangest in Rayna's life.
She's sleeping, when everything happens. At least until Nick wakes her up with an ear-splitting wail. He'd been a quiet kit before then. Well-behaved. She hadn't thought his premature lungs had been capable of such volume, honestly.
Ten minutes later, Kaden runs inside, and that is even more of a mystery than Nick. He's crying, too, and she ends up trying to juggle the now-quiet Nick and her suddenly-clingy mate. Kaden was touchy-feely anyway, but not like this. Not like she'd disappear if he let her go. Something is wrong.
When she tries to call Alister, it's Pan that replies. Rayna fears the worst for several agonizing moments, and her heart leaps to her throat. The first thing Pan does is reassure Rayna that Alister is fine, only there's an issue with the Elder Council that he's dealing with.
The 'issue' lasts twelve hours. Rayna gets the story from Kaden in the meantime, and can hardly believe her ears. Alister, a traitor; Fastoon barely avoiding a genocide; Kaden, Alister, and eight other people going back in time to prevent all this?
(Kaden finally sleeps, and Nick gazes up at her with solemn green eyes, more focused than she'd ever seen him, more than she'd ever seen any kit. She realizes, then, that this far-fetched story was not a hallucination or dream.)
The Council gets their own confirmation from a science vessel named Mira. She had been on an extended mission on the far side of Polaris, and had no way of knowing the details of the battle in Fastoon orbit... except she could recount every shot fired. The Council lets Alister go, after that, though he's under house arrest.
He looks like he's twenty years older when he comes home. She supposes he is, in a way. The first thing he does is hug her, tightly, the same way Kaden had done and continues to do. The second thing he does is kiss her, and the third is to tell her he loves her.
(Of all the things to come out of Alister's mouth, that was what she had least expected. The surprise was not unwelcome.)
The three of them don't leave the house for days. Pan runs interference, allowing them their time together, and Rayna finally gets the full story out of her mates. She can't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of what they went through. Twenty-two years of loneliness and suffering. Suddenly, the clinginess makes a lot more sense.
The only people Pan lets through are Admiral Aphelion and her wing. Only Aphelion herself comes inside; she asks very politely if she can see their son, and Rayna certainly isn't going to say no.
Nick's unsure of the elderly stranger, but he warms up to her quickly once she speaks. He holds on to one of Aphelion's fingers, and she quietly asks what his name is.
She calls him Ratchet, and she says that for a short time he was her pilot. It's the first time anyone calls the kit by that name; Kaden and Alister had avoided calling him anything at all aside from an aborted tongue-roll. He doesn't look like a Ratchet, she thinks. It'd be suited to a boisterous flyer - not a quiet, tiny kit.
Aphelion speaks freely to Alister, despite Rayna's presence. She allows Nick to hold her finger the whole time. Rayna only really knows her from the holonet and Alister's stories, but she's... quieter. Less pushy, less irritable. When she and Alister speak, it's as allies - as friends. Not the tones of two people who dislike each other but are forced to work together, like they'd once been. It's yet another reminder of the bond they all share.
Alister will keep his position. He looks... conflicted at the news. Rayna never would have dreamed that Alister would be glad to lose his rank, but after everything she's heard she thinks she can understand. Aphelion seems to, as well; Alister may keep the title, she says, but his responsibilities and clearances will be severely restricted for the foreseeable future. And Fastoon will not know. The Azimuth family will not lose its honor.
Alister laughs. He sounds like he's going to cry again.
The Clockmaker
Clank goes to the Clock. Back to the Clock. Whatever. For someone who's supposed to be part Zoni, time travel confuses him just as much as it confuses anyone else. Tense-shifts, paradoxes, ruptures in the space-time continuum - whatever. It was a lot to deal with. Especially after what they'd done.
It had worked, and that was the worrying part. It had worked, and Tachyon was dead (Clank can feel this, in the strings of time; he doesn't have to be there at the point and time of death to know it happened). And now history was irrevocably changed. Here was one set of memories, protected from erasure by his quantum actuator. Here was the knowledge that those memories were now no longer real.
Here was the knowledge that this was 16 years before his earliest memories of Quartu, and Ratchet would no longer know him.
----
Klunk is still at the Clock. Clank briefly thinks that this is bizarre, because Doctor Nefarious was still in preschool - and then he remembers that he shouldn't (doesn't? whatever) actually exist yet either, so. It was reasonable.
Klunk folds his arms and stares, but doesn't actually say anything. He's taller than he used to be; he no longer looks like Clank's twin, and Clank can sense that his parts are no longer an imperfect duplicate, either. He wonders how time flows at the Clock in circumstances like this; had it been hours, or more? Years? There was no precedence for a reset like this. The timestrings were - well. Clank didn't touch the timestrings at the Clock. He felt it might be like jumping off of a cliff without his helipack.
Klunk says, "Good job," and it sounds like a sneer, because everything that comes out of Klunk's vocoder sounds like a sneer. And then he adds: "Father is waiting."
For a moment (which was a long time, for a robot; and both an eternity and a fraction of an instant, to a Zoni) Clank hasn't the faintest clue of what Klunk is talking about. Realization strikes; and Clank's mouth drops open, and Klunk is most certainly sneering now.
Father. Of course. He hadn't died, because Zoni do not die, but he hadn't been there. And now he hadn't been gone at all, in just the same way that Klunk shouldn't exist, because Nefarious was still in preschool....
He turns toward the Orvus chamber, and his father stands there, flanked by a dozen Zoni standing in the sort of orderly silence that even Clank had never been able to bring them to. Orvus extends his hand, and Clank takes it, quite on autopilot. Bizarrely, all he can think is that Orvus is very cold.
"I'm very proud of you," Orvus tells him, and pulls him into a hug.
----
There are biscuits and tea.
Clank thinks he ought to find this a little strange, but the Clock is a strange place and the antics of the Zoni have hardened him to a lot of it, so he just takes it in stride. Orvus nibbles on a biscuit, and two dozen Zoni are arrayed around him in a perfect Fibonacci sequence also quietly nibbling on biscuits.
(It's the quietness of the Zoni that Clank finds more bizarre than anything else. He keeps glancing at them as if to make sure that they're not up to something; Klunk, he notices, is doing the same.)
One of the Zoni hands Clank a biscuit, and he takes it on autopilot, and notices that it has a star-sticker on its eye. When he reaches to peel it off, the Zoni vanishes with a chitter.
Orvus smiles over his teacup. "Your friend gives that sticker to that Zoni. It's quite fond of it."
Clank looks up sharply, because he's had a lot of friends, but really - there's only one that really matters at the end of it all. Orvus knows this, because his shoulders are heavy with the weight of knowledge, of all the histories of the universe. And even if it weren't - Clank is a Zoni, too. And Orvus is their centerpoint.
The smile widens, and Orvus sets down his teacup onto one of the nearby Zoni's heads. It does not so much as twitch. "I know how much he means to you," he says, very gently. "I know what you would do for him - have done, in other probabilities. I'd expect nothing less than for you to make friends with him again."
It's - like a blessing. Clank isn't very good with normal organic relationships, but he's seen it in the holovids, and suddenly he remembers some holodrama, when the asteroid farmer had said to his son's suitor: 'You seem like an alright girl. Don't hurt him now, y'hear?' and it was a permission. This was unspoken. You may be friends, and more than that. I will not protest.
"He is - very young," Clank replies. He does not know Ratchet's exact age, because Ratchet had not known, either. Less than a year, at least. "And he will not remember me."
He sounds bitter. He tries to not, but he does anyway. Nine years of partnership that could not be regained, because Ratchet would not need him the way he had before. And his parents... well. The less Clank thinks of Kaden, the better. But it was better this way. At least Ratchet had parents. At least he wouldn't grow up sick and alone on Veldin.
(He'd risked destroying the universe simply to make Ratchet happy; of course he'd do something as minor as letting him grow up oblivious to the ways he had once been hurt. But it doesn't mean he isn't bitter, because - what about his own happiness?)
"I think," Orvus begins, very solemnly, and then his tone becomes wry: as though he's in on the universe's greatest joke. "That you might find he remembers more than you think he does."
----
Sigmund gives Clank a long, technical explanation as to the reasons behind the phenomena. Clank enjoys the technical aspects, he really does, but in one of the greatest ironies of the universe Clank has not had enough time to learn the minutiae. And thus Sigmund's explanation makes very little sense and involves many words with the prefix 'chrono-' that Clank is fairly certain do not exist in any dictionary or scientific text.
(Klunk deadpans, "It is timey-wimey bullshit. That is all you need to know." And Clank hasn't the faintest clue as to whether or not that's sarcasm. Then Sigmund starts to argue with him, and he's suddenly reminded of himself and Ratchet in the early days -)
But. The point is. They remember. All of them, organic and robot alike. Kaden, who had died first, and ten-year-old Angela all the way in Bogon, and Aphelion and Pangaea with their broken memory crystals. And the infant Ratchet. Less than a year old, with the memories of saving galaxies in his head.
How much they remember may vary, and especially in the case of Ratchet, because infant organics weren't meant to have a head full of adult memories. If he remembers anything at all, and he does because Orvus and Sigmund said he must - then he remembers Clank. This is not blind hope. This is fact.
("You're the best thing that ever happened to me," Ratchet murmurs to Clank as they sit and watch the hurricane winds batter the windows of their Metropolis apartment. He presses his lips to the top of Clank's head, and adds: "I don't know where I'd be without you," in a voice that says I love you, and Clank will probably never be more content than he was then.)
----
Clank returns to Fastoon alone. Alone as he ever gets nowadays, at least; there's always a few Zoni physically trailing along, and the hive is always buzzing at the edge of his mind. Always ready to defend his weak robotic shell, if the need arises.
He goes by shuttle, because the time stream near Fastoon was unstable enough and certainly didn't need any more portals being ripped open. The Clock's technology is so far beyond what the Lombaxes have that he's undetected. Which is just fine with him - the last thing he wants to do right now is deal with a government on high alert.
He's kind of planning on hacking something in order to figure out where Ratchet actually lives, even if half of the planet's datacenters were manned by AIs and it would be impolite at best. It turns out he doesn't need to; all six of the Fastoon-bound people who had gone back in time shine brightly to Clank's Zoni eyes, a haze of out-of-sync particles surrounding their bodies. They might linger for a long time, he thinks, and he wonders if he'll be able to find the other two that way. If he needs to. Angela might want reassurances, and Dan... how old was Dan? Where did he live, at this point in time?
Clank pushes Angela and Dan to the back of his mind for now. Fastoon's Lombaxes first - the others later. His sixth sense guides him to the city where the Court of Azimuth stood. He doesn't know the city's name, although he imagines he will before long. Even a week later the planet is a frenzy of activity, still on high alert. It was reasonable, Clank supposed. The Drophyd forces were still out there, not to mention the pirates. He wonders how much Fastoon's government knows.
The building that Clank gravitates toward is shorter, away from the downtown but not on the outskirts. It has ten stories, judging by the spacing of the windows, and four landing pads. The highest one is free of ships, and closest to the time-distortion besides that, and so Clank lands his shuttle right on the very edge of it.
(If Kaden finds it - and Clank clamps down on the instinctual defensiveness, because this was a different timeline and Kaden wasn't half-mad anymore.)
The wall of the building has a door in it, and that is the only entrance accessible from the pad. Clank considers it for a moment, and considers perhaps teleporting inside. In the end, however, he simply levitates himself high enough to reach the buzzer, and then settles down to wait.
He doesn't have to wait long. He has to look up, of course, but not as far as he'd expected, and he blinks upon seeing the Lombax who had come.
Alister had always said that Ratchet looked like his father, and Clank had always acknowledged that this was true. And yet, seeing Ratchet's mother for the first time - their resemblance is uncanny. She moves with the grace of a soldier and the last remnants of an over-cocky youth; she stands like she has to look up all the time and that standard-issue weapons do not quite comfortably fit her grip. The muscles in her arms ripple under her fur, always ready for action even in the safety of home.
Her eyes are soft. Welcoming. Curious, but not at all like the manic thirst for knowledge that Kaden possessed. They were the exact color of Ratchet's eyes.
"It's nice to meet you," she says, and for the first time since Ratchet was an adult Clank feels himself smile.
----
Rayna leads Clank through the apartment. She doesn't slow down to accommodate his far smaller legs, and he approves of this because he'd never needed anyone but the fastest walkers to slow down. She's not much taller than Ratchet, she's easy to keep up with.
Clank doesn't have much to go off of in order to judge the apartment, but it's clean and spacious if a little cluttered. Certainly it must be a higher-end place; Clank has lived in enough places with Ratchet to know what the intergalactic standards for wealth look like.
The room she brings him to is dark, but Clank's eyes have no problems seeing the Lombax in the corner. Alister is sitting in a plush chair with a blanket draped over and around him, with his head tilted back against the backrest. He looks - well. He looks old, even if he's twenty-four years and a thousand battles younger than he was when Clank had seen him last. The coloration of his fur used to conceal most signs of age, but even from across the room Clank can see the deep bags under his eyes.
"Alister," Rayna says softly.
He stirs, raises his head, looks up at her. Then farther down, at Clank. Clank realizes that what he'd thought were blankets concealed something else - a very small, very chubby something else.
The baby Lombax stills when he sees him. He's much darker than the Ratchet he remembers - all blobby brown spots, and his muzzle and ears completely lack the off-white tip. His eyes, however, are Clank's favourite shade of green. There is no recognition in them, just startled confusion, and the hope Clank had allowed himself to feel begins to die -
And then Ratchet laughs.
Baby laughter, of course, loud and squealing, nothing like Ratchet had ever sounded. He reaches out with both hands, arms opened wide for a hug, and Clank has certainly never denied Ratchet that.
He's so chubby, which is quite frankly bizarre, and there's hardly any strength in his arms, and his coordination is poor to say the least. The tiny fingers trace clumsy patterns over Clank's back, his own battle-signals from a lifetime ago: enemy-left and civilian warning and incoming fire, and this beyond a doubt proves that he remembers.
They hug for 10.48 seconds longer than the adult Ratchet would have ever wanted to hug in public, but then again he's a baby right now and no one's around but his own family, and besides - Clank is hardly complaining. When they do break the hug it's Clank's doing, which is a first. Ratchet is grinning from ear to ear.
"You are considerably smaller than I remember you, Ratchet," Clank says. And boops Ratchet's nose, because Ratchet hated that, and he'd always gone cross-eyed as if by reflex. And, well. Clank wants to see if baby Ratchet reacts the same way.
Ratchet promptly goes cross-eyed, replies with an indignant "Nehh!", and blows a spit bubble that pops onto Clank's optic.
Strings
"Have you heard of the red string of fate, Daniel?"
Dan is forced to say that he has not, and Orvus settles crosslegged onto his dresser. The tiny, wrinkly face creases in pleasure. Storytime with the Zoni, Dan supposes.
"The Red String of Fate is a concept that proposes that people - often lovers - can be tied together through time and space. Soulmates, if you will. The string may be tangled, or stretched, but it will never break."
Orvus extends his hand, and a tiny glowing orb rises from his palm. It twirls in a lazy ring around him, and then floats down to tie itself around Dan's smallest finger. He watches in fascination as it wriggles around, splitting into several waving tendrils.
"Now, I believe that this concept is very real. Perhaps not in the sense that the original myth says, but real all the same. For example: you and I are connected. Through friendship, and a mutual enjoyment of puns." Orvus giggles, and one of the orb-ring's tendrils curls through the air and wraps itself around Orvus' finger. He holds it up, smiling widely. "See? Connected."
"Now, multiply this single thread by billions and billions. Everyone whose life you have ever affected, and everyone who has ever affected you. Each of them are connected to others, and those others to others, and so on for eternity. Countless connections just like this one." Dan half-expects the room to light up with threads; it does, kind of, but they are dim and blurry, barely visible.
"Quite a lot of threads, hm? But most of them you can barely see, because the connections they represent are not particularly important in the universal scheme of things. And the universe is quite big, you know! But if we look closely at a handful of strings, like so..."
Orvus floats up off of the dresser, reaching down to grab a handful of tendrils radiating away from Dan's hand. They abruptly light up like the sun, illuminating the room; Dan squints and half-covers his face at the sudden brightness, but it dims just as fast as it lit. They remain brighter than the others, however, and they sparkle like stars.
"These, my dear boy, are very special connections. Very special indeed." Orvus touches each of them in turn, and Dan thinks that maybe he can sense who they represent. Alister, Aphelion, Zephyr...
Orvus drops each thread one by one, until only one remains. It's the brightest, Dan notices, and seems more solid than the rest. Kaden, some part of him whispers, and Orvus smiles.
"Some connections are so powerful that they change the course of history. And this is one such connection. This is the splitting point for this timeline from all the others."
Orvus' smile turns wry, or perhaps sad. He doesn't usually seem old, exactly, or even alien. Suddenly Dan feels a very uncomfortable sense of timelessness radiating from him. This was a being who had seen all of history, from hundreds of thousands of years ago to the far reaches of a future he could never dream of. Maybe even the beginning of the universe, and its end.
"Do you know, Daniel, that this timeline was not the one that should have occurred? The Zoni do not see the future, there are simply too many variables for that! But we can see possibilities, and we can judge which of them are the most likely. This thread, this connection you forged, it altered all the variables in unforeseen ways." Orvus lifts the tendril, and it curls around his finger as though it's a living thing, like a vine perhaps. The connection never breaks, never wavers.
"When you mistyped a single number, it set in motion a series of events that changed, and continues to change, this entire galactic cluster. Do you remember? The night you met Kaden? The docking station requested a log of how many days you expected to remain docked, and you entered the wrong number."
Dan doesn't remember that part, exactly. He'd been more preoccupied with the crazy, sleep-deprived Lombax who'd threatened to kill him, to be honest. Still, if Orvus said that was what happened, he wasn't about to doubt him.
"If you had entered the correct number... well. That was the most likely variable, you know. The most likely timeline. This thread would not exist, because Kaden would have left your ship and you never would have known he was there."
"He would have died," Orvus continues, and smiles sadly. "There are few timelines in which he does not. You saved his life. In turn, Alister's behaviour is changed. He would have died as well, you know. And Aphelion, and Zephyr, and Mira. And me."
Dan starts at the last one, looking up at Orvus again. He half-expects it to be a joke, and while Orvus is still smiling he definitely isn't joking.
"I can't die in the sense that you can, you understand. Nevertheless, I would have been... unreachable for quite some time. It would have been quite unpleasant, and I'm quite relieved I won't be experiencing it directly."
Orvus tugs the strings, and Dan swears he can feel it, like a physical force, something connecting him to those he went through hell and back with. And the Zoni nexus floating in front of him.
"I know you believe you are unimportant, Daniel, but I'm afraid that just isn't true! Your actions have saved many, many lives - not just the Lombaxes, but the rest of Polaris and beyond. Entire planets that you have never heard of owe their continued existence to you."
Orvus plucks the glowing ring from Dan's finger; the threads all vanish, but now that Dan is aware of their existence it feels like they're still there. The knobbly hands - curiously cold for a being made of energy - lift one of Dan's, and Orvus gently wraps Dan's fingers around the tiny ball of light.
"And that," Orvus continues, gently, "Is why you should never underestimate your own worth, my dear boy. You are important. The universe can attest to that."