Chapter Text
“Are you sure you’ll be okay up there?”
The comm lines buzzed with feedback, and that was the only indication Mairon had that they broke hyperspace. In an S-class carrier like this one, there were no nauseating lurches or sudden gravity shifts that had him reaching for handles and walls. The fourth-gen Multimatter engines were the closest to the old antimatter tech their scientists had engineered since the signal blackout, or so he was told. There were no ships surviving that could tell him if this was true.
“Curumo,” he reassured for what was probably the fourth time since their conversation started, “I’ll be fine. Just cover for me until Aulë gets my holo.”
“Yeah, but…” Curumo was always the more reserved one in the forge. Mairon was a planner; had he forgotten that? “The T35-Sulimo is scheduled to cut right through dark space.”
“And it’ll pop right out on the other side,” he deadpanned. Brown eyes bled unwittingly into gold as he focused on soldering the new alarm wire, steady hands managing the board with a practiced finesse borne from all those late nights spent studying the books and exercising everything he learned there. “Trust me. We haven’t lost a single ship in dark space in ages. ‘Sides,” he couldn’t help but smirk to himself, “I’ve seen every blueprint of this thing. I’m a general-purpose mechanic. I know where all the escape pods are.”
There was nothing but faint static for a time on the other end and Mairon began to wonder if getting closer and closer to dark space meant that the signal was about to go bad. That was his job this week, too…with hundreds of thousands of the tiny, shining signal accelerators dumped in between his new crew, they were told to sort and report. And then they were to replace every single one on this massive, new carrier. Even state-of-the-art spacecraft like the Sulimo was bound to have recalls sometimes.
Curumo finally spoke after plenty of deliberation, his voice laden with enough emotion for the both of them. “…Please be careful. Don’t get caught.”
Mairon tilted his head haughtily before he remembered that his watch was set only to comm mode. “What will could they do to me anyway?” he challenged proudly. “We’ll be lightyears from home. Sending me back alone would be damn expensive.”
A door opened and he whispered a quick gotta go before turning pointedly back to the alarm panel to close it up. The panel sealed back perfectly, seamlessly. He turned around in time to salute the passing pilot—his blue lapels indicated his value as a squad captain which made Mairon grossly outranked in this place. Not for long, he thought; he already snuck into the mechanics’ crew so surely he could also sneak his way into pilot school. Only if this carrier could let him off on New Valinor first, and then maybe he could prove to Aulë that he was serious about following his dreams.
He wasn’t sure what inspired him to leave the forges. Call it an excess of ambition. He’d spent so long on that seasonless rock of a planet, examining garbage and assembling the tiniest, most sensitive parts of larger mechanisms—to someone else’s design, to someone else’s request. He was a scrapper and recycler in a yard with little other purpose, and as by the eve he snuck away precious metals to craft rings that glowed with an unnatural light, he pored over books of schematics that felt too familiar…he knew there was so much more he could do.
So he left. He left the forges and snuck on a ship and decided he was headed for anywhere but here. He landed himself a job on a secondary mechanic crew, the kind where no one asked questions and the pay wasn’t particularly great. The jumpsuits itched but they felt like freedom.
Then came the Sulimo—his lucky break. It would make its maiden voyage across Dark Space to get to New Aman and, with its skeleton crew, it would dock there in New Valinor. The same New Valinor that held the flight academy—and, Mairon reasoned, it would be easier to convince Aulë to let him stay once he arrived. It wasn’t like he was important, or powerful, or special in any way. The scrap yard wouldn’t even miss him.
Maybe it was dumb luck that the signal chips were recalled mere days before the launch. It was an opportunity to not only put him on the ship but to put him all over it, let him explore it. There was something spiritual about engineering at such a scale. There was a magic to it that buzzed in the air and left him invigorated.
Most importantly, it was better than the countless days spent over the forges. It finally felt like he was making something out of himself, and somehow this place he was in felt right with his life. Freedom.
The four central comm chips in the room that powered the security network for the doors were all behind a massive wall panel. To get inside, as he’d been instructed, he took out that little T-shaped tool and inserted it into the honeycomb mesh. A gentle pull and a seamless chunk of the wall panel came loose, revealing the electrical network behind it. This part was why he’d been chosen for the Sulimo job; he was tall, but he was lean enough to squeeze into the tight space between the walls. His arms were strong from dismantling dead cruisers, but he wasn’t bulky like the retired fighters who came in looking for quiet work. No, he was just right for the job. Like fate.
The panel slid shut behind him and he was left in the half-light of the machinery. Powering on the smaller of his two battery-powered torches, he balanced it in his teeth to work with his hands free. They always warned him in training of working in these small spaces, where a minor electrical short could lead to a very fleshy fire. Complete with infographics and scare tactics, of course. Always keep the hands free and work delicately. Be aware, be organized.
He had switched two of the four chips by the time he heard the automatic doors at the end of the corridor slide open. Quick breaths, quick feet. He froze.
“Whatever it is, it’s gaining fast,” a hurried voice said from somewhere beyond the wall and Mairon’s soldering iron stilled. “I don’t—someone needs to alert High Command—”
The door on the other end of the corridor slid shut and Mairon felt something settle in the pit of his stomach. Gaining fast, his head repeated. Whatever it is.
He popped the hatch on top of the wall panel and slid himself over to the sunken-in coppery ladder beside it. There would be three more units above the door so he’d be going into the mechanical floor above it. When he climbed his way up a few rungs and slid the roof panel open he immediately noticed the rush of warm air and the coppery tinge of light above him. He eased himself up into the gap there; above, it was high enough to stand and the panels were all painted the deep burgundy of the heat-traps. This, he realized, was an auxiliary engine room up above him—and luckily it sat empty right now, no prying eyes at his orange mechanic’s jumpsuit. He painted a comical figure against the lighting, copper hair against copper lights and recognizable citrus orange. General purpose mechanics certainly knew how to stand out.
He turned back to where he knew the corridor would be directly beneath him and walked on lightweight boots to the far panel. It stood out, its handles raised and silver against the rest of the paneled floor. Behind him loomed the side of an auxiliary engine that did who-knows-what, pistons lightly pumping with a familiar hum and clank that he hadn’t noticed before through all the soundproofing of the main cabin. All he had to do was pop it open with his wrench and solder in the last two sensors.
He couldn’t make it to the panel before the ship gave a great lurch.
He was lucky enough to be near a grav-lock. He scrambled for the handle and held on before it could throw him into the wall, letting out an indistinct cry as the force of the jolt pulled his shoulder hard enough to rebound with a snap. Anyone lesser than a maia would have suffered a dislocation. The emergency lights started flashing and the auxiliary engine squealed in protest. Then the pull relaxed and the gravity stabilizers kicked back in; and he was back on his feet, panting with his arm screaming in pain. The engine clicked loudly once, then the second time felt more like a bang—and then everything went dark.
He was scrambling for his torch on his belt when the auxiliary lights kicked in. The motor beside him was eerily silent. From somewhere below, he recognized indistinct shouting.
He started moving again when he noticed smoke wafting out from the engine. He didn’t want to be there to inhale whatever toxins came out of that thing, he reasoned, and so he slid back through the wall panel from before. The top of the panel was lost, thrown somewhere off to the side of the room, and he didn’t really care to retrieve it. Something serious was obviously happening. He needed to figure out what was going on.
He accessed his watch to flip a switch on his comm, the light on his wrist shifting to the COMM_LOCAL_PRIVATE channel. He practically spat out his identifier code when the security module prompted him; and then the screen flashed green as it set him up in the private channel.
“Boss?” he called distinctly, setting the system to broadcast. “The hell is going on?”
For a minute as he fussed with the wall panel to get into the corridor the comms were completely silent, but then the voice of one of the team’s programmers came in.
“Shit—is there anyone there?”
“Me,” Mairon answered, maybe a bit too quickly. “I’m—I’m here. What just happened? There’s no power.” He finally slid the panel open and came out into an empty hall. Auxiliary power had forced open all of the automatic doors, but a quick check over the status screen told him that the main power was out shipwide. A low rumble began underfoot which he recognized as the fans of the analog life support system.
Finally, the voice on the other side answered, his outer rim brogue cutting through hazily on the comm static. The main network couldn’t carry the signal. Too bad for all of the electronics he just replaced, he thought to himself.
“I think there’s been some sort of explosion,” the voice explained. “Wait—shit, someone’s here—”
“Who’s there?” he asked as he began down the corridor. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the—wait, no—”
The comm line cut suddenly, the signal going dark as the screen on his wrist flashed red with a communications error. He was alone on the channel.
Some wise sense of self-preservation had him reaching for his wrench and holding it aloft like the closest he could get to a real weapon. He wasn’t stupid enough to wander the halls without one, here in the dark…not like he’d know what to do if he saw anything even remotely dangerous. The halls thus far were dark, and he relied on his memory of the blueprints to get around. He’d studied the Sulimo a lot in order to make it look like he knew anything about its mechanisms, design schemas pinched from Aulë’s library to hopelessly follow a dream.
Now, though, he was…frankly, terrified. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The stories about Dark Space were a joke—it was way more likely they’d be gunned down by some idiot gone rogue in Noldorin space. And the Sulimo was no joke—it could take a few blows.
This wasn’t supposed to happen because the rumors about Dark Space were just that—stories. Rumors.
Maybe it was just a standard engine failure, he defended to himself. Maybe it was nothing. Lots of things could explode on a ship. Not a lot could cut main power but realistically a first of its kind ship was bound to run into problems.
A clatter at the end of the darkened room he found himself in got his attention. He’d wandered into a maintenance hall, the panels lining the sides of the room dark. And at the end, where he pointed his torch—a panel kicked open and a single hand desperately reached out.
“Don’t shoot!” he called. “’M not—shit—” A leg appeared after the hand and then the figure appeared to be stuck, the fastenings of his boot catching on the edges of the panel. He didn’t see him wearing any orange jumpsuit that denoted the mechanic who should have been down there—just dirty, greasy clothes.
“You’re a stowaway,” he realized and accused all at once, though the grip he had on his wrench relaxed.
“Depending on whether or not you’re planning on throwing me off the ship, I’d accuse you of lying,” he replied tersely from the other side of the room. He was sliding himself out through the panel now, having untangled himself. He had a crisp, clean voice—and Mairon figured he was from New Aman or maybe one of the other core planets by his inflection. A stowaway, headed to New Valinor—not much unlike you, his mind reasoned for him.
Could be an ally depending on what happens. Mairon had to tread carefully.
“I’m a friend,” he maintained. “It sounds like neither of us are supposed to be here.”
Mairon had approached him by the time he pulled his head out from the panel. Copper hair gleamed bright in the artificial light of his torch, his grease-stained face doing little to hide elegant features. He knew immediately this one was elvish—and with most of the elves keeping to themselves on their respective homeworlds or serving high in their highly organized fleets, he wasn’t sure what a stowaway was doing on board. Unless he was some kind of outlaw from the last great war—but that was many years ago, and many years before Mairon’s time, and he couldn’t see why any fugitives would be left from that age.
The elf pulled himself up to his full height—and goodness, he was tall, Mairon thought, simply towering over him—and he looked down at Mairon warily.
“If this is what I think this is then we’re better off friends than enemies,” he reasoned, holding out his hand in greeting. Instead of taking it Mairon unhooked his other wrench and pressed it into his hand. This looked like someone who would know how to use it in a pinch.
“So be it,” he agreed with the copper-headed stranger. “What’s your name?”
The elf leered sharply at him. “Lesson one, kid,” he instructed as he brushed past him and in the direction of the door. “Don’t give out your name. That’s a bad move out in Dark Space.”
He recoiled a little, following carefully in his steps. “…Okay,” he conceded. “And where—exactly are we going?” He clearly had a direction in mind, the way he wove through the darkened hallway without even need of a torch.
“We’re going to get off this wreck before Morgoth decides it’s no use to him,” he answered. “His teams have a habit of blowing things up.”
Mairon’s stomach dropped. “You said Morgoth,” he repeated. “Like. The Morgoth.”
Mairon recoiled as the wall ahead of them blasted out, the panels scattering across the floor and ripping past his jumpsuit with force. He twisted on his knee and fell, the solid metal floor jarring painfully against his hips. But already the tall elf was dragging him to his feet, hard—pulling him back the other way and getting him blindly running. He heard him curse in a hard string of Khuzdul—an outer rim language, he thought in passing, but soon they were hurrying into a cramped corridor where dim emergency lights barely lit their passing. Mairon no longer had that familiarity with his surroundings; these were not maintenance halls. He didn’t see them in his trips into the upper levels of the ship.
“I don’t think they spotted us,” the elf noted as he peered around a corner, finally stopping to let Mairon catch his breath.
“Who?” He tried again. When will anyone tell me what’s going on in—
“Morgoth,” the elf spat again, running a hand through his red hair. It fell like curtains of fire over his shoulders, visibly bristling. “The enemy of the fucking galaxy. His stupid thrall. I should have known he would be interested in a ship with that name.”
“What? That’s not—” The elf stopped him then, pushing him close to the wall with his arm while he made a gesture for quiet with the other. The smell of smoke fell into his nose, an acrid and horrible thing, and footsteps, distant voices—
Little shit’s on the ship somewhere. Find him or the boss’ll find you.
The voices were staticky, like they were coming from voice recorders. Which made more sense when a heavily armored shadow passed before the bend in the corridor, quickly retreating after it seemed to confirm there was no one there.
The redheaded elf withdrew his arm then and Mairon breathed in deeply, feeling some of the tension leave.
“We need to go,” the elf whispered to him, pointing down the hall. They both turned, Mairon favoring his unbruised side.
“Hello, Copper-top.”
The voice was clean and feminine; Mairon turned around first and his eyes met immediately with the barrel of a gun.
He’d never seen a gun like this before, not this far up close. Blasters like this were uncommon because destructive potential and ships did not mix—this was for security fleets, for armies and fighters. He’d made knives, swords, shields, all sorts of tools in his spare time—but never had he touched the art of crafting ranged weaponry. That didn’t, however, mean he wasn’t aware of what they were capable of.
“Hands where I can see them.”
He obeyed because he couldn’t see any alternative and he could hear the wrench in the elf’s hand drop behind him with an ominous clatter. Their assailant looked young and stood maybe to his shoulder, but if her gnarled ears and distinct markings told him anything it was that she was orcish and her powerful armored stance told him she was dangerous.
The soldiers filing in behind her raised their blasters, each piece of shining silver more terrifying than the last. One of those alone could rip clean through a person.
“Which one of you is Maedhros?” she asked, but her question sounded more like an order.
“If you want to live then don’t tell her anything,” the elf mumbled next to him. Mairon didn’t have a problem with keeping quiet, and the orc woman seemed more interested in questioning them.
“Boss,” said another soldier through his muffled mask behind her, “I don’t think they’re going to talk.”
She swore in some heavy, darker language. “Cuff them both, then,” she decided. “Only so many red-haired rats can be hiding on one ship.”
Two of her officers came from behind her and Mairon found himself being pinned rather roughly against the wall with hands of cold metal. The force of the push rattled his jaw as they wrenched his arms back and bound him in tight steel cuffs.
“Remember,” the elf reminded from beside him. Mairon could hear his cuffs clicking roughly shut. “Not a word. No names in dark space.”
He was pulled away just as roughly. An orc behind him chuckled as he struggled to regain his footing.
“If I had the choice,” suggested the orc to the boss’s immediate right, “I’d gut them alive right here. Serve those orcslayers right.”
“The big guy wants the redheads,” she reminded firmly. “And he wants them intact. Unless you want to be on the receiving end of his wrath.”
“Gotcha,” obeyed the orc. The one behind him hAulëd him back up in a steel cold grip, pushing him ahead as the group began to walk to…whatever horrible fate they were being taken to.
The orcs joked the whole time up. They pulled his hair, grunted awful things in a language he couldn’t quite understand but his mind supplied as horribly derogatory. How did he know this, he wondered?
Just as he recognized other choice words that they uttered into comm radios. It was like listening to himself. Like a voice in the back of his mind that he’d been ignoring for years.
“They’re taking us to a ship,” Mairon supplied quietly to his companion under their captors’ noise and chaos. “They think we’re important.”
“Well, shit,” mumbled the elf followed by a string of Khuzdul. He doubted any of his choice words were any friendlier.
The orc nearest to them laughed through his breathing mask and responded in rough, barked strings of the same language. The elf’s eyes widened but he looked away, as if to look anywhere but at the orc who’d understood his insults the entire time.
They were marched to an open chamber in the cargo bay. Mairon realized they were to be boarding a ship. He also realized in the dim light that the wet ground underfoot was probably not water—but he wouldn’t let himself look hard enough at his surroundings to notice more than the stench of smoke and death.
When he’d escaped the scrapyards in search of adventure, this wasn’t what he had in mind.
The bay door opened to whatever cargo atrocity they had docked on the Sulimo, leaking acrid orange light into the dark room. It stung Mairon’s eyes, intense after a dimly lit journey down unpleasant broken halls.
“You got ‘em, boss?” shrieked a shrill she-orc from the steel dock of a far older ship. Older than anything Mairon had ever ridden, he thought, the kind of aged thing they got occasionally for scrap. Transport class sparrows like these went out of production at least fifty Valarin fiscal years ago; he reconized the model by the tape of faded yellow paint down the right side of the heavily vented loading dock. They weren’t very useful, but they were fast for transporters; the sparrow-class ships had been decommissioned because pirates had taken to filching them and upgrading them with stealth cloaking. He remembered pulling one of those exact cloaking panels off of the entryway of a scrapper years ago.
The chipped parts give it character, Curumo had joked as he hoisted his laser cutter over his shoulder. The fading light painted them a darker orange than daylight, like the candles from some vague memory that he couldn’t quite place. Still gotta move it. Want to give it a whirl? You’ve been flying the simulators, right?
The contrast as he was roughly shoved onto the ship’s docking platform reminded him of just how far from home he had gone. Aulë wouldn’t be able to help him here. No one would.
Mairon had thought he knew being alone, once. But he had never known it quite like this.
They ushered them in as they chattered in their orcish language. An uruk awaited them in the chamber that they used for transport, looking all too dangerous even without weapons. He pointed to the wall, and Mairon would have obliged even before he noticed the long knives that were strapped to the side of his firm vest; even more so at the battle-worn scars upon his face. This was clearly their muscle.
Transport, the orcs said a few times. Contact. He caught other vague words in their conversation. Perhaps in the past he had taken the time to study the orcish tongues. Just because he couldn’t recall doing it didn’t mean he hadn’t. The Signal Blackout represented a lot to the Maiar—lost memories, lost homes, lost friends and family.
“Any idea what they’re saying?” mumbled his elvish companion as they hunched close to the corner, hearing the whir of engines and the radio static of shouting orcs. Soon following in was bundle upon bundle of goods; medical kits, uniforms, food. It seemed the pirates were happy to raid whatever they could from the ship.
No other prisoners. That was either a good thing or a bad thing.
He listened closely for the both of them, trying to understand what was being said. Village. Money. Transport. Hunt. Copper. King. Hurry.
The words came through in a blur, a jumble of language and unknowns. It was like listening to something he could understand but in a very peculiar dialect.
Mairon looked over his shoulder and the elf seemed grave. Even so, his eyes worked with a thousand thoughts, the intelligence and drive in them clear. He behaved like it wasn’t the first time he’d been captured. He was probably thinking about ways to escape already.
“To Morgoth, then,” he realized for the both of them. “I’d suggest you listen to whatever they tell you when you get in there. If you’re useful enough they’ll let you live.”
Morgoth was a bedtime story, a whisper of horrors untold, a tale of loss. They left their home world because of Morgoth.
He knew they were taking off when the lights dimmed to an eerie green glow, the ship giving a great lurch before he had a momentary sense of weightlessness. Then they were drifting smoothly through space to heavens knew where.
From the back windows into the closed airlock, he could see the shadow of the Sulimo against the lights of several sparrow class transporters like this one; and then they left the fleet behind and jumped into warp. He worked his jaw as the air pressure changed around them. Smaller ships never lasted particularly long in warp before the life support started running low. He wondered if they were just going to let the two of them run out of air out here, just die adrift in space. The Uruk watching them lowered his breathing mask onto his face and smugly watched Mairon struggle..
The ship gave another great lurch, sending him slamming into the wall with enough force to jar his hurt shoulder. He fought back a whimper while he regained his footing, pain registering in a distinct wave that spread from his shoulder down his arm and even into his collarbone and ribcage. The elf had been better prepared, his feet braced against the ground. He wondered how much time he had spent on ships like these. Probably too much, by the greasy clothes and the angry fire in his eyes.
His head cleared as the bay repressurized. He caught a glimpse out the window to notice dark steel glittering in the half-light of some distant star. It was smooth and horrible and the precursor to something massive that they had sailed in upon. It was massive, and as they drifted along its hull he noticed the large extruded writing bearing the distinct curl of ancient script.
The Void, it read menacingly.
He knew all of the protocol landing requests different groups used among the stars. He had pored hungrily over manuals, memorizing vocabulary standards for each group ranging from dwarves to gray-elves and everything in between. These call signs, however, were foreign and unrecognizable to him.
“We’re a long way into dark space,” he whispered to the elf. He thought of the tall fellow as his only ally now.
“No shit,” the elf mumbled. His expression was grave. “Just do what they say, kid. Do what they say and they’ll let you live a bit longer.”
Mairon had never spared death much thought. Even now, it was not his looming demise that he thought about. It was the great curving crest above the docking platform that they slowly approached, and its vague familiarity that had him rapt with attention.
It was a strange feeling that he somehow knew what was to come for them. It was almost like, in another life, he had lived it before.