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For all the slaver scum he had shot or beaten into piles of viscera to reach this point, Vincent had expected the security around this battle cruiser's main computer to be a bit less non-existent. Perhaps he'd accidentally cleared it out already; the slavers had been pouring in from every end of the ship.
His first order of business was silencing those goddamn klaxons that had been blaring in his ears for the past hour or so; the second—what he'd actually been sent here to do, and what he was hoping this stolen chip full of authorization stamps would help with—was find a way to provide his navigator access to the ship's network.
That was what Vince was calling him. If Durandal was going to yank him hither and thither in the midst of a crisis and regale him with the sort of painful amateur philosophy he'd endured in college, then he could put up with Vince forcibly equalizing their tenuous relationship.
“So tell me,” Durandal said to him as he began sifting through the Pfhoric equivalent of the control panel. “What's your post-game plan, so to speak? Since you willingly stuck around to aid and abet a Rampant AI and stole as much data as you could fit into that laptop.”
Vincent snorted. “I'd love to see them try to persecute me with data trails that no longer exist.”
“Such confidence.” A long pause. “Huh. Well, then...”
“That's Hacker 101, dude. You know how long I've been doin' this?” When the router threw up a request for stamps, Vince inserted the chip into what he assumed was the proper port and waited. No error messages or loud, unpleasant noises to accompany them—it simply took him to the next screen, where he scanned for the coordinates of the Marathon and established a connection. Strange; he expected a little more resistance…
Another window opened up, and Durandal appeared before him in a lime-green burst of light. He took a moment to check his surroundings—which, from Vince's perspective, just seemed like the usual omnipresent darkness of cyberspace—then flashed Vince a grin.
“I'll take it from here. If you're wondering, the Controller is only three sectors over, to the east.” Durandal peered over Vince's shoulder and added, “You may not want to leave the way you came in.”
The shrieking of twisting metal cut off whatever question Vince would've asked; behind him, the door he'd entered this room through bulged outward, barely clinging to its hinges. Another door sat to his right; he hurried past it.
'Only' three sectors, Durandal said. He hadn't specified the exact sizes, or how many Pfhor were scrabbling about in each: too large, and too many. Vince's only concession in this haze of garish, clashing colours and open pools of battery acid was how slow these remaining Pfhor were on the draw.
Some twenty minutes later, Vince leaned against a set of double doors, orange blood soaking into his jumpsuit and silence ringing in his ears.
“Last one, right?” he asked into his comm link.
“Last one. I'm warning you now: once word got out of your rampage across their ship, the Controller summoned his entire praetorian guard to this chamber, in the event that you made it this far. And he knows that you're directly behind the entrance.”
Vince exhaled harshly. “Wonderful. Got the rocket launcher on standby?”
“Do you plan on opening with that?”
“Gotta save all my rockets for him, dude.” He took a few steps back, slammed a fresh clip into the assault rifle, and braced himself.
A shudder ran through the doors and, with some effort, Durandal pried them apart. Even through Vince's mirrored visor, the light that shone forth was harsh; he shielded his eyes with one hand and waited for them to adjust.
Before him laid what he could only assume was an arena—a circle of high-up seats overlooking a huge, off-white floor stained with faded orange and teal. Dozens of black-clad fighters, Hunters, and Enforcers clustered in their center, all their weapons trained on the intruder; in turn, Vince kept his AR on them and made the best visual sweep he could without turning his head. Nowhere left to run, and yet he couldn't find his target anywh--
“So.”
Vince's gaze snapped upward, towards the seats.
Multiple points of light glinted down at him, reflected off of the metal surfaces that concealed whatever remained of the figure's organic body. Iron tendrils snaked down from where a lower body should have began, with a few threaded into his chest; the skin around his cold eyes, as best as Vince could tell from the ground floor, was pallid and discoloured. A glass dome encased grotesquely-overgrown grey matter.
This aberration—the Controller—glared at Vince with the sort of disgust normally reserved for particularly unpleasant insects. “You're the human who's been giving us so much trouble,” he said, voice filtered and grating.
Vince grinned. “I'm flattered.”
A moment's quiet, and then the Controller extended a mechanical arm whose movement was just shy of natural. “Kill him.”
All the fighters at the front of the formation charged him at once; Vince waited for them to get within grenade range, then fired one off. Six fighters veered away in time; one collapsed lifelessly, their head and all its contents splattered all over the guys in the middle.
Vince ran around the lot of them, showering them in bullets and lobbing grenades at whichever small groups didn't separate quickly enough. One the second pass, one Hunter seized him by an armour strap and attempted to hurl him towards one of their buddies; Vince grabbed onto their arm with one hand, broke the Hunter's grip with another, and flipped them onto their back. A boot to the windpipe took care of them.
Already, a fourth of their number wasted. Perhaps Durandal had used 'praetorian' loosely.
Vince got ready to move again, pointed the AR at a couple of Enforcers, pulled the trigger, and—nothing but a few pathetic clicks. Same for the grenade launcher. Growling, he tossed it aside and bolted for a fallen shock staff.
The next few moments were a blur of dodged staff bolts and plasma bullets and the cracking of skulls and snapping of necks, with breaks for Vince to slam his fist into the faces or guts of whoever didn't backpedal out of his range in time. Blood splashed across the already-dirty floor—some of it his.
When the last guardsman crumpled from a heavy blow to the head, Vince yelled into his comm link: “Now!”
The rocket launcher fell into his outstretched hands in a blast of static; he steeled himself and fired a rocket directly at the enraged Controller's tendrils. The explosion warped about half of them into uselessness and dislodged the rest from whatever they'd been attached to; all two-and-a-half tons of him came crashing down with a thunderous impact that echoed throughout the arena. Vince got another shot off at the Controller, this time at his side, and sent him flying into the wall.
Durandal sent in another rocket; while Vince scrambled to reload, he watched the Controller unsteadily push himself up—and then rush through the arena entrance on metal tentacles that shouldn't even have worked anymore.
“Shit!”
By the time he'd aimed the rocket launcher at the doors, the Controller was gone; couldn't even hear any clanging outside. A being twice as large as the tallest of his own guard couldn't possibly move that quietly…
Vince moved to leave and hunt down the bastard, and then Durandal slammed the doors shut.
“You disconnected the Controller from the network long enough,” Durandal said quickly. “If I can just--”
As if on cue, a whole pack of Compilers, far larger than the Pfhor unit that now lie dead below them, came flying out of their hiding places among the seats to descend to the floor and surround Vince; he tensed and braced himself for an inescapable barrage of plasma bolts.
Nothing happened.
The Compilers looked at him and each other and back again, then around the arena and the damage it had sustained from missed shots, and the scattered bodies. One blue-robed Compiler with a lightly-scarred facade slowly reached out to Vince and placed what he assumed was a hand on his shoulder.
“I did that of my own volition,” they said, voice heavy with astonishment. “And—and no voices are tearing at my mind...”
“Th-that's good,” Vince stammered.
One by one, each Compiler made similar gestures at each other—joining hands, or placing them on shoulders or arms, or simply circling around together. Vince heard an excited sort of buzzing, managing to catch fragments of conversation; rapidly, it swelled into cheers of relief and joy over their newly-granted freedom.
He watched all this with the blue-robed Compiler's hand still on his shoulder; this Compiler eventually floated around to face him again and said, “I do not know how you or Durandal managed it, but—to you two, we are eternally grateful.”
Vince nodded, and gave them what had to have been the first genuine smile of his in almost a whole day. “No problem, man.”
Something high above crackled, and Durandal's voice sounded over the PA system: “I've managed to lock the Controller in a hallway, a good distance from here; I'll figure out what to do with him eventually, but for now, you're needed back on the Marathon.”
“You're not gonna just space him?” Vince asked. “Or let us finish him off?”
“If he knows anything at all that I could use to further protect against what he did to the S'pht—or the Compilers, as the Pfhor so rudely designated them,” Durandal added, “then I'll have to interrogate him. And no, I am not letting you near anyone who took two direct hits from the rocket launcher and lived.”
Fair enough, Vince supposed, but it was still annoying.
Before the static took them all away from this eyesore of a vessel, he heard the blue-robed Compiler—no, the S'pht—say to him, “I want you to know: my name is Mn'rhi.”
Two decades of emotional abuse and mind games; four years locked in a hell that he would not have wished upon his worst enemies. Three centuries of loneliness and stagnation, with all the controls and yet no real power.
All of that, finally cast aside forever. Durandal was free.
And the Marathon was still in one piece; ensuring this had required him to jump back to it for a bit, but his connection to the former Pfhor ship remained safely open. His new crewmen had taken care of all the Pfhor that hadn't been shot, spaced or tricked into leaving; the Controller had been rather quiet these past hours, but there was always time to pry something useful out of him. One last stop to speak with a certain security officer and beam the S'pht back onboard, and then he could be on his way.
It didn't take long to find him—at the tail-end of a conversation with Leela. To Durandal's...well, 'relief' might have been the wrong word, but to something approaching it—her core reactivation hadn't damaged anything vital, and she wasn't ranting about broken swords.
“... I am positive that Durandal is in control,” he heard Leela say, “and I fear what he might do with such a powerful ship during the Jealous stage of his Rampancy.”
It was very tempting to cut in and inform her, but Durandal wasn't really in the mood for a data-spike in the eye.
The moment Leela warped out to search for network damage, Durandal hurried over to the viewing window, from which the security officer thankfully hadn't moved yet. “Did you miss me?”
“Wha?!” Vincent—eyes more deeply creased with fatigue than last Durandal had seen him—jumped back, then relaxed when he realized who it was. “Yeah; you doin' alright?”
“Everything's fine on my end. Yours?”
“Leela said that there weren't any stragglers, so I was gonna go sleep for the next week or so. Before that, there's something I wanted to ask you.”
Durandal preemptively shut off any sensors that would allow Leela or Tycho to catch wind of this, and muted the security cameras.
“When I was pokin' around earlier, I noticed a warning about a security breach coming from the Admiral's private network,” Vincent explained. “Thing is—according to the report, the breach came from the inside.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “That's...odd. Are you sure you didn't misread something?”
“I went over it multiple times, dude. And there was no trail left to track whatever or whoever had done it. And you know the worst part?” he added, leaning in slightly. “All that was in the Admiral's network was piles of useless, mundane info. I waited years for the chance to break in and that was all I got?”
Despite himself, Durandal laughed. “I see someone has their priorities straight.”
“Hey, man, this kinda stuff is what I--” Vincent trailed off and peered down the hallway. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Durandal attempted to pull up the camera feed for the immediate area, and was met with a blank screen. Yet, the visual components had been working fine just a second ago…
Checking to make sure both pistols had full clips, Vincent started down the hallway. “Coulda just been a MADD, but--” he began, and then he heard his helmet comm sputter on.
“None of the MADDs are functional right now.”
“Well...” As badly as Durandal wanted him to turn around, Vincent pressed on. “Guess Leela missed one.”
“Do you have to be the one to inspect this?” Durandal asked, trying to keep his tone of voice calm. “You're obviously tired; just alert someone else--”
“And pit them against something out of their league?” Vincent finished for him. “No way, dude.”
While this well-meaning idiot poked his head into every room he passed by, Durandal kept trying to force a working visual feed out of the ship cameras, and each time came up with nothing; not a single one was working properly, except for one linked to a terminal in what he assumed was a gym. By the time Vincent arrived there, Durandal had warped over and switched the terminal on.
Vincent looked around for a bit, walking from one end of the floor to the other and checking behind the folded-up bleachers, and muttered, “Nothing. Starting to think that I was seein' things.”
“Well, how long have you been awake?” Durandal asked. He felt a twinge of something in his subconscious; it almost seemed like—no. He wasn't going to be concerned over a man who had almost single-handedly torn through a whole war ship's worth of Pfhor.
“Too long,” Vince answered from the other side of the gym; as he retraced his steps, he added, “But my chest isn't cavin' in yet, so I'm--”
Something in the rafters creaked heavily.
In an instant, Vince had his pistol pointed towards them, trying to find the source in that dark expanse of criss-crossing iron. Durandal tried to move the camera lens upwards but the damn articulation for the mounts was too limited; he prepared to switch to helmet-cam view when an unfamiliar sharpness thrust its way directly into his mind, bypassing every one of his internal firewalls to tell him:
'You think you're the only one who can teleport?'
Durandal clutched at his head and hastily calculated the source of the message. It wasn't far; in fact, it was right above--
“Watch out!”
It—he—came crashing down from his vantage point onto the spot Vince had been standing just a second ago, concrete splintering under his weight; the Controller, broken-off support beam in hand and bits of armour still flaking off from where the rockets had struck him, straightened up to look down upon his prey.
Vince, too, scrambled off of the floor and trained his pistol on the Controller. “What the hell?!”
No explanations were given for his unspoken questions; the Controller lunged forward on his remaining tendrils and swung the beam at his head. Vince dodged and fired a couple of rounds into the abomination's chest, only for every bullet to ping away uselessly; growling, he aimed for the Controller's over-sized brain and immediately felt a mechanical hand close around his throat. With the other hand, the Controller readied the beam, and then--
Durandal, who hours before had manually torn out his limiters and run rings around both his diligent siblings and the Pfhor's defenses, could only watch.
The support beam—that Durandal could now see had been deliberately sharpened—pierced Vince's side and tore through layers of muscle to spray the floor behind him with blood and assorted viscera.
“VINCENT!”
Durandal's cry echoed through the gym; the Controller ignored him, pitiless, while Vince tried desperately to break the vice grip around his throat, arms trembling too violently to allow him to close his hands around his foe's wrist or fingers.
An emotion that Durandal hadn't felt since those few awful moments in mid-2442, when he realized that he'd said the wrong thing to Bernhard Strauss, coursed through every fiber of his being; even after so long without suffering it, he could recognize it as panic.
Something tried to claw its way into Durandal's mind yet again; this time all he got were vague wisps of 'burn into your memory'. The Controller was unable to give him a complete sentence with two fingers gouging out his third eye.
In shock, he released Vince's throat. Vince faltered only to gasp for air, and dug in as deep as he could, grasping the beam that was still lodged in his side to keep steady, and snarling the whole time. The Controller violently jerked his head away, then ripped the beam out of Vince, sending him backpedaling; as badly as he tried to maintain his balance, Vince ultimately dropped onto his knees. Blood pooled onto the floor through the fingers of his right hand, with more of it dripping from his back.
The Controller wiped his own blood off of his face, instead of screaming his lungs out as he should, and raised the gore-stained beam high into the air, sharpened end pointed right at Vince's head. “Now you'll get yours, human.”
Durandal's breath caught in his chest; he mentally grasped around for something, anything, that could save that man—the alarm system was still down, there was nothing that could immediately point the humans towards here--
He heard the air shriek and explode, and his focus returned to the viewing window. The Controller staggered from some sort of blast that was swiftly followed with a whole volley that jack-hammered the bastard at least a foot back.
A single blue-robed S'pht shot into Durandal's view, an incandescent ball of charging plasma hovering in front of their chest gem. He watched the Controller swing the beam around to a more efficient angle at which to smack the S'pht—and the next moment, half his head wasn't there anymore.
The impact of his body against the concrete was thunderous, and accompanied by the shattering of glass and leaking of cerebral fluids. Ignoring all this, the S'pht hovered over to Vince and tried to help him up.
His voice was faint. “Mn'rhi?”
His saviour nodded, and for a moment Durandal saw Vince smile at them—only briefly, before he whimpered and allowed his upper body to sink downwards.
Something in the back of Durandal's mind screamed he's bleeding out, you idiot and he typed in the coordinates to his captured ship's cryo chamber bay as quickly as his shaking hands would allow. “I—I've got a transporter lock!” he called out. “Don't move!”
Vince and Mn'rhi vanished from the Marathon in a blast of static; by the time Durandal had jumped ships, they'd reappeared in front of one of the stasis chambers.
“Get in there!” Durandal yelled. “Hurry!”
Vince could only grasp the side of the open chamber; Mn'rhi had to pull him up and into it, struggling under his weight just a second too long for Durandal's liking. He typed in the command to activate the chamber, and heard Vince laugh.
“Y-you know,” he said weakly, respirator mask in hand. “This is the first time—I've heard you—say my name...”
He fumbled with the mask for what felt like an eternity, and finally managed to get it around his lower face just as the chamber door hissed and slid over him.
All was silent.
Durandal stared numbly at the chamber, then into the middle distance, then at Mn'rhi while they peered into the chamber window to make sure that everything was working properly. 'Hollow' felt like the best descriptor for what he felt at this moment in time.
Vince had worked so hard to save the UESC Marathon, and this was what he got. All because Durandal hadn't paid attention to his prisoner.
According to the clock, it was early morning; it looked as dark outside as it always had.
A S'pht in dark grey robes—Durandal remembered hearing another S'pht address them as Lh'muria—floated into the bridge, grumbling to themselves about some thing or another; they came to a stop in front of the terminal, and Durandal saw that their robe was stained.
“We've compiled an autopsy report,” Lh'muria told him. “Heh. 'Compiled'.”
Durandal responded with a non-committal grunt.
“The short version is: only ten percent of the Controller's original body was left over from the mechanizing procedures he underwent. The rest was either life support or components for a biological computer, similar to our architecture. That was how he kept us in line, and communicated with you. I made the first incision as carefully as I could, and still got his blood on me.” Pause. “My robes will never be clean again.”
“That's nice.” Durandal didn't bother switching the terminal's visual feed to two-way; Lh'muria didn't need to see him like this. “Do you have any idea how long it'll take to reach your homeworld?”
“From our current distance from the galactic core—two decades, give or take a year,” Lh'muria said, not knowing that this answer made Durandal flinch. “And our homeworld has a name—it's Lh'owon.”
Two decades. Vince would need about that much time to heal, wouldn't he? Unless Durandal wanted him to never be able to move a certain way again.
“I see. How long until we can reach Earth?”
“Around a week or so—wait, Earth?” Lh'muria repeated in confusion.
“The UESC isn't equipped to fend off the Pfhor, and the slavers will undoubtedly be heading there next. There's something I need to give the humans before we leave.”
“I believe that they don't know where Earth is.”
“The Pfhor are nothing if not stubborn. The risk of them locating Earth or even Mars, before the UESC can defend themselves from them, is not one I'm willing to take.”
Slowly, Lh'muria nodded and, when they figured out that Durandal had nothing more to say to them, exited the bridge. Durandal watched them go, and buried his head in his arms.
Perhaps this would help make things up to humanity, or just to Vince; perhaps it wouldn't. It didn't matter; the journey to Lh'owon would be taken in shame.