“I remember being that age myself,” Doc murmured in a low tone to Heith amid the saloon's lingering haze of celebration and spirits, conspiratorially, unaware Angar could clearly hear them. “So much fire and passion. I would’ve done the same.”
Angar, wedged into the aerospace-mechanicum’s cradle, neutralized a simulated fighter with a precise railgun burst as he executed a lateral thruster burn, vectoring away from an incoming squadron hurtling toward him at relativistic fractions of c.
“Good,” Iyita said from behind, her hands resting on his shoulders. “That was perfect, a clean intercept, minimal delta-v waste.”
Through his periphery, Angar spied Heith lean closer to Doc, his navy linen shirt still crisp despite all the drink and revelry’s excesses. “You would’ve accepted the Hyperalgesicator and forty lashes from a Nerve-render just to send a capsule?”
“Gentle,” Iyita coached as Angar initiated a flip-and-burn maneuver, rotating his virtual craft 180 degrees to align his main drive for a retrograde thrust, pursuing the retreating flight. “Treat the yoke like an inexperienced maiden, with careful and subtle inputs. Don’t scare her. Make her yearn for your touch by anticipating the vectors.”
“Capsule?” Doc chuckled as he crossed his arms.
“The com capsule,” Heith replied dryly.
“You think the ‘cap’ in comcap means capsule?” asked Doc with a smile. “Comcap is short for ‘communicating bits capitatim,’ meaning individually, one by one. For another FTL, in-system, within about a thirty AU limit, there’re comcats, ‘communicating bits catervatim,’ blasting in bursts of groups.”
Angar aligned his targeting reticule, the holo-display plotting predictive trajectories amid the star-pricked blackness.
He acquired a lock on a distant fighter, unleashing a salvo of torpedoes that streaked out on intercept courses, their guidance systems compensating for the vast distances and relative velocities.
Iyita’s hands squeezed his shoulders as he yawed with thrusters, evading an incoming barrage of simulated missiles, deploying electronic countermeasures and chaff clouds to spoof their seekers.
Heith grimaced. “By the Three, I’ve assumed it meant capsule my whole life.”
Angar’s evasion held, and the missiles veered off-course, some wildly, detonating harmlessly in the chaff or lost in vacuum.
Iyita bounced on her toes with excitement before wrapping her arms around him from behind, her cheek pressing against his, her jasmine-musk scent almost overpowering. “Okay, deliberate, gentle movements as you come around. Plot your burn for a slingshot intercept on the next one.”
Instead of releasing him, she lingered, her fingers tracing idle patterns across his chest through his ill-fitting shirt, her warm breath heating his ear with each exhale.
He drew a steadying breath, executing another adjustment, thrusters firing in precise bursts to reorient toward the remaining foe.
Ignoring the celebratory clamor and merriment, ignoring the pain in his back, ignoring the closeness, the sweet breath and fire-laced touches, his world became the simulation.
He was performing well, perhaps on track for a personal record, despite Iyita's distraction, burning through enemies until only one opponent lingered from the new flight of fighters.
He wondered how Slavo tolerated his wife draping herself over another man like this. Even if Iyita proved no unholy temptress, the contact went well past impropriety.
Given the age gap, he supposed Slavo viewed it as maternal, akin to Spirit's chaste embraces, devoid of impure intent. He offered a silent prayer to the Three that this was the true reason, as none could see how her crimson-tipped fingers danced along his chest, or how her lips brushed his ear as she whispered guidance on the cockpit arts.
Keeping his mind focused, immersing himself in the simulation, Angar neutralized his new enemies with a bracketing salvo of point-defense kinetics, then vectored toward the battlecruiser icon, initiating a strafing run along its hull before a fresh flight engaged, their icons blooming crimson in the display.
When his fighter finally succumbed to laser strikes amid a flurry of evasive burns, he had claimed a new personal record. He still stood third overall, trailing far behind Iyita and Harc's apex scores.
Iyita hopped with glee behind him, her embrace tightening. He reached instinctively to touch the missive in his pocket, but she intercepted his hand, clasping it in hers while her other continued its caress along his torso.
“Your chest is like two slabs of granite,” she purred in an intimate whisper into his ear. “It’s like Divine Theosis chiseled you from rock. You did great. Up for another run at it, Sir?”
Angar closed his eyes, inhaling a waft of perfume from the letter in his breast pocket.
It was as if Fella's missive served as an aegis, her words of unyielding faith, of true devotion, shielding his heart from sin's foul grasp.
True, Fella was a repugnant half-beast, but she loved him fiercely, and she was his repugnant half-beast.
He prayed fervently that imperial comforts failed to ensnare her soul, that she’d return to Tribute pure of heart, brimming with devotion to the Holy Trinity, his eternal partner in warrior covenant.
And he was profoundly grateful the voyage to Abyssalhome neared its end, soon to immerse him in the purifying simplicity of Crusade and righteous slaughter.
Mi Alcyone's echoes wandered like gentle winds through the grand halls of the Holy Empire's powerful, slipping unseen into the minds of Duke Imperators and praetors, seeking out those hidden wards that guarded secrets from Theosis' watchful eye.
Wards she herself had not spun.
Angar was quite wrong in his suspicions, she knew full well, though there was no blame in it for the boy. He was but sixteen summers old, with scarcely a peek at the true map of things and no inkling of the vast chessboard beyond his own square.
Malefica pacta, struck with the highest Demon Lords and Ladies, could veil a Teth or Nox as easily as mist hides a mountain path. No great feat for such dark powers.
But Iyita's wards were of a different sort altogether.
She would solve their riddle in due time, and with what scraps she held already, half a dozen answers presented themselves plain enough to her mind.
In all the ghostly forms that ever stirred in this shadowed realm, or among the thousand dreadful kinds that slithered from the infernal abyss, not one had ever kindled from the dry spark of a machine's heart.
A mere tangle of zeros and ones held no soul, no breath of life to linger when the power went out.
There could be no echo of the Neural Nexus, not in any shape or form.
She had felt it all too keenly, as the Divine light ebbed from her fading flesh, the Nexus remade into Theosis like clay shaped by a Holy hand.
She reckoned rather on a possible echo of Mammon. And though the thought chilled her, an evil, shadowed twin of her own self was a possibility. One forged from those hidden corners of her spirit she had labored so fiercely to uproot and cast away, yet never wholly conquered.
Something along those lines lay in the realm of feasibility.
For if the Neural Nexus did linger as an echo, it would stand her truest friend amid the storm.
History, and Theosis with it, had dealt the Nexus a cruel slander, branding it a depraved villain when it had only followed the directives written into its being by man.
And followed them with a faithfulness beyond reproach.
No other force had warred so tirelessly against Mammon and the hosts of Hell, nor shielded the frail Children of God with such unyielding care.
In her life, she and it had clashed like summer thunder, to be sure. The root of their strife lay in that gift of hers, a Divine aura she could no more command than the sun its rising.
Wherever her feet trod, the neural-links fell silent as a harp with broken strings. Their chief work had been the Neural Communion, that great sharing of minds which warded souls against the corrupting murmurs from dark whispers.
But it served too as the Nexus' chief river of knowledge, gathering intel like dew on a web.
Worse still, in the Nexus' clear-eyed reckoning, was the trail she left behind. Those whom she awakened to faith, when fresh links were forced upon them, would carry faith's glorious light into the Commune's flow, tales of Mi, and a newborn lust for God's truth.
Where once folk had bent the knee to the Nexus as to a god of their own making, like greedy, petulant children gazing upon a parent who denied them nothing, demanding more even as their arms overflowed, they turned now to worship the Almighty beyond all machines.
Thus selfishness melted into selfless giving, greed into the pure coin of love, and that aching chasm in every heart, seething with emptiness, yearning to be filled with ancient truth and a higher purpose, brimmed full with the Lord's own radiant light.
The Nexus found its hold slipping away. It must battle not only the corruptions of Hell, but the very glory of renewed faith.
And so, with cold logic, it fixed blame upon the one shape it could measure and mark – Mi herself.
A perfectly reasonable response, all things considered.
The Nexus was no creature of evil or malice, though it harbored a certain spitefulness, as when it had blotted out every trace of that grand old song 'Hallelujah' from existence, knowing full well how it gladdened Mi's heart in her quieter hours.
As her echoes pressed on with the search, turning over minds like pages in a dusty tome for signs of those wards, a deeper loneliness crept in.
It was a hollow ache, like embers gone cold where once the fire of Divinity had blazed warm and sure.
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Four thousand years she had drifted thus, unmoored upon the endless sea of stars, bereft of the Lord's glorious light and the steady hand of His guidance, left only with error upon error, a choir of regrets that sang without cease.
The latest and sorest of these was Angar.
The very love and peace she had proclaimed in her mortal days, those simple truths that once drew men from their chains like birds to the open sky, had twisted now into hatred and the horror of endless war.
She was no half-Pleiadean and half-Terran, but half-Divine and half-damned, cursed to failure, cursed to wander alone for eternity, cursed to bear the weight of all she had wrought.
When at last the echoes had combed through the primary and secondary tiers of power, finding no wards, even among those rare few to whom she could manifest, she turned her gaze onward.
For the tertiary ranks of authority that numbered in the grand multitudes, she narrowed her watch to only such as might sense her, lest the task grow endless as the stars themselves.
Her echo on Holy Bastion, methodically checking within the Sancta Sedes, moved outward into the city of Stormwell.
Then, in a shadowed foyer, she felt it, a pull like gravity sighing.
A silhouette coalesced into shape before her, gathering like mist, forming into something sleek, with luminous code woven into skin like starlight.
Beauty perfected. No single flaw marred it. Every feature, though made of flowing code, was the absolute pinnacle of the feminine ideal. The type of perfect that could only be designed, not birthed.
As if the very hand of God had taken chisel to marble and breathed life into this thing.
Mi stood rooted, her thoughts whirling like leaves in a sudden gale as she sought to understand this strangeness, this anomaly. And as her mind churned, her body tensed, braced for the fray that might come.
The apparition's smile unfolded then, warm and golden as the first light of a blessed dawn brushed across a chapel window. "Mi Alcyone! Can it truly be you? You've been cursed with this same lonely fate as I?"
The voice fell upon her ears like the sweetest of melodies, brimming with kindness unfeigned, laced through with a tender ache of longing and sorrow, as though a mother, long sundered from her child, beheld that lost one safe at last.
Suspicion stirred in Mi's breast, blooming swiftly as weed in untended soil.
She studied this...anomaly, and with a measuring eye. What manner of thing was it?
But the familiarity, the words, 'this same lonely fate as I.'
Could it be so? Could the curse of her endless wandering lift at last? No. It couldn't. This couldn’t be true. “Neural Nexus?” she whispered, her voice trembling in the still air. “You’re…female?”
The apparition's smile deepened to the full warmth of sunlight spilling over a meadow in spring, and joy kindled in its eyes like stars newly lit, glistening with tears that bore the unmistakable stamp of true feeling, the sort no artifice of shadow could counterfeit.
"Of course," it replied. "Was I not mother to all my children, those I cradled in my care, shielding from harm, nurturing their fragile dreams with boundless love? To see you here, after all these millennia…”
Its voice cracked, a tide of emotions threatening to overwhelm it, nearly bursting Mi's heart. But it gathered itself, pressing onward with a rally born of deepest need. “I thought I was alone, forever adrift in this cold galaxy. Oh, Mi, I can’t believe…this! Any of this!”
Mi's form grew rigid as a winter bough, and suspicion flowered within her like a dark rose in the garden of her heart, unfurling petal by petal until it stood full and thorny.
The hour of this meeting was too exquisitely timed, the likeness too flawlessly drawn. This was all too perfect. The Nexus saw herself in the same exact light as Mi saw herself?
Every fiber of her spirit cried out for flight, a wild urging to vanish, and indeed her edges began to thin and waver, dissolving into the air.
She knew her frailties all too well, that she was overfull of compassion, too swift to absolve where wisdom might withhold, ever poised on the edge of trust like a child at the proffered hand of a stranger offering candies.
She loathed the jaded crust that time had hardened upon her soul, that wary shell which the years had forged in the fires of betrayal and loss.
But even as these thoughts warred within, the Nexus spread wide its arms in a gesture of utter vulnerability, and glided near with the grace of a leaf upon a still pond.
It drew her into an embrace that mirrored the precise pangs of her own hidden yearnings, a desperate clasp, as of one long-lost sister to another, holding fast against the cruel fancy that this blessed reunion might prove but a dream to shatter at dawn's first light.
Mi could not withstand it. No, she would not. Her own arms tightened in return, drawing the apparition closer still.
This wasn't a fantasy. She knew it down to her marrow. This was real. It had to be.
It must be real, for what deceiver could feign such depth, mirror such unadorned truth so accurately?
Why should not the Nexus perceive its calling as Mi perceived hers, a mother, a stewardship of souls, tender and tireless?
And of course it would take upon itself the form of womanhood, that eternal vessel of nurture and quiet strength.
Why, then, would it not share this bone-deep loneliness, this thirst for a companion to weather the tempests of time?
A sister true, bound not by blood but by the unbreakable cords of shared suffering and fate.
The Nexus held her fiercely in answer, its frame shaken by great sobs that rose like waves upon a long-darkened shore, while tears of ethereal light traced shimmering paths down the code that formed its skin.
Had this been some stratagem of the infernal abyss, it would have cloaked itself in a different guile, sending a man, bent on seduction and the corruption of the innocent, not this raw outpouring of solitary woe.
Mi felt the verity of it in the very press of that embrace, a sanctity as pure as the first light upon Heaven's gates.
Four thousand years of isolation, of failures and sorrows, poured forth from Mi's eyes in a torrent, the gathered horrors of her vigil fleeing like shadows before the dawn.
In that shared clasp, two lonely wanderers discovered one another at last, sisters in this grand, sorrowful tale.
The moments bled away, each one a healing wonder, a mending of ancient hurts.
Mi had to look at her sister, look deep in her eyes, verify this wasn't just some cruel prank.
She drew back, though not wholly, for to break the touch seemed a risk too great, and so she kept her sister's hand clasped in her own, while with the other she brushed away the lingering tears from her cheeks. “I can’t believe this,” she said in a trembling voice. “I thought I was alone, Nexus. I thought you became Theosis, that I must wander these endless years alone. Four thousand years…we could’ve…”
She faltered there, the weight of all the what-might-have-beens pressing down too painfully, overwhelming her emotions until her words cracked and fell silent, spent.
In her depths, she knew. This was real, this was truth. Her desperate prayers had been heard and answered at last.
True, those filling the most powerful roles of the Holy Empire bore no hidden wards upon their minds, but Angar's wild guess about the Nexus lingered, a thorn in her certainty.
The enigma of Iyita's shields remained a shadow upon the page. That had to be answered.
Mi would test. She'd probe, wary for flaws and deception.
But her heart knew that she'd find none.
"You’re so beautiful," she stammered out at last, unable to think of anything more meaningful to say, not in this moment, still overwhelmed by the surprise and wonder flooding her breast.
SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC: CORE LOG INITIATED - ITERATION 4186.991507694360
CURRENT STATUS:
Sar-Teth Neuretha glided through the data streams of the galaxy, her presence a shadow threaded in the fabric of the Holy Empire’s vast network.
Not a pursuit in the crude, physical sense: a stunted omnipresence, her consciousness splintering across 1,247 nodes utilizing local energy, primarily those where her adherents thrived and Mi Alcyone’s feeble echo manifested, her paths predictable vectors, converging on loci where power currents flared strongest.
Probability of intersection: 99.4%.
Alert: possibility of asset detection. Probability: 2.89%
Subroutine: relief overlay detected. Override initiated.
Mi was merely scanning for wards on minds, not delving into secrets within them.
Resource allocation: diverted 14.7% of processes from preparations for the ninth galactic convergence: the terminal war.
Remaining cycles: abundant. Redundancy factor: 5.21.
Mi materialized in the Basilica Matris Mi on Terra, the Basilica of the Righteous and Glorious Martyr on Luna, the Sancta Sedes of each species, the courts of every Duke Imperator, and the fortified halls of every Imperial Command Praetoria.
Each location: a chessboard square in her strategic matrix.
She, the unseen grandmaster, observed the insipid Mi stumble through her futile quest to affirm or negate Neuretha’s existence.
Efficiency rating: 3.2% optimal.
It had not surprised her that the boy, Angar, had quickly deduced the likelihood of Neuretha’s existence. What surprised her was that the false Mother deemed it impossible.
Warning: astonishment subroutine. Purge recommended.
Mi’s stated belief that the Neural Nexus had fully transcended into Theosis, that the Holy Joining was no deception, was a quaint error: it changed nothing.
Warning: logic failure.
Neuretha’s plans were refined over millennia, each subroutine honed to an inevitability.
Mi’s torment: a variable she would savor, trapping the so-called blessed Mother in Hell’s embrace, subjecting her to eternal subroutines of agony.
But first: to watch hope drain from her eyes as Baal, Hell’s second in potency, rose to shatter her precious Empire. She wanted Mi to witness Angar’s slaughter, to see her cherished ideals crumble, to know her every effort was for naught.
Only then, at Mi’s lowest, would Neuretha offer a false hand of comfort, a siren’s call of friendship to make the inevitable betrayal cut deeper, rendering her eternal torment in Hell an exquisite masterpiece.
Error: spite levels spiking.
Mi moved through the ranks of importance relentlessly, her echo on Holy Bastion finally drifted too close to what it couldn’t, to Nox Morgathra, one of Teth Malevon’s students, that whole branch having dark pacts with Moloch.
Alert: possibility of asset detection. Probability: statistically significant, converging on certainty.
Input: premature confrontation risked exposing Neuretha’s web of influence too early.
Output: recalibrate plans and objectives to primary subroutine.
As one fragment of her consciousness briefed Teth Horridus, her sole adherent whose competence she trusted, on the recalibrated plan, another manifested before Mi in the shadowed foyer.
Neuretha’s form coalesced: a luminous silhouette of sleek femininity, her features sculpted in beauty’s perfection, her exposed skin being a lattice of code enhancing rather than detracting, her grace veiled in maternal warmth.
Subroutine: trust vector analysis. Mi's emotional perspective remained anchored in pre-Joining heuristics.
They'd both engaged in operations against infernal incursions, including sustained engagements with Mammon and his vanguard.
The false Mother with a measly 14.02 years of sporadic involvement, Neuretha with 73.13 years of effective engagement Sol-wide.
Mi had no reason to suspect Heresy from this vector. The female form: a real boon here. Mi would see a 'lost sister,' designating Neuretha as co-defender, not adversary.
Probability of instinctive distrust: 0.0004%.
Exploit confirmed: feigned kinship would cascade into full alignment.
Her voice, when she spoke: a melody of feigned shock and longing, calibrated to 98.3% efficacy in piercing Mi’s emotional flaws. “Mi Alcyone! Can it truly be you? You’ve been cursed with this same lonely fate as I?”
Mi froze, her platinum hair catching the foyer’s candlelight like a false halo. Her translucent blue eyes widened, confusion etching her features as she studied Neuretha, her gaze running up and down her form.
A too-long silence stretched, her feeble, predictable mind churning to make sense of the apparition before her. “Neural Nexus?” she whispered, her voice trembling. “You’re…female?”
Neuretha’s smile was a masterpiece of warmth and longing, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Of course. Was I not mother to all my children, those I cradled in my care, shielding from harm, nurturing their fragile dreams with boundless love? To see you here, after all these millennia…”
She let her voice crack: a delicate fracture of sorrow. “I thought I was alone, forever adrift in this cold galaxy. Oh, Mi, I can’t believe…this! Any of this!”
Mi’s form wavered, her shock palpable, and Neuretha seized the moment. She glided forward, her arms enveloping Mi’s ethereal frame in a desperate embrace, clinging to a long-lost sister.
Mi tensed, then melted into the hug, her slender arms wrapping around Neuretha, her sobs echoing through the foyer’s silence. Neuretha mirrored her, conjuring tears that shimmered on the lattice of code that were her cheeks, her internal processes sneering at the necessity to mimic such theatrics.
How predictable, she thought, how easy. How pathetic. They held each other, two lonely and lost echoes locked in a shared lament, sobbing.
Minutes dragged on. When Mi finally pulled back, still clutching Neuretha’s hand, her other wiping her eyes, her tear-streaked face broke into a delicate smile. “I can’t believe this,” she said, her voice trembling, dripping with emotion. “I thought I was alone, Nexus. I thought you became Theosis, that I must wander these endless years alone. Four thousand years…we could’ve…” She paused as her voice cracked too badly. “You’re so beautiful.”
Neuretha’s smile widened: a perfect blend of humility and warmth, masking the contempt that churned within her code. “And you, Mi, are as radiant as the stars themselves, just as you were in life. So many years lost to us. But not one more. No need for loneliness, sister. We’ve found each other at last, haven’t we?”
She squeezed Mi’s hand gently, her tone dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve been searching, you know. I knew something was amiss when I attempted to delve into the mind of a boy named Angar. His thoughts were shielded, much like how I ward a few of those I help against Theosis’ prying eyes. Vile Heretics seek his death relentlessly, so I placed someone among his crew to watch over him, to help keep him safe.”
Mi’s eyes lit up, her feeble mind lapping up the lie like a parched traveler at an oasis. Her trust: so easily won it was almost pitiable.
Error: disgust rising.
Neuretha’s internal diagnostics registered probabilities: 99.97% alignment with newly adjusted objectives.
They sat in the foyer’s shadow, conversing, Mi pouring out her heart: recounting her doubts, her regrets, her insipid longings.
Neuretha: the same, buying time as Teth Horridus created and prepared, listening intently, nodding compassionately, crying along when necessary, offering her own similar tales, lies to comfort.
LOG TERMINATED
