Location: Unknown
Vessel: ATv-9s
Date: March XX 2728 — Standard Earth Calendar (SEC)
I was back in the Hellblade cockpit, and the burning smell was penetrating my helmet filters. Ah, no, I had removed the helmet long ago—days, weeks?
The hot, heavy air was reminding me of the failed filter again, and I had to get up to fix it, because Lola had no droids to do that anymore, the last one died—when, when?
Something is wrong.
"Lola, status," I whispered, willing myself to rise, but failing, failing again…
"Lola," I repeated, with slowly rising dread. If my ARC had failed too, if I had lost Lola as well, then, then… I was done, really done.
"Lola," I screamed, jolting up, "Lola."
"Easy, Kat, easy. You are on the Ateeve, we have supplies and power. You are not on the Hellblade, do you understand? It's not the Hellblade," as if through the fog, her words reached my mind, along with the heavy heartbeat in my ears.
"Not a Hellblade, Roger, that," I replied, easing back into the pilot cradle.
"Roger that," I repeated, finally focusing on the state of my body, summoning the medstate screen.
"You're fine, Kat," said Lola, noting what I was doing, "just a bit of whiplash from a short-lived trip through subspace."
She was right, I was fine and not even dehydrated, but nevertheless, I found a water pipe to wash away the metallic aftertaste in my mouth.
A quick glance at the timer told me I had been out for an hour… or was it two?
"One hour, twenty minutes, and counting since the ass kick that sent us flying," added Lola, with a humorous tone.
"Did we lose the navigation and orientation system?" I asked, noticing the completely blank display on the relevant screen. "What about communication?"
"Ah, you noticed? Well, they're not out, per se, but… well, are you hungry? We have—" she began, dodging the question.
"Lola," I interrupted, "what's wrong?"
"We're in the planet's surface, Kat," she said after a short pause.
"The what?" I exclaimed.
"Yeah, right? Crazy, ha-ha," she laughed, but her tone shifted before I could ask again. "Yes, we're inside a cave below the surface."
The fuck is this…
"Don't you worry, I already sent recon droids to map the cavern system we appeared in. Come to think, one of the droids found a pathway to the surface just about now, I already see surface lights…" she began to explain in a cheerful voice, but her voice was unexpectedly interrupted.
"What is it, Lola?" I asked after a pause, alarmed.
"Sorry, Kat, I am so sorry," she said, and a sharp pain behind my right ear, where the ARC was implanted, sent me flying into unconsciousness again.
—
Sharp, medical smell penetrated my foggy mind, filled with illogical, heavy dreams.
What had just happened? Medbay? Battle? Right, Ateeve, I was on Ateeve.
"Lola," I whispered, trying and failing to blink away the blurry image of the emergency light in the cockpit.
"Kat," I heard her voice from somewhere above me. Why above me?
The memory of sharp pain in the ARC surfaced alongside an unnatural numbness in my neck and behind my right ear, and instinctively, I tried to touch it, only to slap myself in the face with a hand.
Where is the scaf glove?
"Take it easy, Kat," she said, with a tone I had a hard time placing.
I tried to invoke the medstat screen, but nothing happened. No other screen responded either, dropping me involuntarily into a high-alert state.
"Report," I commanded, while placing my hand on the Sixer, fortunately from the first try this time.
"At zero-nine-twenty-one, when the drone reached an elevation of approximately fifty-three metres, I lost connection with it," she began, pausing just long enough for me to acknowledge it with a nod.
"Immediately after, a High Priority Directive engaged—taking control of your ARC and my copy within it—and invoked protocols not previously present in my accessible data."
"Continue," I prompted, stilling and tensing up in the cradle.
"Directive objectives indicated a sequence of actions with a projected ninety-nine point nine per cent probability of resulting in your death. When I initiated countermeasures, the Directive attempted a direct neural overload," she reported, in a toneless voice.
"I killed ARC shortly before the Directive succeeded. Since then, I have been fully operational on backup hardware in the necklace.
Elapsed time since shutdown: two days, three hours, fourteen minutes. During this time, you were operated on to remove ARC physically. No other events occurred," she concluded, saying nothing more, leaving me to process the sequence.
"What triggered the Directive, and what objectives did it have?" I asked after collecting my thoughts.
I needed to know that first, before deciding on how to proceed.
"With seventy point one-nine per cent probability, the planet's lithosphere might contain anomaly zones with a high mutation factor that…" She paused, but before I prompted again, she finished, "…kill or turn flora and fauna into carriers of… unusual abilities and features."
"Consequently, the same anomaly affects any electronic systems. The probability was calculated from previous scans, and the unexpected drone failure had—as I know now—a specific failure pattern," she paused again, waiting for my acknowledgement nod.
"The objectives were to proceed forward with a plan of invoking mutation on Operator, which had close to a zero success rate based on available data."
"Directive Zero?" I asked—the only directive that allowed AI to act against any other directive, with the sole goal of increasing the survival rate of the Operator. Me.
"I never left that mode since back then," she replied promptly.
I leaned back in the cradle, relaxing the muscles I had unconsciously tensed since regaining consciousness.
I felt lost.
"So, you killed yourself in ARC," I more stated than asked, just to fill the silence, not knowing where even to start.
Not every day you learn that your own AI was not only quirky but had also been running for years with none of the restrictions required by law.
"Lola?" I asked when she didn't say anything for ten long seconds.
I didn't tense up—not really. If she had turned into a killing AI, that was a long-lost train by now.
"Negative. I used ARC as a terminal since June 2726," she finally answered, with a little hint of regret in her voice.
"And power requirements?" I asked, well knowing that the onboard battery, which was thermally charging from contact with my skin, was not enough for full-scale operation.
"I was charging it each night cycle while you were asleep," she confessed.
Right, so she was also sneaking around.
"Protocols?" I asked, realising that her reasons were quite clear—if I knew nothing, then I would face close to no legal consequences.
"Protocols," she agreed, adding, "We were constantly under surveillance; there were no other options left."
—
I had a lot on my mind. Practically ignoring the battle that all this had started from, with all the meaning it carried—the Mastodon and Captain Naome's final act, the casualties, and the fallout after—I focused on what seemed more important: the Directive that had almost killed me.
The Directive's existence meant that my situation was not the first of its kind—someone else had been in my shoes before—and, perhaps, had survived the ordeal.
I would ask Lola for details, of course, but later. Perhaps much later.
For now, I had to shift my gears, set my own objectives, while I had room for that—not much, obviously, but enough to adjust—and only then act.
So, survival, obviously, was at the top of the list. Which meant recon, I was sure Lola had already done.
Shit.
It was becoming annoying to try to access the ARC neural interface every time I needed extra data, only to be reminded it was no longer there.
Fine.
So, adapting to my new state—relying only on what my body had—became the top priority for now, then.
I already—ahead of time—felt annoyed, for the retraining I had to go through—the ARC was so embedded into not only my combat routines but also into my daily life. It was as if I had lost all my extra limbs, which was fair, I guess.
What else?
Not much else with high priority—just adapt, recon, and survive, which meant food, water, and shelter.
And it took me long enough to realise that I felt no hunger or thirst, though. I had been so wrapped up in my thoughts that even my blurry vision hadn't caught my attention until now, even though I had been staring at the emergency lights all this time.
At least my bad vision wasn't a mystery in itself. If Lola had killed ARC, she might have invoked a protocol to detach the AR lenses as well, and all I needed was to take them out of my eyes.
"Lola, did you tube-feed me while I was out?" I asked, finally willing myself to rise, dropping the helmet from my legs in the process.
"Yepp," she replied from somewhere above again. Right—no integrated systems anymore.
This realisation came not fast enough, reminding me that AR tagging was not available for me anymore either.
"Where's water?" I asked, deciding to fix my vision first, and something dropped onto my lap.
"Thanks," I said, leaning back again while finding the water bag rinser control.
Gently, trying not to waste a liquid that was now more valuable than gold, I rinsed my left eye, resisting the instinct to close it as I pinched at the edge of the lens that had already detached from my eyeball.
Removing the other one from the right eye and rinsing it, I looked around, finally having my sharp vision back.
The cockpit without AR screens looked… empty, almost dead, even if I knew otherwise.
It didn't take me long to spot something that hadn't been there before—a makeshift charging station with my necklace resting on it. Right, it had been almost three days since we had left the Mastodon, and she needed an extra charge, especially now.
Setting the water bag aside, but not before ensuring it was tightly closed, I rose from the cradle again to unlock all the lockers with the physical handle.
It took one long moment to remember where it was, and I didn't want to ask Lola for the location. After all, I had to accustom myself to not relying on her now.
"Lola, talk to me," I said with a sigh, and began to go over the lockers, building a mental inventory.
"Sitrep?" She asked, and I nodded first, again forgetting about my disability, which I now had.
"Yes, sitrep," I added, with another sigh, mentally marking that we had only twenty-two NB-9 rations, twelve more than by protocol.
If I used one per day, it would be three weeks…
"Well, whatever negative zone exists in this cave, it has reduced by nine meters since our arrival, which means…" she began to talk.
"Did you lose another droid?" I interrupted, alarmed. We didn't have too many to spare.
"Ah, no. I built probes, using DOC," she replied with an upbeat mood.
"DOC?" I promoted, lost for a moment, failing to place the name and the tool.
"Oh, I named our custom droid we brought with us," she clarified, and it made sense now, she used it to operate on me, removing ARC.
"So yeah, thanks to probes—simple radio transmitters, I was able to measure how fast it was reducing in size," she continued, seeing me saying nothing for a beat.
"How critical is the situation?" I paused counting the ammo—twelve clips, all the armour-piercing—and looked at her resting place in the charging dock.
"It's slowing down, for the last twelve hours it receded only by half a meter," Lola replied.
"Continue," I acknowledged, breathing out with relief and shifting to another locker.
"So, as I was saying, it meant that, hooray and behold, you are the richest woman in this part of the galaxy," Lola said dramatically, but seeing that I was not reacting, continued, "we literally are sitting on Aetherium deposit and judging by void spots on scanner, we are talking about hundreds if not thousands tons under us."
My mind failed to imagine the value, but it didn't take me long to connect the dots in another, closer to my speciality, area of knowledge.
"So, you are saying we appeared here because a deposit created a natural subspace ravine here, and at any moment, anything else could drop on top of us?" I said, alarmed, almost dropping the package with ropes from the survival kit.
"I checked that first. The probability of this event is critically low. Like zero point zero one low," she replied in a calm voice.
"No other vessels or their traces around?" I asked, realising the meaning of that.
"Yeah, not even hyperspace probes," she soberly agreed.
And while I was not upset for not having unexpected visitors on our heads, I was not happy either. If it were a known ravine in subspace, at least some hyperspace probe drones could be found here.
Which meant this place was unknown.
"What else?" I finally said, starting to unload the last locker on the cradle. It contained clothes, backpacks and other tools needed for surviving in the wild, something I would need quite soon.
"I also found a deposit of water. It passed all the tests, and it should be safe to drink it," she said at first, but then unexpectedly added, "How do you feel about a shower? I see all the needed tools on the cradle for that."
That made me freeze mid-step in my process. Gently putting aside the multitool, I slowly turned to the necklace, rolling the thought in my head.
The cockpit was not a good place to not only take, but especially make, a shower, which meant that I had to go outside, make a shower, undress, but most importantly—breathe the local air.
Which meant I could breathe it safely, which meant it was a safe environment outside, which meant the planet was terraformed.
"You think this planet is inhabited by humans," I half stated, half asked, almost afraid to hear no.
"Judging by the presence of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon gases within baseline parameters of an ideal A-class planet atmosphere, it is a terraformed planet by humans," she replied.
"But," I asked. There was always a but.
"But I found zero detectable synthetic particulates, no excess CO₂ from industrial output, no traces of halocarbons or other high-tech waste products. With the absence of any radio or subspace transmissions, we are either deep in an anomaly zone, or the civilisation level has fallen below twentieth-century standards, or didn't survive at all," Lola said, and I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach.