Guardian Angel
This is Eve Online fanfiction; hopefully it makes sense with limited context!
“I’m not certain about any of the material analysis we’re doing, but, this monopole fog is clearly affecting the Triglavian ships just as badly as yours.”
“Yes. And it doesn’t seem that they prepared for these conditions ahead of time,” Clay replied.
Their voice-over-hypercomm conversation with Kondai remained calm, but all else in their world was incandescent chaos. They rocketed through disintegrating debris, drinking in the external sensor input and sending it to Kondai as fast as they could.
The external sensorium was far more pleasant than the internal. The same exotic matter haze that limned the wreckage in energetic radiation, permitting gamma-ray crystallography at a range of kilometers, gradually dissolved Clay’s ship — their body. The same buzzing metric distortion that warded away missiles and particle beams kept away the worst of the fog, but even then, in a million places deep narrow wounds perforated their tungsten shell and fought against the self-repair machinery of their sensitive innards. Random chunks of nominally-stable matter frayed into fission-fragments wherever a monopole impinged on a nucleus.
It itched. Clay had never itched before. They did not like it.
They focused outward: The strange wardens of this hidden basement-universe floated in pieces around them, and the bars on the next gate came unraveled. It was a beautiful thing, but the fact that these utilitarian gateways — which they knew there to be thousands and thousands of — each contained several artificial black holes for power terrified them. Clay, flinging crude projectiles from their metal shell, should not have been capable of fighting the Triglavian builders. Maybe they were gathering data too.
With the last batch of full-sphere diffraction measurements, Clay sent to Kondai, “All good to head through the next door?”
They were technically scrambling to outrun certain death. The packaged wormhole tethers they broke into to get here did something awful to the fierce propulsive field at their heart, and if they didn’t find the way out in some ten or fifteen minutes they would certainly be shredded into little glittery pieces. But the communication delays didn’t bother them. Everything else happened so fast that a few seconds could be spared— and if they were smithereened, it would be far from the first time. Kondai had what they came here for and immortality, even sequential, really took the sting out of smithereening.
“Clear to jump,” Kondai sent. Clay leapt toward the imposing gateway armature, opening up the throttle on their slightly ramshackle cluster of electroplasma and fusion rockets. Their current body was built disposably; their monopole-embrittled frame might have rattled if it wasn’t for the solid plating fused onto them, but as it was they felt reasonably solid.
In the few realtime-seconds it took them to fly through the hole in space, Kondai sent them her findings so far. Clay wasn’t exactly equipped to run the analysis right now. They’ve encountered these Triglavian designs before, but the radioactive glimmer in the region helped puzzle out their inner and outer workings: Their mysterious hulls seemed to be made from normally-radioactive elements somehow pushed into a metastable state by intense artificial gravity or metric distortions, possibly kept solid in battle by the singularities at their centers. Their weapons, like the exotic-matter fog, seemed to provoke exciting nuclear reactions in otherwise-stable materials. Clay thought it felt like nuclear shells.
She had more speculation on the bizarre habits and provenance of the Triglavian machines they were forced to fend off in the realer universe. These basement-universes were subject to wild and strange space-weather, the kind of energetic conditions that can easily be prepared for and even harnessed, but the Triglavians never compensated for the armor-embrittling or surging power or withering radiation. Kondai suspected they were, for some reason, caught by surprise whenever anyone intruded on the pocket-worlds; Clay worried they simply didn’t care to put up a fight any more substantial than they did.
The crimson artificial wormhole — also, suspiciously, cooperating with their ship’s systems — whisked Clay away and deposited them in flat space again, the flare of doppler-shifted radiation quickly clearing from their senses. They transmitted the base impressions and preprocessed targeting readouts back to Kondai as they came in, switched to target evaluation, and halted sharply.
In the midst of a firefight with three Triglavian craft, a familiar design arced across the dusty sky. A Cynabal, a pirate-cartel cruiser, had evidently knocked down one of the Triglavians and was in the process of being toasted by two others. Clay rocketed ahead before fully understanding what was going on, best to get the heavy matter rolling and sort the details out as needed.
They didn’t exactly alert Kondai to the ship’s presence, but their continuous sensory feed shifted from panoramas of the whole sky to analysis of the Cynabal. It was vastly better-equipped than Clay, but struggled with the assailants they’d faced five or six at a time. Its cannons fired almost randomly, splitting their targeting even when they hit, and the cruiser’s otherwise-sturdy shields flickered and fell away in patches.
Some new form of Triglavian electronic warfare or fault injection would be a fascinating and terrifying discovery; Clay scanned for unaccountable emissions from the attackers and signatures of interference on the pirate. They found no interference, and the infrared glow of life-support radiators.
The pirate cruiser had a mortal crew, and they were panicking.
“I’m sorry is that a fucking pirate ship?” Kondai asked; the message must’ve been sent the instant she got their sight of it.
“Yes, and it’s not a capsuleer,” Clay sent back, lighting its first attacker up in a spotlight of targeting illuminators and swiveling to intercept.
Clay, even wearing an admittedly cut-rate skin, was a ferocious thing; they spun around their foe at speeds that would’ve pureed a pilot with their tail pointed straight out and engines burning to keep them pushed in close. The plumes from their engines crackled in the fog like the sparks from a catherine-wheel, and the nearer Triglavian’s arcing, flashing particle-stream couldn’t keep on them for more than a flicker every orbit. The further ship fractured chunks of their monopole-embrittled armor while repair slurry rushed in to fill the cracks, but once their continuous barrage of hypersonic titanium smashed something critical they sharply swerved to beset it too.
The fight was far calmer with only one foe. With the Triglavian ship directly ahead in the cone of their narrow-beam rangefinders, they could turn their scopes to the Cynabal.
It was not in a good state. Chunks of armor and hull hung off its battered frame, they could see damage-control foam filling most of the opened voids. That, at least, seemed to keep the deadly exotic matter out of its core. Most of its artificial gravity was off. The crew seemed to have retreated to a few central citadels; at least part of their poor aim was probably caused by using cramped backup controls. There were probably sixty or seventy people aboard.
Clay transmitted to the thoroughly bewildered pirates. On their screens, an unknown gunship had flashed into existence and in the space of several seconds quite a lot of confusing shooting and exploding occurred.
“Cynabal, get away from the active Triglavian. Hold position thirty kilometers from me.” The pirate cruiser did not react immediately. In an effort to make the situation a little less confusing, Clay turned on their transponder. It was not meant to be off anyway, even here.
“Oh, no. Are you going to try and rescue them?” Kondai asked.
“Of course. Who do you think I am?”
The second Triglavian ship they spun around gave up trying to chase them, and turned its particle fountain on the pirate Cynabal. Clay saw the death it could cause almost in an intrusive thought— they had all the time in the world to plan, but knew what they would do almost instantly. Their engine housings heated to incandescence as they reversed course, slowing and pitching themself into the weapon’s path.
Despite the itching exotic-matter, they didn’t really experience pain in their blasted weapon compartment as much as directed displeasure. They had no crew to lose, just redundant parts.
Displeasure escalated to disappointment when the pirate cruiser turned its guns on them, though.
All but a few of the depleted-uranium shells flew wildly off-target, and the spalling from the few that hit mostly tore up already-isolated compartments around their main engines.
They turned the volume up on their transmitter for effect even if the sound would be clipped.
”#%*@ing stop shooting I am TRYING to SAVE YOU,” some communication officer’s headpiece crackled.
With the Triglavian convinced to try shooting at them again, they tore off sideways, keeping up the bombardment until it collapsed into its singularity core. The Cynabal’s guns stopped firing one at a time as the crew got the memo.
“How did you pronounce that?” someone asked over radio.
“…That is your question,” Clay stated.
Someone else, evidently, took over the radio. After the flurry of a close-range firefight, Clay felt like the disorderly responses took ages.
“Who are you? What do you want with us?”
Whoever had taken charge at least sounded unafraid, even in these circumstances.
“I’m called Clay,” they answered over voice, offering no further detail. “As much as I want to know what you’re doing out here, I would prefer you get back to realspace alive and we are on a time limit.”
“Wha-“ the stranger halfway cut off their confusion over the radio. They didn’t answer for a few seconds more, leaving Clay and Kondai to converse over their faster mind-linked comms.
“Bad news,” Kondai sent. “The gate ahead is open, but it’s reacting to your warp core and not theirs.”
This WAS bad. Clay suspected that the distortion introduced by the way in was what let them take the door back out to the universe, they were probably subtly entangled in the wormhole. They could leave, the Cynabal could not. They couldn’t take the crew aboard; Clay’s body certainly looked and behaved like a ship externally, but it was densely-packed with machinery, with no interior or accomodations. They contacted engineering and metric physics databases for help.
“Not good. How fast could we swap our ships’ engines?” Clay asked.
“Not in twelve minutes! But…”
The pirate crew finally answered. “You’re a capsuleer? You people aren’t known for sympathy. Why would you help us?”
Clay slowed, drifting rather than whirling. It was, unfortunately, true. And they had to convince the pirates quickly.
“Because you’re not capsuleers. Your deaths would be permanent. I cannot express the scale of this tragedy. Now, unless you can leave here the way you came, we’re going to need to make some radical modifications to your ship extremely quickly.”
The radio went quiet again, probably while the crew argued. Eventually the stern person returned. “Alright, fine. What do we do? …Thank you,” they uncertainly added.
Clay tried to summarize the situation, sending bizarre astronomical data where it helped. “I came here through a piece of transportation hardware I barely understand. It’s entangled with my warp core, and if I don’t leave in ten minutes, it will explode and destroy me. But it’s also the key to that door up ahead.”
“The scary red triangle with three eyes?”
“Exactly. That’s the way out, I came in here through another one.” They, once again, wondered where exactly “here” was. No stars, no planets, but a lot of light and haze and surreal planetary terrain. A question for later. “So, we’ll have to transplant my warp core into your ship and—”
“The warp core that’s about to explode and kill you?”
“That’s the one.”
“Fantastic. Continue.”
Clay laughed to themself, then decided to patch it to the radio for the deadpan communicator’s benefit.
“Once you have my core, you can fly back out to safety—”
Kondai interrupted them this time. “Clay, problem. That’s not the gate back to realspace. There’s one more of these little gauntlets.”
“&#!%.”
“How DO you pronounce— Sorry, not important right now.”
These unfortunate space-travelers would not survive alone. Especially not with the extremely dubious core modifications they were about to make. Clay couldn’t bring their ship through with them; even if they had time to fuse the hulls together, warp-field boundaries and waveguides were very fickle things.
“I have a plan,” they told Kondai. They did not like it.
“There’s another problem,” Clay informed the pirates. “There’s another fight through that gate, then the way out.” They heard swearing in the background. “I can help with that but we have to hurry and replace your core. I’m sending plans…”
With the Cynabal torn open in places, its normal defenses against detailed scanning didn’t quite keep Clay’s prying eyes out, they had accounted for all the maintenance drones and spare parts they had within reach of their citadels.
“You want us to blow a quarter of the ship off and shut down the shields? Are you insane?”
“Well, it’s not ALL the shields,” Clay tried to reassure.
Capsuleers were, deservedly, frightening figures, as they floated into position just behind the cruiser they wondered if the crew was shaken or reassured. A dozen maintenance robots crawled through the cracks in its armor, mounting explosive bolts and cutting struts. Clay made their own modifications. They overrode just about every safeguard in their repair nanoware, and melted most of their warp core’s bracket into grey sludge. It was a new feeling, they could feel its power leave them, a faint distortion suddenly vanishing from their skeleton and leaving them oddly dull and vacant. Something slightly magical had been replaced with mundane beams and girders.
They watched the process through their inner eyes. The usually-needlelike filament of their warp core was, somehow, bent into a seeping red triangle. They did not like this Triglavian stuff one bit.
After a few minutes of frantic work, the pirates signalled that they were ready. What happened next certainly horrified them: They powered down their dorsal shields, the exotic matter rushing in and making parts of their ship’s hull seem to rot and rust in time-lapse. The most damaged sections were soon ejected; an explosion rocked the Cynabal and its top flew off, spiralling into the void. Clay blasted in to hover protectively bare meters above the jagged hole, their own shields filling in the gap.
Several of the cruiser’s more vital bulkheads were torn out during the work. Their external cameras, studded all over their hull, could look down an uneven shaft straight to its main engines, where four engineers in hardsuits pried open the inner housing of their warp drive’s motive field. A couple meters and a protective gravitic screen separated them from the precisely-engineered crack in space that could send them skipping across solar systems.
“You’re doing good,” Clay transmitted, hoping to reassure the frazzled crew. “Do you know how to prompt a core catastrophe?”
“What? I thought we were swapping! What are you going to do without a warp drive?”
“I’m touched. But I’m trapped here anyway, and a cruiser’s core won’t fit in me. Mine will merely move you very slowly.”
They heard the communications officer, or captain, or whoever it was make the sounds people make when they’re thinking and aren’t happy about what they’re coming up with. Normally they didn’t like to rush people, but the situation grew grimmer by the moment. “Don’t worry, I can’t die. I’ll just wake up in a nice space station with a headache,” they recited.
“I… Right. Thank you. Diayati to engineering, I need you to collapse the core, now…”
Over the course of their work, the crew had gradually let more and more of their internal chatter get through to the external channel. Clay generally tried very hard to avoid thinking of entire crewed ships as single organisms on par with themself— they were one, the striken cruiser’s crew was dozens. But it did almost feel like telepathy, being slowly clued in to another being’s thoughts and impulses.
The engineers didn’t bother making sure they heard this command right, it was one of the less strange things they’ve had to do to their poor ship lately. With strange solemnity, one of them stomped over to a control panel, and the other three stared down as the heart of their ship flickered and extinguished. Something vital left it, as it had left Clay.
With a clear line of sight to their suits’ antennas, Clay transmitted in their own voice, “Stand back.” The engineers jumped, and retreated.
They detached armor covers from their underbelly and ejected the last of their connection to space and time. Clay’s flickering, reddened warp core drifted down the carved-out shaft, casting a surreal shifting light as it gently descended. The engineers’ heads all slowly swiveled to track it as it fell into the core enclosure, and a weight seemed to come off their shoulders as it snapped into place and brought their stardrive back to life. The instability alarms went off immediately, but Clay had warned them of that.
“Great, looks like it’s working. Now… About this fight,” Diayati radioed.
“Yes. I saw your combat drones in your bays,” Clay started.
“Right, SOMEBODY was supposed to have launched those when we were attacked…”
“It’s a good thing they didn’t. I’m sending a network card down, I need your engineers to connect this to the drone control computer. I’ll pilot them and escort you out.”
They ejected a cargo compartment down the shaft, too. Diayati didn’t complain, but they knew Kondai was still watching and would have some questions— Piloting five drones, manually, over hypercomms, was simply not something capsuleers could do.
“We’re running out of time. I’ll fix your ship as much as I can, but once you have that card plugged in, you fly through the gate and burn for the next one you see.”
They saw the engineers sprint out, and hazy damage-control fields fill some of the gaps. Clay prepared to turn their ship into a bunker. Their rogue repair-nanobots cannibalized the housing of their warp drive and their sublight engines, and the entire ventral face of their hull pried itself away into a flat plate, sticking to the hole in the Cynabal and welding itself on to roughly cover the damage. Exposed machinery fizzled unpleasantly in their exposed underside, but they directed maintenance drones to attach a few spare shield generators to the shoddy repairs. They had done nearly everything they could by the time the cruiser lurched and flew toward the next gate.
There wasn’t much to do in this body any more, so they focused on their new networked appendages. Through railgun-drones’ spotty eyes they watched the blasted hangar of the Cynabal rattle then glow as it passed through the gate. They waited for the light to return to normal, then launched.
Their five bodies tumbled briefly in space, then they oriented themself, linking to the cruiser’s sensors to find anything threatening. Yet more of those Triglavian warships— not a serious danger to them before, but wearing these drones, Clay was less than a thousandth their previous size.
This would not be an easy fight.
The two Triglavians flew toward the cruiser with their odd weapons glowing. Clay wasn’t sure how much the Cynabal could survive in its state, but they were not going to find out. Only two of them. They had five drones. They didn’t have to last long.
Clay, now in the Cynabal’s system, found the command channel to speak on. “To the gate. Stop for nothing.” Still, the big ship seemed to flinch slightly as their drones screamed past on trails of disintegrating fusion-rocket lining. Two drones to each warship, their railguns glowed white-hot and evaporated as they dumped the magazines as fast as possible, then flooded the fusion cores and rammed them. The drones, then the Triglavians, crumpled and exploded in sharp bursts of white.
The last drone, scorched by internal overheating but still in one piece, quietly docked with the Cynabal just before it left this hidden realm. Clay said nothing; the card they gave the pirates later turned out to be a mundane communication node.
With their still-functional remains trapped in the abyss, Clay talked with Kondai.
“So. How did you do… Any of that? We’re all plugged into the controls, but I’ve never seen a capsuleer operate individual drones and repair nanobots,” she sent.
“That is a very long story,” Clay answered. “I will have to show you.”