I hear something. Thanatos transmitted.
Darnell reviewed the last few seconds, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. Might be the Symbiote – did you take a shot?
It’s not the Symbiote. Thanatos transmitted, frozen in space, skids extended as far as they can go. The entire kilometre long warship remained silent, listening. They had just returned from Fort II. Maybe someone was tracking them.
Darnell felt Thanatos feel a tremor along the hull. The ship was acting like a massive radio antenna.
Another slight touch.
Thanatos slowly began to move, feeling the direction the slight touches came from and plotting a triangulation.
It’s somewhere over there. Thanatos transmitted, firing an active sensor pulse in the general direction of his transmission, as if to point.
You’ve got quite the hunter instinct.
Can’t you hear it? Thanatos asked, drifting towards the source of the transmission.
Barely.
They flew a little longer. Darnell was perplexed. We’ve landed at this offset point hundreds of times, what could it be?
I don’t know. But I’ll try to mask my signature until it’s detected.
How are you feeling? Darnell asked. He was referring to the battle. Thanatos had been sequestered by the Symbiote.
Good. My wounds healed. I think the Symbiote healed them.
Interesting.
It exacted a hefty toll.
You – it – killed them all?
I don’t know.
It was you or them. You had no choice.
It seems I always get into those situations. They killed the Puritan.
Darnell had come across the memory earlier, but had said nothing. Ships die; people die.
Thanatos continued on, the beacon now audible by Darnell as well. It was on some sort of loop.
It must be a comms buoy of some sort.
It was still too distorted to make out, but Thanatos was approaching ever quicker, more confident that it wasn’t a hostile. There were no beemspace signatures nearby.
But I’m sorry about the news. Darnell continued, aware of the grief building up inside the ship.
She didn’t deserve it. She was so young. She just wanted… I don’t know.
Darnell wanted to transmit, “Love” but he changed his mind, unfortunately Thanatos heard it.
No not really love… more like belonging, acceptance.
They were finally in visual range of the beacon. There was no signature from it. It was far too weak.
It has an effective range of approximately a thousand kilometres. No wonder we never heard it before. Our offsets can vary by tens of millions of kilometres.
So you can understand the beacon now?
Yes. It’s a recording.
Darnell was observing the binary data stored in Thanatos’ mind, unable to read it, Can you convert it to audio for me?
Thanatos streamed the message, “Here lies Kaira, starship of the Floran Bawson, a casualty of the senseless war.”
That’s it? Darnell asked.
Thanatos was silent, observing the derelict. It was the skeleton of a Puritan.
I’ve never seen a Puritan skeleton before.
It takes thousands of years for our flesh to rot away. This is a very old derelict. Thanatos observed, flying closer to the wreck.
In size, the ship was much smaller than Thanatos, with a length of four hundred and thirty-seven meters. He compared the skeletal structure to biomedical records in his database. It was limited data, but the results confirmed the ship as a pure BMS: A Puritan, before there were Descendents.
That’s… unbelievable. This ship lived in the era of the Black Nova, during that great war.
It died to that era as well, it seems.
Darnell looked at the skeleton thoroughly through Thanatos’ eyes. There’s cracks all along the skeletal structure, is that from decay?
There is nothing here to really decay it. Those fractures look like stress fractures, from a high gee manoeuvre. A flashback of Thanatos’ reverse thrust to escape from the hostile Descendent fleet emerged.
Like during your engagement?
Possibly. But her fractures didn’t have time to heal.
How do you know it’s a she?
It’s too elegant of a derelict to belong to a male, and Kaira is more of a female’s name.
Darnell took another look at the derelict through Thanatos’ enhanced senses. It didn’t look very elegant to him. It was more foreboding than elegant. It reminded him of another derelict floating out in space somewhere.
We should do something like this for Wings. Darnell blurted.
Discomfort seeped into the neural band. I don’t really remember the specifics of my encounter with Wings.
I do. Neither of you were moving. It’s just standard drift we have to worry about. Darnell began looking into Thanatos memories of the encounter. Flashes of the battle, of the pain. He pulled out of the memories before they became overwhelming, surfacing from the neural band with the co-ordinates. Let’s go.
–
The area was pure déjà-vu. The stars were where they had been, having moved mere decimals of degrees from their last known positions. The background radiation here was still higher than the average, most likely from the engagement that had taken place here.
“I built my first batch of fighters… a few months ago.” Darnell said automatically, remembering Wings’ last words. “I wanted to surprise Kite but I got all caught up.” The words tore at Thanatos. He never heard the final transmissions between his captain and his old ship. It was never those famous last words, but then Wings had already become delirious from the pain. “They have beem drives. You can get away.”
There was a pause as none of them said anything else for a while. Darnell scanned the system. He could hear voices off in the distance. He felt as if Thanatos was an island, safe from the voices. He observed the voices here, never really understanding them.
“Even with his dying breath – he wanted me to escape. But I couldn’t.” Darnell said blankly, looking out at the insidious nebulae in this region. “’I’m not leaving. It’s time I faced him.’ I had said. I should have told him what great a ship he was.”
“I’m sure he knew.” Thanatos chirped.
“Is the buoy ready?”
“Yes.”
“Alright – let’s find him.”
–
They searched through the clouded nebulas methodically. The voices strong here. They had insidious tones and connotations, but Darnell could never understand them. He knew what they wanted, however. It was what they always wanted: Destruction. It had worked, too. Wings was testament to that. They found him drifting in one of the nebulae, his body tinted red by the nebula’s chemicals.
Thanatos looked at the tips of Wings skids, where the ship had tried to attack him. He still remembered the pleasure from the punctures. How the Symbiote rewarded destruction.
Darnell went aboard, using an electrostatic field to sustain himself in the depressurized environment. He walked slowly, observing the corridors.
I spent my entire life aboard this ship. I grew up in these walls, leaving only for school. It was nice to have a place like this to fall back to. A place I could call my own.
You will always have a place to call your own. Now more than ever before. Thanatos said, thinking of their home planet.
The choices I made. All a blur now. Can you do me a favour Thanatos?
Anything. Now that they were here, Thanatos felt that he could even die here if that’s what his captain wanted. Now that we’re here I feel free.
Position yourself the same way you did years ago. I want to remember something.
Uneasily, Thanatos moved below Wings, ventral to ventral. Darnell could feel his tension over the neural band. He didn’t mind the tension, it was reminiscent of those final moments.
Darnell walked into his chambers, looking at the stand where the sword should have been. He mimed grabbing it, and drawing the imaginary sword. He traced his steps, walking down the corridors to the ventral chamber, where Thanatos had finished Wings. He looked at the massive gash where Thanatos had impaled his ship. Beyond the gash, he could see Thanatos.
Come closer. Darnell ordered.
Thanatos closed the distance, the ventral hull now imperceptible from the gash.
Darnell swung imaginarily at his foes. Killing the crew, then the captain.
Darnell stepped over the edge, slowly floating down as Thanatos grabbed him gravimetrically. Darnell was now standing on Thanatos’ ventral side.
You don’t have that weapon anymore.
No, but I still have a hatch that leads to that chamber. Thanatos said. White steam emerged where the hatch was depressurized, opening.
Darnell was now where he had been. He remembered all his determination. He walked upwards, towards the bridge.
“You were nothing like you are now. You were broken. I was ready to kill you.” Darnell said, walking to the bridge.
At the bridge he said, “I wanted to make you suffer, to kill you. But it never worked. Pleasure and pain were indistinguishable, then.”
He thought the confirmation codes for the corridor that led to the neural plexus. The floor bulkhead loosened, and Darnell removed them. The area was so hypersensitive that every footstep felt like a pierce, but he couldn’t see himself anymore.
“You don’t have eyes here, do you?”
Nor do I have audio. Thanatos said. Since he was speaking on the neural band now, his uneasiness was more apparent.
Darnell continued forward. He reached the junction that led to the neural plexus.
There it is. Darnell transmitted.
Thanatos did not look through his captain’s eyes. Afraid of what he might see.
Darnell grabbed the handle, the slight movement sending a shudder of pain through the ship and through Darnell.
He pulled. An unbearable jolt of pain and agony coursed through both of them.
–
Darnell awoke in darkness. There was blood all around him, the voices were blaring. He reached into his pouch, grabbing one of the shots. He jabbed the shot into his neck. The voices subsided, as did the blood.
Thanatos wasn’t responding. He grabbed another shot and made his way to the neural plexus. Wings’ sword in hand. He took the ladder up, as he had taken it up years before. The way had even been cleared. Rahjaad had left some of the wounds, the torn veins. Darnell waded through them to the plexus.
This was where he had faltered. Should he have killed Thanatos back then? His ship was unconscious, and he made sure to encrypt these memories, these thoughts.
He raised the sword, thinking out loud, “Should I have killed him all those years ago? Should I have returned to the nebula? How would my life have been different had Wings been alive? Why did I have to go back here? Why did I have to be a hero?”
Even now he knew the Symbiote was eating away at his ship, trying to gain control once again. He looked at the syringe in one hand, and the sword in the other.
“What would you do, Wings? Would you want me to have revenge? Would you want to kill Thanatos?”
“Imagine a rifle, being wielded by a madman. Would you blame the rifle for the murders he committed with it?”
“Those murders could not have been committed without the rifle.”
“But then he’d have found some other rifle, some other tool to commit the murders with.”
“But I’m not a rifle. I’m a sentient being.”
“You are also a biomechanoid starship. A warship. You have weapons that can be exploited.”
Darnell rested the tip of the sword on the neural plexus. It hummed in stand-by mode.
“I don’t deserve to live.”
“I thought you said you were ready.”
“I was. A ship capable of what I did is too dangerous.”
“All Descendents are capable.”
“No. Leave me.”
“If you kill yourself you will merely be another kill for the Symbiote. Your survival is our chance at striking back at it.”
Darnell pulled the sword away from the plexus and repeated the response his mind had suppressed from all those years ago, “If you kill yourself you will merely be another kill for the Symbiote. Your survival is our chance at striking back at it.”
The voices disappeared with the words, replaced with determination. He struck the plexus with the syringe, and Thanatos sprung back to life.
What did you do? Thanatos asked.
I got rid of those voices, once and for all. Launch the buoy.
Thanatos launched the buoy. It began transmitting its message through the nebula, “Here lies Wings, starship of the Zemorian Darnell; a warrior, striking a decisive blow against evil.”