Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #71 – Chrysalis

Mimi leapt on her left, avoiding the tail strike at the last second, just by feeling the vibrations of the air. She pirouetted on her toes, crouched down to avoid another swing, before jumping over the spiked frame of one of the monsters, using it as platform to jump even further out of the way. All while playing, all while still playing. She felt the remnants of her cape sliding down, adjusted it slightly to avoid it falling off completely. Then, stood at the top of a pillar, analyzing the situation from above. There were many of these creatures – how many she couldn’t tell, with her abysmal sight. They focused on her, after the corridor to the flight deck was sealed. Understandably, since she had destroyed so much of their frames just by plucking the strings of her instrument. Whatever logic moved those biorobots (if biorobots they were) had to have classified her as a priority target. Still, their frequencies were all over the place. The chord she struck to finish off the first creature in the flooded area didn’t seem to work as well on its companions. That meant that each had slight differences in the composition and structure of their frames and head cases. That meant that she had to touch each of them for at least three, four seconds, to allow her fingers to record their driving tune. It was easier said than done: she didn’t know how many of them there were, she couldn’t see them, she had to rely on sounds and vibrations to avoid their strikes. Her echolocation gave her a semi-detailed map of the room, which was how she knew where to find a pillar. Still, she couldn’t rest there forever, or the things would have targeted Robin instead. A clacking of claws surprised her. The creatures were piling up, riding on each other to reach the pillar, climbing the walls all around her. Mimi groaned, counted up to three, slowly, calming her heartbeat. Before leaping down from that tall mess of scaffolding, hoping to land in a safe spot.

Robin exploited the confusion to delve deeper into the system, focusing all of her attention in driving through the maze of programs and configuration options, using McAllison’s signatures to break in, to look for the right path. She coughed, spat blood, didn’t even wipe her lips. Her fever was rising, her reflexes were getting more sluggish, every movement sparked pain through all of her nerves. Something warm flowed down her cheeks. Tears? Blood from her eyes too? She didn’t know, she didn’t want to know. All that mattered was the system, delving into it, finding the switches. Her senses were dulled, the external world reduced to nothing but a ghostly dimension that somehow surrounded her. The crew members. Kryzalid. Lagash herself. It was as if they never existed in the first place, as if they were just a projection of her mind. Suddenly, she felt a presence on her right, her eye turned around shortly. A young woman in her early twenties or even late teens, covered from head to toes in nothing but feathers. A young woman with long red hair, blue eyes. No, not a woman – Robin’s memories of her.

“Hey, you’re gonna fall if you do that.”

Robin smiled, coughed blood again. She answered to that phantom, she answered as if she saw her for the first time. Her mind was saturated, leaking pictures and memories as her gem kept blinking.

“Well, at this point it’s inevitable.”

“Dude, seriously?”

“Yes.”

The feathered girl reached for a handrail that didn’t exist anymore, let her arms rest on it, on the emptiness that once, in her past, was a bridge.

“Well, your choice. We are a free country.”

She stood there in silence, like that time, before saying her next line.

“What a beautiful night for a suicide.”

Suicide. Again that word. Only, this time it didn’t apply. That wasn’t a suicide. That was the result of her choices. She wasn’t giving up on her life. She was living it to its fullest. Squeezing out every ounce of it to achieve her goal. She delved deeper and deeper into the entrails of Lagash, opening doors, hijacking subroutines, moving through the maze of op-codes and special lingo, the boring sequence of commands McAllison had to input every time.

“Look, not to tell you how to do that, but the more you think about it, the less you wanna jump. Been there, done that. Didn’t jump. And, now, look at me, enjoying my life, looking forward to downing jugs of alc, getting stoned aaaand orgying my way till morning comes.”

This time, their gazes didn’t meet. Robin’s eyes were entranced by the vision of the codes and programs running that humongous masterpiece that once was a colony ship, a product of the pinnacle of Terran technology – one that allowed mankind to spread around the universe. One that now was wiping that same mankind in a twisted game, an artificial limiter set to keep things under control.

“That’s a nice gem you got on your forehead. Can I have it, before you jump? Don’t wanna have to fish it from the bottom of the river.”

Robin grinned, as more and more blood poured out down her cheeks, as her gem flashed and blinked in broken patterns.

“No, sorry. You can’t have it. I still need it… for a little longer. But later… later, maybe…”

“Oh, were you talking to me, before? Cause it totally sounded like you were shouting at yerself. By the way, name’s Caro, yes? What’s yours?”

Robin punched her way through the last security protocol, using all what she could use out McAllison’s credentials, experiences, memories. As the core of Lagash’s control system was laid bare in front of her, she found the strength to turn around, to face Caro’s younger self one more time. To answer her with a genuine, tired smile.

“R… Robin. My name is Robin. It… it will always be Robin!”

Only for Caro to vanish, disappear like a hologram. Replaced with the shining red eyes of two crew members, raising their claws on her. Robin didn’t have the strength to move. Didn’t have any energies left. All what she got was running through her brain, keeping it alive while the rest of her body failed, while the fever ravaged her. She gasped, as her fingers instinctively went for her gun, raising it, pouring all her last remaining energies into it. She pulled the trigger, averting her attention from the terminal for a long, interminable second.

But nothing came out of it.

No noise.

No light.

The magazine was empty.

She knew it, obviously.

She knew it.

But she didn’t want to believe it. She had squandered her last line of defense to save some no name soldiers she had never heard of until two days before. Just so that they could bring McAllison’s crystal back to Kaitos, hoping that some of those weird ‘humans’ of this cycle could reverse engineer the interface. That was stupid. That was extremely stupid. A hope spot, one that she didn’t think through. Her eyes opened wide, her pupils dilated, her heartbeat accelerated as the tails went up.

Before their tips exploded in a burst of dust. Before the attention of the assailants turned back to Kryzalid. To her shite-eating grin. To her violin, ravaging their bodies at every new chord, without ever being able to finish them off. As even their claws started to crumble, they turned around, left Robin be, joined the other members in her assault on Kryzalid.

“Robbie, how long do you need it? I’m running on fumes!”

Robin bit her lip, gritted her teeth, turned back to the terminal.

“Two… maybe three minutes. Some commands… have timeouts… that cannot be skipped.”

“Three whole minutes?!”

“…y… yes!”

“Shit.”

Kryzalid leapt again in the middle of the room, surrounded by the monsters. She tried to locate them all, to count them. There had to be a reason why they weren’t unleashing their micros. Maybe, they wanted to avoid the risk of them wrecking havoc on the ship. Maybe, there were some interferences between their systems. Maybe, they didn’t want to destroy each other by mistake. Whatever the reason, she was equally grateful and bummed than that happened. Grateful because matching their tempo to keep Robin safe was a chore. Bummed because that would have made all of them so much easier to deal with. Right now, as soon as one of them aimed at Robin, she had to intervene. With her lack of sight, that meant focusing all of her attention on the noises coming from that corner of the control room, shielding her comrade from whatever went at her. Fortunately they weren’t shooting, but that was easier to explain. Fear of damaging something important. If that computer controlled the micros too, having them turn on Lagash would have been deadly for the whole ship. Mimi didn’t know if that were the explanation, but couldn’t find a better one. So, she decided that that was her ‘truth’, the one she believed in. And kept playing, playing to keep Robin safe. She moved around the room trying to deal more and more damage, trying to touch the faces of the creatures. To do that, though, she needed to stop playing. Stopping playing meant certain death, failure. A conundrum with just one possible solution. One she kept as a last resort, one that she didn’t want to use unless absolutely necessary.

Till the tail swung at her.

And broke her violin in half.

**

Xaviella Rubico sensed something amiss. First, the transponder of McAllison went silent, not even five minutes sooner. Then, his signal suddenly emerged again, but from the terminal of the weapon control center as an authenticated user. But, not even two minutes before it, came the unexpected assault of that second wave of soldiers, soldiers equipped with portable sound generators. These soldiers were different from the first which came through the corridor, sporting white and gray uniforms, full helmets with golden visors and more elaborate, slick guns. Ultimately, that wasn’t going to change the end result – those weapons were nothing more than a nuisance compared with the ones the frames of the crew members housed, but the loudspeakers embedded in their armors meant that they could shield themselves from the swarm. That was something that irked her. This cycle had been too fast to react, too fast to break down the first level of protection of the micros. Nothing in the previous four loops had prepared her for this. They even managed to keep their Moon colony safe, for the first time in the history of Lagash. That was the biggest hint that something went wrong. But what? How could knowledge have survived the wipeout? Even the small number of spy satellites that were spared by the previous loop were now reduced to cosmic dust. All the transmissions they received, all of those they intercepted, demodulated, spied on before the Turn of the Millennium, had absolutely no reference to the swarm, to the frequency. Still, that was a problem for later. The priority now was dealing with that nuisance. While her crew engaged the old and new soldiers, while they squared against the two plant abominations, she recalled the reserves, the seven or eight people in the maintenance team, sent them a beacon.

[[Go for the weapon control center and check on McAllison, he might be in need of support. Kill everything that isn’t him]]

At the same time, she accessed the logs uploaded by McAllison’s secondary brain before his transponder went dark, before he accessed the weapon control terminal. She trusted him, even after she went almost insane after Castillo’s suicide. McAllison was a skilled technician, one of the best at steering the cannons that surrounded Lagash. The fact that he accessed the terminal could mean that there was more trouble brewing at the horizon. Sending her a recording might have been his roundabout way to ask for help – or another one of his post-depression stunts, much like the videos he shared in the past with the whole crew at the peak of his grieving period.

Captain Rubico glanced at the status of the control room, at the dozen or so armed men keeping her crew at bay, while the two rhizomes were laying waste and causing massive damage all around, in a way she didn’t expect to be possible. Before the second wave showed up, dealing with the present threat in her command center was the highest priority – so, she couldn’t spare mental energies for viewing the log McAllison sent. Now that the new wave of soldiers came, the situation had evolved from mild annoyance to full-blown anomaly and every scrap of information became useful. Every. Single. Scrap. That plant woman with the white flower, that Captain Commander Lily, was nothing short of a monster. What if the recording that McAllison sent was about a monster too? She had to know, now more than ever. So, she booted the footage, let her secondary brain take care of it, analyze it.

Only for her to see a white beam, shot by a gun. Micros unleashed. A blind violinist sending them back. McAllison’s body eaten by his own swarm. Before the communication was cut.

Captain Rubico would have gasped, if she still had a mouth. Other humans. Led by someone who knew about their weapon tech. With someone that could redirect the swarm against them, by playing the same tune with an unheard level of precision. Rubico turned on her comm channel, sent a beacon back to the engineering team en route to the weapon control center.

[[McAllison has been killed by other trespassers. Kill them all, starting from the violinist. She can turn the swarms against us, so don’t unleash them until she’s dead. After her, deal with whoever is accessing the terminal]]

Yes, that was the right decision. Even if they stole McAllison’s credentials, even if they plugged their brains into the machine, there was no way for them to deal any damage. There were too many layers of protection before they could access the real core of the system. Enough time for her crew to deal with the intruders for good.

For the very last time, this humanity would have been deleted too.

Then, her crew and she could have walked among them as gods.

Like Yarramundi promised them, millennia before.

**

Mimi was slammed against the wall at full force, just by a swing of the tail. She gasped for air, tried to stand up again, slowly. When a second strike came, causing her to tumble to the ground, rolling on the dust, hitting the floor once, twice, sliding on it. She rolled on the ground as soon a she managed to, right as another tail attack came, almost impaling her on the spot. She sat down, breathed. Breathed. Her fingers moved in the air, clasping what was left of her instrument. Only the handle. The body was smashed, broken into pieces, sprayed all around her. Her bow was broken in half too, swinging down like a pendulum.

“…n… no.”

Inhale. Exhale. Her violin. The violin aunt Caro made for her. Was no more. Broken into pieces by the creatures she was fighting. Not even Agave had destroyed it. Not even Lily. Not even that first creature in the flooded corridor. Still, now it was nothing but a collection of scrap metal and wood splinters. She tried to put them together, to somehow glue its remains together, hoping that somehow, someway, her violin could come back to life, come back to its original shape. Just by force of will. A miracle. In her heart, what she asked for was a miracle. As her fingers stopped moving, as the splinters kept slipping through them, she was forced to accept it. Her companion. Her anchor of sanity. The last memento of aunt Caro. Was gone. Destroyed by those faceless demons, those walking carcasses that roamed the seedship. She gritted her teeth, clenched her fist. There was no time to mourn it. There was no time to dwell into her memories. Rage poured through her nerves, to her veins. Her blood boiled, as she slowly stood up again, throwing away what was left of her bow, of her instrument. Standing up and staring at the blurry shapes surrounding her, the red lights shining like embers above her. She couldn’t see their spikes, their frames, the claws, the scorpion tails either. Still, she knew that they were there, that they were towering over her, just waiting to strike her down. They were waiting, of course. Waiting to see if she could still play. Waiting to see if she was still a threat. But their patience was already over. The result loud and clear. No sounds. No music. So, they raised their tails together, baring their harpoons. Lowering them all at the same time. Like guillotines, skewers to tear her into pieces.

Mimi used the last of her strength to leap up again. Her foot landed on the closest creature’s head, used it as a jumping pad. She leapt even higher, now on the frame of the second, on the body of the third, till she reached the top of the pillar again, this time unarmed, keeping her heartbeat, her breathing barely in check. It was time. It was that time. Whether she wanted it or not, resorting to it was her last chance of saving the day. So, she grinned, smiled at that writhing mass of wires and limbs that was slithering underneath her, a mass slowly coming for her, climbing the walls and scaffolding to reach for her position.

“Stinky evildoers! You think you have beaten the mighty Kryzalid just because you have destroyed her violin? As if! What you did was messing with the wrong cocoon! Because, you see, this…”

She freed her arms from her cape, let it fall over her lower body, baring her chest, her upper body completely. The words she said afterwards. Those words. She waited for a lifetime for that moment. It felt wrong to be so excited, but kid-her would have approved. Kid-her would have rejoiced. So, she raised her finger to the sky, shouting out loud so that everyone, everywhere on the ship could hear her.

“…this… this isn’t even… MY FINAL FORM!”

As two of the monsters approached Robin again, she stretched her left arm, straightened her fingers. The skin on the interior of her forearm opened up, revealing microscopic dots on her ulna, her radius. Nylon wires came out of them, piercing holes around her wrist, delving into it. Glowing patches dotted her left palm, in a plethora of colors and shapes. Her right hand moved up, her index and medium fingers joined, clamped together. Her nails slid back, as a telescopic metal structure emerged from them. Another transparent wire shot out of the beam, delving into her right wrist. Then, she started sliding that metallic rod on her left forearm, on the wires that were now covering it.

Sound.

Sound echoed in the weapon control room once again.

Causing the two monsters close to Robin to look back, to turn around in utter surprise. Right as Kryzalid turned her body into a weapon. Right as every fiber of herself became her new violin. Right as everyone in the room stared at her, trying to gauge the significance of that change, trying to understand what that meant, trying to reach out for her position even faster. Only for her to grin once again, baring her fangs, giving them the raspberry. And for her shoulder blades to open, bursting out thin mechanical frames, unfolding nanofabric that spread all around it.

In a beautiful pair of blue, shimmering butterfly wings.