Fireflies

A cloud of burning embers swirled about him like fireflies in the dark. He envied their bright, brief lives. He wanted to reach out and touch and catch them but his arm was heavy, so heavy, so tired, and it was all he could do just to watch their flight.

Somewhere, under his feet, behind his back, somewhere far away, the deck was shaking and the bulkheads were trembling and an alarm was crying, so far, far away. It was all lost in a dull roar that filled his ears and he knew that must be the air escaping, spilling out into space. That should have troubled him.

But he was tired. So tired. He watched the fireflies wink out, one by one, and followed them down into darkness.

[No signal]

He dreamed and that was wrong for his kind were not made to dream and the dreams were black-tarred spiderweb dreams that tried to snare him and cling to him with hints and visions and whispers, images of his old life, and the one before that, the real one.

He dreamed of the white-walled room where he’d begun his second life, everything ceramic smooth and eggshell brittle, the lights blued and blurred, the air cold and disinfected.

“How do you feel?” It might have been one of the daughters that had asked. He’d known their names but been made to forget.

“Numb as Novocaine,” he’d said but she hadn’t laughed or even smiled.

“That’s progress, I guess,” said another voice, someone out of his field of view. He couldn’t turn his head. It was similar to the first voice but subtly different, wearier perhaps. “What do you think he’ll make of it?”

“He’ll be delighted, no doubt,” replied the first. “Pizza for everyone and a vacation somewhere warmer—maybe Mercury.”

“No, seriously.”

“Well, think I’ve found a way around the body dysphoria and schizophrenic heautoscopy. I figured we’ve been going about it all wrong, trying it out on these gung-ho alpha wolves. Their identity is too wrapped up in their physicality. We need the military training, but without the ego. So I found someone a little more, hm, detached.”

“A sociopath? That’s low, even for him.”

“No, no. Not that. More like, um, traumatized.”

“A psych case? My apologies, that’s so much more ethical.”

“Hey, if it works.”

He raised his hand to object about being talked about in third person. Or he tried to. His hand was heavier than in memory, and he could barely make it budge. Wrong, this was wrong.

“Guardian?” she’d said instead and reached forward and reached into his chest and her fingers slipped easily through the memory-form smartalloy surface of his chest and found a firefly that had somehow got caught there. She held it up and made it glow.

And that was one more wrong thing. That wasn’t what she had said and she knew it. She was supposed to say something about destroying his world. It made him mad that she wouldn’t say her lines. “Put that back,” he wanted to say but it was a dream and he was stuck with the script, with these memories and regrets, with this pain.

“Eyes up, Guardian.”

Her fist closed about the firefly but instead of dimming its light grew and grew and grew, brighter and brighter, searingly intense, blinding, bleaching away the room and the bed and the woman and he blinked fiercely against the light and—

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on something hard and cold, metal under his legs, against his back. His legs were splayed out in a V before him, his hands loose at his sides. He was in a narrow corridor, bookended to his left and right in solid-looking doors of grey steel. That was odd. It wasn’t—well, he wasn’t sure what it wasn’t. Something tickled at the edge of memory, and was gone.

The wall in front of him was plain and grey and had been torn open in a great long jagged line for the length of the corridor, as though some great claw had been scrabbling to get at him. Through the tear, he could see darkness. Stars. The edge of a great sphere, bone-white, cross-hatched in red like a child’s scribble. That was odd too, but odd in a different way, because it meant he was in space, and the corridor was open to space, and there couldn’t be any air in the corridor and he would asphyxiate very shortly. He tried to take a breath and was not terribly surprised when he couldn’t.

“Ah well,” he said out loud (though there was no air to carry the sound). “It was dull while it lasted.”

“Guardian?”

He refocused his eyes. There was a sort of floating double spindle thing hovering in the air, just above his head.  The back half spun, a trifle nervously perhaps, while the front half regarded him with a single glowing eye. Yet another oddity in a day already filled with them.

“You’re alive! You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for you,” it chirped.

He realized he was hearing it directly in his head. He tried to answer. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a Ghost.”

He peered at it closely. It seemed substantial enough. “You sure about that?”

“Actually, I’m your Ghost.”

“You look nothing like me.” He raised his hands, slowly, gingerly, and was reassured to find they also looked fairly solid. He made a fist with one, then the other, flexed his fingers. Took two fingers and poked himself in the chest. No. Definitely quite substantial and not at all ghost-like. “I don’t think that’s how these things work, you know.”

“Well, you’ve been dead a long time.”

“Dead?” He thought he would have remembered dying. It was the sort of thing you’d expect would leave an impression. He tried to think back and—and met a blank wall. Nothing. He couldn’t remember a single thing. There was a name, maybe his name, a number, language, how to walk and talk, violence too, how to fire guns and use knives, how to hurt and maim and kill. But no episodes attached to these things. No faces. That should have been terrifying. Instead, it felt, well, strangely familiar.

He pushed himself to his feet. His legs, too, seemed no worse for him being so recently dead. He bent his knees, stamped each foot, nodded to himself in satisfaction. He supposed wherever he was must have artificial gravity, since he didn’t seem to be floating off into space. He looked himself up and down: Boots, some kind of suit or armor, maybe a uniform of some kind. On the breast there was faded lettering: SHIVA D. “Dead, huh? For how long?”

The Ghost bobbed in the air a bit, whirled and gave a kind of squeaky digital fart, seemed to consider the question. “Um, I’m not really sure, actually. A long time.”

“What, months? Years?”

“Oh no, no, no. Nothing like that.”

“Ah, that’s a relief then—”

“Centuries, at least.”

He gave it a long, hard look. It wobbled and blinked at him. He continued to glare. “Look, my photonic little friend, I’m angry and confused and perhaps a touch bewildered and unfortunately about the only thing my brain remembers how to do is smash, destroy and break things, things I am very willing to try if you continue to babble nonsense, so choose your next words carefully: How. Long.”

“You see that?” It twisted in the air so that its eye pointed to the tear in the corridor wall, and the rusted white shell visible amid the stars. “That’s Europa. Nearly a billion kilometers from Earth. It’s been a long time, okay?”

He followed its gaze. Thought about what that meant. Realized he hadn’t the faintest idea what that meant. “Huh,” he said, which seemed about the best response he could give. “Europa.”

“Look, you’re gong to see a lot of things you won’t understand.”

“Yeah, like if this place is open to vacuum, why am I not dead?”

“Well, you’re an Exo, so—”

“A whatto?”

“Exo. A human consciousness uploaded into a robotic brain.”

He blinked. “No kidding?”

A dark dragonfly shape occluded the stars, blotting out the view of Europa. The bright spikes of drive flares briefly bathed the corridor in an orange glow, then it was gone. He realized the corridor must already be only slightly above absolute zero, but somehow the sight made him shiver.

“This is Fallen territory,” the Ghost said, speaking faster now. “We aren’t safe here. I have to get you to the City.”

“The City, singular article? What happened to the others?”

“Gone. Destroyed. Come on, we have to move.” It floated away, towards one end of the corridor and the door barring the way. “Those scavengers will be crawling all over the ship any second now.”

He mentally shrugged to himself and followed in its wake. “If it’s a billion klicks away, how are we going to get to this City?”

“This is a colony ship. There’s got to be something we can fly in one of the launch bays.” It stopped before the door and seemed to consider it for a moment. “Locked,” it muttered. A sparkling blue beam erupted from its eye and struck the lock mechanism. “Just a moment.”

“Resurrection and lockpicking, those are your two skills, huh?”

“Hush, just a moment. I’ve almost got—”

Molten-hot sparks erupted from the rim of the door. Metal slagged, going red, then orange, then white and running like wax. Then the door flew from its hinges, sailing over his head as he ducked and covered his head with his hands. Something crouched in the corridor beyond, something spider-slim with four glittering eyes. It held a pistol in one hand, a static-sparking blade in the other. It leaped.

Without thinking, he lunged forward to meet its charge. His fist lashed out, connected with the thing’s head. Something surged within him. Like touching a live wire. Tasted of ozone and anger. The thing’s face crumpled in a burst of whispering white smoke. It flew backwards, impacted against the corridor and bounced off before falling into a crumpled heap.

He looked at his hand in shock.

“Did I do that?”

“The power of the Traveler,” the Ghost said. “You’re a Guardian now.”

“Oh. Does that mean I have to punch things?”

“Well, no. Not quite.”

“Ah.” He tried to hide his disappointment.

“There will be quite a lot of shooting involved as well, I imagine.”

“You’re just saying that to cheer me up,” he said, and bent to examine the dead thing. Its space suit was purple and grey and seemed multiply recycled, repaired and patched together from half a dozen different suits. There were sigils daubed in white, a spiked and evil-looking pistol, and a knife with an almost translucent blade. He picked up the pistol. “What did you say these things were?”

“Fallen.”

“It is now.”

The Ghost gave a digital sigh. “Oh, there’s someone you have just got to meet in the City,” it muttered.

“And this?” He held up the pistol, twisted it this way and that to get a good look at it, squinted and aimed, then reversed it and squinted down the barrel.

“It’s a shock pistol and please don’t do that,” it pleaded. “I didn’t bring you back just for you to die again.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he lied confidently,

“We are going to die out here. You can hear me, right?”

“Yes, yes, Fallen, City, Guardian, travelling, shock pistol, much punching and shooting,” he said absently. He aimed at the wall. The Ghost hastily zipped aside just as the weapon jerked and spat a ball of incandescent white flame that smacked into the steel and left a charred, spiral scar. “Seem to have found the trigger.”

“Wonderful,” the Ghost said faintly. “Can we go now?”

He waved the pistol grandly, causing the Ghost to frantically twist and whirl out of the line of fire again. “After you.”

Away from the rent in the hull the corridor plunged into blackness. The Ghost seemed to swell and expand, pushing itself outwards around a soft glowing ball of light that drove back the darkness for a few paces in each direction.

“Any other tricks?” he asked it.

“Transmat.” It must have sensed his confusion, because it continued: “Short-range teleportation.”

“Neat.”

“Delighted you think so.”

He tried to smile but discovered he didn’t have a mouth. He reached up, felt the shape of his face by touch, encountered hard angled surfaces, a hairless skull. He tapped one of his own eyes and felt the lens beneath his finger even as he shuddered at the strangeness of it.

“Okay, so spill the rest: Who put me in this body, what happened to all the cities, why are we in orbit around Europa, why do four-eyed aliens want to kill me and why have my fists suddenly gone all Mjolnir?”

“I don’t have time to—”

“Speak quickly, then.”

“Well. Um. You are now a soldier in a millennia-old struggle between forces that believe the best way for the universe to evolve is through ruthless competition unto death, and those who believe in cooperation.”

“Ah, quite right, survival of the fittest, peace flows from the barrel of a gun and the devil take the hindmost,” he agreed, then caught the Ghost looking at him strangely. “Oh, we are, uh, we’re on Team Cooperation, huh?”

The Ghost gave a resigned blat. “Yes,” it said simply.

“Oh. Right. Great. Brotherly love, hugs and kisses for everyone. Like I always say.”

The corridor trembled and shook. He swayed on his feet, reaching out one hand to steady himself against the corridor wall. He felt vibration through the palm of his hand. The Ghost stopped too, and tilted upwards, as though trying to peer through the corridor ceiling.

“What was—”

“Quiet,” it whispered. “They’re right above us.”

He waited, one hand braced against the wall, the stolen pistol in the other, tensely watching the ceiling. There was a jolt, as though the ship had been struck by a hammer, and then the vibration died away but the darkness seemed to thicken. He could almost see tendrils of it reaching for him from beyond the perimeter of the Ghost’s faint light.

Finally, the Ghost straightened, and began to move forward again. He waited a beat, then padded after it.

There was another door, one studded with a sort of wheel-like lock and a small viewing window. This one did not explode in his face, so he spun the wheel and swung the door open. On the other side was a small chamber and another door.

“Airlock,” said the Ghost. “Just a little bit further. Let’s hope there’s something left.”

The outer door closed, air hissed, then the inner door swung open to reveal a large, rectangular chamber, cluttered with boxes and beams, cephalopod sprays of wiring and tubing, the frozen skeletal arms of cargo-loading robots.

The center of the room was dominated by two great wedge-nosed ships with bulbous drive units and jagged stabilizer fins. The nearer of the two was a wreck—hull panels missing, wiring yanked out and hanging in limp clumps, cockpit windows smashed. The other looked intact.

Four of the aliens, the Fallen, surrounded it, chittering to one another. Two rotund drones floated nearby.

“Fallen!” the Ghost exclaimed, a tad unnecessarily he felt. “Clear them out!” It vanished into a dissipating cloud of bright motes.

“Hey!” he exclaimed.

The sudden sound made the Fallen and drones jerk and whirl in surprise. One gave a raspy, chittering cry.

He tried to raise his hands placatingly, non-threateningly. “All I want is the ship,” he said, unsure if they understood, hoping a low and level tone worked in their language. “Let me have it and I’ll get out of your hair, um, arms, legs, mandibles, whatever.”

All four were looking at his raised hand. He glanced at it, realized he was still holding the shock pistol he’d taken from the dead Fallen. “Oh this? I can explain.” He waited a beat, thinking furiously. “Okay, no I can’t.”

The four aliens and their drones opened fire. Sizzling bolts of lightning came flying at him from every direction. He threw out a hand, a desperate and futile attempt to ward them away. The air shimmered in a wide arc before him, solidified into milky white glass. The arcing bolts impacted against it, fizzled in frustration and dissipated.

No time to marvel. The drones jetted to either side, seeking to outflank his new shield. He fired the pistol, blew one apart, dropped and rolled as a sizzling blast screamed over his head, came up on one knee and blasted the second.

The four aliens scrambled for cover behind the shuttlecraft, leaning over the nose or around the wings to take potshots at him, evidently waiting for the shield to weaken.

“Use your grenade,” said the Ghost.

He whirled left and right, looking for it, but there was nothing. “What?”

“Don’t think, just do it.”

So he thought, grenade, and there was a ball of sizzling white light in his hand. He hurled it over the nose of the shuttle craft. It detonated in a blinding flash, then detonated again, and again, and again. Two Fallen were caught in the blast, and thrown several meters into the air, their bodies describing limp arabesques before thudding down against the deck plates.

The remaining two charged.

One shot caught the first in the face. A spurt of white mist erupted from its mask and it pitched backwards. The second swung its rifle like a club, catching him on the shoulder. Metal crunched against metal, and bounced away. The Fallen staggered, off-balance. He barely felt it. He looked into its four glowing eyes and felt the rage and hate there and he pressed the muzzle of the pistol against its chest and fired. The light went out.

“All right, let me see if I can get us out of here,” said the Ghost, materializing again at eye level.

He wasn’t listening, though. He was looking at the pistol held in his hands, and the four smoking corpses, the smoldering remains of their machines. He had killed, killed without knowing why, and that should have been disturbing, but instead all he felt was that vague kind of familiarity, much like the feeling he’d had on realizing his past was blank and walled away from him. There was a rightness to this wrong. A comforting isolation. Numb as Novocaine. Now that was an odd thought.

“Why me?” he asked the Ghost.

“I don’t know,” it admitted after a moment. “There are many of us, Ghosts that is, and each of us seeks that one person we will know is ready to bear the gift we offer. It’s not perfect, but then nothing is. I’ve been searching for a long time, seen… Monsters. Dreams. Nightmares. When I saw you, I just. Knew. You were the one.”

“But you might be wrong?” he pressed it.

“We can talk later. It’s a long way to Earth, we’ll have time.”

He felt an urge to follow and obey, to do his duty and avoid asking questions. It was instinctive, some ancient and stubborn part of him that still clung to his thoughts. Still, he hesitated. If he was being asked to kill strangers, even alien strangers, he wanted to know why.

An animal roared behind him, part lion, part bear, pure fury. He turned. Something huge was coming through the airlock door, its hands pressed against the frame and it pushed and bent the metal, making it scream and cry out, forcing its massive bulks through and into the hangar. It towered, easily twice the height of the other Fallen, maybe more, the horns on its head brushing the ceiling. It held a cutlass in each of its lower arms, cradled a stubby and evil-looking weapon that smoked and smoldered in its upper two. A host of smaller Fallen crowded behind it.

“Archon,” the Ghost yelped, vanishing again. “Move!”

He took a step back, and another. The Archon leveled its weapon and fired. A meteor shower of orange-red shrapnel flew over his head. Behind him, the shuttle cockpit glass shattered. Flames spluttered about the drive unit. Caught, fanned, went blue-black with heat.

“Sheee—” he started to say, when the shuttle exploded.

A murderous storm of metal fragments blew out, slamming into the walls and floor and ceiling and bouncing everywhere and a meter-sized scimitar of steel was flying right and him and he raised his hand but nothing happened no shield no nothing and it was too late and the metal was scything through him and there was pain, brilliant, all-consuming and it hurt and hurt and. Didn’t.

[No signal]

“—yit!” and he was standing again. He frantically patted himself down. Whole. Not a mark on him.

The Ghost gave an apologetic wobble before him, then disappeared. Revealing the phalanx of Fallen standing amid the smoking shell of the shuttle, and looking mildly put out to seeing him there.

He’d had enough. Led by the nose around this ship a billion kilometers from Earth after centuries of sleep with barely a word of explanation. Shot at by aliens he’d never seen for reasons he couldn’t understand. Killed, again. For the crime of being alive, it seemed. Fine. If that was the way the future was, then fine. He would have preferred a reason, order, sense, but if that was how they wanted it. Fine. He only wished he had teeth to show them.

Fury crackled in every limb, seemed to fill him up from the inside, in his head, almost blinding him. Like a storm, barely contained. He charged. Weapons fired at him but they were nothing now, tiny pinpricks, darts and arrows blown aside by his storm. He was almost on them. He leaped. Descended like a thunderbolt. His fist met the steel of the deck and he felt his fury flow through it, expanding outwards in a raging torrent, an annihilating shockwave of pure power. Bodies crackled, disintegrated, melted into nothing. The Archon writhed and bellowed, and fell to one knee.

He hit it again. And again and again and again and, and, and the fury abated, leaving him a husk, empty and drained. They were dead. All the Fallen were dead. More than dead, they had simply vanished, utterly gone. Even the gigantic Archon was dead, the only one of them big enough to leave a corpse behind.

“Great,” he muttered. “Just great.”

“That was our only way home,” the Ghost sighed, reappearing and gazing at the ruin of the shuttle. “Now what do we do?”

He stood for a long while, not immediately answering, just looking down at the titan at his feet. Finally, he looked up, towards the ceiling. “Well, how did they get here?” he asked the Ghost.

“In a skiff, probably. But you’re not thinking of…”

He bent and picked up the Archon’s steel-flame weapon. “You’re right, there must be some other way.”

“Really?”

“No, of course not. Let’s find this skiff of theirs.”

#

He stalked through the corridors of the ship, his way now lit by the flickering glow from the barrels of the shrapnel launcher. A Fallen leaped at him from the shadows. He burned four holes straight through its chest. From then on, other small groups of Fallen hissed and spat at him, but scurried away into the darkness when he raised the bulky weapon at them.

“They’ll only circle around and try to ambush you,” the Ghost warned. “You should take them out when you have the chance.”

“That’s not very Team Cooperation of you.”

“The Fallen don’t understand cooperation,” it said. “They’ve raided human settlements, stolen technology and hunted and slaughtered people ever since they appeared in the system. At Twilight Gap they came close to annihilating humanity. Strength is the only language they understand.”

“So you say,” he shrugged.

“Trust me.”

“Something tells me I’ve heard that before. No hard feelings, Spooky Lazarus, but I’ll make up my own mind.”

“But—”

“You said you picked me for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is. Ever wonder if maybe you picked me precisely because I’m not the kind of guy who’ll kill just because someone told him to?”

It fell silent, quorking a little to itself, like a restless raven.

The corridor opened into an open, spherical space. His footsteps echoed. Three levels of steel catwalks circled the space. The walls were lined with rank upon rank of glass-windowed sarcophagi. The glass of each one was opaque, the monitors and status lights dark and silent. Like a thousand dead black eyes. Tubing and conduits hung limp and inert.

“Cryostasis pods,” supplied the Ghost. “They held the colonists in suspended animation. No, I wouldn’t bother trying to open one. They’ll all be long dead.”

He placed his hand against one anyway, trying to feel the hum of electricity or the vibration of mechanics, but there was nothing. The surface was cool and smooth and dead. There was a name on each pod, personal details, age, profession, height and weight, then a code word, “Exodus Grey,” and then the name of the ship, “Shiva Dawn.”

“Where were they going?”

The Ghost chugged and spun a little, which he was learning was its way of giving a shrug. “I couldn’t tell you the exact star system, but they were heading out of this one, that’s for sure. Escape.”

“Didn’t get very far, did they?”

“Europa was probably just a stop on the way,” it agreed. “There used to be a settlement there. Picking up more people, but then the Darkness hit.”

“The Darkness?”

“Um, Team Total Darwinism.”

“Ah. I was supposed to protect them, wasn’t I?” he murmured.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I failed them.”

“Don’t brood on it too much. Everyone failed, everywhere, even your Warminds, even the Traveler. You’ll do better this time. After all, you’ve got me to help you now.”

“How reassuring.” He withdrew his hand, and looked around the ancient graveyard. He quickly gave up trying to count: Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. “Come on, let’s find the command center. That’s probably where they broke in.”

The command center was near the nose of the ship. Sure enough, they were not alone.

There was a hole cut in the ceiling, neatly circular, and something bulbous and purple-grey clung to the rim. A dark tunnel led upwards. Beneath the hole stood another Fallen, larger than the others though not Archon in size, with a tubelike cannon braced on one shoulder, hands wrapped around the weapon foregrip. A great black metal sphere floated just behind it, the outer shell ridged and spiked, with a great purple eye that shone and limned the Fallen’s figure in glowing lavender light.

“Servitor,” the Ghost whispered in his ear. “It creates a protective shield this gun won’t penetrate. You’ll have to take it out first.”

He grunted in acknowledgement and approached slowly, keeping the weapon ready. The Fallen kept its weapon trained on him but did not fire.

“Howdy,” he said to it. “Mind if I borrow your ship?”

It spoke to him. Its voice was gravel and granite, but the words clear and unmistakable. “Begone, foul and blasphemous thing,” it growled at him. “You are death and rot, you stain the holy machinery of that body with your touch. Unclean. Begone!”

After the brief shock at being addressed, he felt his irritation seeping back in. “What do you think I’m trying to do?” he snapped back at it.

“You killed the Archon.”

“He killed me first. Look, I just want to go home.”

“I just want to go home,” it mimicked, mockingly high and sing-song, before its voice returned with redoubled fury, a wrenching cry of pure hate and anguish and desperation. “We want to go home, you filthy, unwoven usurper! Home is dust and ashes and wind. Home is lost and memory. Because of you, machine-stealer. We can never go home!”

“Spooky Laz, Laz the spaz, Lazzy, Larry old buddy, what is this cat talking about?” he asked inside his head.

“The Fallen also got hit by the Darkness, the same force that took out the Earth. Only, the Fallen seem to blame humanity for it, somehow.”

He shook his head, unsure the thing would understand his gesture. Out loud, he said: “Well, that sounds messed up, no two ways about it. But I’ve been alive for a grand total of about 30 minutes, during which time your people have tried to kill me three times and succeeded once, whereas I haven’t stolen one single diode. So I’m not about to roll over and die because you asked or to right some wrong I’ve never even heard of. You can have this ship, all of it for all I care. But I’m going home. If that means I have to fight you, then I will. Up to you.”

“What other choice did you leave us?” it snarled. “You are the ones telling us to die.”

“I’ve been dead. Don’t recommend, or wish it on anyone. I don’t seem to have bones, but if I did, I’d know in them that I’ve seen cycles of violence like this before, and I’m telling you, the only way to end it is to end it. Here and now.”

“I will end it,” it agreed, and he knew what that tone of voice meant and was moving even before it pulled the trigger. It lobbed fiery shells at the spot he’d been standing, scorching and melting dead machinery and steel panels, while he broke right, flung a grenade that stuck to the servitor’s purple eye.

It scooted back, shook back and forth trying to dislodge the grenade. When it blew, it tore the servitor apart. The flaming wreckage spun in circles for a second, spitting and venting white mist, then detonated in an explosion that drove the Fallen to its knees. The purple glow vanished.

The Fallen recovered, tracked, fired again. A fiery slug hit him, threw him back against the wall. The shrapnel launcher bucked in his hands, ramming against his shoulder. Fiery clouds tore through the Fallen’s armor, its proud cape, its delicate horned helmet. It wavered on its feet, wheezing and coughing and bubbling breath in its throat. “Thief,” it spat weakly. And fell to its knees before toppling over sideways.

“Ow,” he muttered and fingered the spot where the shell had hit. It was hot to the touch and the metal alloy of his skin had bubbled and blistered, like dough left for too long in an oven. But even as he probed it with his fingers, his skin rippled and smoothed, healing itself, wiping away all trace of the injury.

He laughed in delight at first, then amazement, then looked at his dead enemy, and the laughter died and trailed off into a chuckle, bitter with disgust. What chance had the Fallen had against someone who could summon a shield or grenade out of nothing, who healed in seconds, who could come back to life even when killed? Against that, all his foe had been armed with was a mere cannon, and its rage and fear. Its desperation.

“Well done,” said the Ghost.

“Was it? It was a slaughter. They never had a chance.”

“They’ve killed tens of thousands of people, maybe millions,” it reminded him.

“I thought you said it was the other side that believes in a battle of annihilation,” he replied. “It could’ve ended today. Now I’ve given them reason to want to kill a thousand more.”

“A pacifist Guardian? Well, there’s a novelty to it, at least. The Hive or Vex might be more your speed.”

“You mean these are the only aliens we have to worry about?” He stood under the hole bored in the ceiling. The light inside was dim, the tubing swollen and bumpy and at least ten meters high. Experimentally, he stretched his arms out to either side, gauging. No, it would be too wide, he wouldn’t be able to brace against the sides.

“Oh, the Fallen are probably the weakest of our enemies. There’s a warrior-race of religious fanatics who believe that killing things brings them closer to godhood, semi-organic robots trying to alter the fundamental laws of the universe in order to make themselves immortal, and a brutal, militaristic empire that’s begun to dip its toes in this system probably just to keep the other three from becoming too powerful.”

“Fantastic, thanks for waking me up at such a nice juncture in history.” He pointed upwards. “How do you suggest we get up there?”

The Ghost tilted upwards, then regarded him with something like a worried tilt. “Jump?” it suggested.

“But it’s way too—” he broke off when he caught the thing sighing to itself again. “Really? That high?”

“Try it.”

It was like having rockets strapped to your feet. He vaulted directly up in the air, sides of the hole whistling past him, catapulting all the way up the docking tube and coming to land on the deck of the Fallen skiff. There was a crew of two, both of them members of the smaller breed he’d encountered first, the ones with only two arms and two stubs.

He waved the shrapnel launcher towards the bore hole. “You two,” he said to them. “Out.”

They looked at one another. There was a quick exchange of chittering talk. Then they scrambled out of their seats, cautiously edged sideways past him in the narrow cabin space, then launched themselves towards the hole, nearly diving out of the ship.

“Right,” he said, turning towards the controls. “Think you can fly this thing?”

“No hands,” it pointed out. “But I can tell you how.”

After a brief experimentation, they found the controls that irised shut the boarding hatch and retracted the tube. The ship wobbled slightly, suddenly free of its connection from the human colony ship. He turned his attention next to the vista before him.

The great arc of the surface of Europa filled much of the view, dusty white about the poles shading to rust-red about its equator, and then beyond it the striated and swirling bands of Jupiter. He got a good look at the ship he’d been crawling around inside of, with its three bulbous cryostasis pods like meatballs on a stick, a trefoil splay of maneuvering thrusters, three finned and winged main cargo craft bolted to the boxy main body, where he’d found the hanger and smaller shuttlecraft.

He could see the damage, too. Long lines carved in the hull, metal peeling and curling away from the wounds. Holes punched through a wing here, thruster nozzles crumpled and broken there. The whole thing was surrounded by a cloud of debris.

“I came here in that thing? I must be braver than I thought.”

“Just a moment,” said the Ghost at his shoulder. It pulsed the controls with its eye beam. Icons swam and scattered on an array of spherical displays. “This thing should have superluminal drive. Let me just see if I can figure out how to—uh oh.”

“Uh oh?”

One icon, particularly large and spikey, arrowed to the center of the display. Another display flickered to life, showing a kind of lopsided spear shape, with what looked like a massive thruster strapped to one side, gun ports bristling from everywhere else. “Fallen ketch.”

“Is that good?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Options?”

“Run.”

“Good idea. One question: How?”

“Trying to assess that now.”

The icon grew larger on the screen, the image clearer and more defined. He turned his attention to the visual display, scanning the starfield. There. A grey shadow, tiny at first, but growing in size with alarming rapidity.

“Any time now, Larry.”

“Almost.”

The ketch was larger now, clear enough to make out surface features. Clear enough to see the weapons angling towards the skiff. One beam pulsed, flying well wide of the skiff, testing the range.

“Ghost?”

“Think I’ve got it,” the Ghost said.

The ketch was almost directly above them. Its batteries glowed and fired, violet beams that carved through the void in front of the skiff’s nose, evidently warning shots but close enough to burn away some of the outer paint. The skiff bucked and twisted, its nose dipped, then swerved so that it was pointing directly towards the colony ship.

“No, no, no,” the Ghost burbled as the skiff’s engines kicked in and launched them on a collision course. “Pull the yoke!”

“What yoke?” He pressed himself against the back of the seat, as if that would help. The colony ship now completely filled the forward view.

“Pull everything!”

He grabbed at a protruding bit of hardware, yanked and turned it in desperation. Retro thrusters fired, bringing the ship to a jarring half. “Whew,” he muttered, and gave the control another experimental spin.

The skiff flipped nose over tail, so that they were pointing at the ketch. The main thrusters rumbled to life again and the skiff shot forwards.

“Of-friggin-course.”

It was the ketch’s turn to twist and turn in desperation. It began to pour out a volley of hasty fire. Most of the beams missed, spraying the space around the skiff. One smacked into the skiff’s nose, causing it to swerve under the impact, another punched into the tail. Air whooshed out the tear before the self-sealing hull closed around the breach. A third hit the skiff’s belly. One of the cockpit displays fizzled and went dead.

The skiff continued to accelerate, knocked off course by the blast and aimed at Europa now instead of the ketch. The Fallen ship lumbered around, batteries still firing, though between the Ghost and his own attempts to wrestle the skiff under control, their flight was so erratic the shots flew wide.

In the cockpit of the skiff, he yanked on the controls, tried to swerve, did a barrel roll instead. The cockpit glowed purple in the glare of pulse beams flying past the viewport.

“I thought you said this thing could go faster than light.”

“It could!” the Ghost wailed.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

“That first salvo blew the jump drive—”

The skiff rocked as another shot impacted against the tail. He yanked the control yoke, but this time nothing happened. The skiff continued to plummet towards the icy surface of Europa, only now falling like a stone rather than diving like a terminally depressed penguin.

“—and that one took out the control surfaces.”

“So, what do we do?”

“Well, how to explain it,” it blinked at him in thought. “It’s like this: We crash.”

“I’ll die!”

“Sure, but remember, you’re a Guardian now. that’s not a big deal anymore. I can resurrect you.”

“Oh, right.”

“Probably. If I don’t die too.”

“What?”

“Look on the bright side, at least the ketch has stopped chasing us.”

Sure enough, the Fallen vessel was breaking off pursuit from the evidently suicidal skiff, slowly wheeling around and heading back towards the orbiting colony ship. It fired a few desultory parting blasts their way, a sort of multi-terawatt way of saying ‘And stay out!’

“We’re still going to die. How is that the bright side?”

Below them, he could see the icy plains of Europa, long ridges of sharp ice, the upswelling of a cryovolcano spewing water and ice crystals into the atmosphere. There was a building, too, something clearly artificial, wedged deep into the ice and his only regret was he would never get to find out what it was because the surface was coming up very fast now incredibly fast and he knew it was stupid and futile but he closed his eyes before the impact and.

And nothing. The ship hung in the air, nose poised about a meter above the wind-swept surface, perfectly still. In casual defiance of all laws of physics, it hung there, suspended by nothing but sheer impossibility, totally motionless.

He opened his eyes. Looked at the Ghost. “Did you do that?”

It wobbled. “Not me.”

“Did I?” He raised his hands, tried waving them grandly about the air, commanding the ship to move. It ignored him, preferring to remain nearly perpendicular to the moon’s surface, a tiny pin balanced on the surface of a ball 3,000 kilometers wide. “Take that as a ‘no’.”

They had come down right at the edge of some kind of human settlement or complex. There was a cluster of buildings not far from the nose, piled high with snow, roofs sagging in places from the weight pressing down upon them. Exposed girders and struts were porcupine-quilled with spearpoint icicles. Faded lettering was slowly being scoured from the exterior walls, so that only the outline of the first three letters could be read: BRA

A single figure tottered out from the ruins, a hunched and froglike figure starkly black against the blinding white of the surface, cloaked and cowled. It approached and halted.

“What now?” he asked the Ghost. “Do I say hello, or is this thing going to try to murder us, too?”

“I don’t believe it,” the Ghost said without looking at him, entirely focused on the figure outside. “That’s Xûr.”

“Is it? Well, why didn’t you say so!” He resisted the urge to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, remembering he didn’t have eyelids anymore. Or a nose. He settled for a long-suffering sigh. “Who’s Xûr?”

“The Emissary of the Nine.”

“Ah. Good for him.”

“Considering he’s probably the reason we didn’t attempt to drill a hole through 50 kilometers of ice with the nose of our ship, I’d say he’s probably not going to kill us. Probably.”

“There’s some doubt in the matter?”

“He’s a sort of itinerate arms dealer, sells weapons and armor to Guardians, though where he gets his stock from and what he does with the goods he takes in exchange, we have no idea. He claims to represent a party or parties called ‘The Nine,’ though again who or what they are is open to speculation. He’s a little unnerving and odd, but other than that he seems at worst neutral, at best helpful to our cause.”

“Huh,” he said, and drummed his fingers on the ship’s console in thought. There wasn’t much point in staying in the stricken ship, he figured, and the little fellow outside seemed harmless enough when compared to the rampaging four-armed aliens who’d tried to kill him on sight.

He retrieved the shrapnel launcher, slung it over his back, and began to climb up the now-vertical skiff’s interior, towards the ventral hatch. He had to stand on the back of the pilot’s seat, leap for a handhold, then drag himself up to the hatch, hang on by one hand while he worked the controls, before finally pulling himself out of the ship. Although the nose was nearly touching the ground, the tail of the skiff was several meters up in the air. With a mental shrug, he figured he’d test how much control he had over jumping—or he’d see how resilient his new body would be after a short, sharp plunge to the ground.

It turned out almost pleasant. With a thought, he drifted softly down from the hatch, landing lightly directly in front of the figure. The howling wind blew snow and ice nearly horizontal, whipping the figure’s robes about its body, but the Guardian didn’t feel the cold and they stood there quite casually, two neighbors having a chat.

Up close he could feel the strangeness the Ghost had warned him about. From a distance the figure had appeared to be standing still, but now he saw that its slightly hunchback form was in constant micro-motion, wavering back and forth, like someone shifting their weight on their feet on a rolling sea ship, or someone dizzy trying to regain their balance. From the depths of the shadows where the face should be burned two pinpoints of light that he hoped were eyes. A writhing black mass of tendrils or tentacles, feelers maybe, sprouted from the shadow of its hood and seemed to scent the air.

He wasn’t sure if a handshake was appropriate. He settled for a nod and a polite “Thank you.”

When the thing, Xûr, spoke, its voice was distant, slithering and echoey, like a handful of people all trying to talk at the same time and say the same thing. “Do not be alarmed. I know no reason to cause you harm.”

“That makes a nice change.”

“I bring a message from the Nine.”

The Guardian waited. He waited for a long time. The wind shrieked and kicked and clawed at them. Xûr shiftless endlessly, his outline blurry and indistinct. The Guardian wondered if the ice might abrade him away, or blow him off his feet. Finally, he grew impatient. “Well?”

Xûr started a little, a daydreamer suddenly awoken. “I forget,” he said. “I do mean to explain, but every time I try, I lose the thread.” There was another long pause. “The pull is so faint here, the sun so heavy.”

The Guardian looked sidelong at the Ghost, and gave a minute shrug. “Numb as Novocaine,” he sighed.

Xûr suddenly stood perfectly statue still. When he spoke, there was only one voice, and it was a woman’s. Quite clearly, she said, “Aris?”

The Guardian started at the sound of that name. One burned into his own brain, the only ember of self he had left. “How did you—how could you know?”

The moment passed. Xûr began to rock back and forth again, resuming his twitching, unsettling movement. The chorus of voices spoke again. “Bodies come and go but the cells remember.” He turned and took a few shuffling steps towards the ruins. He seemed to walk on the surface of the snow without sinking in. With a vague sweep of one arm, he beckoned the Guardian to follow. “You are the one I was sent to find.”

“Oh?” he kicked through the snow drifts, floundering after the tentacle-faced Quasimodo. “How come?”

“I come bearing help,” Xûr said. “I think you have terrible need of my gifts.”

They came to a pair of great steel doors. Xûr made no moment, but at some unseen signal the doors parted down the center and began to grind open, slowly sliding to each side. Without waiting for them to open fully, Xûr stepped across the threshold.

On the other side, the wind died down to a background murmur almost immediately. It was eerily quiet. It might have been a hospital, the Guardian mused, or an insane asylum. There was a total lack of anything approaching a right angle, every surface was curved and smooth and clad in pearly ceramic. Tables and terminals rose almost organically from the floor, gentle upwellings in the surface. Soft lights glowed overhead.

Xûr turned to face the Guardian and the woman’s voice spoke again. “Welcome home, Aris.”

#

“Home?” the Guardian—Aris—repeated, looking around the antiseptic white room. The word held no weight to him, no memory or emotion. Xûr could easily have pointed to a cardboard box and said “Home” and it would have meant just as much: Precisely nothing.

The Ghost floated away, stooping to pore over the various bits of machinery and terminals about the room. It chattered to itself as it went, “Fascinating…Golden Age, pre-Collapse…well, well, well, BrayTech, why am I not surprised…” Its voice grew fainter as it meandered across the room.

Aris returned his attention to Xûr. The moment of lucidity was gone, as before, replaced with his usual sphinxlike blankness.

“You said you had a gift?”

“Yes.”

“And it isn’t even my birthday. Or it might not be. Who knows?”

“Yes.”

“So…where is it?”

“Below.”

“Short and to the point, I like your style. And what is it?”

“Answers.”

“I haven’t asked a question yet.”

“All organic life seeks answers, the eternal question, the why behind all whys. Even you, twice risen, thrice born, shattered and remade without your consent or understanding. Below is your grave and cradle, your end and beginning. Finding it may give you... Clarity. It may be that the Nine wish to help you in this.”

“May be? Thought you worked for these guys.”

“My will is not my own. Is yours?”

Well, that was the question wasn’t it. Even ignoring any philosophical questions about the deterministic nature of the universe, had whoever ported his brain into a robot or whatever raised him from the dead left him with free will or merely the illusion of it. He spread his arms wide. “Search me. What is this to the Nine? What’s in it for them?”

“The Nine are—they are very big.” Xûr gestured with his hands, describing arcs in the air, great spheres or loops of nothing. “I cannot explain. The fault is mine, not yours. It may be that they, too, seek to understand what you are.”

“Thanks, Xûr, I do so love our little chats.” He reached out to pat the thing on the shoulder, thought better of it, settled for giving it a thumbs up instead. “I’m tired. I’m done with enigmas for one day and I’m tired. Why am I tired? I’m a robot a billion kilometers from Earth and I’m tired. And hungry. Can I even eat?”

He poked about his jaw with one finger. There was a kind of hinged section there, where metal slid over metal as he spoke, by nothing like a mouth. A hole at the back, behind another bar of metal, maybe large enough to fit a straw, but no teeth or lips or tongue.

“Gfhey,” he called to the Ghost on the far side of the room. “Lry, cn I even eat wd ths thing?”

“No, not really,” it said as it floated back.

“Cnt?”

“Language.”

“Wht? I sd: cn’t.”

“Ah, all right then. No, your body has no need for food or rest, though Exos sometimes want to both eat and sleep. We’re not sure why; something to do with residual self-image from your biological brain, probably.”

“Terrible design,” Aris said, removing his finger from the orifice. “Our tentacled buddy here is positively sure we should head downstairs in search of answers, although the answers to what exactly he’s a little less clear on. What do you reckon?”

“You’re probably the first Guardian to venture here since the Collapse. Europa is a mystery to us, so there’s no telling what you might find. From what I can gather, this facility was involved in the development of the original Exos in some way. I also found…” its voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing important.”

It was such a transparent lie, Aris almost felt guilty for calling attention to it. “All right, tell me later,” he said. “So, what’s your advice?”

“There’s always a price for Xûr’s gifts,” the Ghost mused. “It is just knowledge for knowledge, or something more sinister?” Its two sections twisted about its axis, the way a human might scratch at its scalp or nervously rub its hands.

“The Vex are here,” Xûr said. The woman’s voice again, singular and clear.

Aris tilted his head to look at the Ghost in silent question.

“The robots I mentioned, the ones trying to upload themselves into the fabric of the universe,” it said. “Minds without brains, intelligence without consciousness, pure thought without emotion or ethics or empathy. While the Fallen and Hive hate us—the first because we are strong, the second because we are weak—to the Vex we are just raw materials, obstacles on the route to securing immortality. They want to wipe us out, not out of malice, but because it’s the most efficient solution. If they are here, then there is something here that they believe will help them to do that.”

“Ah,” he thought about that. “Shit,” he observed. “Probably shouldn’t let them do that, huh?”

“Stopping them would be the Team Cooperation thing to do.”

“Figures.” Aris unslung the shrapnel launcher and turned to Xûr. “Let’s go down then.”

“Follow.”

Much of the complex was in ruins, ceilings collapsed, walls caved in. Other rooms were intact, starkly white and pristine as the entrance hall had been. Perfect as a porcelain doll house. Pastel lights shone from panels and terminals. Some rooms resembled a laboratories, others infirmaries or operating rooms with rows of beds, still others production lines where robotic welding, cutting and riveting tool arms stood frozen.

They descended by many winding and twisting slopes and staircases, some shattered and ruined, ragged steps hanging precariously above an abyss. Xûr did not hesitate but simply stepped off the edge of the lowest step, and without transition or movement or falling, appeared on the ground below. He waited patiently, not looking up.

Aris shook his head, and made like a leaf again, fluttering gently down.

The corridor eventually ended in a great gateway, a wall of steel with a central bulge like a seal. A dozen figures knelt before it. They were bronze-colored, their heads like the helmets of Roman legionaries or Greek hoplites with transverse metal crests above cyclopean eyes, their limbs thin yet humanoid. Each one held, in the center of its abdomen, a vial of thick, milky-white fluid.

“Vex,” the Ghost said. “Don’t try your peacemaking diplomat routine again. They can’t speak, might not even understand the concept of language. They don’t need symbols to mediate between abstract ideas and the world around them. It’d be like trying to reason with a virus.”

“What are they doing?” Aris asked, keeping them covered with his weapon. They ignored him, heads bowed, unmoving.

“Worship,” said Xûr. “Organic life must adapt if it is to survive.”

“Worship is adaptive?”

“To the Vex, yes,” the Ghost said. “Their whole species sees reality as a problem and is trying to solve for god.”

“Everyone needs a hobby.” Aris nodded towards the doors. “What’s in there, that they’d want to worship?”

“That is the answer to the riddle of your existence,” said Xûr.

“Is it.”

One by one, in sequence, the eyes on each of the Vex illuminated, glowing ruby red in the darkness. With sharp, stuttering movements, a dozen heads came up, turned, and regarded the three figures. The Vex found their feet. Brass casings on their forearms opened and slid and the unmistakable outline of weapons sprouted from their hands.

His shield was up before they fired. Burst of blood-red fire hammered into the crystalline wall. He stepped through the shield and it parted about him; he hurled a grenade, grunted in satisfaction as a double handful of the robots were blown to pieces in the detonation. The shrapnel launcher roared as he fired left and right, felling Vex with each burst.

He blew the head off the next one. Instead of falling it seemed to shake with crackling rage and then charged straight towards him, firing wildly. A roundhouse kick sent the shattered thing spinning away.

“Aim for the belly!” the Ghost shouted. “The bodies are just finger puppets. The fluid is the Vex.”

Sure enough, each shot to the abdomen shattered the container, and the Vex immediately toppled over and lay still. One, two, three went down. He fired on the fourth, but its outline blurred even as he squeezed the trigger, blinked out of existence, then reappeared several meters to the side. Aris tracked, tried to fire again, but the trigger clicked. Empty.

He cursed. Beams hit him from three sides, staggering him back. Casting the gun aside, he charged forward, gathering himself, unleashing the power he felt surging within him. It exploded outwards in a blast of light, disintegrating the last few Vex. Leaving him standing in a smoldering scrapheap.

Xûr walked past him without comment. His cloak and hood were singed and smoked where he had been hit, but he gave no sign of being in pain or even noticing. He motioned to the doors.

“This is the path and the gate,” he said. “Here.” In his hands, Xûr held a small, golden, glowing dodecahedron. “A gift from the Nine.”

“Um, thanks?” When Aris touched it, the material twisted and straightened, unfolded, pushing itself inside out, forming first a grip in his hand, then a barrel, a shoulder stock, a magazine, a weapons sight, until he was holding an assault rifle. “That’s a neat trick.”

“I may be here when you return. If you return.”

“Reassuring as always, my friend,” Aris nodded. “Guess I’ll see you when I’m looking at you—”

Xûr have a sort of half-bow and turned away. He took two steps, then his figure shimmered and dissolved into nothing. There was a brief gust of inrushing air as it struggled to fill the sudden void left by his parting.

The Ghost briefly swelled, pushing the four blades of its face outwards in visible surprise.

“Transmat,” it gasped. “But that was a massive energy spike, beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Whatever snapped him took him far, far away. Seriously far. He could be on the other side of the galaxy now, easily.”

The doors slid smoothly and soundlessly open as he approached. The room on the far side of the doors was dimly illuminated with somber sapphire lights. The design was much as before, curved and sloped architecture, swirling circular spaces, arcing and arching geometry. Machinery densely packed the room, in orderly tombstone rows.

Aris stepped across the threshold. A voice boomed from over their heads, coming from everywhere at once, dispassionate and detached: “Crypt perimeter breach. Exo lifeform present. Welcome home.”

Aris crouched, trained his weapon upwards, scanning the shadows.

“Thanks,” he told the ceiling. “I’d say it’s nice to be here, but. Murder robots and whatnot. You know how it is.”

“Artificial intelligence activated.”

“That’s nice.”

The voice changed, becoming recognizably human. Aloof though, commanding, if anything even more detached than the digitized voice that had preceded it. “Well, what have we here? The prodigal prototype returns. I guess that drunk old Russian finally let you go. Hello there, Aris. Though I suspect you won’t remember me.”

Aris straightened and glanced in irritation at the Ghost. “How come everybody knows who I am except me?” he complained.

“All part of the process,” the voice explained. “I made you, Aris. I am Clovis Bray the First, your creator.”

“Howdy.”

“Charming as ever, Aris. I would annihilate you, but you’ve come at a fortuitous moment. The Vex have been unsatisfied with my body and have been trying to infect my soul now, too. We’ve been at a bit of a deadlock, thanks to the malleable plasticity of the digital. Any attack they can create within my systems I can immediately counter. I am god in here. Their Everted Mind has resorted to building bodies for them to take the fight into the physical. I’m afraid you’ll have to kill them all.”

“Will I?”

“Naturally. This house is—well, within this place lies humanity’s salvation. The answer to humanity’s eternal struggle: Mortality.”

Aris sighed. “Why is it that everybody around here is obsessed with living forever?”

The voice ignored him. “Were it to fall into the wrong hands, humanity, and the universe, would be utterly doomed.”

“All right, all right, don’t overdo it,” Aris told the voice. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’d rather be home and in bed but I’m here instead. Let’s do this so I can go home.”

The Vex poured into the room in waves. First the smaller soldier units he had fought before, then horned ones with more powerful rifles, trapezoidal ones that floated above the floor and fired sustained beams of energy, towering giant ones that lobbed burst of pure flame. The skipped across the surface of reality and closed in around him.

Aris vaulted away, easily leaping over banks of machinery, and when they lumbered in pursuit they walked right into the path of his grenades. He landed and the gun roared in his hands and they died, shattered and broken, they died and they died and then more came, and the air about them flickered with a network of fiery blue lines and his bullets pinged away harmlessly.

“They’re adapting,” the Ghost warned him. “Two can play at this game. Here, let me show you.”

He saw. He knew. The white light in his fist burned now golden orange and the touch of it burned and burned and turned the Vex to embers and ash. When their shields glowed orange he changed again, and blasted them with purple-black fire that burned colder than the void.

In desperation, they summoned the Everted Mind.

A kernel of light burned in the air. It flared, a tiny dying star, then winked out and in its place was the Mind. It was a floating, inverted pyramid shape, larger even than the biggest of the Vex, and its shields were not blue or orange or violet but pure white and absorbed everything he threw at it. It considered him a moment, ignoring the bullets and flames licking futilely at its impenetrable perimeter, then weapons pods unfolded on either side of its body and opened fire. A double gatling burst of multicolored light sprayed out.

He flung up a shield, but in seconds it cracked, splintered and shattered under the withering barrage. Too late, he took a step back, threw himself sideways, but the shots tracked and found him and hammered into him, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the wall.

[No signal]

“Ow,” he said when he was himself again. The room was dark and empty again. The Everted Mind was gone. “Yeah, that’s right, you better run,” he muttered.

“It’s gone, deeper into this… crypt,” said the Ghost. “It’s searching for something.”

“You’ve become quite the conjurer since we last met,” said the voice. “Did Elsie or the Warmind teach you that? An achievement like this would take a certain, aha, clarity of vision. Do you know how it is done—no, I don’t suppose you do. Crude cellular repair, localized reversal of quantum states, time travel if you will, or perhaps it pulls a copy of you from a parallel universe? Fascinating. A veritable little Ship of Theseus, aren’t you? Do you come back the same each time, I wonder?”

He did wonder. He remembered dying, remembered how it felt, the pain, and then there was a, well a what, an interruption, a break, a disconnect. There was that briefest moment of nothing, maybe the smallest quantum of time the universe permitted, then here was here again. Would he even know if he was the copy—but that was a foolish thought. Life was metamorphosis, each now forever emerging from the chrysalis of the past.

“Does it matter?” he said out loud. “I think I’m me. I act like me, walk like me, talk like me. If I am undistinguishable from me in all respects, then the difference is irrelevant.”

“Ah, but if you had changed, would you even be aware of it?”

“Well of course I’ve changed. Silly question. People change all the time, every day, every moment. Identity is not a fixed position but a process, you are who you are because you’ve been through the process, and continue to go through it. There’s no such thing as true stasis. No point in trying to hang on to something that was never there.”

“It’s still the Ship of Theseus, that’s your answer, eh?” Clovis chuckled. “Ah, good old Aris. That’s why we chose you, you know, for your lack of attachment to yourself. Would you like to see?”

“No,” the Ghost snapped immediately.

“Ah, so you’ve already seen it as well, eh drone? You came to us broken, Aris. But I fixed you. Made you better. Perfected you.”

Aris regarded his arms and legs for a moment. “Bang up job,” he said dryly. “Who wouldn’t want to be an amnesiac killer robot that still gets the munchies for some reason? No notes.”

“You would be dead, if it weren’t for me.”

“I am dead, haven’t you been paying attention? A dead guy who died and got turned into a robot and then died again and got turned into a magical assassin and then died a couple more times after that. Dead, dead and dead. Doubly, triply dead. Dead 2, the sequel. I have been rebooted more times than the Spider-Man franchise. I am super-massively dead. I am deader than any dead thing has ever been in the history of dying.”

“Finished?”

“For now,” Aris grunted. He retrieved the rifle Xûr had given him. “Now where’s that big bugger gotten to and how do we beat it?”

“It is attempting to reach Clarity,” Clovis replied. “I’ll guide you.”

The lights in the room went dark, then a single row illuminated. A pathway into the darkness. He followed and new lights shone deeper into the crypt, while the ones behind him winked off. A tiny little caravan of light in the dark.

There were more Vex down here, studier and hardier, and he cut through them, a hot-white knife through butter. It was almost automatic now, action without thought. They were an obstacle, an annoyance and they fell to his guns and his fists in squads and platoons. Some of them carried engrammatic matter, like the gun had been, and he added to his arsenal. A pistol at his hip, a fusion rifle across his back.

Black-hulled Vex edged in fire stepped from the ether, one last attempt to stop him. Their burning shields deflected every shot and their onyx shells healed over each blow. They were imposing and unstoppable. They were chaff before his wind. He was a falling star, his landing bleached the world into impossible light. They burned, like paper in a furnace, they burned and were gone.

Aris reached the gate. He was on the third floor overlooking a kind of open courtyard, with two more levels below. It was easily the largest space he’d encountered in the crypt, perhaps 100 meters side to side. As with the rest of the crypt, the bottom floor was a maze of machinery. That was not what drew his attention, however. Light glowed from two points in the room.

At the far end, the Everted Mind hovered before a wall of rippling blue light that filled one entire wall of the courtyard, surrounded by a phalanx of smaller Vex. It seemed to consider the barrier, for a moment, fired a beam of pulsating violet light at it, studied the beam’s lack of impact, considered some more, fired again, only this time the beam was scarlet and steady instead of pulsing. This too had no effect.

High on a pedestal at the opposite end of the room, almost directly below where Aris crouched, stood one of the Fallen, one of the larger ones, like the one that had spoken to him. It was entirely encased within a glowing blue sphere, and in its four arms it held what looked like a semi-translucent ball of light. A circle of Vex surrounded it. A small Vex reached out and touched the bubble, and promptly dissolved in a flash of light. Another stepped forward to take its place.

“What are they doing?” Aris whispered.

“I don’t know, but whatever is on the other side of that barrier feels… wrong,” said the Ghost. “It’s like an area of darkness, extending even across the barrier and into this room, like a black hole pulling at the fabric of the universe. We’re standing at the event horizon. My Light won’t reach us in here. You understand? If you die in here, you die for good. I won’t be able to bring you back.”

“Well, I’ll be careful then,” Aris promised. He pointed towards the Fallen. “Wonder what his story is.”

“There is a test,” the voice of Clovis explained, quiet enough for only the two of them to hear. “There’s only one way to gain entry. A new test I recently devised to frustrate the Vex after they manifested in armatures. Quite genius in its simplicity. It’s not a test of intelligence, no, they could mimic that easily enough. No, it’s a test they can never pass: A test of sentience. The key is held by the hostile lifeform held in the prison. To gain the key, you must free it and gain its cooperation. You see? Negotiation, empathy, communication, an awareness and appreciation of the alien Other, all things the Vex can never simulate and become because if they did then they would no longer be Vex. Aiat. They cannot be but as they are.”

Listening to Clovis, and seeing the way he’d trapped the Fallen in a cage, a tool to be used and discarded, Aris suspected the Vex were not the only ones lacking empathy. Could Clovis himself have passed the test he’d set for the Vex? As for himself, Aris thought he might have insights into how it felt to be a pawn in someone else’s game.

“Can you communicate through the shield?” he asked the Ghost.

It bobbled a ‘yes.’ “X-ray band laser tightbeam, it won’t penetrate but he should be able to sense it as fluctuations in the shield around him and respond in kind. Keep it short though, won’t take long for the Vex to detect it and zero in on us.”

“All right, do it,” he said.

“You’re on.”

“Hey big guy,” Aris began. The Fallen jerked and whirled. “Up here, third floor. Got a proposition for you: I get you out of there, you give me the key, then we both get out of here in my ship. Deal?”

“A trick,” it sneered. “Another subterfuge of these abominations.”

“What proof do you want?”

“Bring me the eye of that monstrosity. Then we will talk.”

“Weird, but if that’s what you want. Just watch and learn, big guy,” Aris nodded to the Ghost and it severed the link.

“Watch and learn what?” it asked him.

“Haven’t quite figured that part out yet.” He considered the barrier, and the Mind parked directly in front of it. “Is that barrier made out of the same stuff as the one around our Fallen friend?”

“Oh yes,” replied Clovis.

“So, what would happen if the Mind were to touch it?”

“Poof!” said Clovis. “Instant annihilation.”

“All right then,” Aris nodded. “Let’s give the big fella a bit of a push. I’ll jump down onto one of those towers—”

“Leaving you completely exposed to that thing’s firepower, great plan so far.”

“—ahem, and then drop to the floor, use the towers for cover so I can get close to it. Then. Wham.”

“Wham?” It looked at him for a moment in thought. “That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard of.” Another beat. “Let’s go.”

“Atta boy,” Aris said, and stepped off the edge of the balcony.

Half a hundred red-eyed heads snapped around at the sound of his impact on the top of the machinery tower. A forward roll, beams burning the air over his head. He dropped down to the floor, landed in the middle of a pack of six Vex. “Scuse me,” he said, grabbed one by the arm and whirled it like a flail, dropping the others like bowling pins, before flinging the hapless Vex head-first into the nearest bank of machinery.

“Get”

They closed in but he was moving, accelerating, sprinting faster and faster, twisting and turning among the forested towers.

“Out”

He ripped the head from one Vex, used it like a mace to crack open the fluid stomach of another.

“Of”

Drove his fist clean through the hull of another without stopping.

“My”

Faster and faster, the air about him starting to burn. His shoulder blasted through a Vex and the detonation took out four more standing beside it.

“Waaay—oof!”

One dropped to a knee and a fiery shield coalesced into the air about it. Too late to stop or slow or even turn, he rammed right into it, momentum carrying him forward, lifting him into the air. Sending him somersaulting into a forward flip high over the top of it.

He came down on one knee. With nothing between him and the Everted Mind.

“Meant to do that,” he grunted. “Remember me, you sonovabitch?”

Another leap, both hands together, the storm in his hands. He pounded both fists into the ground,  sending a wave of killing light rushing towards the Everted Mind. Cold and arrogant and dismissive, it watched the oncoming blast front without trying to evade. Confident in its shields.

From its twin arms, a dozen weapon pods unfolded. Aimed. Charged.

The ground beneath the Mind rippled and buckled and heaved. Lurched upwards. Threw it sliding backwards. Its shield brushed the barrier wall behind it. Almost a caress.

Matter collided with antimatter. A spark. Just a tiny pinprick flash, more brilliant than any sun, blazed for an instant and winked out. Like someone had poked a pin in the fabric of the universe and let the face of God come shining through. The world was impossibly white, then utter black. Then came the explosion.

Aris was picked up, batted across the room by the force of the blast, flying, glancing off machinery, spinning, rolling, bouncing off the floor until he finally slid the length of the courtyard and rammed into the far wall.

When he could see, the Mind was gone. Completely and totally erased, not even its shell remaining. The closest Vex had been annihilated too, leaving a few dozen in tangled heaps

Aris groaned and shook his head and waited for his eyes to adjust. Light swam and the haze of the room slowly resolved into recognizable shapes.

“We did it,” he said, half in wonderment.

“Not quite,” said the Ghost in his head. “We still don’t have the key—and the only reason the Vex didn’t kill that Fallen yet is they didn’t want to risk losing the key. They’ll have no reason to hold back now.”

Aris looked up to where the Fallen still stood. As one, the surviving Vex angled and began marching towards it. Their weapons fire began to range in on the blue field about it. The shield fizzled and smoked under the assault. Began to visibly weaken.

“But I killed their Mind thing,” Aris complained.

“The whole species is a single organism, all the Vex are all the Vex, killing one doesn’t flip an off switch.”

“Dammit,” Aris struggled to his feet and took a wobbling step and then another. Careened sideways and had to support himself against the wall. “Don’t feel so good.”

“The Darkness,” said the Ghost. “You’re hurt and I can’t heal you. It’s too far. You won’t make it in time.”

“Sez you.” He pushed himself away from the way, took a few more staggering diagonal steps, tried to straighten, slipped and fell to his knees. Cursing, he got to his feet again. The shield about the Fallen was very pale now, almost transparent.

“Even if you make it, the Vex will kill you.”

“Could be,” he agreed. He was close enough that the Fallen could see him now. It looked at him. Fear, betrayal, desperation there. Most of all fear.

He’d failed, just as he’d failed to save those colonists, all those eons ago. Saved nobody but himself.

The shield winked out, leaving the Fallen exposed to the full force of the Vex’s weapons.

The Fallen stiffened, pushed its chest out and lifted its head up. Proud before the executioner’s blade. A volley of fire swept towards it. And met a translucent, pearl white wall.

Aris wished he had a mouth to grin at the Fallen. The look of surprise on its face. He lowered his hand, the one that had set the shield. And slumped face-first to the floor, spent. As one, the Vex turned towards him.

The Fallen stepped forward, grabbed the closest Vex, and touched it with one of his arms. There was something there, a four-pronged antenna or mandible or blade, Aris couldn’t tell. It touched the Vex and it jerked for a moment. Then turned and fired on its closest neighbor.

The Fallen touched another, then another. With each touch the Vex began to turn on one another, raking each other with fire, slaughtering each other at point-blank range. In seconds, they were dead and only the Fallen survived.

With slow and deliberate steps, it walked towards him. It leaned forward and retrieved the fusion gun from his back. Examined it a moment, then wrapped one hand about the trigger and aimed it at his head, then shifted its aim towards the Ghost that floated above him.

“I should kill you,” it rumbled.

From where he lay on his stomach, Aris lifted his neck, raised his gaze and wearily regarded it. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“A life for a life,” it said.

“Nice work with the probe, virus, reprogramming, thing,” Aris gave it a weak thumbs up.

“I am a Sacred Splicer of the House of Wolves.” It paused, let the fusion rifle drop. With one of its lower hands, it drew a short knife and placed it on the ground between them, blade pointed towards Aris. “Misraaks.”

“Gesundheit.”

“Velask, Gesundheit of the House of Light.”

Aris wondered if it was making a joke, if the Fallen even had jokes. If he’d be able to tell if it was joking. It did not appear to be smiling. “Ah no, that was a, um, greeting. My name is…” he looked down, and patted the faded lettering over his breast. “Shiva. Call me Shiva.”

“Sivaks, the wanderer. It is a good name.”

Misraaks did not extend a hand so Aris pushed himself more or less upright, standing, only swaying a little bit, and regarding the hazy blue wall in front of them. He nodded towards it and asked the Fallen, “You got the key?”

Misraaks held out the mote of light. It fell into Aris’ palm and floated there, hovering a millimeter above his skin. It tingled.

“Will you kill me now?” Misraaks asked.

“Good grief, no.”

“I am free to leave?”

“Absolutely.” Aris gestured towards the barrier. “You don’t want to see what all the fuss is about first?”

“No, I know what lies beyond,” it said. There was unmistakable sadness there, a hurt and a longing. “The Whirlwind.”

Aris didn’t follow the idiom. He shrugged. “Suit yourself. There’s a ship at the surface, one of yours, might be guarded by a guy I know. Little chap, tentacles for a face but otherwise he’s cool. You’re free to go.” He looked up at the ceiling and raised his voice. “Hear that? My buddy here is free to go. No killer cages, no funny business, just let the guy go. Deal?”

“Oh, very well,” said Clovis, a touch petulantly. “My thanks for ridding me of the infestation. The creature is insignificant, if you wish to keep it as a pet that’s up to you. Can’t wait to show you what’s inside. It will change your mind, I know it will.”

Misraaks retrieved its knife from the ground, with a final bow, it retreated into the gloom.

“Potent Darkness energy,” Clovis continued. “I could never use it, but something tells me you can. Through my creation, my legacy will endure for eternity.”

“That’s nice.” Aris was only half-listening. He watched until he lost sight of the Fallen’s grey on black shadow and then turned his attention back to the barrier.

#

The room on the other side was octagonal. Each wall was taken up by a monitor, or else a black mirror. 

There was an obsidian shape at the center of the room, an elongated diamond of stone or metal black beyond black, threefold black upon black upon black. It seemed to devour the light, swallow it up and reflect nothing back. There was a density to it, a solidity, as if it were more real than anything else in the room. The weight of it pulled at the eyes with the irresistible force of a black hole. It hummed and whispered and sang and was as silent as the grave.

“What is it?” Aris asked the Ghost and found himself whispering.

“You heard Clovis: Darkness,” it said. “Pure evil. An emissary or herald, a doorway, a trap.”

On each wall the monitors stirred and the same image appeared on each one. A man stared out, not looking at the camera but past it. Looking at nothing. His hollow-eyed gaze saw to infinity and his pupils burned like twinned black stars. He was physically powerful, he was insubstantial as a wraith, he was adamantine, he was fragile as glass. Someone off-camera spoke to him and asked him how he felt.

Without changing expression, the man said, “Numb as Novocaine.”

“Don’t look,” the Ghost urged. “It’s—”

“I know who it is,” Aris said.

The unlight burned from those images. The air was heavy with it, tight, cloying and insidious. It seeped through his skin.

The face on the screen moved and the eyes locked with his. The man smiled at him, smiled as he had never smiled in life. “It’s okay, Aris,” the man said in his own voice. “This is a place of life, a place of peace.”

“You know me,” Aris whispered.

“Of course I know you. I’m a part of you. Been with you since the beginning, old friend. Here, let me show you.”

Aris remembered. He remembered everything. His first life, his human one. The Traveler. The miracles it brought. The upheaval those miracles had brought. Hundreds of millions thrown out of work by programmable matter. Religions foundering on the irrefutable pearl sphere floating in the skies, creating Edens with its presence. He remembered those who had seen the chaos and the wealth and plenty and seen their chance to grab more and incited the dispossessed and confused and lost to violence. The riots and bombings and pogroms and wars. He’d been there, a soldier through it all, and it had broken him.

A hollow-eyed man sitting on the edge of a bed on an ice-ball moon with nothing left to lose, nowhere left to go. He might have stepped off the train of history then, fallen into the promise of oblivion. Only to be caught and baited and lured with the promise of forgetfulness. He hadn’t wanted to die, no, that felt like cowardice. But he’d wanted to forget and they’d said they knew a way how.

“It’s trying to weaken your resolve,” the Ghost said. “Don’t let it get to you.”

“No,” the thing on the screen said. “Quite the opposite: I’m making him stronger.”

Aris was walking towards the obsidian thing without thinking, his traitor feet carrying him closer and closer. It might have been a magnet, pulling his metal body towards it step by unconscious step. His hand rose, drawn irresistibly upwards.

“Aris no, don’t touch it—”

His hand rested on the smooth, cool surface. He felt something like a heartbeat under his fingers, the pulse of the universe. A great indrawing and exhalation of breath across the cosmos. A satisfied sigh, eons long and deep as existence. He felt. Recognized. Like calling to like. A doorway opened inside and what could he do but step through.

The world wavered. Grew dim. Sound muffled and distorted, like he was deep underwater. Deep. His vision twisted and bent and he was coming apart every atom stretched in every direction and yet compressed, squeezed into nothing by incredible pressure and he’d never felt such pain yet never felt such pleasure and then.

He.

Was.

Standing in a garden.

Blooms. Red blooms. A whole sea of waist-high red blooms, stretching to infinity. They grew incredibly fast, sprouting from the ground and pushing into the air and flowering and withering and dying in seconds. Like the waves of an ocean rising and falling, rising and falling, in swirling and spiraling fractal patterns, patterns within patterns within patterns. Over and over. Different each time, but also the same.

The sky was overcast, dark with clouds from horizon to horizon. They grumbled and shifted through the sluggish sky. Black rain fell, and where it touched the blooms withered. The air was perfume and rot, sweet and sickening.

He ran his hand through the blooms and saw that his hand was skin and nails and hair. A human hand. He held it up, marveling and that was why he didn’t see the other approaching through the field.

“Hi Aris, glad you could make it,” said Aris’ voice.

Aris lowered his hand and saw the other. He knew the face it wore was his own, the one he’d seen on the video screen. His original face, before his first rebirth in an Exo body. It was smiling at him, arms wide in welcome.

“Relax, take a load off, enjoy the view. This garden sure is something, isn’t it?”

He glanced around and nodded. “What is it?”

“Everything,” his other self replied. “It’s everything.”

“If you’re really into poppies, sure.”

“Look, Aris, I can tell you’re a little confused. I get it, really I do. She’s like that with all her pawns: Go here, do that, collect 100 of these things, kill that thing. Not me. I’m here to give you the truth. Let you see things clearly.”

“Me?”

“Yup. Gotta admit, I feel kind of proud of you. Gave you the spark of life. You’re as much my son as you are that narcissistic Doctor Frankenstein out there.”

“Your followers tried to kill me.”

“Well sure they did son. Sure they did. That’s how you play the game. I give you things to struggle against and you grow stronger in the struggling. I help you become your better self. I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s the only way you’ll learn.”

“Everybody wants to help me, it sems, but nobody asks me what I want. You are just more of the same.”

“Well that’s where you’re wrong. Now you’re thinking, what’s this guy’s game? It’s simple, so elegantly simple. Majestic. You’re one of hers, right? What better way can I prove her wrong, than by helping you out? You see? That’s the point, that’s always been the whole and only point: everything needs my help in the end.”

“I can see you’ve been spending time with Larry and Xûr,” Aris smiled, though without humor. He waved his hand in a hurry-up motion. “You sure sound like them. So how about we skip the gnostic metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and get right to the part where you tell me what you want.”

“Hey, sure, like I said, I’m here to help you, buddy.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever it is that you want to do. You want to save the Earth? I can help you do that. You want to destroy the Vex? Buddy, I can help you do that. Just name it. Power? Fame? Immortality? Oh, you’d better believe I can help you do that.”

He did laugh then, a good clean laugh, it welled up from him, irrepressible and the threw back his head and laughed. “Anything?”

“Just say the word, my man.”

“All right,” his laughed subsided into chuckles. “Okay, I’ve got one. It’s like this: I want you to take your big black diamond, and shove it right up your—”

He was on Europa again. In the same room, standing in front of the diamond. It was quiescent now, still. The voices silent. Whatever force had animated it was gone.

“Guardian? Guardian, are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“You vanished.”

“Sorry about that. Had a word with this cube’s owner.”

“You… talked to it? What did it want?”

“Oh, to make a deal, the usual Faustian bullshit,” he said, and chuckled at the memory. “Eternal life, riches, all the good stuff, all I need to do is sell my soul.”

“You refused?”

“Well of course I refused,” he said. “They don’t get it, not that homunculus waiting upstairs, not Clovis, not the dark mirror me, none of them get it. They can’t handle someone who doesn’t want more.”

“Well add me to the list, because I sure don’t get it.”

“They all expect you to be like them, always hungry for more and more,” he explained. “They have all the morality of a cancer cell. I don’t want more. The only one around here who’s already immortal, and I’m the only one who doesn’t want it. Don’t tell me the universe doesn’t save a sense of humor.”

Aris turned and walked away, turned his back on the black monolith and left it behind. Like Orpheus climbing up from Hades, only this time, Aris never looked. back.

“Come on, let’s go home.”

#

The ship was still there, parked now horizontal to the ground, its hull clear of any mark or damage.

Two humanoids huddled in the shelter beneath the hull, the black-robed figure of Xûr, and beside him, huddled and wrapped in its own cloak the Fallen, Misraaks. They looked up as he crunched across the snow and ice and he waved. Neither waved back.

“Whatever happened would have been the will of the Nine and therefore right, but I am…” Xûr paused, then plunged quickly on, “I am glad you have won.”

“In a weird way it’s good to see you, too.” Aris patted Xûr on the shoulder. He turned to the Fallen, Misraaks. “Dunno about you but I’ve had my fill of this place. Ready to jet?”

Misraaks hesitated. “There is another,” it said, and stepped aside.

Behind it stood another Exo. The body was similar to his own but feminine, though he realized that might not mean anything. There was a panther grace there, a tense readiness to leap. She wore a kind of shawl or half-cape, and a rifle was slung over her back. Her bright white eyes regarded him with expectation, but also wariness.

“Aris,” she said. It was a cool, reserved voice, not unlike Clovis’, each sound and syllable pronounced with cutting edged clarity. There was a tickling familiarity to it, beyond even the similarities to Clovis. He could have sworn he’d heard that voice before, and recently.

“Ah, another one of my ad—"

“Admirers,” she said in sync with him. As if she’d know exactly what he would say. “You always say that.”

“I’ve never said that before in my life. My most recent one, anyway.”

She shook her head a little. “You have it?”

She asked it casually enough but there was a weight behind her question and Aris was suddenly wary. She was utterly focused now, the panther about to spring. Misraaks felt it too, and took two steps to the side, arms raised placatingly. Xûr merely waited, oblivious.

Before he answered, he balled his hands into fists, and felt the power building there.

“It?” He figured that could only mean one thing. “The black floaty throat lozenge.”

“You have it?” she repeated.

“Sorry,” he said slowly. “It’s still down there if you want it. You’re welcome to it. If the guy in charge doesn’t bore you to death first.”

“You… left it?”

The façade of detached distance shattered. She was utterly taken aback. He eyes searched his, trying to read his soul, still not quite believing. Aris relaxed, uncurled his fists and spread his hands to show they were empty. He aimed a thumb over his shoulder.

“Hey, if you want it, BMG.”

“What? No, I mean, not yet, not like this, it’s just. After all these. Could it be. But how. I mean. This has never happened before.”

“Lady, you would not believe how many times I’ve said that to myself today.”

“Elisabeth,” she said distantly.

“Call me Shiva,” he shrugged. “Just like the sound of it. Been a real pleasure, anything for my fellow killer robots.” When she said nothing, Aris beckoned to Misraaks and headed for the skiff’s boarding tube.

“Wait,” she said suddenly.

He stopped and turned.

“You Guardians travel in threes,” she said. “The Emissary, a Fallen Captain and an Exo. Is this your fireteam?”

“My movements are not predictable, even to me,” said Xûr. A quick bow and he vanished.

Aris looked to Misraaks, who nodded.

“No, guess it’s just the two of us,” he told the stranger.

“Good,” she said. “Then you’ll have room for one more.”

END