Above the skies of Trogarra, far beyond the reach of even its outermost moons, Nate Arturi had a funny feeling that the coming swarm didn’t look all that happy to see him.
Not that a mindless aggregate of devoured planets and reanimated space junk could really be said to be happy. Or that it could technically even see, for that matter. As far as Nate or anyone else knew, Synth swarms ran on little more than evil fairy dust. Most people had long ago given up on making sense of the Synth. All Nate knew for sure, at the moment, was that he needed to stop this swarm before it gobbled up Trogarra.
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Pierce’s voice crackled from the Camelot, wholly unperturbed by the approach of the planet-killing swarm. “Toilets on Separuu.”
Beside Nate, Ex paused, pipe midway to his mouth, and looked expectantly in the direction of the Camelot, which would’ve been too far away to notice with the naked eye had it not been for the steady outpouring of plasma fire lancing from its cannons, pruning the edges of the swarm.
“You mean bathrooms,” Snuffy asked, “or…?”
“Nope. Just toilets.”
“I see where he’s going with this,” Ramirez said.
Nate shook his head, wanting to share in their fun but mostly just feeling worn out. It had become something of a recurring game these past few months: the slow, room-by-room imagining of this wild dream house they would one day whimsically build, linked from room to room across as many planets and systems as they wished via some hand-wavy q-jump portal magic that Nate and Ex would surely one day figure out. It was a fun flight of fancy—a make-believe house that was at once meant for each of them individually as much as it was meant for all of them, and for none of them. Dreams didn’t have to make sense, after all. And at least this one distracted from the equally unlikely dream that they would somehow manage to finish their hunt and eliminate the Synth within the crew’s human lifetimes.
“Picture this,” Pierce was saying, and Nate could see him splaying hands wide in his mind’s eye. “Floating platform, suspended right in front of one of those big, majestic floating island waterfalls of theirs.”
“Ahh,” Snuffy said, like he was starting to get it.
“You can’t poop in the fall pools of Separuu,” Tessa said in a tired tone.
“They are sacred to the Svendarian people,” added their new council rep, Epistrius, in the mildly horrified tone that confirmed his predecessor Gendra’s warnings had failed to brace him for the abysmal level of professionalism aboard the Camelot. It probably didn’t help that Epistrius was himself a Svendarian.
There was a grin in Pierce’s voice. “Ah, but that’s the good part, see? Because we have Cap cloak the toilets, right? So as far as anyone can tell…”
“It’s raining poop?” Snuffy concluded.
Ex snorted plumes of thick pipe smoke and joined Nate in shaking his head.
“Immaculate poopception,” Ramirez said. “Nice.”
“Not sure if nice is the right word here,” Snuffy pointed out.
“I’m not cloaking your toilets, Pierce,” Nate said, eyeing Ex, as he increasingly found himself doing, for any signs of impending trouble. Ex frowned back at him.
“Fine,” Pierce said. “Toilets over the Bone City, then. Same plan.”
That coaxed a real smile. Toilets over the Troglodans’ capital city didn’t sound so bad right then, considering how inhospitable the Trogs had been since the Camelot had arrived to their aid. Nate still wondered if they shouldn’t have waited a few hours longer, really let the grumpy bastards feel the weight of the approaching swarm before they popped in to the rescue. Instead, they’d done the responsible thing, followed orders, and gotten here as fast as they could—arriving just in time to draw several loudly stated suspicions from the Trog clan leaders that Nate and his crew had somehow brought this swarm upon Trogarra. (As if said leaders hadn’t seen the swarm coming for days now.)
All in all, the Trogs were proving surprisingly whiny about having their asses saved by a lone ship’s worth of weak little Terrans.
Ex snorted so hard he got caught in a coughing fit. “That’s rich,” he managed between coughs, thumping his chest through a cloud of curling pipe smoke, “coming from you, Little Hobbit.”
Fair enough.
“Toilets over the Bone City, then,” Nate agreed. “Just tighten up that edge there first, will you?” He nudged the relevant coordinates their way via his link with the Camelot’s shipboard intelligence, Cammy, and the crew responded quickly, directing fire to the unfolding mass of tendrils reaching out from the swarm. What those tendrils were searching for, Nate didn’t know. Food, he supposed. Fodder for the swarm. All they found was a wall of plasma fire, scorching the bulging edges of the swarm back into neat shape.
Beside Nate, Ex toked on his pipe, thoughtfully tut-tut-tutting as Nate gathered his focus and their energy for the main strike.
“How’s that for a haircut?” Pierce was saying on the battle line.
Nate had to admit it wasn’t bad. It felt a little foolhardy—maybe even disrespectful—how casually they’d taken to chitchatting whilst tangling with swarms of magnitudes that could very well end them were they to slip up even once. But that was the point, wasn’t it? The chatter soothed their nerves, kept them from clenching too tight. It was too easy to fall into the paralysis of overthinking every move and strike when all it would take was one infinitesimally small error, one handful of severed Synth protomatter drifting off undetected from the battle, pulled inexorably over weeks and months into Trogarra’s orbit, then into its atmosphere, then—
“You know,” Lundquist said thoughtfully, innocent as pie as he pinged the swarm scan on Nate’s HUD, “that is a rather optimal configuration for penetration.”
“Uh, Doc?” Pierce said. “No offense, but I think you’re starting to get a little too close to your work.”
“Penetration,” Ramirez chimed in agreement.
“No one’s penetrating anything here,” Tessa said. She was, unsurprisingly, vehemently not a fan of Lundquist’s increasingly frequent “let’s fire Nate into a swarm for science” proposals.
Nate understood the good doctor’s curiosity, if not precisely what he hoped to learn from such an experiment. By all appearances, things seemed to have been going swimmingly ever since the triumphant return of Forge Station and their Aether-wielding Merlin at the Battle of Jupiter. They’d saved Terra, torching an Archon in the process. And in the months since the Worldship Terra had set off on its maiden voyage, they’d smitten swarms from there to Separuu and back again.
In this sector of the galaxy, at least, it was easy to believe that the spirit of the Alliance had been reborn—that they’d turned the tide.
It was just that no matter how many times the Merlin told them to stay the course and fight the good fight, Nate and his crew couldn’t quite ignore the way the numbers didn’t seem to add up. Because no matter what they did, no matter how many swarms they burned, how many heads they cut from the hydra, it was impossible to deny that the Synth appeared to be proliferating faster now than ever. Far faster than they could hope to contain them.
As much as no one wanted to say it, the war seemed to be quickly approaching a dangerous inflection point. They needed new ideas. They needed innovation. But the Merlin had made it exceedingly clear that all Nate needed to worry about was falling in line and clearing the path to the old G-Sec relay. And given how many times he’d gotten his ass kicked in the past years for thinking he knew better than the Merlin and his fellow Knights, that was exactly what Nate intended to do. At least for now.
The Merlin knew what he was doing. He’d fought this war before.
But then why had the last Great War stretched on for centuries? And why were the Synth back now?
“Whenever you’re ready, Cap,” Pierce said.
Nate watched the coming swarm, mind churning with unwelcome questions.
“For science,” Lundquist’s voice echoed in his mind. It was a plea he’d repeated in many of their talks, usually right before Nate would clarify that the good doctor did in fact remember that the swarms ate literally everything they touched. “Hmm,” Lundquist would reply to that, tapping his stubbled chin with a tablet stylus with a look that reminded Nate a little too much of the way Ex occasionally slipped on the fine details of what was and wasn’t compatible with the survival of squishy, human-meat-suit types.
Not that Nate was exactly squishy these days—or even completely human, strictly speaking. But still. Even for a competent Knight, getting fired off all willy-nilly into the heart of a swarm was a stretch when it came to survivability. And with this swarm fast closing and a whole planet of ornery Troglodans at his back, saving the day seemed sufficient for now.
The counter ticked down, Ex tucking his pipe away in preparation.
“Stand by for cleanup,” Nate said.
“Hmm,” Lundquist grumbled, clearly disappointed.
Nate ignored him and let out a long exhale, opening himself to Light, feeling the power flow through him. He willed his muscles to relax around it, welcome it in, waiting for the moment, as they’d done several times now. Waiting with Ex for the perfect proximity, the perfect configuration. Waiting, waiting, and—
Now.
They moved together, opening themselves as they swung their sword, calling down enough searing Light fire to—
Shit.
Something sparked and jittered through them like a pulled muscle giving way mid-swing. Nate strained to regain control of the unwieldy tidal wave of power and finish the swing, but it was too late. The better half of their power dissipated, poofing off into space like so much incoherent noise. What was left of the attack slagged a few square klicks off the leading face of the swarm. Barely enough to slow them, much less wipe them off the map.
Which left the swarm barreling down on top of them at killing speed.
Nate hit the gravitonics hard, too off balance and drained to even think about taking the swarm head-on. He narrowly cleared the outside edge, the swarm rushing on past like a mindless wrecking ball, bound straight for the outermost moon of Fardrog, and for Trogarra a few light-seconds beyond that.
“Uh, Cap?” Pierce asked on the comms.
Nate looked around for Ex, confused and breathless. His heart fell when he saw Ex’s phantasm gaping down at his own hands, face glitching with the faint flickers of the ghastly apparition beneath, the faceless presence of Azmodeus trying to break through.
“We’ve got it,” Nate told Pierce, profoundly uneasy with the stupefied look on Ex’s face. The swarm was closing on Trogarra’s outer moon fast. “Hold on.”
No, it’s not, Ex shot at him, clenching his fists to still the jitters.
I didn’t say anything, Nate pointed out, trying to convince them both that this didn’t scare the shit out of him.
But you’re thinking it. You can’t hide it, Nathaniel.
So it’s not getting worse, then?
No. Not worse.
There was a pregnant pause as Nate tried, ever so gently, to remind them that they needed to move their asses.
Just less predictable, Ex finished, with a grim, humorless grin. And increasingly systematic.
With one last shudder and a grunt of effort, Ex banished those flickering jitters and fixed Nate with a look. “Let’s go.”
They kicked it into overdrive, chasing after the swarm on what felt like fully stabilized systems. Ahead, the Camelot was already dancing into position ahead of the swarm, burning off layers of writhing Synthoid matter as fast as they could.
We’re gonna figure this out, Nate told him.
Ex said nothing, only nudged their focus back to the swarm currently barreling for the moon of Fardrog. Nate didn’t know what else to do. In the blink of one Archon rumble over Jupiter (and one cup of tea at Nate’s childhood home), they’d gone from worrying about whether Nate was possessed to being pretty damn sure Ex was. But there wasn’t anything they could do about it right now.
Especially not as the Troglodan channels came aflutter with new activity, and a second swarm came slingshotting around the Trogarran sun.
“What the… shit?” Pierce said, like he honestly couldn’t tell if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
“Uhhh?” Snuffy added.
Nate didn’t blame either of them for the confusion.
“Boss?” Ramirez asked. “Are we looking at another big guy in system?”
Nate and Ex were already asking the same question of every bit of system sensory data they could pull. It didn’t make any sense. Swarms didn’t split. And they sure as shit didn’t employ elements of tactics and surprise. It could’ve been pure coincidence—two separate swarms converging on the Trogarra system at the same time from different angles—but that was astronomically unlikely. Unless they were being directed by a presence of another caliber entirely.
He closed his eyes, searching for that eerie wrongness he’d felt twice before.
He couldn’t feel an Archon here.
Not besides the one inside Ex’s head, at least.
But there was the second swarm—right there—looking maybe even bigger than the first, rounding out from behind the sun and all of its handy interference like they knew damn well how to catch the sentients with their pants down.
Another coincidence?
It didn’t matter now.
Nate gauged distances, weighing their options. Not enough time to get there on sublights. Not enough clearance between the new swarm and the assembled Troglodan armadas to get a clean shot with any of his FTL armaments, either.
“Dammit,” he muttered to himself. Then, to Ramirez, “Can you tell the clan leaders to get their ships the hell out of the way?”
“Trying, Cap,” Ramirez answered.
If the steady stream of Troglodan curses and the walls of unbudging Trog dreadnoughts were any indication, he wasn’t getting all that far, but there was nothing for it. Nate and Ex pushed the noise aside and left it to Ramirez.
“Perhaps if we deploy the bait rig…” Lundquist thought aloud, dropping the intended location on Nate’s HUD.
“Do it,” Nate said. The bait rig was another project he and Lundquist had been toying with, based on Lundquist’s hypothesis that the Synth’s primary sensing mechanisms were likely attuned in one way or another to the forces of gravitation. Nate didn’t especially believe their stupendously powerful gravitonic array was going to do much here, but if Lundquist said it, it was good enough.
He busied himself with the things he could control, eyeing the closer of the two swarms, taking his own gut measure of how fast the Camelot could burn it down even as Ex crunched the numbers and confirmed.
“Dammit,” he whispered again, frustration swelling at their controlled, surgical job gone awry, their missed attempt to annihilate the swarm without survivors for cleanup, their complete failure to sniff out a second swarm headed for the system.
Nothing for it, he echoed internally, calming the noise.
Then he braced himself, aiming as best he could for the space between the Trog armada and the second swarm, and made a solo q-jump across the system.
