Crash Sights
Nari's gradual smile immediately sank into an expression of deep concern.
The question had caught her off guard, somehow. She knew the answer, sure. She just wasn't quite certain how to explain it to the liralen. Like, she knew where the portal was, but she hadn't gotten it working again, but she might have an idea how to, but...
"Maybe" was the word that escaped her lips.
"Maybe?" Visk repeated, his face painted with confusion.
Nari shrugged. "So, I...uh, I arrived here via a...portal or something. I'm not really sure. I know the way back to it, but there's a couple...problems."
She sat back, nervously wrapping her tail around her waist. "First of all, I'm not sure how the hell we get there without running into the swarms. I have no clue how common they are, how fast they move, and where they are; my only experience with them is the one I had with you."
"I can help with that."
"You can?" she asked, squinting her eyes at him. "Do they follow, like, a pattern or something?"
Visk shook his head. "No, it's basically what I was telling you while we were climbing. They kill me and then I know I have to go in a different direction."
Back at it with the dying shit. "Visk, you're not dying," she grumbled. "You're alive and well right here. If you die, you stay dead."
"You do?" Visk asked. "I don't."
"What exactly happens when you...uh..." - she raised two fingers of her wing-hands to form air-quotes - "'die'?"
Visk scratched his chin. "Well, I usually feel some sort of agonizing pain from whatever killed me, be that getting eaten alive by nanobots, falling off a cliff and destroying every bone in my body, or getting poisoned, and then my eyes open and I'm back before whatever decision I made that killed me."
"That's not dying," Nari said. "That's, like...I don't know, hallucinations of some kind? Whatever you're experiencing there, it's not real. Your brain is making up shit."
"Well then, how come I have yet to be eaten by swarms from your perspective? I can't just magically know where they are. I have to get killed by them and then I can avoid them at an earlier time."
"That's what I'm trying to figure out!" Nari shouted, her ears drooping as she realized she was yelling. She glanced over at the liralen, who was stony-faced, not seeming to have any strong emotional response to the uproar.
Fucking hell, Nari, that all-too-familiar voice in her head said. No wonder nobody wants to talk to you.
She blinked and stared meekly at Visk. "Sorry for yelling," she muttered. "I just...don't understand what you're talking about."
"Is my...dying thing not...normal?" the liralen asked, his voice nearly a whisper.
"Not that I'm aware of. You really experience that?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, I'm still not convinced that you're actually seeing the future or whatever," she said. "If you could, someone would've figured out how to do it already. Frankly, when we get out of here and get back to Nexus, you should probably get some sort of psychiatric evaluation."
"That being said," she continued, crossing her arms, "I don't have any better approach to avoiding the swarms than taking your word for it. So I'll...humor you for now. And I'm sorry you're going through that. Dying a bunch."
Visk nodded in agreement and acknowledgement.
"Nari," he said after a brief moment of silence. "You mentioned there's a couple of problems. What else?"
The nerian looked toward the ground. "The portal closed behind me."
"And you couldn't turn it back on?"
"Nope."
The two sat there quietly for another minute before Nari spoke up again.
"You said you crash-landed here in a pod. Were you able to see the open sky from where you landed?"
Visk glanced upward a bit in ponderous thought. "I think?"
"Can you take me there?" Nari asked. "I have an idea."
"The clearing is right past here."
The duo stood before an enormous double door, made of stone and carved with ornate paterns. Despite its size, each door had a chiseled handle at roughly arm height. Nari could also spot a motor and sensor above, but if they were functioning, they certainly didn't show it; the door remained shut in place even as they approached.
As they'd traveled through the ruin, Visk had filled her in on some of the details regarding his crash landing. Supposedly, the center of the facility was some sort of giant park, an artifical prairie kilometers across that didn't seem to serve any functional purpose. That surprised her, since the Precursors were generally known for their practicality, but this ruin had upended some of her ideas on who the Precursors were already, so she'd shrugged it off.
"This thing's a pain in the ass to get open," Visk said. "Last time I was here, I was getting chased by a swarm and had to shut it. It'll be easier with another person helping, though."
"Here's hoping we don't go two for two with that," Nari remarked.
With a nod, Visk moved over to the left side of the right door and put all four hands on the door in preparation to push it open. With his lower right hand, he gestured for Nari to take a position next to him and do the same.
"Okay, three, two, one," he counted. "Push."
Nari put as much might as she could spare into her arms and wings, applying pressure on the door. For a few minutes, it didn't seem like it would budge; however, after some considerable physical exertion, it made a loud creak and began sliding, getting jammed again after it'd opened up enough for them to squeeze past it.
A light breeze brushed over Nari's scales as the cool, fresh air of the outdoors washed over her, a welcome change from the dusty corridors of the ruin. It was twilight now, and the green daytime sky was beginning to fade to more cerulean hues as a few stars pierced the heavens.
In the dim light, Nari could vaguely make out the landscape before her. She and Visk stood on a vast crimson plain, red bushes and small groves of trees meandering across the grass. Sandy rocks and cliffs towered in the distance ahead of them, an odd spire extruding from the surrounding hills.
It was obviously artificial in nature, an enormous garden grown wild in the absence of its tenders. The field was surrounded on all sides by a wall of unfathomable proportions, circular in shape and interspersed with pillars, the bottoms of which were lightly misted in a pale green fog; the pinnacle of Precursor masonry on a scale never before seen by a sophont in the modern Prism Galaxy.
She gasped.
"So you wanted to check your 'net' thing, right?" Visk asked, snapping her attention out of her own thoughts.
"Oh, yeah...sorry," she sighed. "Just...distracted by the sights, I guess. What the fuck is this place?"
"You seem to know better than I do."
"Fair enough," Nari admitted. "This is just...this is going to make news headlines when we get back. Most Precursor ruins are nothing like this. It's like some sort of...ugh, I can't find the word."
"Sanctuary?" Visk suggested.
"Yeah, that's what I was looking for," the nerian nodded. "I feel like this place was designed with some kind of profound symbolic significance to it."
Vakko is never gonna fucking believe me.
"Cool," Visk said. "Well, I don't mean to rush you, but we're kinda on the clock here. Swarms could arrive at any time and without much warning, and that'll be even more of a concern if you wanna see the pod."
Right. She'd been telling the liralen about her plans as they'd made their way over here; she wasn't sure if this system had a Net connection, and if it didn't she reckoned the telemetry data from Visk's drop pod would be her best bet to figure out where the hell she was. Admittedly, she wasn't as good at that stuff as, say, Amaki, but she'd manage; in fairness, pretty much her whole life was depending on this, so she kinda had to.
"Okay," she said, snapping herself out of her thoughts. "Let me just pull up my holo."
She tapped a band on her right hand and two small projectors popped up, quickly latching onto her eyes and projecting a heads-up display into them. Gesturing with her fingers, she navigated its menus and made it to the settings screen, selecting "Net" to see if any network connections would pop up.
The Net was a difficult thing to explain, mainly because it wasn't just one thing, but a common term for several different networks. Originally envisioned as a way to connect the people of Prism, the original Slipnet had been rendered mostly unusable in the First Robot War, with the entire thing getting overrun by scripts and chatbots.
Nowadays, the most common use was peer-to-peer connections directly between machines, or intranets within companies. Those connections still needed to go through servers and routers to function, though, which were generally operated by various governments of the galaxy, with varying levels of interoperability. Comms buoys outside of slip gates generally functioned as system-level routers to connect to the wider network, and that's what she was hoping she'd be able to connect to.
Precursors willing, it'd be a Compact or Ku'rasil router, hopefully not Empire, and really hopefully not Lirune Federation. Even that'd be better than getting lost in space forever, though.
Her heart sank as a red X appeared on the display showing no connections available.
She gestured to refresh the page, and it searched again. After another minute of the screen's throbber spinning, it returned the red X again. No dice.
Shit.
She tapped the holo to turn it back off, then stared at Visk with an expression of disappointment.
"No dice. Where's your pod?"
The trek to the pod took half an hour. Visk had mentioned it was located in the center of the whole structure, but Nari had opted to just follow him as he made his way there - he seemed to know where he was going.
The center of the field was populated by yellowish-tan rocks the color of limestone, porous and alien, forming an intricate, tunneled landform much like a sponge that stretched out of the tranquil grasslands. The lack of foothills or any smooth transition to the different terrain suggested that this was an artificial structure, some sort of bizarre work of art by the Precursors.
The sides of the rock formation were filled with sandy caves and fissures. It was through one of these fissures that Visk had taken them; the tunnels quickly opened up to a strange clearing in the rocks, a vertical gap through which Nari could spot the eerie glow of a moonless sky.
In the center of the clearing was the pod.
It was clearly beaten up and had undergone a rough landing. If not for the sand, Visk probably wouldn't have survived the collision - piles of sand formed an impact crater of sorts around it, and much of the metal casing was bent and singed. Atop its roof, the minced remains of a parachute suggested a better outcome that had not come to pass.
Based on Visk's recollections, none of this was surprising to her. What was surprising to her was the logo emblazoned on the side of the pod. Taro Manufacturing.
Her employer.
What the hell did Taro have to do with crashing an innocent man into an unknown planet? They were an aerospace manufacturing company, mainly - their logo specifically being on the pod meant it was owned by them. As far as she knew, they weren't in the business of making people...disappear.
She decided it'd be better to keep quiet about this. There was still an undercurrent of slight distrust between her and Visk, and he could probably wait until getting back to SV-817 before finding out.
"So here it is," the liralen announced, gesturing to the wreck. "Not terribly intact. I don't know what you want to do with it."
"I have a few ideas," Nari said, booting up her holo scooting around the periphery of the pod until she found an entrance, a busted-open doorway with bent hinges. "Give me a few minutes."
With that, she stepped inside and got to work. First of all, since this was Taro, it'd be a good idea to record the serial number. She quickly located it to the side of the doorway - they were in the same spots on all Taro pods - and noted it down in a text editor in her holo.
Next up, she opened a menu on her holo to check for remote connections in the local area. She didn't like using a terminal for this like Amaki, opting to use a GUI instead; regardless, if she could get remote access to the pod's flight computer, she could download the telemetry onto her holo and bring it back home for smarter people than her to deal with.
Unfortunately, no dice - the connection screen came up empty. So that idea was kaput.
Maybe the network connection driver were just busted or something. She went a bit deeper into the pod, locating the user interface button on the wall of the main chamber, and gave it a press. Nothing happened.
Shit. Evidently the computer hadn't managed to fight the ground and win.
Her last idea was a bit of a Hail Mary. It wouldn't help her much when it came to getting off this planet, but it would maybe give some answers when she got back to civilization. Back by the door, a box protruded from the wall that contained the physical flight computer hardware. There was a screwdriver clipped to the side; she nabbed it and used it to unscrew the box, exposing the computer's innards.
Nari was no computer expert, but she'd worked with them enough to know what she was looking for. The hard drive was just dangling in the middle of the box, connected via a very loose wire to the motherboard; she disconnected it and stashed it in her backpack. She kept the screwdriver as well in case she needed it later.
Well, that was a bit of a disappointment. She sighed and turned to exit the pod, almost forgetting to grab her backpack as she slid out the doorway. "Okay, Visk, I didn't get much."
No response. "Visk?"
Nervously, she crept around the side of the pod to where the liralen had been standing and quickly realized why he hadn't replied. He appeared to be passed out on the floor, twitching slightly as if getting pinched.
"Visk? You ok?" she asked, running towards him and laying a hand on his side. She touched a wing to his face and rubbed it. Though he was clearly alive, he didn't seem to be conscious right now.
"Visk!" she said again, more stressed this time.
Right as she was about to start freaking out, the convulsing stopped and the liralen's eyes began to flutter open. Nari sighed in relief just as Visk's eyes shot open and he glared at Nari, his face an expression of deep seriousness.
"Swarms are coming," he stated. "We need to get out of here. Now."
Nari blinked in surprise, not quite immediately believing him yet. Frankly, she wasn't entirely sure that Visk's visions were real - there was a very real possibility he was just paranoid and slightly insane.
Regardless, once she'd opened her eyes again, the liralen was already running into the distance, making his way toward the tunnel out of the clearing. She couldn't afford to lose him, so ignoring any of her own personal reservations, she sprinted off after him.
"You're sure the swarm is actually coming in here?" Nari asked.
Visk turned his head. "Very sure!" he shouted.
Nari scoffed and glanced forward as the duo made their way back out into the open field. The twilight she'd seen it in before had long died down into the gloom of night; though the sky was moonless, some sort of purple aura in the sky softly illuminated the environment in an eerie glow.
Much brighter was a faint blue glow in the distance, about the size of one of the hills in this odd countryside. She quickly realized what the glow was, her certainty increasing as she noticed a faint rattle coming from its direction.
Swarm.
Thoughts swam through her head. How had Visk known about this? Surely his "visions" were just delusions. Had he snuck off while she was working on the pod?
Nah, he couldn't have. She'd barely spent any time in there. So what else could it be?
Besides the visions, of course. Those weren't real. They couldn't be. Everyone knew death was final, that time only flowed in one direction. These were the basic laws of the universe.
So why did the bastard keep predicting exactly where the swarms would be?
It'd taken them about half an hour to get to the pod from the doorway initially at a walking pace. With their current pace, they could probably make it in half that. She wasn't sure how fast the swarm moved - did they have 15 minutes? She surely hoped so.
Over the next few minutes, she barely kept up with Visk as he dashed through the crimson fields at a brisk pace she could barely match. Nerians had been bred for flight, so they had a very specialized type of endurance they were good at. Running like this was not that type.
As they continued, Visk spared a glance over his shoulder at Nari - and beyond her. His eyes widened. "Nari, you're gonna hate me. We need to go faster."
The nerian swore under her breath and looked back as well. Sure enough, the swarm was approaching rapidly, a cloud of chrome pellets about the size of a house speeding across the landscape. She'd never had this clear of a view of it; she wasn't sure if the full extent of it made it more or less terrifying.
Begrudgingly, she picked up her pace to match Visk's. Her legs were getting sore. She couldn't pull this off for much longer.
A bead of sweat ran down her face. She looked back toward Visk. The liralen didn't have much on him, just that grappling hook he'd used earlier...
Wait.
"Visk!" she hollered over the sound of the duo's footsteps. "Do you think the grappling hook could get us out of here quicker?"
He contemplated that for a moment, then shook his head. "Don't think so. It's too unwieldy; I think it'd just knock me over if I tried to use it on the ground." He looked forward toward the doorway. "It doesn't have too long of a range, either. It's only really good for crossing pits or climbing walls."
"Shit."
"Yeah."
The duo continued to run in silence for a few minutes, gently following the contours of the hilly terrain. The air was roughly room temperature, nice and comfortable, and the ghostly glow of the night sky softly illuminated the ground. It was almost tranquil, if not for the steadily increasing rattling noise behind their backs. Despite her best efforts, it was starting to stress Nari out.
Her heart pounding in her chest, she broke into a full sprint, desperately trying to close the gap between herself and the door, ignoring the pain in her muscles. As she passed Visk, she heard his footsteps grow quicker too, and soon he was beside her, stumbling slightly as he hopped over a tree branch.
The rattling was almost deafening by now. Nari didn't want to take a look this time.
Only a couple minutes from the doors now. Nari had pushed her tail up against her back, which wasn't great for her balance, but she wanted to minimize her length from front-to-back as much as she possibly could. As far as she could tell, every millimeter counted.
It felt like her scales were standing on end. Visk seemed comparitively nonchalant, but the way he ran indicated he wasn't entirely calm either. Nari pointed her pistol back in the direction of the escape pod and blindly shot in the direction she thought the swarm was; whether it hit anything or hurt anything it hit was anyone's guess.
With a final, panicked dash, the two finally reached their destination, slipping through the doorway clumsily. Before Nari could blink, Visk had swiveled around, grabbing the handle on the open door with all four hands; he dug his feet into the ground and leaned back with a grunt. Nari immediately set out to join in, pulling the lower part of the handle with her lower arms, and just barely avoiding smacking Visk in the head with her wing.
The doorway made a pained metallic groan and slammed into place, momentarily overpowering the rattle of the swarm outside. Just a moment later, the swarm hit, pinging against the door like a torrent of iron raindrops. The duo fell to the floor, out of breath from the exertion of closing the thing.
They sat in silence for several minutes. Nari had buried her head in her wings, and peeked out from behind her fingers; the door had held, and the dust they'd kicked up in the process had just about settled, as the patter of the swarm slowly dissipated and eventually disappeared.
"Well, I think we did in fact go two for two," Visk remarked.
"I hate it here," Nari mumbled.
Once she'd stopped hyperventilating, she let her wings down and peered up at Visk. "You're sure the door will hold, right?"
"The swarm's already left," he said. "I don't think there's any danger."
"Well, uh, we're safe for now then. Hopefully." The nerian sighed. "No dice on getting a Net connection, though. I do have one last idea to get us out of here. It's not what I wanted to do, but it might work, and I think it's our best bet to get out of here."
She crossed her lower arms and looked Visk in the eyes. "At this point, I'm willing to take that bet."