Origins
05 Nov 2016EMFDeathPenguin
She comes to stand by me as I watch the mining lasers bore into the rock.“Shouldn’t smoke those,” she chides. There’s a smile hiding there.
“A lot of things I shouldn’t do. Do em anyway. And: I have help.”
It’s a lame retort and we both know it. She’s just trying to make me smile, but I’ve a sour mood today. Besides, it’s true. The nanomachines the docs injected me with repair my lung tissue as fast as the cigarettes destroy it. I can feel them in there, in the dark, doing their thing.
“You’re thinking about him again.”
It’s not a question. But my silence is still an answer.
“Asteroid depleted,” chimes the computer.
I hit a few buttons on the Micro panel. The lasers disengage and the Anaconda adjusts to face a new asteroid. The brown dwarf close by irradiates the bridge in a strange purple light.
The computer pipes up again. “Preparing limpet drone.”
I reach down and pick up the glass of brandy poised on the command panel.
“That the stuff from Lave?” she asks.
“It is.”
Her laugh is full, almost girlish. My heart flip-flops. She always did do that to me.
“Remember when we had that for the first time?” Her voice is so full of life. I almost look over. Instead, I just nod.
“You nearly stumbled into that weird fella’s Asp. He had you convinced he just wanted to take you on a short trip to a nearby neutron star. I came out of the bathroom and ran down to the flight deck. Didn’t even pay the bar tab. Sent the MP’s after me.”
I chuckle. “We had some good times. You were so trusting.”
I feel something like her hand on my arm.
“And you were so kind. Despite your cynicism. Especially back home.”
Outside, the lasers chew into the rock and the limpets grab the fragments. The movement is rhythmic, slow, and mesmerizing.
“I haven’t thought about New America in a long time,” I say.
“Remember those giant bees I had as a girl?”
This time I do laugh. Ridiculous things, big as Labradors, and just as gentle.
“Scared me to death the first time I saw them,” I say, “but then the one you used to call Envoy Many Feet nuzzled his face into my armpit while I was on your old couch. Tried to curl up against me. And the other one” – I snap my fingers – “no, don’t tell me, I’ll remember… ah yeah: Representative Fuzzy Back. He started to lick my feet.”
“They loved you. Always.”
“I know.”
I take another sip of brandy. The nanomachines are so fast I can barely get buzzed anymore. Damn it.
Her hand probes my robotic left arm.
“You didn’t opt for a cosmetic model?”
I shake my head. It’s not that I couldn’t afford one of the fancy life-like ones (or even a 3D-printed replacement arm); I could afford hundreds of them.
“Cosmetic arms don’t usually carry modified embedded firmware capable of overriding a ship’s power distributor limitations.”
Her voice is a whisper. “Pirates.”
I nod. “Pirates.”
“Why?”
I stare at the weird light of the dead star ahead of me.
“Because I needed to learn from them. Their tactics. Their methods. How they think and move.”
I pause and add: “Because he used to be one of them. Before he became… something else.”
What I don’t say is I can still hear the screams of the innocent traders over the comms as Archon Delaine and his Kumo Crew laid waste to convoy after convoy. What I don’t tell her is how he enjoyed watching my heart break again and again and again as his raiders bore down on people just trying to make a living.
But he wasn’t entirely without honor. A strange man, and definitely an enemy. But I nonetheless, I owe him.
“One night, their leader placed a glass of this very brandy in my hand and told me he knew I was no pirate. And that he should kill me right there.”
“What did he do?”
“He then told me a story.”
“About him. About –”
“Difcan.”
A long silence. The lasers hum.
“The next day was the first day of combat training.”
“How long?”
“Two years. Every day. I got so used to escape pods that I had names for them. Josephine was the one in the Cobras, Paulette was the one in the Couriers, Amanda was the one in the Asps.”
Emergency messages and broken canopies and the sound of my own breathing as the Pirate King assaulted me again and again. And through every beating, after every day, all I could think was if I’d only known this shit before. And the next day I’d try again. And fail again.
Until one day.
“The day I beat him, Archon threw me a party. Told me I was free to live in his space, provided I never gave up the hunt.”
“And so you’re here.”
I nod. “So I’m here. In Anarchy space, mining for ship upgrade materials. These engineers are… demanding.”
Lavian brandy burns like a motherfucker.
Her voice behind me is barely audible.
“Do you ever think about her?”
I take a long swallow and try to hold back the laughter. I think it would startle her. And maybe more than that; maybe I’m surprised at my own reaction.
Think of her? How can I think of anything but her?
I put down the glass. Pour myself some more.
“I remember when she was seven and that dumbass teacher of hers called us into the school to show us the holo-memes she was making in class. You remember that?”
“I do,” she says.
“That damn penguin. Killing all those tigers and spider-things and crab-monsters. You were disturbed, as I recall.”
“It was a disturbing holo-meme.” Her tone is defensive.
“I thought it was cute, actually.”
“Yeah, I know. You said so.”
“Do you remember what Sarah said when the teacher told her to explain it?”
My little girl with the baby blues. Dark hair straight and long like her mother’s Those bright, sharp, intelligent eyes looking straight at me and her no-nonsense answer.
“She said: Daddy, it’s obvious. It’s a death penguin.”
My voice hitches as a memory hits me.
I’m sitting in the Cobra III Archon gifted me when I left. Sitting outside Andreas City, just outside of hailing range. No idea what to do next. Not noticing that I had drifted into the station’s range…
I laugh it off.
“Death Penguin. Fucking hilarious.”
“What about me?” she asks. Her voice has that lilt I know so well when she’s hopeful but afraid.
“My love, you know that answer.”
“Tell me, then.”
The lasers bore into the rock, making it melt.
It was our first real trip as a family. A new Python, barely outfitted. But Sarah was so excited to get out and see the bubble.
Felicity Farseer had been a friend of a friend, the associate of a professor I knew and shared an office suite with at Jameson Memorial. Told me to take the Python out there to see her; that she could upgrade its jump range to something extraordinary.
Sarah’s eyes lit up when she heard about it. I knew she dreamed of being an explorer, much to her mother’s dismay. I didn’t tell them that the visit to Farseer was the first step in making that ship into something I would give Sarah when she graduated college. It was going to be my present to her, a gift that I had planned to give her to usher her into the life she dreamt of.
When we took off from the planet, everything seemed fine. The ship hummed like she was happy and content. We exited orbital cruise.
That’s when it happened. When HE happened.
Difcan. Pulling me out of supercruise.
And then the assault. Everything happened so fast. Shields down, hull integrity shredding, the computer screaming at me when modules shut down.
We tried to get Sarah into the escape pod. I knew there would only be time to save one of us. Michelle knew the same thing. We almost had her in.
And then the canopy blew. None of us were in our Remlok suits.
“My dear, to this day I have no idea how I ended up in that pod. I remember Sarah’s body slamming into me, my back hitting something hard, and all of a sudden my left arm was on fire. The pod’s hatch was clamped down on it, grinding through the muscle. I could smell my own blood and see through the pod’s viewport. But my sight was weird. Limited.
And still she held my hand. You were gone; I couldn’t see you. But I could see Sarah. She held on until… until…”
I don’t know all the science to space. I’ve stared at a thousand stars, looked into the hearts of black holes, and all I know is that, out in the black, all bets are off.
Some people say death in space is quick. That the body freezes instantly. That there is no pain. Others contend that the person’s blood boils inside them first. That it’s agony. All I know is that I never let go of my daughter’s hand. My left arm severed as the hatch churned through it, but my damn hand never let go of hers.
And I saw her go.
You’re still conscious in escape pods. The Long Sleep doesn’t set in right away. I floated among the debris.
And then I saw him. He positioned his python right next to me. I saw his helmet turn toward me, and then he turned about and was gone.
I drifted.
Darkness. Untold time.
I woke in the pod once. Fully awake. Something was outside. Large and strange and shaped like nothing I’d ever seen. Green lights glowed at its center.
Thargoid.
I could sense it reach into my mind. Like fingers rubbing into my brain, invading my very soul.
And I started to cry. Not because I feared death or pain – I cried because I knew this thing was going to kill me, and I would never get my revenge on him. It was in that moment that my revenge was born, and I wept for its death like I would weep for the death of my family.
The only way I can describe what happened next still seems like total gibberish. The thing outside – the thing in my mind – nodded. In my mind. Some psychic stamp of approval transferred.
And then darkness again.
Shortly after, Archon found me.
“He almost sold me to a slaver, you know.” I say. “But I guess he saw something in me.”
He saw the murder in my heart. Like the Thargoid did.
Her voice comes directly by my ear. “Be careful, my love. Those who go through hell either get through to the other side, or they become it. Don’t become the monster you hunt.”
I finally turn to her.
But of course, she’s gone. All I see is my reflection in the glass of the bulkhead. My helmet is off, and I can see the mechanical eye that replaced my old one. Space claimed my eye the day it took my family.
Now I look like… like something else.
I’m sitting outside Andreas City when the station hails me.
“Unidentified Delacy, squawk ident or prepare to vacate the premises.”
I think of Envoy Many Feet.
I hit the comms button. “My name is EMF…”
“Yes?”
And Sarah. Sarah’s hilarious killer penguin.
“My name is EMFDeathPenguin.”
A brief pause.
“Very well. Delacy Echo Mike Foxtrot, welcome to Andreas City.”
Gotta love Anarchy space.
I turn back to watch the lasers finish with the asteroid. They’ve cut it in half. I light up another cigarette and laugh.
“I’m going to find you,” I say to him. “I’m going to find you.”
For my inheritance is the dark between the stars. And my purpose is death.
“I am Hell,” I whisper to the man that killed my family, across the lightyears.
I breathe in the smoke and feel the nanomachines. Doing their thing.
In the dark.