Hollow Place

Maria

Date: 18 October 2830

Maria fought to blast a Seeker to oblivion at close-range with slow projectiles. She wished she could get back out of proximity of the thing to where her weaponry would actually do some good against it, but no such luck was forthcoming. The Cybrid was just too smart for that. Barring a lucky EMP strike, Maria would have to wait for Delithita (currently occupied with a pair of Adjudicators) to turn and blast the vermin off her.

Maria instead through a quad-EMP shot at one of Del's targets, knocking the thing's shields down and allowing the full fury of her friend's massive armaments to strike the enemy's bare hull. The Adjudicator became a pretty blue-white fireball that rivaled the intense Mercurian sun in intensity.

Icey's Gorgon was pinning an Executioner helplessly against a crater wall, taking the bug-shaped vehicle's heavy battering with grim determination. "Ice, crouch," Maria ordered, but it was unnecessary as the Gorgon dipped to throw a pair of Shrike missiles into the larger vehicle's belly. The Gorgon became a black silhouette against white as the Exec's reactor, too, went critical.

Seeing Del still dueling it out with the other Adjudicator, Maria cursed silently and turned on the Seeker, firing a shot without aiming.

She smiled. She always did better against Seekers when she just fired offhand. The Seeker in question tumbled end-over-end as missile explosions severed its legs.

"Nice shot," Icey noted, as he helped Del finish the Adjudicator.

"Picking up a comm burst from the Seeker's carcass," Del said. "Human code patterns!"

Maria drove the snow-white Apocalypse into the shade of the crater rim as she brought her scanners to full resolution, playing them over the wreckage. "Hmm. How about that. The Cybrids had a human transponder on the thing. I bet they wanted to use it to confuse our IFF systems, but we caught them before they left their escort."

"They know about us by now," Icey's voice said calmly.

"Likely."

"Well, I'd like to examine the wreckage," Del said. Maria flicked the affirm button on the comm, and she and Icey stood guard over Del as she dropped from the belly of her Executioner and entered the Seeker's debris field. She vanished underneath a pile of shattered structural elements, and an instant later stood up straight and waved vigorously. "Trojan Horse! Dead." The flash of Del's empistol reflected briefly off the burnished metal. "Deader now."

Maria closed her eyes. The damned Cybrids had obviously captured some survivors and sucked their brains to make use of them. Why they felt they needed infiltrators on Mercury, which had been wiped pretty well clean of human presence, was beyond her though.

"Cremate the poor fool and let's get back home," Maria said softly.

-----

Date: 11 May 2834

Estri grimaced as Tycho immediately vanished upon the task force's return to Fantasma, but then she expected it. Her friend was one of the legendary-- on Mercury, at least-- Ghosts, and he was sure they had a lot to catch up on. He went to Ops with Delithita to discuss the current situation in the colony, which Estri gathered was not so great. Their leader had died recently, it seemed, and she'd seen Tycho's face go white when he heard the news. With murmured condolences, she'd decided to leave him in the company of his friends and have a look around this colony which should not even exist.

She looked around what was referred to as Level Two, which seemed to consist of little more than a big vehicle bay with peripheral facilities, wondering just how the Ghosts had managed to get their hands on so many Cybrid vehicles.

She looked over to the gold-painted Shepard in the corner and blinked as it pointed its blaster cannon at her. "Good day," came from the vehicle, and insanely she wondered if she was hallucinating again.

"Um, hi," she said. "Are you... um... that Shepard over there?" The voice was artificial, and did not seem to be a comm transmission. She instantly regretted the foolish question, but was surprised anew when the vehicle responded.

"Yes, this is I." The blasters waggled again. "I am Ajax. And you?"

"Dunk-- um, Estri." Dunkelzhan was her old name with the Union, and though she had spectacularly severed ties with them, force of habit often made her start to say the old name.

"Your sensor profile is intriguing," the Shepard said conversationally.

Estri, whose gaze had wandered over to a Bolo that seemed to be looking at her with a curious expression, looked back at Ajax angrily. "What of it?"

"Testy are we? Hmm. I think I know where you came from." When Estri did not reply, Ajax continued. "You seem to be pretty well chewed up by nanites. I think... that particular alteration is what the Black Death Union received awhile back to cure some plague."

"Yes, I was with the Union once."

"They let you go? Fascinating."

"They didn't, really."

"You went AWOL from the Union? Hold on, I have to downgrade my estimate of your intelligence in my database."

"You shut up, damned glitch. I've had nothing but trouble from your kind!"

The Shepard's blasters twitched from side-to-side. "Oh? Those nanites saved your life, remember."

Estri glared angrily at the Shepard, and stalked past it. "They took a lot more than they gave me."

As she left, she heard a female voice reproaching the Shepard, and she did not look back. It sounded like it had come from the Bolo.

Talking HERCs. Rude talking HERCs. What had she gotten herself into?

She wandered out of the vehicle bay, locating what looked like a major corridor running a hundred meters straight through the level. Estri took the corridor to the end, and seeing a door marked "Main", stepped inside.

It was a lift, and it creaked alarmingly as she stepped over to the control panel. It had only five lights and a manual control pad, and when she touched it it dropped alarmingly at a full two-fifths gravity... putting her in freefall. She yelped and let go of the manual, and the lift screeched (loudly) to a halt.

She looked out the narrow window to see blank stone, muttered a few rude things as she pressed the control again, more carefully this time. The lift slid downward at half the previous rate, still unpleasant, but at least under control. It dropped to the bottom of the shaft and stopped. She pressed the control to open the door and found herself in a corridor three hundred meters in length, with a light at the end.

A couple people were traveling the distance between the lift and the opposite end, and she flagged one of them down. It was a young man with a drab, brown uniform covered with machine oil. "What's down there?" she asked, pointing down the corridor.

"Where'd you come from?" he mumbled, and by his breath she could tell that he'd had more than a few. "Level Four. Garden. The Deep End. So forth."

"Okay, thanks..." she said softly as the man shuffled past, wondering what he'd meant by Deep End. She had to be off it to have come here, so she'd fit right in...

-----

The Deep End was a bar. She'd chuckled when she saw the bartender, a grouchy fellow that looked more likely to spit in your cup than fill it, pushing a far-bigger man off a stool and yelling at him. "You idiot, you tryin' to kill yourself? Go get sober and don't let me see you here for a week."

The man's cybernetic eyes and traceries of Cybrid wiring turned to her and she felt a knot in her stomach. "You're new here," he said.

Estri nodded. "Yes, I came in with Tycho."

"Mmm. I'll give you water, since a visitor deserves better than the swill I put out here." He turned his mutilated eyes away from her and she sat down at the bar without looking back at him.

Estri, a quiet, female voice sounded in her ear. She looked around but saw no one close by, and the only women in the bar were with a group of men in the back. Estri dismissed the voice as the bartender placed a glass of water in front of her. She drank, raising an eyebrow. It was good water, with a faint sulfurous taste and tiny carbon dioxide bubbles.

Estri, the voice repeated. Go to the door behind the bar.

"You hear that?" Estri said. The bartender looked at her, puzzled. "Woman's voice."

"Nope," he said, and turned away, ignoring her.

Behind the bar, now! the voice said in a commanding tone even Annie would have admired. It was a voice used to being obeyed, and Estri mumbled a "Yes ma'am" reflexively and went around the bar.

"What'd'you think you're doing?" the bartender demanded, half-turning toward her with a pair of liter bottles in either hand.

Estri looked at the back wall and noticed a door cut into a jagged projection of stone. "Something's calling me."

"Lady, you're looking at the door to Ghost Wolfe's place. I don't know what it is, but if Del catches you down there, she'll probably disembowel you. Repeatedly."

Estri did not reply. She walked through the door, ignoring the bartender's exasperated sigh.

She squeaked as a trapdoor opened under her feet and she began to fall down a black shaft. She reached out to stop her fall, and Mercury's low gravity served her well as she reached out and grabbed the tunnel's walls.

She dangled there for a moment, shaking. This place was nasty!

"Let go," the voice said.

"Who are you?" Estri shrieked, trying and failing to still her shaking long enough to get the purchase necessary to climb back up.

There was no response. Estri's hand slipped, and she screamed as she fell again, this time unable to stop herself.

Up in the bar, the bartender shook his head as Estri's Doppler-shifted cry faded.

-----

Estri struck the ground on her butt, the breath exploding from her lungs as the impact reverberated through her enhanced skeleton. She bounced to her feet and looked around wildly.

There was an airlock door with a status light blinking white to her left.

"I'm here anyway," she muttered, and opened the airlock and stepped in.

She decided the other side would not be in vacuum, since it was deep, deep underground and there would be little use for an airless room down here when one could use Mercury's natural vacuum closer to the surface. The status light blinked white on the inner airlock door, and Estri opened it and stepped inside.

She looked around, puzzled. There was a stone table in the center, with a chessboard in the center. No game was set up; an array of pieces sat in rows on each side of the board.

A chair sat on either side of the table, and there was a smaller table with a deck of cards in the center on the opposite side of the room.

Estri felt something in the room, a sense of emptiness.

Ghost Wolfe, she recalled. The leader who had recently been killed. This had been her place.

Estri turned to go, but something indefinable stopped her.

She was welcome here.

It was like the Wolf Pack headquarters on Mars, when she had joined with them three years ago after her rescue. Those were hospitable people-- most of the time-- and though she had been the newest of their force, she knew that she was a part of them. Annie, the grand master of the Pack, had told her time and again that no matter what her origins, when she took the oath of service, she was one of them forever.

This was good, since she was certainly not welcome among the Black Death Union anymore.

Not really noticing she was doing it, she pulled the nearest chair out and flopped her long, lean frame into it. The Union. She grimaced. Such delightful people, if they could even be called people anymore. The wonderful nanites that made them so powerful, so superhuman, also stole what it meant to be human. They had been taking the nanites to boost their strength, not realizing until too late that the treatment stole something vital.

Few escaped the Union, and those that did usually ended up dead awhile later as they realized just how empty their lives had become... and ended said lives. While Estri knew that she was only in the beginning stages of the Change, she realized that she would become a hollow, robotic shell of a human being before too much more time had passed.

The Cybrids had done their level best to hasten the process, and had intended to convert her into a Trojan Horse, but they had not got to it when the Pack had smashed them and rescued her and a few other unfortunates.

She appreciated the rescue, but knew that it only prolonged the torture.

She stared at the chessboard, with the two ranks of pieces staring at each other from their starting positions--

"What...?" she said softly. She had been certain--

She shook her head. Hallucinations again. The damned nanites were starting to steal her mind.

She didn't want to become a damned robot.

She touched the white queen's knight, pushed it into a space in front of the queen's rook's pawn. The move left a little hollow in the white formation.

She stared at the empty square. "That's what's going to happen to me," she whispered. The pieces of herself cast aside, leaving a hollow, empty shell.

Not you, the voice said, and she cursed as she tried to ignore the maddening hallucination. You are destined for greater things.

-----

A few hours later she awakened, her face wet with tears. She'd cried herself to sleep, she noted with detachment. What a surprise, she thought sarcastically.

She'd do better to wander in front of a pissed-off Executioner, she told herself bitterly. But no. She had to face her fate bravely, until she reached some point where bravery-- and anything else-- was irrelevant. She knew her emotions were fading away, leaving cold, mechanical efficiency in their wake.

Fool, the imaginary voice said kindly, and Estri looked down toward the stone floor. She frowned deeply. Perhaps she was being a fool. Perhaps she should just let the Change proceed without worrying about it, and enjoy what she could of life while she had the capacity to enjoy anything.

She looked at the chessboard again, where a black pawn faced down her knight. She blinked a few times, sighed, and went to the airlock.

The climb was easy in the low gravity, and she came out into the back of the bar to face down a rather annoyed-looking young man in the black uniform of a Ghost. "Just who the hell do you think you are?" he said in a cold, cold voice. "Don't you know what that place is?"

Estri looked at him, puzzlement showing in her turquoise eyes. "An underground room?"

The Ghost gave her an irritated scowl. "Yeah. An underground room. Don't let me catch you there again. Don't let any of the other Ghosts catch you there, especially Delithita."

"She's got a temper, so I hear." Tycho's enthusiastic stories about the Antipode came to mind, and the name Delithita was associated with various forms of destruction.

"Heh. Understatement. One of her pastimes is throwing people against walls."

"Okay..." And this was the leader of the Ghosts now? Annie would immediately lose respect for any leader who lost her temper on a regular basis. Leaders led, she always said. When they got mad, they made errors and did not lead effectively.

"You don't approve, eh?"

Estri didn't reply.

"Hey, that's alright. Just don't mess around in the Sanctum, alright?"

Estri gave a little shrug and left the bar. Her first day and she was already in trouble with the local authorities.

-----

01 October 3500

Estri walked down the tunnels of Fantasma alone, like she had done for centuries. Of the days of the 'Siege, she was the only one who survived, besides the Ghosts, who were gone.

She'd decided not to maintain contact with them after the Shift. They had nothing to offer her but reminders of a past she was not interested in recapturing. A past when she was human.

Oh, she still looked human enough; the nanites made few visible changes. Her blue-green eyes were still blue-green and looked fully human... until one looked closer. Then the tiny, tiny wiring elements and crystalline sensor beads were visible, drawn in mathematical spirals around her irises.

Her body had some subtle differences; being somewhat taller and more athletic than she had been. She'd put on a few extra centimeters as her bones were replaced by metallic structural elements. The muscles that worked said bones were tighter, faster, with neurons that transmitted their commands via thin threads of superconductor fiber.

But looking in the mirror, she did not notice any difference, except that when she looked, she saw something that was not her own.

She'd fought to maintain her self, but had failed. She stared in a mirror trying to remember what exactly it was she was supposed to see that mattered, but could find nothing.

She crossed the side tunnel to Level Twelve's primary residential section, where she lived. The levels past Four were all arranged in a stack some five hundred meters farther into the rock from the old Fantasma, and extended down from Five (which was even with Four) to Thirty (which was several kilometers lower yet.) Maria's old Sanctum remained, and no one had quite dared to disturb it in centuries.

Estri took a measured stride past the doorway to Twelve's core, finding herself where she needed to be, within five centimeters of the same spot she paused to examine the corridor every day for the past ten years.

Only this time, someone was waiting.

"Estri," the man said with a mocking bow. Estri froze, preparing for combat status. "A fully Changed warrior," the man said in an amused voice. "Why, I haven't seen one of you since Maria killed off the last of the BDU force back at the old Mining Guild base..."

"Who are you; what do you want?" Estri said in a monotone. This was danger. Deadly danger.

"Information."

"I have none that would be of interest to you. Good day."

The man took her arm, and she found herself quite unable to escape the man's grip. This was intriguing, since she was able to brush aside the average human effortlessly. "I think you do."

"Specify."

"You were down in Maria's Sanctum back in the old days, weren't you." It was not a question.

"I was. This is irrelevant. You waste my time at your peril."

The man took her hand and gave her a mocking, chivalrous bow. "Come now, you're immortal. Hasn't that taught you patience?"

"No."

"Anyway," the man said, brushing aside Estri's terse response, "I know you were in the Sanctum once. I heard the Ghosts talking about it some fifty years later."

"You wish to know what happened there."

"That would be nice."

"What is in it for me?"

The man showed his teeth in what someone might have called a smile... if they hadn't seen the eyes. "Your life."

"Do you imagine I find that of value?"

"You would not have suffered your existence for this long otherwise, no?"

Estri did not reply. She was not particularly eager to terminate her existence, but neither then was she interested in expending any particular energy in maintaining it.

"You will cooperate?"

"This is what happened," she said, and preceded to chronicle minute by minute everything she had experienced then. The man seemed satisfied. "Now," she said quietly. "Who are you?"

The man shook his head. "Do you imagine I would tell you?"

"I suppose not.”

The other gave her a small bow. “Good day, Miss Estri." The man walked away down the tunnel.

Estri looked at her hand and raised an eyebrow. She began wiping her hand with a small kerchief from her pocket, and placed the cloth back in when she was done.

"Fool," she whispered, as she turned and headed for the lift that would take her to the public science lab. The man had given her a genetic sample with the touch of his hand, and she had a certain interest in what the genetic analysis would yield.

-----

Several days later, she was studying the MercNet archives and came up with a name for the face. It was a minor beaurocratic functionary from the Core. She raised an eyebrow as she noted the man's lack of family; his parents had both been killed in "accidents" twenty years previously. He had no wife or children, few friends to judge by his psych profile, no one who would pay him any notice.

But then, that's exactly what the Immortal Brotherhood looked for.

Her comm system beeped. She stared at it. It had not been used in years; she had little interest in conversing with, well, anyone.

"Identify," she said curtly to the machine.

"Unknown origin," the computer said in a voice that matched her own.

"Allow," she said.

"Ah. Estri."

This was the first thing that had piqued her interest in centuries. "Ghost Wolfe. Interesting. What is the purpose of this call?"

The other woman smiled faintly. "How would you like your humanity back?" she said softly.

The comm winked out, leaving Estri staring at the blank screen.

When she finally got around to noticing, she realized that her pulse was not at its regular sixty beats per minute that it had faithfully kept time to for six hundred years.

Her heart was beating faster.

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