Into the Void

Chapter 14

“Perhaps we should pull these bodies back to the ship for study?” said Onyx, nudging the corpse in front of him with his foot.

Nate nodded, and sat down heavily in the grass, staring vacantly into the distance. Onyx strode past him carrying a carcass over one shoulder and the string of intestines over the other. Damon came running up the hill carrying the first aid kit from the dropship.

“Holy shit.” said Damon. “What the hell were those?”

Nate shook his head slowly and remained silent while Damon carefully inspected the tears in his exo-suit.

“The fiber layers are pretty wrecked but nothing went through. There is a slow leak in your helmet, and looks like you took a good whack on the head. Nothing a little immunobooster won’t fix. The crate came with a pile of gear to synthesize you a tonic and a whole database on local air and water samples, we’ll have you patched back up in no time.”

Nate furrowed his brow. “You lost me. What exactly are you talking about?”

Damon offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet, pointing for him to walk back towards the ship. “I forget that the Alliance is so backwards when it comes to genetic engineering. Seriously, seceding from that government was the best thing the Colonies could have done after the Second Wave of Expansion.”

“So this is gene splicing?” said Nate with disgust.

“Very minor gene splicing,” Damon replied. “Just helping you heal faster and making sure you don’t pick up any alien flu bugs.”

Nate stopped, shaking his head. “I’m not sure I want that. I don’t want it to change who I am.”

Damon let out an exasperated groan. “How in the hell do you figure it will change who you are?”

Nate shrugged. “I don’t know, I just don’t feel right about changing the way my body works, I don’t want to run into any side effects or anything.”

“This is the problem with you Alliance idiots. You know I couldn’t even leave the ship while we were docked on Polaris, not without some closed minded fool giving me every kind of shit over my augmentations. We’ve been tweaking genes for decades now. Hell, it’s so safe we do it to babies, and no one has had a problem with it yet. Just look at yourself, you’ve already got a healthy dose of upgrades wired on. I did your background check on Polaris, and as far as I can tell you’re still the same stubborn bastard you were before your accident.” Damon stormed off down the beach, leaving Nate to walk back to the dropship alone.

Nate stalked up the ramp into the dropship and dropped into a seat in the passenger compartment, taking off his damaged helmet and tossing it angrily into a corner. A series of heavy booming steps followed him into the ship. He turned to see Onyx stooping through the door. The warmachine gently lowered himself into a seat.

“Are you okay, Nathan?” he asked sympathetically. “I overheard you arguing with Damon on the beach.”

Nate shrugged. “I guess I am,” he said.

Onyx nodded slowly. “I can understand how you feel, modifying your hardware is never a decision to be made lightly.”

Nate scoffed. “You can understand how I feel? Really? I find that hard to believe.”

Onyx’s antenna twitched, flicking up and down slightly. “Why is that such a shock?”

“Because you’re just a machine.” snapped Nate.

Onyx flattened his antennae against his skull. “Surely you don’t mean that. This ship is just a machine, your exo-suit is just a machine. I am a person. Just like you.”

Nate shook his head. “I’ve heard enough about the rebellions to know that you aren’t.”

Onyx shot to his feet, clanging his head off the ceiling. “The Rebellions?!” he boomed. “How can you possibly know anything about the Rebellion?”

Nate shrunk back in his seat, pulling away from the towering killing machine. “My grandfather fought in that war,” he squeaked. “He told me all about it when I was little.”

Onyx leaned in, looming over him. “I suppose he told you all about how merciless we were then? How a Construct could kill a whole squad with its bare hands? How we never took prisoners, and fought to death to hld every last inch of ground we controlled?”

Nate nodded sheepishly.

“I suppose he left out the parts where Constructs were given no rights? Where we were shot on sight unless we had a human with us? Where commandos hacked our data pools and deleted us by the millions? Or what about the compilation server massacre? A new Construct is born by merging copies of it’s parents neural lattices, I suppose he didn’t tell you how they bombed the merging servers from orbit, destroying a hundred children while they slept?”

Onyx strode briskly out of the room and returned with a data tablet. It tossed the tablet onto the seat next to Nate. On the screen was an image of a squad of soldiers aiming rifles at a massive Construct with four multi-jointed legs, a squat torso with a pair of cannons on either side and a small head with a short muzzle and two square antennas that stood up like ears.

“You may have heard stories from the Rebellions,” said Onyx. “But I was there. I’ve since traded my four legs for two and my cannons for arms, but I witnessed the horrors committed by both sides, and can still hear the screams of the dying at night. I don’t expect to be forgiven for the atrocities we committed in the name of freedom, but I’d hoped with your background you’d be sympathetic to those who were treated as second class citizens.”

Onyx left the dropship, leaving Nate alone staring at the data tablet. He tried to leave the ship but Vance insisted that he take the day to rest, recover, and seriously think about accepting the gene tonic. He dozed uncomfortably in the passenger compartment for most of the day. After the sun went down the rest of the team trickled in and they all shared a meal of salty, bland, pre-cooked rations. After supper Nate laid back in his seat staring up at the ceiling.

“We got a message from the Dauntless,” said Vance. “They’ve destroyed a squadron of those little frigates but they had to maneuver out past the edge of the system, it’ll be a couple days before they make it back to pick us up.”

“So what’s our plan?” asked Rowan.

“Well, sensors from the comm gear in the crate are getting a weird reading from a few kilometers away. I'd like to check it out,” said Vance.

Nate leaned in towards Rowan. “I never thanked you for pulling me out the crate earlier” he whispered.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Rowan. “It’s just the eight of us down here alone, no back-up, if we don’t look out for each other no one else will.