Celestial was laid out on a table in room 246-Eta, sublevel C, Valhalla I. Her eyes were dull. She would have looked asleep, if it weren't for the slowly blinking blue stripes on her face. Her mind awoke. Memories of the battle onboard the Aegis came back, rushing in an unstoppable cascade of data. She screamed, or did she? She could not tell. She could not see. She could not hear. All she knew was darkness as the memories faded. She tried to force herself to move, but couldn't. She heard a faint murmuring, deep in her skull. She concentrated, and finally made sense of the murmur. "StopStopStopStopStop..."
A faint buzzing in her skull appeared, like a hummingbird drilling into her scalp. She recognized an incoming transmission, but the sender code was a mystery. She immediately shut the link with a rude burst of static. Twenty seconds later, exactly, it was back, but this time it was just a message packet. She opened it cautiously, and scanned it thoroughly. It was not harmful, and she read the header. She quickly parsed the data, and ran the code. Immediately the murmur vanished and her eyes were able to see again. Her stripes regained their color, and she sat up. Her eyes glowed red. No one had the right to imprison her! No one! The door melted before the weight of her fury. She ordered the door to die, and the world blazed white hot as the door slithered downwards to puddle on the floor. The guard on duty had one panic-stricken look at her before she grasped him with her mind and sent him slamming into the ceiling to rain down in clumps of gore. She moved on.
More fools stood before her. She walked with a purpose, head erect. The soldiers stumbled backwards; no one expected her to keep moving towards a squad of men with fully automatic weapons. They raised the guns to fire, and the world erupted in a blaze of searing hot fire. The guns melted in their hands, charring them beyond recovery. The rounds within went off, spearing the soldiers with their own ammunition. Her laughter rose above the inferno of death, heat, and pain. Celestial was anything but gentle. 'Subtle as an orbital bombardment' her old trainer had said.
She proceeded to be subtle all the way to the control center.
Once there, she unleashed a new fury of death upon the people inside. Within the space of five seconds, all that was left was small piles of ash scattered about, some with metal puddles inside. She gave the room a last toss of her head, and the world exploded. Five shapes loped towards her, hunkered down and extremely menacing. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that it would be foolish in the extreme to burn them. They came closer, but did not fire. One stepped forwards with a grin on his face, for he was male, that much was fairly clear, and said the dumbest thing ever. Her fury rose again, and she flung him into a wall at the far end of the room. He muttered something derogatory about female banshees and got up. Celes was surprised that he could talk, let alone stand. The other four made no move to come closer, but her wrath was worked up. She 'lifted' a nearby slag heap and let it fly at the one on the left. He dodged and fired a single blast at it, rending it into shards and billowing smoke. The five moved together, communicating in a way she could not fathom. The one who had been flung at the wall erupted in flames as he rode a tail of fire towards her. Her attention diverted, the others moved in a phalanx to flank her. She 'blocked' the one with a large steel door, and his thud was most entertaining. That taken care of, she then turned to face the others. She saw their arms twisting, and realized they were slotting weapons away. She burned with anger at the thought that they had even dared to point a weapon at her. She wove into a blur, moving faster than the unaided eye could see. She struck, once, twice, three times she struck, and each blow met air. Her targets had moved, faster than an eyeblink. The stripes on her face burned like blue ribbons of fire, and her eyes became even more feral. The five rose into the air, whirled around and around at an ever-increasing speed before slamming together and crashing into a heap next to the other. She stood over them, considering what to do with them now that she had beaten them. The first one groaned, and sat up. She glared at him, and he just smiled back. They all stood, and one went over to the door and started welding various bits together and then smashing them.
The third's eyes glowed a soft blue, and she suddenly felt her anger melting away like snow after the first spring rain. She found her voice and asked a simple, yet elegant question:
"Who the hell are you?"
"We’re the Marauders. Come on, virago, it's time to get moving."
"Not without answers." Her memory slowly seeped back, and she remembered a niggle about Marauders.
"Wait...What you said your name was...Hawke, was it?" she asked of the first one.
"Yeah. That'd be me. Geez. Next time we go rescue someone, we wait to wake them up, okay?" This last she realized was directed towards the others.
"So that was YOU." Her anger started to rise, but the third one's eyes began to glow softly and it dissapated. She whirled on him. "Damnit, stop messing with my head!"
The last one, who hadn't yet spoken, broke his unsaid vow of silence. "Looks like you two are hitting it off nicely, Vince. Hawk, don't be an ass."
"Oh yeah? I haven't seen you exactly being mister perfect-rescue-plan-man yet, Bear. Whose idea was it to go randomly blowing holes in things to find her again?"
Bear just grunted and started blasting random bits of dangling electronics. Hawk wandered over to a console and started noodling around in the database.
"Well, Celestial--Do we call you virago or Celes?--looks like you've met the nutjob crew." He broke into a grin. "This man here with the glowing eyes is Vince. Thank God we have him around. Be a lot harder to rescue you if we didn't have his emotion-dampening abilities. We still don't know where he got them."
She bristled at that
"The fella making a mess out of the door we call Arc. He's the repair tech. Go figure. We're gonna need him to make it out alive."
Arc waved and went back to the door.
"The jerk on the console is Hawk. Damn fool can't keep himself from hacking. He apologizes for the offense you took to him liberating you, don't you Hawk?"
Hawk looked anything but apologetic. He flashed another grin and went back to setting off random alarms on Naval bases.
"He's the computer ace. Need something done, and he'll do it. Not without sufficient wit though. Wish they'dve fixed that bug."
"I'm Jace, the CO of this band of misfit cyborgs. Enough chitchat though. HAWKE! Get me a route to her ship. Now."
Hawk flapped his hand at Jace and got back to work. Within three seconds he had a holographic map spitting out of his projector.
"Here's our path." His hand traced a line in the image, and a blinking arrow moved through the line he had drawn, pointing out the doors they would need to
get through. "The doors are all locked down. I can't hack them open, thanks to someone's triggerhappiness with the fireballs. She would have to go and hit the main power conduit..." He rolled his eyes and got up, only to be met with a pair not too unlike his own. However, unlike his, these eyes were the color of blood under a halogen spotlight. Celestial was pissed.
"Okay. I've cut you some slack-" He started to cut her off, but she slapped him and went on. "Don't get smart here. I cut you slack and then you go and start slandering me again! Maybe there were some...Complications between there and here. Maybe I was under attack! I'm sorry that the world can't be all sugary and perfect for you, Mister Hawke, but I want to stay alive here."
She stepped back and Hawke stood, blinked, and burst out laughing. "I knew you'd come around. See? What'd I tell you? She can't resist me!" The others rolled their eyes; Hawke had been blathering like that since he'd first heard they were to go rescue a female.
He started to strut around the room, but ducked out of the way as a laser cannon scorched the air where his head had been. He rolled under a desk as the others hit the floor. Vince sent a comm burst informing the others that he'd scanned the incoming bogeys and that they were unarmored. The Marauders cycled their weapons and armed the flechette guns. At the signal from Jace, they all rolled into position and fired. The tiny bits of case-hardened steel shredded the unarmored soldiers and they flew backwards to be pinned to the wall like a tacked up study in anatomy. Jace waited a moment and then got up, eyes scanning, switching modes, and scanning again. Confident that there was no danger, he flicked over to infrared and then turned to Celes. "As you can see, this isn't gonna be a picnic. Let's get moving, we've got a lot of ground to cover."
Some fifty demolished soldiers and a half a compound or so, they made it to the shuttleport. Hawke commed the others to cover him as he 'jacked a console. Within two minutes, he'd managed to locate a terminal, plug in, find the shuttle roster, and completely lock himself out of all of them. He looked up and swore. "Damnit, there's something wrong about this.
Celestial ran some last minute preflight checks on her new Battlecruiser. This ship was nice; had a lot more guns than the last one. The only downside was it lacked the same firewalls and encryption schemes that her old ship had. This normally wouldn't have been too much of a problem, but most ships didn't have to worry about a certain cyborg hacker named Hawke Quorrom. She sighed. Hawke was cute, in a way, but he could be terribly annoying. An alert activated, it's screeling blare demanding her attention. She glared at the little light and it flared up and exploded. The light was gone, but the noise was still there. She sighed, and opened the alert. Damn Hawke anyways. He was up to his old tricks again, trying to hack her main computer core. This wasn't normally a problem in her old ship; she'd tweaked the defenses enough that he wasn't able to get in unless she was preoccupied with some wargame or another. This time was different. She'd barely gotten the alert when the breach alarm went off. That damned fool! He's fiddling around with the coded interlocks! Her screams were too slow. Hawke made the dreaded "wrong move". NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Her agony was as brilliant as her anger, but fueled beyond her fury by the anguish of losing her body. Celes felt her world crunching down as system after system on the ship shut down. The last to go was her neural link to the computer that powered her universe. The system quietly died as a last whisper brushed her consciousness.
She died.
*********
Is she alive?
As hard as it seems to comprehend, she is.
I can't believe that anyone's psyche could survive that kind of trauma.
That's just it. It didn't. Celestial is gone. The body is there, but the person...The entity known as ‘Celestial' is as good as dead. Even if the memories survived, it's impossible that the mind would be the same. By impossible, I mean a chance of less than one in five hundred thousand. Only one other case like this came back, in all my forty years of medical experience.
Dead? Someone's dead? Who? Who's dead? Is it me? Who am I? What am I? I don't knoooooowww!
Pain! I hurt! I-I live? Am I alive? I am alive! But I hurt. Hurthurthurthurthurt!