Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 231 (Patreon)

Chapter 231 - First Restorations

Starring at the pair of gate ships sitting on the floor of the maintenance bay, Eventus couldn't help the feeling of guilt that was gnawing at him. It wasn't rational he knew, after all, they had checked for survivors to the best of their ability after the transport had gone down. But cloaks were hard to see through on a good day even for them, and there had been no good days once the siege had begun.

“Which one is Ea's?” he asked Caeles, the Tria's engineer having headed the recovery operations.

“The one on the left,” Caeles said, pointing to the ship in question. 

“Atlas should be restorable without your intervention,” Febria interjected.

The brown haired medic from the Tria had the thoroughly average look of someone who had yet to go through a phase where they touched up their appearance beyond what nature gave them. Though the overly intricate braid draped over her left shoulder made Eventus wonder if that had been a choice more driven by the war than her own opinion on the subject.

“Did you know them?” Caeles idly asked as Eventus walked over to Ea’s jumper.

“Not really,” Eventus shook his head. “The maintenance corp received a general briefing on them after they ignored council determination and left to conduct their experiment. But direct intervention was put on hold when their new terraforming method did not immediately cause some sort of disaster.”

Similar to his own proposal for testing the development capacity of naturally long lived near-humans, the pair’s Exogenesis project had only really been refused on the grounds of the resource and manpower expenditure being far too high during a time they didn’t have either to spare.

“With the war nearing Atlantis they should have returned immediately after the success of the test,” he continued, repeating what he had read in the council files on the subject. “But they and their team remained on the test planet for several years confirming viability for human habitation.”

Making his way into the gateship, Eventus’s eyes scanned the modified interior with a critical eye, taking special note of what looked like a cobbled together mind transfer unit poised at the head of the horizontally laying stasis pod.

“Well that’s moderately illegal,” he muttered.

The technology involved was somewhat similar to what the Asgard used to transfer themselves between bodies, only unlike Asgard technology which was more or less limited to bodies genetically identical to the minds original, their own version of it could transfer the resulting consciousness to any available human body. 

Historical records from pre-plauge databases showed that when the technology had first been created it had been with the same idea as the Asgard’s version, a limited form of immortality in the case of death. Say a pair of people were out in the field, one died, then the other could transport their consciousness back in their body to be placed in a newly grown replacement.

Unfortunately it was quickly discovered that having two consciousnesses in one body either ended with the carrying body’s biological functions breaking down or one of the consciousness basically crushing the other out of existence. The technology had been mostly relegated to lab study at that point in hopes that some way around the problem could be discovered, research which had eventually led to the technology the Asgard were currently using to prevent higher dimensional superstructure degradation in their artificial bodies. 

Before that point however, a series of others had gotten the bright idea to prolong their lives indefinitely by taking over other people’s bodies, eventually, the technology had ended up completely banned with a rather strict penalty attached to its use.

“You’re very lucky the laws around restricted technology are currently being judged on a case by case basis instead of the standard,” he lectured the woman in the pod as he reached down to the control panel and began the revivification process.

A planar energy field passed over the interior of the pod removing the frozen substrate that was slowing Ea’s cellular processes, at which point the curved surface of the stasis pod pulled open allowing Eventus direct access. 

As much as he would usually try and ask permission for this sort of thing, it was clear from the heavily aged Ea’s bleeding and burned state that there was no time, so he leaned down and placed his hands on the woman, triggering his healing abilities. Seconds passed as his mental energy made its way into her body, and then Eventus’s knees nearly buckled as his mind fully registered the sheer amount of wrongness there. Everything in Ea's body was failing, and at the current rate it would be minutes before she was dead past the point where it was likely even he couldn't bring her back. 

Drawing as much energy from the amplifier pendant as he safely could, he pushed healing into the decrepit woman. The plasma burns on and shrapnel in her chest were first, as even though they were technically less of a problem then the advanced age, Eventus knew they were what would cause the most problems while he was fixing the rest of her.

Clinks of metal hitting the stasis pod signaled the last of the shrapnel being pushed out of her body, and Eventus winced slightly at the slight feeling of depletion that he was already beginning to sense. 

“I don't know how far I'll be able to restore her,” he warned Febria. “But I’m going to try and push her restoration as far as I can, so be ready to catch me if I push too far and pass out.”

“Is that safe?” Febria asked with a slightly frown.

“As long as I don't do it too often,” Eventus reassured her before focusing back on Ea.

Despite how he knew it appeared to someone watching, reversing age wasn't a particularly simple thing. It was in fact hellishly complex, to the point one of his teachers had once described it as trying to convince reality of a lie. And that wasn't too far from the truth, because reversing someone's age basically meant restoring their body's cells to a state that no longer existed.

The older a person was, the more missing cellular information there was, and thus the more of your own energy you needed to spend to trick the universe and force their body back to a more healthy state.

Ea's biographic file, which had last been updated the year of the evacuation, had listed her as having a biological age of 46 and a chronological age of 17,439. Which meant that her current biological age, after 10,000 years in cryo based stasis, was roughly equivalent to someone in their mid 90s. And while that wasn't quite as bad for one of his people as it would have been for a human, when added to the general deterioration of long term cryostasis it was just about as debilitating.

All together that meant that Ea was, biologically speaking, the oldest person Eventus had ever tried to heal. Energy bled out of his body like water from a bucket with a three inch hole in it, and he only barely managed to keep up thanks to the extra pull available to him from the amplifier.

A slowly increasing heat from around his neck however, made it clear that even that wasn't going to be able to keep up. So, knowing his limits, he cut off his focus, only to stumble back as a sudden wave of weakness flowed through him.

Febria's arms caught him before he could fall, and he shot a thankful look to the medic before focusing back on the stasis pod to see what he had wrought.

The visual change was striking, what had once been a white haired rail thin woman in her late nineties now looked like a somewhat healthy black haired woman in her mid sixties.

“Atlas,” Ea groaned as her eyes began to flutter open. 

“Still in stasis,” Febria offered, helping Eventus to one of the gateships benches. “There was only a single person with the gift of healing available, and given your wounds, you were the higher priority for restoration.”

Eventus gave a somewhat shaky wave. 

Ea carefully pushed herself up, her gaze sweeping past them to the open ramp of the gateship. “This is Atlantis?”

“Section one's maintenance bay,” Eventus confirmed as a small bit of his energy began to return. “We brought your gateships here after recovery. Though I'm sorry to inform you that only your and Atlas's gate ships managed to survive the intervening cycles since you went into stasis.”

“Other gateships?” Ea asked, looking back at them with honest seeming confusion in her eyes.

Febria frowned slightly before pulling the medical interface off her belt and pointing it at Ea. “What's the last thing you remember?”

A small shudder went through Ea and she hugged herself for a moment before a haunted look settled across her features. “The transport was breaking up around us, we were trying to make it to the hanger when something exploded… I was badly hurt, and Hyas died immediately… But Atlas managed to help me the rest of the way to the hanger. We cloaked the gateship, waiting for the ship to break up fully then used the falling wreckage as cover to break through the Wraith's blockade. We tried to enter the city, but the shield had been retuned to disallow passage. Atlas thought he might be able to bypass it anyways given time, however with my wounds, it quickly became clear that I would not survive that time. Thankfully the gateship had a pair of stasis units from our work on Polrusso, so Atlas helped me into one, and then I woke up here.”

“...So you only escaped with a single gateship?” Eventus inquired, really wishing he had the energy to focus fully on this new mystery.

“Yes?” Ea confirmed, giving a slow nod that caused one of the grayer locks of her hair to cross into the path of her vision.

She stared dumbly at it for a moment, before lifting a hand and studying it as if she had never seen it before. “How… How long has it been?”

“A little over ten thousand years,” Febria told her before turning to Eventus and continuing. “I'm not detecting any lingering damage from the extended stasis.”

“T-Ten thousand!?” Ea stuttered in shock. “And you only just found us now!?”

“It's a long story that involves several reckless decisions by Janus,” Eventus returned dryly.

Ea blinked and a general sense of resigned understanding settled across her features. “Oh… Well, I suppose that cannot be helped then.”

“...” Febria glanced back and forth between the two of them for a moment with the clear confusion of someone who had never been affected by the scientist. “Seriously?”

“Janus’s genius often made it difficult for him to notice things that those with a more focused scope of vision would say should be obvious,” Ea put forward.

“With people around to compensate for that sort of problem he was a net positive to our civilization by a rather significant degree,” Eventus reluctantly added in. “But we can go over that later, because I need someone to help me back to my apartment so I can sleep for the next day or so.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author’s Notes: Eventus really needs to find where Moros hid all his extra wizard staff’s. Or at least an amplifier more suited to his draw level then the one he currently has. But given their current rarity that's not exactly an easy task.