New Story: Ravana's Shadow (Patreon)

This is the sequel to a story I already released: Forerunner's Child. Unlike some sequels, this absolutely requires having read that story first. If you haven't read it yet, check it out here before reading this one.

No one went to the secure section. 

There a thick layer of dust covered every surface. Even the enduring metamaterials used in Institute construction showed signs of decay, turning brittle and yellowing from hard vacuum. 

Kit’s environmental suit kept her comfortable and warm, humming with circulating air. She felt every touch against its surface as keenly as her own skin. She shared its circulatory system, exchanging the creamy blue liquid that passed for her blood with reservoirs within the machine. Its artificial muscles contracted when she wished, amplifying her otherwise modest strength.

She needed that strength to move several crates of old equipment, heaving them aside along with the corpses of a few drones. 

Even Forerunner had not come to reclaim the metals tied into this gear. On the material-starved moon of Mara, every gram of iron or lithium was precious. Every ounce of copper could be part of more blood, or another piece of industrial equipment.

“Are you still reading me?” she asked. Once, her voice had seemed high and childish. Now, she wouldn’t know how to react if it went back to normal. “Forerunner?”

“He can’t,” Maddie said. She spoke higher and quicker than Kit, with a cadence that wandered almost as much as her ambition. “The persona can’t interact with those parts of the base.”

She adjusted the lamp on her chest, turning up the brightness as high as it would go. Her steps dislodged ancient dust, which lifted before her in a cloud.

“Looks like nobody goes in here,” she said. Kit stopped beside the last security door. Its outline towered over her, easily twice her height. She reached down to her belt before selecting the flash-cutter from among the other options. She spun it through the air once, then ignited the tip with a precise tap of two fingers. 

She dropped to one knee, her tail stretching out behind her as far as it would go. The oversized organ of red-brown fluff was at least as long as the rest of her, and nearly twice the volume.

The days of that being a hindrance were long gone. Mara’s bioforming was part of her now, as deeply as the other changes.

“Why’s it sealed?” she asked, tracing the control box with the thin line of her cutting torch. “Wren must’ve known this was here.”

“Nothing in the service record about why,” Maddie said. “You’re the Director. Can’t you read all the secret files?”

The cover plate toppled onto the ground, exposing the complex mechanism underneath. Not wires, or anything her old human self would’ve understood. The Stellar Pioneering Society belonged to a lineage stretching numberless years of advancement, as sophisticated in engineering as it was with biology.

She still barely understood it. But she didn’t have to design any of it or fully master its fundamental principles to get it to do what she wanted. Kit exchanged her torch for a torsion field wrench and brought it carefully over the glass shards. Fresh current lit them again, outlining thin traces of transparent blue. 

“I can give orders. But I can’t force Forerunner to volunteer information.” Even after a year serving as the Director of the Institute of Perpetual Luminescence, not all information was shared with equal frankness.

Of course, she knew to expect as much from the moment she stepped out of the fabricator and saw herself in a mirror. 

The civilization that crafted the Institute had total dominion over biology. They could casually replace organs, add new ones, and blend them seamlessly. They could change the ears of every colonist with something taken from a homeworld animal and graft a tail to them as though they’d been born that way. They never aged, never wore out or suffered permanent injuries.

One security bolt fell from beneath her, and the door jerked. Not enough to open it, there were two more. “Feels like Forerunner should tell you everything now,” the fox continued. “We’re depending on you while Wren’s down in Remedial. How are you supposed to make good decisions based on imperfect information? We’ve got work to do! Problems to solve!”

Among the largest of those was a truth about the Institute so fundamental that no one besides Kit had questioned it, something incomprehensible to her yet incidental to the colonists she now governed. Every citizen of the Mara colony was a child.

It was thanks to her that anyone knew why. They didn’t live on a thriving world, where settlements large and small sent their smartest to be reborn as immortal scientists.

They did spend their days constantly engaged with scientific advancement—because Mara wasn’t a thriving world of millions. It was a desolate, airless moon, without even a sun in the sky. Its soil contained no metals necessary for most machines. Without radical innovations in material science and energy production, even the Pioneering Society’s incredible technology would not be enough. They would all die in frozen agony.

Hence their size, and physical development. Kit’s age meant she wasn’t even four feet tall. Hardware-level conditioning of her mechanical brain meant she neither understood nor desired the processes that might otherwise increase the colony’s population. 

Forerunner had half a million people in its library of mental imprints—experts in every field, beings of every culture and race. But with the Institute of Perpetual Luminescence, it had a perfect explanation for why every resident was a peerless multidisciplinary scientist. 

“We do it the hard way. Forerunner won’t tell me about this stuff until I’m there. But once the door is open, he doesn’t have a choice.” 

Finally, the last of the security bolts melted through. Kit felt the snap through her boots, even if she couldn’t hear anything through the intervening, airless void. The door jerked down slightly—but only through its own weight. No air hissed out from within, and the dust didn’t lift at her feet.

“This might be a good chance to turn back,” Maddie said. It sounded a little like the words came from just beside her, but Kit knew that was a lie. The interface implant in her skull could allow such communication, and much more. But Maddie hadn’t hijacked her senses against her will for a long time—she wouldn’t do that without asking! Not again. 

“I know you and Wren are still sour at each other, but… if she locked things up, it’s probably for a good reason.”

Kit glared down at the toy fox. “I’m not here because I’m mad. I’m here because we need every tool we can find to survive. Any resource we neglected, any technology we didn’t explore…”

She kicked at the door a few times, without much success. Then she backed up and jumped.

Kit might be four feet tall, but Mara’s gravity was somewhere near a third of what she’d grown up in. She was also part squirrel, so maybe that had something to do with her new dexterity.

Kit soared up until she reached the opening. Her tail stretched out behind her, or tried. The suit caught it, almost throwing off her balance. Kit moved anyway, twitching and struggling until…

There! Her fingers sunk into the opening. Seconds later, her weight settled on the door, tugging it with her. It slid another few inches, then ground to a halt. Ancient mechanisms wobbled and groaned, and she kicked it with her boots. Nothing happened.

Finally, something moved behind her—a heavy robotic frame, with skin of hard plastic and limbs of simple grippers. Importantly, Forerunner’s humanoid drones were also the size of adults, easily able to reach the door even from ground level. The mechanism shifted, shuddering its way to the ground.

“I would have provided assistance,” Forerunner said, over her helmet radio. “One moment.”

Her feet touched down on solid ground a second later, and Kit backed away. She recovered the flash-cutter from the floor, returning it to her belt with a click.

The space beyond wasn’t another abandoned laboratory, dark and cold. A steady blue glow suffused a tall corridor, both made from silvery metal leading to an airlock. 

Like the hallway behind, the space towered over Kit, at least three meters high and a similar distance wide. Yet even the short passage to an airlock resembled nothing she’d ever seen in the Institute—square and blocky, instead of the soft curves suited for their small size.

Maddie whistled, or at least she seemed to over the radio. “Woah. I don’t remember ever being in here.”

They advanced together into the gloom, towards what Kit took to be an airlock. It had a similar shape, though vastly bigger than anything in the Institute. It would easily allow a large baseline human to pass through, even if they wore a suit as bulky as the ones she’d used in her old life.

Yet there was only one door, on the far end. First, she had to walk past a series of glowing red… shapes? They hummed quietly, and her suit sensors relayed a brief spike of energy. 

Not the machines, said another voice. Not Maddie, not even Forerunner. It seemed to echo from the room around her, just as Maddie’s drone seemed to produce her voice, despite the hard vacuum around them. The ground beneath your feet is holy, Daughter of Sol. No mechanism crafted in man’s image shall enter.

She turned back, eying Forerunner’s drone. “Did you…”

The drone had no head of course, despite the otherwise human features. It had no face to read what he might be feeling. “I cannot use your implant to communicate with you, Kit. Pioneering Society protocol prohibits me from writing or reading your thoughts directly. I may use cognitive filters, but only when they correlate with the needs of your template.”

But you know what I heard, she thought. She took another step forward, until her hand reached the far wall. It had a small, round window, through which most of the light radiated. The space within shone like sunlight, soft yellow white.

Tears welled up on her face. Kit dropped to one knee in front of the door, reaching in vain to brush them away. She whimpered over the radio, her tail pressing close to her body. “Forerunner, please. Back that drone outside.”

“If the airlock closes, I will not be able to open it. The Acheron’s bridge has a direct conduit to the Institute’s primary reactor.”

My reactor, said the voice. The more it spoke, the more Kit could discern features. Male like Forerunner, yet younger somehow. She’d peg it for a young adult, though her bias filtered it another way. Not a father like Forerunner, maybe an older brother?

“Wren rarely visited, and this was her birthplace. You do not even understand the dangers inside.” Forerunner touched her shoulder with one metal claw. “Please, Director. I cannot protect you if you go.”

“Will you hurt me?” she whispered over the radio.

Child of Sol, wanderer and vagabond. My captain has done this to you, taken what was mighty and made you weak. I see the woman within. I see the blazing sun of Surya in your eyes. Banish the machines, Icarus. Within is wax and fresh feathers, we will craft anew.

“Wait outside,” Kit said again, more forcefully. “I’m going in.”

“Why?” Maddie had remained silent until then, trailing just beside her. Now she hopped up, resting both forelegs on Kit’s knee. “Forerunner only wants what’s best for us. If he says it’s not safe, it’s not. He wouldn’t lie to you.”

Kit choked back a laugh. Forerunner wouldn’t lie. She didn’t doubt the persona’s sincerity, that was obvious. But his honesty…

“You can’t see it through drone cameras,” Kit whispered. “I feel it on my face. Not screens in the ceiling, not heat lamps, not fake skylights. Home.”

Where the first flames were kindled. Where your fathers hammered their spears, and your mothers parted the soft earth to place their seeds. Where their children grew mighty. Where their backs hardened like iron. Come within, Icarus, feel the warmth of our mother on your face. You know her name.

“Sol,” Kit whispered. Not just a designation—an invocation to an ancient god. The star neither old nor mighty, yet greatest in the heavens. “Please, Forerunner. He won’t hurt me.”

“You can’t imagine the pain your death would cause.” The metal grip on her shoulder relaxed, then lifted. Forerunner turned its back on her and walked out of the airlock.

The other likewise, said the voice. No machine may enter.

Kit glanced down at Maddie’s fox, dusty with powdery ice and trace deposits of Mara’s strange compounds. “She’s not a machine. Maddie is human too, she’s just far away.”

“You hear something,” Maddie said. “It isn’t talking to me.”

Kit rested one gloved hand on the fox’s back. That fur lacked any of the sensitivity of the real thing, it was never meant to be a second body. Maddie built her drones from cheap composite and fabric, so they could be easily recycled and replaced.

I cannot judge what is not within my sight, the voice said. I allow her entry this once. If you wish to accompany her again, bring her in person. A man wears no masks. No shadow cast is dark enough to blind the eye of our first star.

Light seared into Kit’s view, radiating from behind her. She glanced back, and the helmet polarized, turning sharply gray in an instant. Air roared outside her suit, scattering dust all around her. Most of it sublimated away, rising as faint vapor from her suit and the fox’s fur in front of her then drawn away from view. 

Maddie hopped away from Kit, circling around her in something between nervous fear and protective patrol. “What Forerunner said. Kit, we’re out of our domain here. You’re really using that body. I can disconnect from mine.”

Kit stood up straight, her tail rising behind her. One hand drifted down to her belt, touching the cutting torch, the knife, the flashlight, the magnetic decoupler…

She left them in their clips. “Wren wouldn’t leave something dangerous behind. This must be here for a reason.”

The fox’s tail tucked low behind her, and her ears folded backwards. “‘Dangerous’ means something different to different people, Kit. Do you know what Wren was?”