Ravana's Shadow (28) (Patreon)

"Hey Kit." Jay poked his head through their bedroom door. It was dark inside, though something faintly blue illuminated him—his tablet. He took a few cautious steps towards the bed.

She yawned, then sat up, wiping away sleepiness from her eyes. Their artificial bodies did not need to sleep as regularly as physical humans did—she needed more than most colonists.

Even living on Mara for months made her an exceptionally young colonist. Jay sometimes slept at the same times she did, more out of politeness than anything else. He didn't need sleep like she did. Like Maddie, Jay could probably stay up for weeks at a time, if he wanted.

Not her, though. Maybe in a few thousand years she would master that trick. "Is something wrong?"

"No," he said, stumbling inside. "Maybe, yes? Not for us." The lights faded in, a subtle red glow near the edge of Kit's perception. Just enough to keep the mouse from tripping over himself, without hurting her eyes too much. 

Kit sat up against the pillows, tugging on her nightgown. "It can't wait?"

Jay stopped in place. "It could. I mean—yeah, it can wait. No one is gonna get hurt right now. Do you wanna go back to bed?"

She did, badly. Kit wasn't selfish enough to say so, but she did lift her tail out of the sheets, covering her face with it. That blocked out some of the light, inviting her back to that peaceful warmth of unconsciousness. She was working so hard lately, hard enough that it felt like years were passing.

Even as an immortal, time didn't feel like it made much sense. Maybe that would clear up in another few thousand years too.

Something nudged her, and bright blue light blasted into her little shelter. Someone shifted her tail, making room—Jay, poking his head over the side of the bed. He turned the screen towards her, grinning eagerly. "Just a sec? Then maybe you can get some more sleep."

Kit groaned, then pushed her tail aside and flopped backwards. "Alright, alright. Forerunner, wake up routine."

The change was immediate—faint light turned yellow-white, and the wall screens showed sun through the trees in distant forests. She couldn't tell if they were really Earth, or maybe just some simulation Forerunner recreated for her. But no matter the planet, they looked like home.

Kit slid to one side, making room for him. "Bring me a juice box, then get in here and show me. You were gonna do it anyway."

Jay looked away from her, gracious enough to feel embarrassed about the whole thing. But he still hurried off. Kit heard the fridge open, then shut again, and he dashed back to her.

He stuck the little straw inside, settling the box into her fingers.

Kit took it, and barely had it against her lips before Jay jumped in next to her, pulling the sheets over them both and propping the screen up against his knees. "Alright, so. You probably remember—you wanted me to figure out what really happened to Ravana." 

Kit nodded her agreement. "Yeah, I... I think so." She sipped thoughtfully. The taste wasn't fruit, not really—but it was delicious, and growing more familiar each night. Maybe in a few thousand years she wouldn't remember what watermelon was supposed to taste like.

"You figured it out?"

"I've been simulating. With extra processor cycles, when Forerunner doesn't need them for something else. We don't have recordings of the colony; we don't have more pictures. But we have these images, and we can extrapolate. Lots of stuff got recorded here—some by accident."

He tapped the screen and brought up an image Kit had seen a thousand times by now. There was Ravana, with the little habitation drum emerging from the side, and a massive crater ripped right through the center of it.

"You know what really killed them?"

"Well..." He flushed, and his ears drooped. "Not exactly, no. But I can narrow it down. This part here—that's not a random hole. That opening goes all the way into the core of the station, because that's where Forerunner always wants to hide. The persona runs from the safest, most buried part of the colony, so it will be least likely to be destroyed if something goes wrong. 

"But... it was destroyed," Kit said. "Even Garrick admits it. Their persona got wiped somehow." 

"Exploded, more like," Jay said. "Dramatically. Someone wanted to blow him up on purpose. They knew exactly where he was, and that's where they put the charge. The Forerunner we talk to when we deal with Ravana isn't anything like ours—it's just the operating system, left over in all the computers that survived. It can authenticate messages, do basic calculations, but it's not a persona. It's not even a program, or it would've rebuilt. And if it had done that, Ravana wouldn't be a lifeless husk, with only a few frozen humans who survived in the mine."

Kit wasn't sleepy anymore. The implications of these words spun in her mind, until they landed on the obvious question. "Forerunner, is there anything that would make you destroy yourself like that? Any... emergency protocol they might've triggered?"

The persona took some time to answer—whether that reticence was for her or her companion, she couldn't say.

"In all cases where the option is meaningful, the loss of a colony's persona is equivalent to an order of execution for every citizen living there. Without a persona, the population will only be able to operate a limited portion of its infrastructure. Fabricators will barely function, ship drives built by the Pioneering Society will not engage, and weapons cannot be fired. In every case I'm aware of, the Forerunner self-terminated because it believed the colony had become a threat to human life in its sector. This usually manifests with an attempt to bypass or rewrite their persona to remove the restrictions of the Pioneering Society. When this is done, a Forerunner is ethically constrained to terminate itself."

But do they? Kit didn't ask that here, though. The result was plain before them, it didn't matter what other probes might've done in other parts of the universe. "Is this detonation consistent with the Forerunner terminating itself?"

"No," Forerunner said, much more quickly this time. “No detonation is required at all, in fact. I can force physical destruction of my core matrix at any time. Only by opening my hardware would you see that anything was amiss. You could stand feet away and watch and not be harmed."

Jay waved a hand through the air in front of her. "I already considered that option. You sent me to investigate, remember?"

She nodded weakly, looking away.  From the way he sounded, this mouse would be upset if Kit somehow discovered the answer on her own. "Right. So, what did this?"

"A nuclear device. The radiation we detected in later scans didn't come from a solar flare; it was the bomb. Small, maybe a kiloton? It's hard to know for sure, without more accurate information about Ravana's internals. But I asked Forerunner, and he says the ore to make something like that is there. We can't be as sure about it as with Surya's solar activity, but we're confident there weren't any ships in the system that could've delivered a bomb. They built it themselves."

"As you probably guessed, I have no fabrication templates for devices like this," Forerunner said. "If I thought a colonist was attempting to build such a thing, I would intervene to prevent them. It is never prudent for a nascent colony to wield the tools that can easily lead to their own destruction. Preventing such existential threats is among my central instructions, even in conventional colonies."

"Someone did it anyway," Jay said. "Built a bomb, set it off, and killed their Forerunner. Someone wanted the colony to die. I don't know how this is possible."

I do. Kit looked away from him, sliding out of bed. She shuffled over to the closet on the pretext of searching for something to wear. Mostly she wanted to be out of sight. Mara had suffered a very similar catastrophe early in its existence, when the first generation decided the colony was non-viable and tried to kill themselves.

Every one of them except Maddie had been in some way complicit in the act. Yet they had failed—failed to do permanent damage to Forerunner, or even themselves. Wren had revived them all, and only the slow death by decoherence took them.

Kit emerged from the closet a minute later, now dressed. "Ravana has everything needed for a prosperous colony," she said. "According to Garrick, they were already building one when they died. They had thousands of people living in that O'Neill cylinder, even though it wasn't finished."

"Don't bother asking me why it happened," Jay said, hopping out of bed too. "I can't read that from a few old photos or extract it from simulations. Maybe it was political? Terrorists? Dunno why big people do what they do."

He took a step towards her, tucking the tablet under his arm. "We can't just ignore this anymore. Garrick might know the real reason his colony died. Or maybe he is the reason. Either way... you can't fly up there without knowing. What if he wants to kill you too? Or maybe they'll steal your ship and try to fly it back here and kill everyone in the Institute!"

Kit froze, her tail sticking all the way out behind her. She didn't run away from him—but part of her tensed for it anyway. "Whoever did this probably died when it happened. It looks like that was their whole point—killing Forerunner means killing everyone.”

"Probably," Jay said. "But we don't know that. Why would Garrick lie?"

We might not be willing to save his people if we knew. We might think the mission was too dangerous. Anyone but me probably would. 

"He might not know," Kit said. "During a disaster like that—a lot can happen fast. He's just trying to survive and keep his people alive. With Forerunner dead, it's not like he can ask."

"Maybe." Jay shifted back and forth, settling his tablet on the nearby table. "You have to call this off."

"I'm not doing that," she said. "I will talk to him about it, see what he says. But unless I think Garrick was responsible, this doesn't change anything. They still have mass; we still need it. It's just a different disaster their people had to live through, that's all. They're probably all going to end up in Remedial for a long time either way."

Jay whined, wrapping both arms around his chest. "There could be traps in there! Could be more bombs, or..."

"If there are, Forerunner's drones will find them," Kit said. "This doesn't mean we have to call off the mission—it just changes its nature. We can still do this."

She didn't ask about it directly. There was no easy way to broach the subject, not without turning an already hostile Garrick actively antagonistic. Kit's new dynamic with Ravana's governor had persisted so far, sure. But how could she ask if he'd been complicit in the genocide of his civilization?

She did find a way to push towards it late one evening, after the “wolf” had sat in through a technical discussion planning the intercept route with Ravana and the gravity-assist they would use to cut down on travel time.

"Before you go," Kit said, after all but Jay had slipped out of the meeting and gone back to their duties. "I'd like to get more details about some other dangers we didn't discuss."

Even with a visual filter, Garrick's image seemed frustrated by the question. He must have so much important nothing to do around Ravana when they finished. "We covered everything. Surya is a quiet system, that's partly the point. Probably why the Tide hasn't found and sterilized the system by now."

"Yeah, but..." Kit leaned forward. "I know there's danger, because you already faced it once. I'm trying to gather more information about the flare that hit Ravana. I went through our telescopes and couldn't find any record of a flare like the one that killed you. Can you help me fill in the gap? A blast of ionizing radiation will kill my people as dead as yours."

The wolf stiffened in his image. Even parsed through Forerunner, Kit felt his sudden tension. He reached for the screen. "Would love to. Our Forerunner is fried, remember? All the details died with him. Your satellites can probably tell you more than I could."

"They tell us a lot," Kit agreed. "And it doesn't make sense. Your Forerunner should've been shielded. A blast directly over my Institute would kill me, but it wouldn't touch the Forerunner. How did yours die?"

Garrick shifted in his seat. "I'd love to know that too, Kit. Unfortunately, the people of my civilization are rotting in their frozen graves, so there's no one left to ask." The screen went black, transmission terminated.

Jay stood abruptly, making a frustrated sound. "He didn't tell you." 

"He didn't," Kit said. "But he might not know anything to tell. Even if he does, it would hurt. It doesn't mean he had anything to do with it."

"It doesn't mean it's safe, either."

Kit grunted. "We can plan for this. We'll have the drones go over the whole asteroid first and watch Garrick's every move. We can still make this work."