by Vowron Prime
“Annoying, but bearable. Thanks for asking.”
“Of course. Please do let us know if it becomes too much to handle. I am initiating the program now.”
The rockets fired once again, this time, propelling him at a steady one-G into the silent darkness. He was more than happy to relax and let it do its thing—there was no doubt that Nova’s program would get him to the station right on schedule. The suit had oriented itself such that the planet was now below him, making for a pretty phenomenal view. He did have to initiate several long-distance teleports to keep himself from getting sucked into the planet’s gravity as he accelerated through space, but that too thankfully happened less and less often.
“I feel like I oughta break out the popcorn or something. I mean, we’ve got a super soldier in a stealth suit with badass superpowers, in outer space, assaulting an alien satellite! Like, can you even make a movie as cool as this?”
“Nina, what he is about to do is quite dangerous. This is no joke.”
“Oh please. This is my brother we’re talking about! The guy’s pretty much bulletproof, and that was before he became superman. Oh shit—your people don’t have Kryptonite, do they? Please tell me there’s no Kryptonite!”
“What is Kryptonite?”
MC couldn’t help but chuckle at their banter. Somehow, the thought of Sanctuary being livelier than it’d been in a long, long time filled him with elation. His late buddies would be giving him slaps on the back from their graves.
The three passed the next several hours in a similar fashion, making MC more relaxed than he had any right to be. Even for him, blowing up a geosynchronous orbital space station was a bit daunting.
The suit’s rockets had shut off fifteen minutes in, but they began to fire with increasing frequency as he neared his destination, performing minor course corrections to match his trajectory to the station.
Given that the station had no external lights, the entire superstructure was completely invisible to him until he came close enough that its outline blotted out the stars behind it.
“Oh. Oh holy… Nova? This thing is massive,” his sister exclaimed.
“Yeah. Knowing the dimensions and experiencing it in person are two entirely distinct things.”
“Indeed. As I had said, the station is over five miles in length, and two miles in girth at its widest point.”
“Nova, that’s no moon… It’s a space station!”
“Well, yes, of course. Why would it be a moon?”
Nina’s quip made MC crack up. “They’ve been making those shitty sequels for over a century now… But c’mon, you two. Time to get serious. “
The suit slipped past the station and spun around to put the massive object between him and the planet. It was only then that he could truly appreciate the structure for what it was. The matte-black form contrasted against the brightly lit planet behind it, looming ever-larger as he neared one of the docking collars that protruded from the facility.
The station itself looked much like a long needle, if the needle was adorned with a prodigious hemispheric dome on one end, and a much, much larger spherical bulge at the other, containing the power plant and space-time anchor.
Several rings rotated around the station, no doubt providing rotational gravity, though according to Nova, the Dyn also employed artificial gravity tech for their more critical areas. MC’s entry point put him right in the middle of the station’s span, on an arm that connected directly to the central shaft.
Drifting ever closer to the colossus, he eventually came upon the cylindrical docking collar, gently latching onto its metallic exterior with the suit’s magnetic boots.
“I have re-enabled manual control. Everything is in your hands now.”
“Well executed, as always. Get ready to open Sanctuary’s armory doors. Here goes nothin’.”
MC attempted to feel out the interior of the collar as best as he could without sight or Midar to aid him, though such caution was hardly necessary for a short teleport like this. The next moment found him inside the dark tube, yet the inherent inaccuracy of a blind teleport meant he’d reappeared a foot above the floor of the corridor.
The suit fell to the ground with a thud, sound muffled by his stealth field. On her side, Nova began the opening sequence for the enormous armory blast doors, filling the room with air. Sanctuary’s pressurization alarms until Nina shut them off. Luckily, the M37’s back compartment was air-and-watertight like the rest of the suit, so the action had no noticeable effect. A precaution, in case they needed to send him anything while he was inside the station.
He paused for a moment to make sure he’d gone undetected, but it seemed that their infiltration plan had worked, or at least if there were any alarms firing, he didn’t hear them. That gave him a moment to take in his surroundings. Clearly designed for some sort of cylindrical tram, the passage was about twenty feet tall. That made sense, given its span—almost half a mile in length.
What made less sense was the ambient lighting, or more accurately, the complete lack of it. Black metal formed every surface, with glowing green geometric lines snaking their way around, almost like the traces on a circuit board.
“Apoadeid architectural design,” Nova explained. “I believe this is the first either of you are seeing of it.”
MC didn’t reply, silently moving with his stealth field and the suit’s optical camo enabled. Nearly invisible to both visuals and sensors, he soon encountered a problem.
“Nova? There’s something headed my way. Fast.”
“It’s… but why?” Nova exclaimed, her vidfeed displaying her obvious panic. “Magnus, you must dodge it!”
“Thanks, Nova, I’d never have thought of that.”
He crouched low, focusing on the approaching tram. Timing would be everything.
Three… two… one.
He teleported forward thirty feet just as the bullet-shaped hover tram was about to ram him. Reappearing on a thankfully empty track, he spun around to look at the tram car that rapidly grew smaller as it passed into the distance.
“That was too close. I thought you said this collar would be unoccupied.”
“It should be. I selected this spot mainly on account of its low traffic, yet even I do not have the arrival and departure timetables. I am truly sorry, Magnus.”
“Well, at least we know that my stealth is working,” he said, trying to brighten the mood. In the corner of his HUD, he saw Nina rubbing Nova’s back in consolation.
The rest of his journey passed uneventfully, eventually putting him at the terminal station that housed a tram car. He teleported past it onto the elevated debarkation platform, where two Dyn tripod drones patrolled. Ignoring them, he continued forth.
MC made his way through a couple of rooms that seemed oddly like empty airport security screeners.
“Magnus, teleport past this section. I do not want you getting close to those sensors.”
“Ten-Four, Sanctuary.”
The area past it connected directly to the colossal central shaft’s entrance, where transparent metal walls gave him a clear view into the cylindrical expanse that loomed on the other side.
Similarly pitch-black, its every surface was highly angular and decorated in the same blue-green circuit-like veins. Except this time, the sheer scale made the effect so much more impressive. It must have been at least a thousand yards in diameter, and maglev elevators shot up and down the shaft’s interior like black bullets, bound for one of the numerous destinations within the station. Supersonic bullets, if his instinct was right. Nova had put the head count for the facility at around ten thousand Harvesters, which actually sounded low given its incredible size.
“Magnus? What you’re doing may be crazy, but I’d give anything to see what you’re seeing right now, in person. This is… mind-blowing.”
MC chuckled. “I’m also seeing this through the suit’s cameras, sis, so you’re not missing much. But I do agree—I never thought I’d get to see anything like t
his. Life has a way with surprises, doesn’t it?”
“Amen to that.”
He considered calling for one of those elevators but opted against it in case it gave away his position. He instead teleported right through the transparent metal into the zero-G of the central area, allowing him to begin teleporting down the hollow shaft to the power plant and space-time anchor. They were so far away that his eyes couldn’t actually perceive them. As if that wasn’t enough, the sheer magnitude of the station’s interior completely distorted his sense of distance perception.
The shaft was not only free of gravity, but was a hard vacuum as well, as the M37’s readouts informed him. The Dyn must’ve figured it a waste of resources to dump air into such a gargantuan space, but it worked out well for him. It meant he only had to teleport himself a few times to get some speed. After that, he just coasted his way through.
The bottom of the shaft looked a lot like the cylinder of a revolver, decorated with tiny holes along the perimeter—tubes for the high-speed elevators. After finding an empty one, it was then simply a matter of descending down to the doors the elevators used and teleporting himself out—a task that was again made simpler on account of the translucent metal walls. Thankfully, he encountered no elevators during his time in the tube.
Back on “terra firma” once again, he consulted the map projected onto his HUD. It indicated that he was just a couple of levels above the power control room, though that wasn’t his final destination.
There was no easy self-destruct switch to flip here, and the systems had so many redundancies that Nova said it would be impossible to hack or corrupt. She had only gotten lucky with the transit gateway thanks to Sareen’s administrator access codes. No such luck this time.
And that meant he had to make his way into the generator itself. Which happened to be a miniaturized sun.
To the great shock of brother and sister alike, the energy source powering the entire facility was an artificial star, surrounded by some kind of Dyson sphere. Or, Dyson rings that rapidly rotated around the fusion reaction, absorbing the vast majority of its radiated energy.
The plan? Relocate off a sliver of one of those rings. Just enough to destabilize its balance, which would eventually cause it to break. When that happened, the energy released from that sun would no longer be absorbed, and would instead melt theliving daylights out of everything nearby—station included.
Nova had said that unlike most stars, this one wasn’t quite self-sustaining, and with the safety protocols in place, the reaction would eventually shut down and go cold. That would take several minutes to hours to happen. More than long enough to wreck the space-time anchor that was adjacent to it, rendering the station inert.
MC found his current surroundings to be far more populated than his ingress point, forcing him to hide and maneuver around the Dyn that seemed to be everywhere. It was quite the assortment too, from the Zevan-type Dyn to the Qephyx orbs that he’d seen in the underground cavern, and there was even a third race he’d yet to come across.
Leathery, dreadlocked alien worms who lacked organic appendages and floated around in egg-shaped hoverchairs with mechanical arms sticking out of the bottom.
“Those are Apoadeid, one of the three founding races of the Dyn, and the constructors of this station. The vast majority of Ubiquity’s spaceships are constructed in their incredible fleet yards. When it comes to navigating space, they are second to none.”
Thankfully, MC’s stealth strategy seemed to work here as well, and while he was sorely tempted to relocate the Ultimators he spied into oblivion, any offensive actions he took now would only lower the chances of their success. There would be plenty of time for that later.
A few more minutes put him at the control room’s doors. No Midar meant no intel on what lay on the other side, forcing him to rely on Sareen’s floor plans, but a bit of ingenuity made up for that. He walked up to the door and knocked. Literally—he rapped on it several times with the suit’s hand, then backed off to the side.
He did not have to wait long. The heavy footfalls of something big could be heard approaching the door. It opened just a moment later, and sure enough, a stocky silver Ultimator came stomping right out. The behemoth disappeared a second later when MC relocated it into one of the thick load-bearing walls nearby, slipping through the door just before it closed.
There before him was a room full of surprised aliens.
The Machine had infiltrated a pen full of sheep. Admittedly advanced, lethal alien sheep, but that didn’t change the fact that not one of them even had a clue.
Twenty-One
MC skulked up to the Qephyx orb-type Dyn floating nearby, enveloping it in his stealth field. Sensing something wrong, it whipped around, but he immediately lobbed a sticky EMP grenade at the metal sphere.
His aim was good—the alien plummeted to the ground. Its systems seized. Having expected that, he’d already retrieved the portal from its back compartment. He managed to catch the falling alien in time, sending the unconscious enemy through his portal. All in under three seconds.
Nova had equipped him with all the right tools to non-lethally take down each of the Dyn types—shock rounds for the two fleshy ones, and EMP grenades for the Qephyx. Nova herself secured the zapped Dyn inside the armory’s airlock as Nina stood watch in the X42, a nasty, oversized one-gauge shotgun in her hands.
MC swapped out for shock tranquilizer rounds, firing his rail pistol at the other two Zevan-type Dyn in the control room under the cover of invisibility. The lone Ultimator guard found its entire frame fused into a lump of metal as MC relocated it into the nearby metal wall. Not one trace of it remained; it may as well never have existed.
He relocated the two unconscious workers into the portal, just like their Qephyx coworker.
Nova reached through to hand him her portable terminal, which he snapped to the magnetic plug on the power plant’s control console. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do without administrator access, especially since these systems were built by the Apoadeid; the infection tactic she’d used in the caverns wasn’t going to work.
The best she could do was to unleash a torrent of bogus messages into the system to tie it up. The torrent of traffic would slow their response times just long enough to allow MC’s sabotage to go unnoticed. Or so she hoped.
“It is done. The systems should remain blind until several minutes after you rupture the core. At that point, nothing can prevent a total meltdown.”
“That’s my guardian angel! I get the sense that we’re not going to be unnoticed for much longer.”
As if on cue, the circuit-like veins that covered every surface began to flash rapidly, exacerbating the already dim lighting situation. It didn’t help that those were the only light sources in the entire room. Maybe the Apoadeid had a different sense of sight because the blue-green strobing made for strange ambiance against the angular obsidian metal.
Predictably, the alarm also went off. Apparently, the Apoadeid preferred ear-splittingly-loud digitized foghorns for when shit hit the fan.
“Welp, there goes our secrecy.”
“Magnus, hurry to the core! The longer you take, the less our chances of success!”
“You got it, boss. What should I take?” He looked around at the various pads, handheld terminals, and other gadgets in the room.
“Do not bother. Everything that can be stolen is likely tagged and connected to the Dyn global network. We do not want to risk compromising Sanctuary’s location because one of the devices had tracking on it.”
“Right. Good point. On my way.”
MC was already at the room’s exit when he paused to fuse flooring into access panels, ceiling into terminals, and walls into other walls. By the time he was done, there wasn’t much of a room left. Whatever functionality it originally had was utterly destroyed. Since he’d already been discovered, there wasn’t any harm in doing what he could to slow them down.
“Holy shit!” Nina exclaimed. “Note
to self: do not piss off Super Magnus.”
“Well, I figured it might buy us some time, especially since we’ve been detected. Also, aren’t you supposed to be looking over the captives?”
“Don’t worry,” his sister said, “I’m doing a great job of ensuring that these unconscious bodies haven’t wandered off anywhere.”
“Just making sure they’re not playing dead...”
“Oh, not to worry. I gave everyone a good whack when you tossed them over. They’re out cold.”
“Magnus, all that remains is for you to destabilize the absorber rings,” Nova said.
“On it,” he called back, running to a particular autodoor that didn’t open for obvious reasons, requiring him to teleport through. The door put him inside a maintenance hallway that eventually led to a small vertical shaft. In the span of ten seconds, MC had teleported his way down the long tube, dropping another four floors.
He sprinted around a handful of corners, nearly hitting several Dyn who were now running up and down the halls to get to their emergency stations. On more than one occasion, he teleported past the oncoming worker instead of hiding and waiting for them to pass.
Forty seconds later put him at the closest wall bordering the powerplant.
“Magnus, stop! You’re already there,” Nova shouted as MC passed his destination.
“Thanks,” he replied, pivoting on his heel.
While this wall was far thicker than any of the internal ones, the vast empty expanse beyond it meant that a blind jump would be quite safe.
He teleported directly into the zero-gravity room. Of course, the word room was entirely insufficient to describe the enormous space. That gigantic spherical enclosure he’d seen from outside the station—the one that was two miles in diameter? He was now within it, and at its very center blazed a small sun.
His suit’s visual sensors went white for a split second before closing their irises to compensate for the exposure. Even then, they couldn’t quite deal with the intensity, so MC had the AI superimpose a high-resolution wireframe map of the surroundings to add some detail.
