Into the Black

(BSS Starlight Raven, descending to Thraki, Eye of Despair)

“All right, clear of the fleet, no problems so far. Descending into the atmosphere. Keep an eye on the sensors, Raven, and let me know if we get any strange readings.”

“Other than ones caused by being in a dimension born of pure chaos?” The AI was being snarky. Clearly, she still wasn’t happy with my choosing to go down to the planet. Still, best not to make a big deal about it.

“Yeah, other than those. We need to have a baseline weirdness value, so we can find out what is extra weird about this little pocket of Hellspace, in particular.”

Raven just shook her head, so I turned back to my plot, and focused on flying the ship. “Altitude fifteen thousand meters. Course steady for the population center closest to survivor’s suspected location.”

“Device is still logged on to the local network. Looks to be streaming from a music site. I am detecting some phasic energy in the atmosphere. Getting stronger as we descend.”

“Dangerous?”

“Unknown at this time.”

“Passing ten thousand meters.”

“Wait, there’s a spike—”

WARNING!

Soul-sheering detected!

Damage over time will increase with proximity!

I didn’t know what there was a spike of, because suddenly it felt like EVERYTHING WAS BURNING! I could vaguely see purple flames in front of my face. And I heard screaming. Maybe it was mine? I couldn’t tell, because the entire world was made of fire.

And then, nothing.

“Sir, can you hear me?” “Master!” “Hey, Boss! Wake up!”

Someone was calling me, but I couldn’t think. Didn’t recognize it. Them. More than one person calling me. Couldn’t think. Too much pain. I felt something touch my neck. An injector, some part of my brain that wasn’t fried was telling me. Icy coolness spread through my body, putting out the fire. Blessed relief.

Blinking, I found myself lying on the deck next to my chair, with Raven, Cali, and Jaynie all kneeling over me. “Wh-what happened?”

Raven shook her head. “You nearly died, is what happened! The moment we crossed ten thousand meters, you just caught on fire, like pictures of the Burning. I turned on the psychic shields, and it stopped, but I wasn’t sure you would make it!”

I took a deep breath, which, thankfully, only hurt a lot, and said, “I’m fine, or I will be. Message the other ground parties, have them go shields up.”

“Already did so. None of the other Nomads were affected like you.”

Cali nodded. “But we did get notifications through the interface. It mentioned ‘Soul-shearing’, whatever that is, and had a timer before we would start suffering negative effects.”

I opened my mouth, but Jaynie shook her head, cutting me off. “Timers weren’t the same. We checked with the other teams, too. Timers were different for each individual. Those with more Psy powers and greater skills in Psy use got shorter timers than those who were barely able to use Psy, or focused more on resistance than active uses.”

I nodded slowly. “And, since I have the highest level of Psy skills in the whole organization, thanks to the Sorcery ability I gained, I had a countdown timer that started at zero.”

Turning to Raven, I was again about to speak, only for my question to be cut off. “No, I had no notification, or any timer, and I was unaffected by the Burning.”

I took another breath, having an easier time this time, as the cocktail of painkillers and healing nanites went to work, and took a look at my character sheet. What I saw was… not good. HP was 150/1780, SP was 190/1820, and PP was 2570/4200.

“How long was I burning?”

Raven answered, “One point seven three seconds, from the start of the Burning until shields came online and stopped it.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slow. “Then let all teams know that the Soul-sheering, or the Burning, is a Damage Over Time effect, that was doing 1000 points of damage to my HP, SP, and PP per second, and it suggested that the dot would get stronger, the closer we were.”

Jaynie whistled. “That’s one hell of a dot. At this point, the only surprising thing is that there’s actually a survivor at all. What must their regen be like, to sustain that?”

“Don’t know. Maybe they’re immune, somehow? If the effect is greater with people who have psy powers, then that would explain how the Perfected were the first to go, and then others over time. The survivor might just be someone who hasn’t got any psychic potential at all. Or, they have some other kind of defense against the Burning.”

“Speaking of which, Master,” Cali cut in again. “What are we going to do about the ground missions? I mean, those with timers of 1-2 hours could probably get something done, but they wouldn’t have any backup if things went bad, and they could end up respawning. If this isn’t one of those things that just makes us recreate our presence here.”

Raven looked off to the side for a moment, and then said, “Frostwolf is escorting a lander from Orgrim’s Hammer to the military HQ. They can drop shields for a moment, and test things, if you want. All their timers are twenty hours.”

I pulled myself into my chair, my brain starting to fire on all cylinders again. The Frostwolf was one of the Crow-class assault craft that the Marines had. Crew of five, including a pilot, main weapons, two turret gunners, and an engineer. They should all have armor, same as the Marines in the lander.

“Permission granted. Full armor, full safeties before they take down the shields. Also, I want to know if their timers continue from before, or reset.”

Raven nodded, and then listened to the reports. “Standard armor and armor safeties have no effect. Timers reset.”

I nodded. “Shields up, turn on the psychic shields on the armor themselves, the ones designed to defend against intrusion, and try again.”

Raven paused, and then said, “Frostwolf reports no reappearance of timers. It appears that the shields are enough to keep things at bay.”

I checked my stats again. I was at 1700 HP, and ticking up. That would be enough for a quick test. Thankfully, I was already wearing my armor. The girls would have made my life hell if I went on this mission in ‘normal’ gear. I picked up my helmet, and sealed it, motioning for the others to do so, too.

Once they were sealed up, and all three of us had our shields up, I turned to Raven. “Raven, shields down, half-second interval. We need to see if this works for everyone.”

“You mean, see if it won’t kill you.”

“Same difference. Do it.”

Raven nodded. Nothing. “Shields back online.”

I sighed. “All right, looks like the suit shields will provide enough protection, at least for a while.”

“The power packs on those shields are only rated for three hours, continuous use.”

“Then I want all groups back on their crafts in two hours after debarking. This puts us on a timetable, but we can rotate crews if needed, or set up replacement power packs or area shields.”

“As you command, Admiral.”

(Broax Agricultural Township, Thraki, Eye of Despair)

Shrask leaned back in her chair. Well, it was her matriarch’s chair, but the matriarch was dead, along with everyone else on the planet. So, really, it was hers. Like everything else.

She poured herself another glass of theva wine from the matriarch’s private stash (HER private stash!) and sighed, letting the music play. It was midday. She ought to go and prepare the midday meal. If it was before, she’d have already been in the kitchen, helping cook for the clan.

Their farm, and all the ones in Broax, were ‘simple’ things, growing theva berries. No mechanized farming bots, like in the big, corporate fields. Their farms were used for old-style farming, which some people said were better for them, or tasted better, or things like that. All it meant is that they paid more for their goods, while getting less. Whatever, wasn’t her problem.

Wasn’t her problem. Not before, and certainly not anymore. The only problem she had now was what to do to break up the monotony of being the only living person on a planet of ghosts. At least most of the Screamers weren’t around here.

There were three main types of ghosts, as she saw them. The first were the Figments. They looked like spectral forms of their former selves, but they didn’t talk or interact with her. They just hung there, robotically going through the motions of the tasks they used to do, even though they couldn’t actually do things like tending a field or cooking in a kitchen. Not that they knew that, or anything.

The second were the Talkers. They acted like they were the people they used to be. Maybe they were. She had talked to some of them, ones she knew in life. They knew her, remembered their lives. Some of them even knew that they were dead.

She didn’t like speaking with the Talkers. Not unless they were one of the ones she didn’t actually know. It hurt too much, seeing her friends dead, but still there, talking to her. Especially when they started asking why she wasn’t dead, too. When they started blaming her.

It wasn’t her fault! She didn’t know why she was alive, damn it all! There was nothing special about her. Nothing that separated her from others. She didn’t have any kind of special power, or anything like that. She was just an ihm.

Still, the Talkers were at least better than the Screamers. She called them Screamers because that is what they did. All they did. They were so enraged by their deaths, and everything that surrounded them, that they constantly howled in anger. The only good thing about them was that screaming was all that they could do. They, like the other ghosts, could not actually hurt her, or interact with the world of the living. But the screaming got old, fast. At least they were mostly in the cities.

All three of them were harmless, physically. But the mental damage? They were certainly capable of that. She would go to see a counselor, if they weren’t all dead. Instead, she was on her second bottle of wine today. Almost the same thing, right?

She sipped her drink, and wished that something, anything, would change.

(BSS Starlight Raven, descending to Thraki, Eye of Despair)

“Descending past three thousand meters. Raven, do you have a landing site picked out yet?”

“Unfortunately, most of the open space is dedicated to farmland. There’s only a single area where we have enough space to land, unless we want to drop in on someone’s field. Looks like a pad, just big enough to fit the ship. Probably used by large cargo shuttles taking goods to market. This area is mostly privately owned, not corporate farms, selling specialty produce.”

“Specialty produce?”

“Organic, sown by hand, tended by actual laborers, instead of the corporate fields that mass-produce goods, using automation and pesticides. The regional specialty is theva berries, which are both eaten raw, or pressed and processed into wine. Most of the local farms, or vineyards, I guess, sell to a winemaker about twenty kilometers away.”

“Sounds like a good place. I’d rather not antagonize someone who might be so powerful that they could fight off this soul-sheering. But I’d also rather not have to try and go all the way across town on our tight timeline, looking for the survivor, if we don’t have to. Show me a course that will let us overfly the area the survivor’s supposed to be, so we can pass over them on the way to the landing pad. Perhaps they’ll reach out, and try to talk.”

“Plotting now. Sending to your terminal.”

“Thank you, Raven. Now, let’s go see if anyone’s out there.”