The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Nameless742, Gabriel Ross, and NerdNErd Nerd.
Operative Leonardo Henrique and Logan Greaves.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
The quadcopter transport drone arrived at the facility entrance at hour thirty-two of the preparation window, with Marcos piloting it from the colony and threading the five-meter drone through the ten-foot gap in the Strathari gates by compressing its rotor arms to their minimum profile. The clearance was tight enough that the rotor housings scraped against the door frame on the way through, but it made it in one piece.
From there, the drone navigated the wreckage of the destroyed mechs and dropped five hundred meters down the shaft, its rotors echoing off the close walls in a deafening, thundering roar that shook dust from surfaces that hadn't been disturbed in millennia, before finally slipping through the hole in the elevator platform.
When it touched down in the central hub, Mark was waiting.
"Alright," he said, his hands resting on the edge of the stasis pod. "Three hours from the moment we disconnect. Marcos, you're on the clock."
"Don't worry, I've already got the timer set," Marcos said. "I recommend we aim for ninety minutes, maximum. The three-hour estimate assumes optimal conditions, which we won't have due to the fact that every bump, tilt, or change in ambient temperature draws additional power from the internal reserves. Treat the margin as half of what I told you, and you'll sleep better tonight."
"I'll keep that in mind," Mark said as he turned to Titus, Valerius, and Lucius, who were already standing by near the drone's cargo platform. "The Strathari inside this pod weighs roughly a thousand pounds. The pod itself is made of the same interior-grade alloy as the rest of this facility, so I have no idea what the total is. Could be two thousand. Could be three. However, the weight isn't what worries me. Just take a look at the housing."
Valerius was already crouching beside the well, running his gauntleted fingers along the pod's base.
"Well, I'll be damned. There are no handles," he observed. "I can't see any grip points either... The housing curves inward at the base... There's a lip here, maybe three inches wide, but it's got a smooth finish. Our gloves aren't going to bite into this."
"Yup, that's the problem," Mark confirmed. "The corridors are wide enough since they were built for beings that made us look like children. But getting our hands under this thing and keeping them there for three hundred meters is going to be the real challenge."
Lucius circled to the far side, studying the clearance between the pod and the well's rim. "If we each take a quadrant and lift from the base lip, we can shuffle it up and out. But the angle is going to be ugly. One slip and we're dropping a few thousand pounds of pod on someone's foot."
"Then don't slip," Mark said. "Aurelia, I want you out ahead of us, clearing the path. Make sure there's nothing on the floor between here and the hub that we could trip on in the dark."
"On it," Aurelia said, already moving toward the corridor with her helmet lights sweeping the floor.
Mark positioned himself at the head of the pod, closest to Talos's face. Titus and Valerius took the sides, and Lucius anchored the base. Four sets of armored hands found the narrow lip of the housing and locked on.
"Once it's up, we don't stop moving," Mark said. "There's nowhere to set this down in this corridor that won't risk cracking the housing or jarring the internal systems. One continuous carry to the hub. Three hundred meters. Ready?"
The three other men all nodded, and Mark reached down and disconnected the primary power coupling from the battery bank. The soft blue glow inside the pod flickered once before stabilizing on internal reserves. The panel above the tank continued its slow and steady blip. They were on the clock now.
"Lift," Mark ordered, and all four men lifted.
The weight was significant but not unmanageable, not with four enhanced soldiers in powered armor sharing the load. Mark's Strathari-enhanced musculature bore more of the burden than the others, his arms absorbing the pod's mass with a deep, burning steadiness that the Elites had to strain harder to match.
But Valerius had been right earlier. The weight wasn't the real enemy. The shape was.
The pod's housing was a smooth, rounded cylinder with no flat surfaces, no edges, nothing for an armored gauntlet to bite into. The three-inch lip at the base was the only purchase they had, and the moment they cleared the well's rim and started moving, the pod wanted to roll. Every step shifted the center of gravity, and every slight adjustment sent the housing sliding against their hands, forcing constant corrections that turned a simple carry into cooperative agony.
"Left side's slipping," Valerius grunted, hitching his grip higher. His servo-motors whined as he compensated, the armored fingers of his gauntlets scraping against the smooth alloy with a sound like nails on glass.
"Tilt it toward me," Mark ordered, shifting his own grip to rebalance. The pod seesawed between them, the internal fluid sloshing audibly, and for one second, Mark felt the housing start to slide out of Lucius's grasp at the base.
"I got it," Lucius said through clenched teeth, jamming his forearms under the curved bottom and bearing the weight with his entire body rather than just his hands. The result made it look like a man trying to hug a boulder, but it worked, and the pod stabilized.
They moved through the corridor in a shuffling, four-man lockstep that would've looked absurd if the stakes weren't so high. The pod's awkward geometry meant they had to stay tight, shoulders nearly touching, each man adjusting to the others' rhythm like a unit carrying a battering ram.
The first fifty meters went smoothly enough. Hard, but manageable, and with a rhythm of boots scraping in unison and servos humming. But by seventy-five meters, the rhythm was fraying. Titus's breathing had gone from controlled to labored, and Valerius had to re-grip twice in the span of ten steps. They began to overcorrect, and overcorrection meant the pod wobbled, and wobbling meant more energy was burned just to keep it stable.
At one hundred meters, Lucius's forearms nearly gave out, and his grip slackened for half a second, the base of the pod dipping before he caught it again with a grunt. The pod lurched, and the fluid inside sloshed hard against the walls, causing the heart monitor above the tank to stutter once before steadying.
"Stop," Mark ordered. They froze in place, four men locked under a few thousand pounds of dead weight, arms burning, thighs screaming, each of them silently calculating the remaining two hundred meters and arriving at the same grim conclusion.
"Commander," Titus said, his voice tight. "I can keep going, but I'm going to be honest with you. Two hundred more meters of this and someone's going to lose their grip for real."
Mark looked down the corridor that stretched ahead of them. It was wide, straight, and empty, with the ceiling a good forty feet above their heads, and the walls thirty feet apart, making it wide enough for-
"Marcos," Mark said.
"Way ahead of you," he replied, and there was a note in his voice that was dangerously close to amusement. "The corridor is roughly thirty feet wide and forty feet tall with a flat, unobstructed floor for the remaining two hundred meters to the hub. The quadcopter transport drone is currently sitting in the hub with its rotors cold. I can have it airborne and at your position in approximately forty-five seconds."
A beat of silence passed between the four men holding the pod.
"Why," Titus said slowly, his arms shaking, "didn't we think of that before we carried this thing a hundred meters?"
"I was wondering the same thing," Marcos said, and now there was definitely amusement in his voice. "The drone is rated for external cargo loads well in excess of what you're currently holding. The corridor ceiling provides more than adequate rotor clearance. I could have flown it directly to the vault the moment you disconnected the power coupling. But you seemed so committed to the manual approach that I didn't want to interrupt."
"Marcos," Mark said flatly.
"Bringing the drone now," Marcos quickly said.
The distant whine of rotors spooling up echoed from the direction of the hub, growing rapidly louder as the quadcopter lifted off and banked into the corridor. Thirty seconds later, the drone appeared at the far end of the passage, its navigation lights cutting through the darkness as it flew toward them at a slow pace.
It slowed to a hover five meters away, then crept forward until the cargo platform was directly beneath the pod.
"Lower it straight down," Marcos instructed. "The magnetic locks will engage on contact."
The four men squatted in unison, controlling the descent inch by inch, and the pod's tendency to roll reasserted itself the moment they started bending their knees. Mark's thighs burned, and he could hear Titus's heavy, yet controlled breathing.
The base plate touched the cargo platform, and the magnetic locks engaged with a resonant click that Mark felt in his molars.
They let go and stepped back, dropping their arms to hang at their sides while the blood rushed back into their forearms with a prickling sensation.
"Pod is secure," Marcos reported. "Internal reserves at ninety-one percent. We're on pace."
"Good carry, Commander," Titus said, rolling his shoulders. He looked down at his gauntlets, where the smooth Strathari alloy had worn faint, silvery scratches into the armored fingertips. "But how about next time, we lead with the drone?"
"Couldn't have said it better myself," Mark said, watching as the quadcopter lifted the pod off the ground, tilted slightly to adjust for the weight distribution, and glided back down the corridor toward the hub, covering the remaining two hundred meters in about fifteen seconds.
They followed on foot, and nobody said a word, though Mark was fairly certain he could hear Marcos suppressing the AI equivalent of a laugh through the comms.
Once the drone reached the hub, it didn't stop. It banked smoothly toward the shaft, rose into the open mouth of the vertical column, and began its ascent. The sound of the rotors echoing off the shaft walls faded into a distant, rhythmic thudding that grew quieter with every second.
Mark watched it go, then turned to his Elites.
"Stairs," he said.
Titus looked at the staircase, five hundred meters of Strathari-sized steps, each tread three feet deep and two feet tall, and let out a groan that was entirely genuine. "You're kidding."
"I wish I was," Mark said with a sigh.
---
The drone beat them to the surface by forty minutes. By the time Mark and his Elites emerged from the facility's entrance, gasping and drenched in sweat despite their armor's cooling systems, the quadcopter was a good way into its trip south toward the colony at maximum speed.
Marcos piloted the drone with the kind of aggressive precision that only an AI could manage, threading through the mountain passes and over the tree line at speeds that would've made a human pilot's stomach flip. The pod's internal reserves were at seventy-eight percent when the drone cleared the colony's perimeter walls and began its descent toward the clinic.
Mark arrived at the clinic twenty minutes later, having made the 2-kilometer trek to the maglev station and finally riding the maglev from the staging area at the tunnel entrance. He came through the front doors of the original clinic, cut through the main corridor, and entered the new addition through the freshly sealed connecting doorway. Dr. Corven was already working inside, her hands moving across the pod's control panel while two of her medical assistants prepped IV lines and monitoring equipment.
"Reserves at sixty-six percent," Marcos reported as Mark entered. "Well within the window."
"Good," Dr. Corven said without looking up. "Marcos, walk me through the stasis release sequence. Step by step."
"Initiating now," Marcos replied, his voice dropping into the measured, clinical cadence he reserved for procedures where a mistake could kill someone. "The release is a four-stage process. First, we introduce a thermal gradient into the suspension medium to bring the body's core temperature up from near-cryogenic to Strathari baseline, which for a healthy adult male is approximately one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit. This alone will take roughly twelve minutes. Do not rush it. If the thermal gradient spikes too fast, you'll trigger a systemic shock response that his cardiovascular system is not ready to absorb."
Dr. Corven's hands were already moving, inputting the thermal parameters on the pod's control interface as Marcos fed her the values. The clear medium inside the tank began to shift, the faintest shimmer of convection currents becoming visible as the temperature climbed in measured increments.
"Stage two begins automatically once core temperature reaches baseline," Marcos continued. "The pod will administer a chemical trigger compound through the nutrient ports along his spine. This compound counteracts the metabolic suppressant that's been holding his cellular activity at one one-hundred-thousandth of the normal rate. His heartbeat should begin accelerating within thirty seconds of injection.
"Stage three is respiratory activation," Marcos said. "His lungs haven't drawn a real breath in four hundred thousand years. The diaphragm will need stimulation. The pod handles this with a series of low-voltage electrical pulses to the phrenic nerve cluster. Dr. Corven, you'll want to have a manual resuscitation kit within arm's reach in case the automated system fails. Strathari ribcages are extraordinarily rigid. If you need to perform chest compressions, you will need Mark or one of the Elites to do it. A normal human cannot generate enough force to compress a Strathari sternum."
"Understood," Dr. Corven said, though she shot Mark of a doctor who didn't enjoy being told she couldn't physically save her own patient.
"Stage four is the drain," Marcos finished. "Once respiration is confirmed and the heartbeat stabilizes above twenty beats per minute, the medium evacuates through the base vents. At that point, he's out of stasis and on our clock. Get him into the chair as fast as the hoist can move him."
Mark stood with his arms crossed, watching the medium shimmer and the temperature readout climb degree by degree. The only sounds in the room were the soft hum of the pod's systems, the steady beep of the heart monitor, and the distant noise of the colony carrying on outside, oblivious to what was going on behind the clinic's doors.
After eleven minutes, the temperature hit one hundred and four.
"Time for stage two," Marcos said.
A soft hiss came from the base of the pod as the chemical trigger compound entered the suspension medium through six small ports along the housing's inner wall. The fluid clouded briefly, sending a milky dispersal pattern fanning out from each injection point before dissolving into the clear medium and making contact with the skin.
Mark watched the heart monitor as the three beats per minute became four, then six.
"It's working," Dr. Corven whispered as it rose to eight beats per minute, then twelve before a sudden spike to nineteen made Dr. Corven's heart skip a beat, before the rate dropped back to fourteen, which left her hovering, uncertain whether to intervene.
"Let it settle," Marcos cautioned. "His nervous system is rebooting from scratch. The irregularity is expected. It will stabilize."
The stuttering smoothed out, and the beats found a rhythm that, while still far slower than a human heart, carried a steadiness to it that hadn't been there before as it rose to twenty beats per minute. Then twenty-one and twenty-two.
"Stage three is a go," Marcos said. "Phrenic stimulation initiating."
A series of faint clicks came from inside the pod as the electrode system engaged, and Talos's chest hitched, a movement so small that it barely lifted his rib. A second hitch was followed by a third stronger hitch, and slowly smoothed out into something that looked like breathing.
It was shallow and labored, but the oxygen sensors inside the pod registered gas exchange, and Marcos confirmed what could already be seen. "Respiration confirmed. Heartbeat is stable at twenty-four beats per minute. Commencing stage four and draining now."
The medium began to evacuate through the base vents, and the level dropped steadily, revealing Talos's body inch by inch. His broad shoulders emerged first, the damaged armor still clinging to his body in broken plates, followed by his chest, his midsection, his hips, and his remaining leg.
Dr. Corven's assistants moved immediately, attaching leads and sensors to his exposed skin as the medium receded. Each contact point sent new data flooding into the monitoring station, and Dr. Corven's eyes darted between the readouts with the rapid, compartmentalized focus of someone processing ten variables at once.
"Blood pressure is dangerously low," she said. "Even by whatever passes for normal in his species. Right, Marcos?"
"It's expected," Marcos replied. "His total blood volume has been in a near-frozen state. It will improve as the cardiovascular system fully engages. Just give it another three to five minutes before intervening."
The medium drained past his feet, the last of it gurgling through the vents, and for the first time, Mark saw Talos in open air. He was just a broken man lying in the gutted shell of a machine that had kept him alive longer than any living thing had a right to survive.
He was smaller than Anahrin. Shorter and stockier, built like a boxer rather than a professor. The skin was a pale bronze, but up close it carried a network of older scars layered beneath the damage. The right arm was gone at the shoulder, the stump sealed by the suit's emergency cauterization system. The right foot and ankle were gone, the lower leg ending in a similar sealed stump. Half the face on the left side was a ruin of scar tissue, the orbital ridge shattered, the eye socket empty. Yet through all of it, the chest kept rising and falling.
"Get him on the chair," Dr. Corven ordered. "Now, before his pressure drops any further."
Mark and Severus moved to either side of the pod. The hoist straps and chains descended from the ceiling, and they worked the sling under Talos's body with the care of men handling something irreplaceable, because they were. When the sling cinched and they triggered the lift, the full weight of a thousand pounds of Strathari biology settled into the harness all at once, snapping the chains taut as the hoist motor whined, and the anchor bolts in the reinforced ceiling took the load. Six thousand pounds of rating for a thousand-pound patient. The overkill paid for itself in the steady, controlled arc that swung Talos out of the drained pod and over the waiting cradle of the healing chair.
They lowered him in, and the chair's articulated struts adjusted automatically as the weight settled, recalibrating to distribute the load across the frame. Dr. Corven's assistants locked the support brackets into place around his torso, his neck, and his remaining limbs while Dr. Corven herself connected the nutrient feed lines to the IV ports she'd prepared.
"Chair is online," Marcos reported. "Beginning cellular recuperation protocol. The system is reading his biology and tuning its output to match. Internal organ assessment in progress."
The chair hummed to life around Talos's body, sending a low vibration that Mark could feel through the soles of his boots. Soft blue light pulsed along the emitter arrays running the length of the chair's spine support, syncing to the rhythm of Talos's heartbeat. Mark watched as the chair's diagnostic display populated with data. There were organ statuses, tissue integrity, bone density readings, and neural activity, amongst other things. Most of the readouts were yellow or red, while a few were green.
"His liver is severely compromised," Dr. Corven said, reading the display. "And one of his lungs, the left one, has extensive scarring from what looks like shrapnel damage. Old wound that appears to predate the stasis by years."
"Worry not, the chair can address both," Marcos confirmed. "Organ regeneration and repair are well within its capabilities. The liver should be functional within a week. The lung scarring will take longer, probably two to three weeks, depending on how his body responds to the accelerated healing. The shoulder stump and the leg, however..."
Dr. Corven nodded as she ran a handheld scanner over the shoulder stump, studying the readout. "His body is already showing signs of cellular repair at the wound sites. Microscopic, but it's there. The stasis field was suppressing his natural healing factor, and now that it's gone, his biology is trying to close what it can. I believe we're looking at full stabilization of the existing wounds within days rather than weeks."
"And when he wakes up?" Mark asked.
"That's the question, isn't it?" Dr. Corven stepped back and looked at the full picture. A ten-foot-tall alien warrior covered in the scars of a war that ended before humanity existed, hooked into a machine that was rebuilding his insides one cell at a time. "His neural activity is present but suppressed. He could wake up in hours or in weeks. There's no way to predict it. What I can tell you is that when he does wake up, he's going to be disoriented, in pain, and potentially hostile. I'm going to need you to be here when it happens."
"I will be," Mark said.
He wasn't sure why he sounded so certain since he had no reason to be. Everything Severus had said about the danger of waking ancient warriors was valid, and Mark wasn't naive enough to dismiss it. But standing there, looking down at the ruined body of a pilot who'd fought to protect something he believed in, Mark couldn't bring himself to see a threat, but a soldier who'd done his job and paid the price in full. He saw a man who'd been carried to safety by a friend and left to sleep through the death of everything he'd ever known.
And somewhere beneath all of that, in a place Mark didn't talk about and tried not to think about too often, he saw a debt.
Anahrin had saved his life. Had rebuilt him from the ground up, poured his own DNA into Mark's shattered body, and spent the last year and a half of his existence teaching a human how to carry the torch of a dead civilization. Anahrin had believed his people were gone. He'd died believing he was the last one, that the Strathari had vanished from the universe due to his actions, with no trace left behind except a rebuilt human and an AI coded in haste.
Now it was clear that he'd been wrong since one trace remained. Broken, missing limbs, half a face torn away, but alive. Stubbornly and defiantly alive for four hundred thousand years in a tube.
Mark owed it to Anahrin to make sure Talos opened that remaining eye. He owed it to the old man who'd called him his most perfectly imperfect creation, who'd spent his last healthy night alive fixing a reactor so Mark could fly, who'd smiled at the name Strathos' Shepherd with trembling lips before closing his eyes for the final time. Anahrin couldn't be here to see the last of his kind wake up, but Mark could be here in his place, and he would be.
"Alright, everyone out," Dr. Corven ordered. "I need sterile conditions, and I need silence. If his vitals change, Marcos will notify you. Until then, go eat and get some rest. You all look like you've been dragged through a mineshaft backward."
"Not too far off," Severus muttered as they filed out.
As soon as they stepped outside, Mark found Lyra sitting on the front steps of the clinic, her jacket pulled tight around her shoulders despite the warmth of the afternoon. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, and her chin rested on top of them, her eyes fixed on the door Mark had just walked through.
The street beyond her was a barely contained circus.
Every child in the colony had seemingly gravitated toward the clinic the moment the drone had descended with its alien cargo. They were clustered in groups of three and four along the street, trying to peer around corners and through windows, their faces caught between wide-eyed terror and irresistible curiosity. Adults were doing their best to wrangle them, but every time one child was pulled back, two more crept forward.
A boy who couldn't have been older than six broke from his mother's grip and sprinted three steps toward the clinic before she scooped him up around the waist. He squirmed and pointed at the building, firing off questions so fast they blurred together into a single, breathless stream of "what is it," and "can I see," and "is it really an alien," while his mother carried him back toward their home with an expression that suggested she was questioning every life choice that had led to this moment.
"Is he going to be okay?" Lyra asked.
Mark looked down at Lyra, who hadn't moved from the steps, but her eyes had shifted from the door to him. Her voice was small, which only happened when she was worried about something but didn't want to make it anyone else's problem.
He walked three steps down before sitting down beside her on the steps. "Dr. Corven is taking care of him. He's hurt really bad, but he's strong. One of the strongest people I've ever heard of."
"Stronger than you?" Lyra asked.
"Hmmm, maybe, but I'd give him a run for his money," Mark said with a light chuckle.
Lyra thought about that for a second, processing the idea of something stronger than the person she considered the most powerful being in her world. "The other kids are saying he's a monster."
"Well, they're wrong," Mark said. "He's not a monster. He's one of the people that our ancestors came from. He's family, in a way. Very, very old family."
"How old?" Lyra asked as she cutely tilted her head.
Mark tried to figure out how to make four hundred thousand years make sense to a nine-year-old. "You know how old the colony is?"
"A few months," Lyra said.
"And you know how old the cities back on Earth were?" Mark asked, before clarifying. "The really old ones?"
"They were really old," Lyra said with a nod.
"Well, he's older than all of them," Mark said. "He went to sleep before humans learned how to build cities, or write books, or do any of the things that made us who we are. And he's been sleeping this whole time, waiting for someone to find him and wake him up."
Lyra's eyes went wide, and she turned to look at the clinic door again. "Whoa, that's like, forever."
"It is," Mark agreed.
"Was he scared?" she asked. "When he went to sleep, was he scared?"
Mark thought of the logs Marcos had pulled for a moment.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I think he probably was."
Lyra was quiet for a long moment, her chin still resting on her knees. Then she unfolded herself and leaned into Mark's side, pressing her face against his arm. He felt her trembling slightly, like she always did when she was trying to be brave about something that scared her.
"I'm glad we found him," she whispered. "If he was alone for forever, then I don't want him to be alone anymore."
Mark put his arm around her and looked out at the street. The children were still watching from every angle, held back by adults who were barely managing the perimeter. A pair of girls, maybe eight years old, had somehow climbed onto the roof of a neighboring module and were lying flat on their stomachs, peering over the edge at the clinic's windows.
"Me neither, bug," he said, and meant it in a way that went deeper than words could carry. "Me neither..."
---
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