It was night on the part of Mid-Childa where Cranagan lay. From its orbit one could see the few lights that were still on, the sky clear of any obstructing elements.
One of Cranagan’s moons, Vileda, was doing its rotation around the planet as usual. It was the biggest of the moons, with the widest orbit, and made out of common material one could find on any other moon.
However, this time on its path around the planet, Vileda passed something in space. It distorted the space around it slightly and seemed to appear out of nowhere. Vileda was between the object and Mid-Childa, obstructing any sensor device to break through to observe it.
Suddenly, the object made a blinding effect, some sort of energy spike, and propelled something out of its exit. Immediately afterwards it disappeared into empty space, leaving nothing behind to provide evidence it was there.
But, the small thing it had left alone caught up in Vileda’s weak gravitational force and went into a slow orbit. It was very small, smaller than any other space-faring vessel Mid-Childa had access to. It was smooth on its metal surface and had the looks of a bird. Two wings protruded out from its hull and indicated that it could have been used for ordinary flight.
It was not damaged in any way, but still, it was dead. No lights could be seen and its engines were quiet. However, there was some sort of shimmer along the hull. An energy shield of some sort was still active, perhaps getting energy from a separate source inside the ship.
It stayed where it was, in orbit around Vileda. There was only a matter of time before Mid-Childa observatories would pick it up and retrieve it. When that happened, another mystery would show itself before them.
.....
A few weeks had passed since Sigrid had first found herself on a new planet. During that time she had been moved to and isolated in another department in the hospital. Why, she didn’t know. She did have a few visitors now and then though.
Most obvious was the doctor, Shamal, who came by on routine check-ups. Then there was a rather short but authoritative woman who had come by and asked a lot of question. Sigrid had not been able to answer on several of them, as there were still some bits of information she could not remember. On the other hand, the woman, who introduced herself as Hayate, had been very friendly and had not pushed the questions any further. Sigrid suspected Hayate didn’t let her know everything about what had happened, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t feel the need to cause trouble.
Only a few days ago there had been a new face visiting her. She had introduced herself as Nanoha and was the one who lead the rescue team that recovered Sigrid’s lifepod. She thanked her for that and they chatted for a short while before Nanoha had to leave again.
These short visits continued for a while until they all; Shamal, Hayate and Nanoha, visited her at the same time.
“Well, this is unusual,” Sigrid said and looked slightly confused.
“It’s been nearly a month since you arrived here and I can’t imagine what you have been going through during this time,” Shamal said. “That’s about to change however. From now on you have your own room in one of the buildings close to here. You will get a visit once per week by me to check you up. There might be other visitors, official or unofficial.”
“Why this sudden change?” Sigrid asked.
Hayate was the one to speak this time.
“There has been an investigation going on ever since your arrival. In none of the reports are you mentioned. I first found this a bit odd, but I later found out you were being kept hidden due to some…other information the higher-ups have received. All of the nurses here have been told to keep quiet as to not make it public.” She looked at Sigrid more closely. “It’s been a fair while now since I received any notion to keep you hidden. I assume they managed to cover it up pretty well and that any information about you was kept sealed. Therefore, I don’t see a risk in letting you out.
Of course, you will be under surveillance all the time so we don’t lose you.”
Sigrid did not know what to say before Nanoha spoke.
“I will be in charge of your well-being for the time being, despite all the other things. I will come by now and then to talk and take you outside,” she said and smiled. “Depending on your health in the near future, you will also be going through some tests.”
“Tests?”
“Tests to evaluate you as a mage. Since you have a device and a Linker Core, we can only assume you have had previous experience with them both.”
“Yes,” Sigrid said doubtfully. “That is correct. I think…”
[My Lady] Forseti suddenly said. He usually kept quiet when other people were around, so it startled them a little. [If you are in doubt, I think what they mean by ‘Linker Core’ is your ‘Gift’. I am also fairly certain the term ‘Mage’ is similar to your status as a ‘Knight’]
“Oh. Then I understand just fine,” Sigrid said, thanking Forseti quietly.
“I know Shari would like to take a look at that device,” Hayate said to Nanoha telepathically.
“Ask her if we can borrow it. We might found out something. It’s quite talkative, that’s for sure,” Nanoha responded.
Hayate cleared her throat to get Sigrid’s attention.
“If you would not mind, Sigrid, I know a person who would be very interested in studying your device. We might even get some information you yourself do not possess. She might be able to upgrade him too.”
Sigrid now looked at Hayate with suspicious eyes. As the Knight of Beskanti code said, leaving a device out of a master’s reach was not allowed under any circumstances and was also frowned upon. She could not allow it.
“No. Not unless I am there with him. He is not leaving my side,” she said bluntly, clearly showing she would not change her mind.
Hayate glanced at Nanoha, who nodded in return.
“Alright, I think we can do that,” Hayate said and smiled. “When do you think it would be appropriate to take you there.
Sigrid shrugged. “I feel fine right now. I can go whenever suits you.”
“Shamal?” Hayate asked.
“She should be fine. She has only been here this week since she was being kept hidden anyway. Just give her some clothes and she should be fine to go,” she said.
“We will wait outside for you,” Hayate said. Your clothes are in the closet. They were a bit damaged but I tried my best fixing them up for you. Come out whenever you are ready.”
“Thank you,” Sigrid said and waited for them to leave.
When the door closed behind them, she rose from her bed and walked over to the closet. Opening it, she noticed her clothes lying in front of her. She picked up her dark green pants and put them on first. Hayate had done a fine job fixing the many holes they had sustained in the crash.
Going in particular order after that, she was soon dressed as she had been on Cancri. Her boots and jacket still fit accordingly, despite the repairs. She attached Forseti’s sheath onto her belt and put him in it.
Her armor was last to be put on. It didn’t fill a direct function, other than additional defense, but was still an important part of her barrier jacket. The armor was fairly simple; two shoulder pads and a breastplate. Despite how heavy it looked - it had the look of solid steel - it was made by a material from Cancri, providing both good defense and being light in weight.
Before she left the room, she used the time left to put her blonde hair in a single braid behind her head. She hated having it in front of her freely hanging, as it often impaired her vision.
.....
It took a while for them to get to the lab, as the traffic was quite heavy. The security procedure was heavy as usual, all the way down into the building where the lab was located.
When they finally arrived at their destination, Shari was already waiting for them.
“Ah welcome, welcome,” she said cheerily when they entered the lab. “Shall we get started immediately?”
“That would be for the best,” Sigrid replied without hesitation and held out Forseti.
Neither Nanoha nor Hayate had said anything and was perplexed over why Sigrid so easily could hand Forseti over this time.
Shari took the device from her and set it up on a table. Hayate leaned in Sigrid’s direction.
“What made it so easy to hand him over now? You were quite reluctant before,” she asked.
“As I said, as long as I’m close-by, it’s fine. We did this at home when maintenance came up,” Sigrid replied without shifting her gaze from Forseti.
Hayate nodded for herself and continued to observe.
Shari had begun attaching cables to Forseti that lead into the main computer to access his main core. He was very talkative during it.
[I hope this doesn’t damage my ports. I would hate getting a malfunction due to some small error of judgment] he said in a slightly offended tone.
“What makes you say that? This is the most advanced analysis you can get around here,” Shari retorted, her technical pride showing through.
[I very much doubt that. This is nothing like what I usually was handled with. It feels…rough]
“I don’t think you should feel anything. You are a device, albeit a quite talkative one. Now keep quiet while I analyze you.”
It took some time for the computer to access all sectors and extract the analysis information Shari needed to draw any conclusion. When it got displayed, she took her time reading it and looking through.
.....
It took an hour or two, before she showed up with the results. They were sitting outside in the hallway, watching her work through a window.
“Surprisingly, against my belief that Forseti was completely different from anything, he is actually made out of Belkan technology,” she said and looked at the three. “I compared his internal structure and software with some other devices and they are very much alike. There are only some small fallacies in the coding that differentiates. Whoever constructed him made a really good job researching Belka and copying it.
However, I did find out that, opposed to your devices and by which you have certainly have noticed by now, he is much more talkative and thinking. I haven’t found out why exactly that is yet, but I think they added their own hardware and software somewhere in his core. It will take some more time to go that deep.”
“Take the time you need,” Sigrid said, “but I won’t leave until you are done.
“Take the time you need,” Hayate said. “Nanoha has to go, but I’ll stay. Can’t let our guest be alone.”
Shari nodded and went back into the lab. Nanoha rose from her seat and headed towards the door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Sigrid. We will take a look around the area and I’ll show you our office,” she said.
Sigrid nodded. “That sounds nice; I’m honored to be in such good care.”
Nanoha smiled and left the room. Sigrid returned her attention to observing Shari through the window. She had begun to disassemble Forseti and analyze him more thoroughly. Sigrid wondered if Forseti would be nice enough to let Shari look at his most protected parts, but she doubted it. She wouldn’t tell him to do so, a device still had some power over its own existence.
.....
1 year earlier, somewhere within the empire of Northern Beskanti on Cancri.
The ground was thick with snow that had fallen during the day. The moon was occluded by clouds in the freezing cold night and didn’t lighten up anything in the surroundings. It was close to pitch black, which suited the little girl hiding in a ditch. She was next to a small road leading to a nearby base belonging to the Northern Beskanti military and guards were patrolling by the walls. Inside the high fence there were also several watchtowers, which covered the whole base with light.
The girl crawled silently closer to the fence and had to stop when a guard passed just in front of her. He looked tired and bored. He passed without even looking in her direction and she continued to inch forward. When she had gone as far as she could, the ditch ending up on the road, she went completely still and tapped the headphone wrapped around her ear.
“Korpral Jónsdóttir, we have confirmed your position,” a voice crackled into it. “The truck’s ETA is forty seconds. Be prepared.”
The voice cut off and Jónsdóttir tried to hear the truck approaching. She could hear it faintly, just around the bend of the road. She tensed up a bit, nervousness creeping up on her.
Her squad was now in position around the base and would at the same moment as she entered, begin their intrusion. Their objective was a simple one; Infiltrate the base, locate the data core and blow it to hell. Jónsdóttir was the bomb carrier and had to get into the base’s command center to reach the data core. The rest of her squad would provide distraction and, if needed, covering fire if things turned ugly. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be the case.
The truck slowed down before the gate and came to a halt. Jónsdóttir activated her stealth device attached to her barrier jacket and crawled as fast as she could across the road to reach the truck.
The guards began the obligatory searching of it, walking around it and looking underneath.
She timed it perfectly. Without needing to wait, the last guard moved away from the truck and provided a clear passing for Jónsdóttir. Her stealth device flickered due to the ground, but not enough to get the attention of the guards.
She got under the truck and used two hooks to attach herself to it. When she was firmly attached, the truck began to move.
She looked out from under it and saw a lot of feet walking around when they passed the gate, into the base. The base was active day and night, making an attack really hard. This mission had been planned for months and some had to bet their life on it to gather enough intel. There were some rumors circulating about that infiltrating agents had been captured and never seen again, but it was a lot of shushing about it. Jónsdóttir took that as a sign that the rumors were not rumors.
The truck came to a halt in front of another gate. She looked around, trying to spot her own squad. No matter how hard she looked, she didn’t see a trace of them. She smiled for herself, because if she couldn’t see them, no one else would.
With that in mind, the truck began inching forward. The gate lead into the building where the command center was situated and it was where Jónsdóttir would jump off. It was much brighter in there; all the spotlights focused on the truck itself.
Some guards approached it and began to unload material from the back. With that acting as a distraction, Jónsdóttir unhooked herself from the undercarriage as quietly as she could and began to look for the opening.
There, a few meters to her left was an open door leading to a corridor. The path was currently clear, as the guards used another opening to unload the material. She crawled out from under the truck and pulled herself up on her knees. Then, in a hunched position, she made her way towards the door. She made certain she was unnoticed and risked a glance towards the guards unloading. They still went on their business and payed no attention to her.
She focused ahead of her again and inched closer to the door. There was a camera situated above the door, but unless it could see thermal signatures, one really needed to focus to see her. Her stealth device was an almost perfected technology, with few faults. Still, it hindered her movement by a great degree, because if she moved too fast the device could not keep up with her and it would fail.
She finally touched the doorframe and was just about to enter the corridor when another guard, an officer, approached her from a corner. As controlled as she could muster without too fast movement, she slowly retreated and pushed herself up against a wall. The officer walked straight past her and began screaming orders to his subordinates. Jónsdóttir slipped through the door and found herself in a long corridor. She began to walk down it, recovering the schematics from her memory. The command center was located further in, a couple of turns ahead. There didn’t seem to be a lot of activity inside the building itself, most personnel being on the outside. Perhaps they didn’t have any people out on missions in the middle of the night…
Jónsdóttir shook her head and threw that thought away. If she was here, there was bound to be enemy missions underway in other places.
A steel door blocked her path when she rounded the final corner. The command center lay behind it, waiting for her. She checked behind her and listened intently. She decided there was no one around and deactivated her stealth device. The device was silent, but she still felt the electric currents racing over her body as the illusion field fell.
She opened a pocket on her armor and took out a small datapad. With a few commands she had hacked herself into the security system and worked her way through to the door she was next too.
Hacking a military base would seem extremely hard, if one didn’t have enough info. Thanks to the planning of the mission, Jónsdóttir’s squad had already been given the necessary info to access it and it was not a problem. The only thing she had to worry about was if a human was surveying the network traffic, but the probability of that however, was low.
She heard the lock move in the door and she put the datapad back in her pocket. With the stealth device activated once again, she moved into the command center.
It was dark inside and no one was stationed there. She found that strange, as it should be monitored every second. She didn’t think more of that and moved on. The datacore she was looking for was in the center of the room, surrounded by monitors. She couldn’t see the core itself, since it was surrounded by a steel shell, but she knew by the intel that she had found it.
She began to place out some demolition charges, powerful devices capable of blowing up the entire command center individually. She treated them carefully, still not trusting the fail-safe they had. She had never been good with handling explosives.
When she was done, she tapped twice on her earphone again. An affirmative came back and her next objective was to get herself out of the base to safety. Her squad would then begin the distraction to speed things up.
Jónsdóttir moved to activate her stealth device, she had turned it off to move easier during the planting of the charges, and clicked it. When the device began to set up the illusion field again, her heart made a jump in her chest as the alarm began sounding throughout the base. It was a shrilling sound that pierced her ears and she watched with panic in her eyes as the steel door she had come through slammed shut. At the same time, automated sentry guns began to lower themselves down through the roof. She had received no intel of that, but ran for cover anyway, her instincts telling her to get out the line of fire.
In the panic that had ensued, she had forgotten that her stealth device was turned on and when she moved too fast for it, it broke. Usually, when it was deactivated, her external protection shield would come online. She had no such luck this time, as the illusion field drained away too slowly for the shield to activate. Before she reached cover, three of the six sentry guns had gained a lock on her and fired.
Although she thought she was done for, the guns fired some sort of incapacitation beam. She felt her body go numb and her mind started to drift away, while the sentry guns continued to fire until she lost consciousness. They then deactivated, letting the guards waiting outside to storm inside and secure her.
2009-04-11, 03:25
Graphic Designer
Plotbunny. They have to come at work...
For those that belittle their favorite characters, complain about pairings, complain about oversexed images. Stop, thank you.
). For the Belkan religion and it's evolution I was trying to go for something I thought could fluidly turn into the modern Belkan church. As I see it it'll go from Kaiser is divine and Goddess to Duel gods (kaiser and goddess) to the Goddess slowly being eliminated.
Why must you do this?
