Book 8 – Interlude Part 1

It happened behind his back.

He’d been tending his gardens as he always did for a morning routine, when the ceiling of his cozy grove was ripped apart and an exo-suit blasted through.

Two things were rare about this. First, he’d never had anything fall down through his roof, so that was unique in a way. And second, he’d never seen his exo-armors moving around without him piloting them.

Modeling programs were already showing him the full trajectory of that exo-suit when he turned around to look at the source of the comotion. Not that he really needed them, given how obvious the entire crime scene was.

Straight through the biome dome, down into the roof of his house, easily breaking through the top floor before coming to a stop on the second.

Camera systems in his home were still working fine, so he swapped through the feeds until he could watch the intruder, see what he was up against.

The exo-suit’s hull integrity was already below critical levels. As in, the armor could hardly even stand by itself even at full power. Thus, no threat to him.

Which meant the true danger would be the possible pilot within. It could be a machine, or a human who’d recovered his older jettisoned variants.

But more important – whoever or whatever program was piloting that exo-armor couldn’t be on the side of Relinquished. He had a pillar heart setup in his grove, and that would have fried any machine aligned with that goddess. It’s range went beyond the dome hull of his grove even.

Plus if Relinquished had discovered the means to bypass these pillars, then she would have attacked him with an army, not a single crashed exo-armor of his own design.

…

Actually, he was nearly certain she would arrive herself to kill him. That goddess hated him above all other humans in the world, at least according to Grandpa. And Grandpa was always right about most things.

Thus: The crashed exo-suit pilot was either human, or a weak variant of a machine that was unaffiliated with Relinquished – as a stronger machine would have no reason to pilot a suit. In both cases, he was certain he could defend himself against.

So he’d simply taken his blade, staff and lantern, then opened his front door and walked back into his house. If he were honest, he was more thankful that the crashed suit had ruined his home instead of his agricultural garden.

The house he could fix. Plant growth took months on the other hand and couldn’t be rushed. Even the mites hadn’t given him their secrets for bioengineering. Yet.

Still. He kept his blade at the ready as he walked up the creaking steps. He hadn’t lived this long by not exercising the minimum of caution. Humans could prove just as dangerous as machines if they were occult mages of some kind.

On the second floor, he saw with his own eyes what his camera feeds had sent him.

The armor hissed clouds of vaporized lubricant out of the damaged exterior parts. Parts of his house were dangling off splinters, many of which were still in the process of reaching their structural limits and falling off their last held position, clattering on his floor.

As for the exo-suit itself…

One armored hand was currently half-embedded in his dressing drawer. And as his eye examined the arm, he detected interesting modifications. Several of the artificial muscles had been damaged, cut out and replaced by other cannibalized fibers. But the new affixed points were set in an odd pattern.

His eyes zoomed in on those, more curious.

He’d made those easily modifiable of course, so that in post-combat situations he could replace damaged sinew with lesser stabilizing muscle fibers. Harder to pilot from then on, but doable.

The rearrangement here was… adequate. It allowed all standard motions, minus a few extreme edge cases, but without any drawbacks to stabilization. Whoever had tried doing field repairs to his exo-suit had clearly spent months learning how to best make it work if they’d come up with this on the spot.

“Grandpa, is this one of yours?”

His staff began to glow, lights shining through the wood. The lantern mites within began to fidget further, walking in changing geometric patterns. He felt a presence connect to him, speaking directly through his mind.

NOT MINE. The old soul whispered. NOT KNOW ELSE. STINKS OF HUMAN.

“And why do you believe it isn’t a machine piloting my exo-suit?”

COSMETICS. PAINTING. GAUDY DECORATION. SEE? HUMAN THINGS.

His eyes started scanning. Populating his vision with notification after notification. Huh. He hadn’t noticed the cosmetics, too focused on the suit’s engineering modifications.

Badges, gold decorations, paper scripts written in… latin? Odd choice for a language, but his database returned that as the match.

That meant whoever was within it, was likely human. Grandpa was right.

That helped him fully relax. So this was a human, who had recovered one of his discarded armors, and spent months restoring it to working shape. Excellent, a peer even.

“Thank you Grandpa. I appreciate the advice.”

NOT GRANDPA. IS DUMB WORD. The old soul sent back, upset as usual when he’d addressed him as such. But he’d known grandpa for years now. From the moment he’d picked up the discarded lantern off the side of a roadway, back when he was a starving half-dead child.

Grandpa was always Grandpa. Whispering advice on where to go, where to find food, where to hide. His actual name was not as fitting as Grandpa.

BAH. STUPID HUMAN.

The presence in his mind snapped back into the lantern, brooding.

He shrugged, and got back to the task at hand. If he could feel family love, as the humans in Nadja explained what that was, then Grandpa was certainly the first person he loved. He felt a pang of loss again at the thought of that city, as usual, but he put it to the side, trying to focus.

The exo-suit remained unmoving, the vapors around it dissipating. He looked over the latches and setup, trying to discover which of his prior suits he’d abandoned behind. But then he realized something was off.

For one, it was using a blade… like his own blade. In fact, it was an exact replica. He’d only lost three in the past. What were the chances a human had managed to stumble around that same area in order to recover his old weapon?

Far more likely that the mites had entombed the discarded blades at some point, and then lifted them up the stratas where one was intercepted by this human. So that could be dismissed.

But the other part was not so easily dismissed.

Because this exo-suit… was his exo-suit. As in the same exact iteration he was currently using. Version 41.5.

It had the same latch design updates he’d done to assist him in getting out under crushing water pressure. The memory of having to rip a hole through his own armor, and then slowly pry all the metal apart until he could correctly jettison himself from the sunken suit had made him spend some time on those latches. Plus, as he learned, he had too much metal within himself to float or swim. He had to hold his breath for two hours while he walked on the bottom of the seabed before he got to shore again.

Find this and other great novels on the author’s preferred platform. Support original creators!

Miserable experience.

He’d done that update only three months prior, and there hadn’t been any other additions since. So only his exo-suit should have that. He walked back to the window, and looked outside down at his grove.

His exo-suit remained untouched there, held up by winches and heavy chains. Ready for the next expedition out.

So how was there a second exo-suit here?

Something was off with all this. He approached the suit, looking over the damages. It remained motionless, its back halfway through the floor to the next level downwards, legs and arms spread out. Lights were flickering on the sides, pressure gauges were all showing loss of power. The suit was dying. The AI inside was following automated protocols now, struggling to keep the suit running by diverting power and systems one after another as they failed.

Which meant the pilot inside was either dead, or unconscious, given no commands were being sent to the armor.

His eyes tracked the damages, and sent him a report. There wouldn’t be a way to recover this suit, and soon the AI would run through its last possible solutions before it ran out of power for itself.

Which meant life support systems would equally die soon.