With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

17th February 2013
18:43 GMT

The armour suits don't get back up once he passes, either.

So… What, he's added some sort of counter-magic ability to everything else now? Or an ability to turn hearts off? If they actually retain any sort of awareness, that seems more plausible, but it's still-.

I carefully avert my gaze from him, looking only at the shoes of his escorts as I make sure that my empathic vision is as weak as possible because I still remember Mr. Nelson's warning about looking into peoples' souls. There's no way that he isn't almost as aware of the souls of the people with him as he is of his own. This area isn't Anti-Lifed so he shouldn't have perfect awareness, but I still…

Yes. I walk over to the entrance to a nearby building and take up position as if I was guarding it.

No chatter from the Anti-Life party. Because there's nothing the guards know that he doesn't and there's nothing that he wants that they need to be told to do. What an unpleasant way to-

BaBUM.

-live.

Is he aware of that? Has he been coming here for a while, or..? And I looked at him, which he would have felt, but… This place is Aztec in style, not Apokoliptian or modern American. The broadcaster was clearly his work but all the rest has been Aztec magic. So I'd guess that Tlazolteotl is working with him rather than being enslaved to him.

Why?

Don't know.

From the direction their feet are moving in, I'd guess that none of them are coming towards me. Can't risk looking at them directly, so… Ring, passive sonic imaging.

Compliance.

And… Yes. Just by listening to the echoes I can more or less follow-.

One of the large suits reaches across the top of the pyramid with the portal on it and picks up the fallen suits before walking off in a different direction. Hm. I could send M'gann and Kon after Mannheim while I follow the big suit, but we don’t have any reliable covert way to get back in contact or find each other. We could both follow Mannheim but that would be kind of obvious. We could try killing him, but since he's here on 'friendly' terms with Tlazolteotl I'm not hopeful. Or we could try following the big armour and see where that takes us.

That sounds like the better option.

I step away from my post, and the sounds I'm getting suggest that the rearguard are watching me but taking no action. That's fine. Down the middle of the street, like a robot following the line to its destination. Is that how they walk? Don't know. But the alternative is activating the wings and none of the others seem to be doing that.

Tracking the big armour is easy: it's taller than almost all of the buildings. And the power assistance in this armour means that it's not a strain for me. Blood pressure… Okay. I.. could supply my brain by ring and leave the rest of my body to just try its best, but if Mannheim's around with… Poorly defined abilities, I think that the risk would be unwise.

No people around, but the stone seems to be in good condition and the greenery is in good condition. The armour suits don’t appear to be doing it, so I imagine that it's just how this place is. I didn't have any preconceived ideas about what a haven for women who died in childbirth should be like, but I suppose 'just another Aztec city' is pretty reasonable. They wouldn't want to be reminded of how they died for eternity, and they'd have been living here for longer than they were alive. Certainly for longer than they'd been trying to give birth. And the aim was to give them a place to recover mentally before seeking reincarnation so the gods couldn't make it too nice.

The big armour suit looks like it's heading towards a huge building at… Roughly the centre of the city. It has the traditional stepped pyramid design but the individual steps are huge; big enough that the large armour would be forced to climb them rather than walk up them.

I pick up the pace a little, trying to be only just behind the large armour before it enters the building. No one looks, no one cries out and none of the suits I can see act any differently. I can't get readings from Mannheim's party from here, but if I really want to find them later I doubt that it will be hard.

Mannheim doesn't back away from fights. Not any more.

The large suit that I'm following stops just in front of a large door in the huge ziggurat. It's stone, and painted in surprisingly bright colours. I know that people in medieval Europe had access to bright pigments and dyes earlier in history than is sometimes assumed, but it's still a little surprising to see bold colours like that in an Aztec city. I suppose that even if it is an anachronism for the time these cities date from that doesn't mean that their afterlife wouldn't have it.

The big suit puts the smaller ones down and pushes-. Ah. The doors are stone, and on some sort of turntable. They swivel as the suit pushes, revealing the interior.

I can hear the sounds of a forge almost immediately. So this is where they're being made?

The big suit picks up the smaller ones and walks inside. It doesn't close the door immediately, so I accelerate to a jog and get inside. Then back…

To…

Walking normally.

So this is where they're keeping the heartless. And the prisoners.

BaBUM.

The prisoners are strapped to… The arrangement reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Bound wrist and ankle, gagged and attached to gurneys, they're pushed around the room by heartless… They're dressed as… Priests. In one part of the room they're… Being ritually bled, the priests officiating showing absolutely no emotion as they discharge their office. They're using knives and pots rather than modern medical equipment, but the blood is staying liquid rather than clotting anyway.

BaBUM.

In another part of the room more heartless hammer metal, pausing every so often for blood to be poured onto the plate. Magical transmutation? I can't… Immediately call to mind a transformation that would require human blood, but perhaps it's a conduit for some other spell instead. They're using only primitive tools, and their supply of metal doesn't seem all that large.

BaBUM.

The finished parts are carried up to the top of a dais where a single man is working on the internal frames. Parts are attached either by his hand or at his direction, blood is added and… I think he's performing a ritual anointing. His chest is cut open, but there's a visible heart in his chest-

BaBUM.

-and it's the source of the Anti-Life feeling that… It's not filling the room, but it's a constant background drone. The man himself is… Muscular. Huge, actually, six and a half feet tall and extremely muscular. I didn't think that sort of musculature existed back in those days, but it looks like I'm wrong. Close-cropped hair. Clearly of a South American ethnic group. There's an open suit of armour behind where he's working, metal stained by old blood.

And a… When he briefly turns in my direction I see a metal plate attached to his face over his mouth.

Adom didn't have any pictures, the statues had long since eroded to nothing and I felt stupid asking him to draw them, but… He fits the description for Tezumak.

I don't think anyone deserves to be Anti-Lifed, and the whole human sacrifice thing does get a little muddled in a place with an afterlife that rewards being sacrificed and allows reincarnation. But I don't like the fact that I'm about to help the least moral member of the League of Ancients, including the queen who reintroduced slavery to Atlantis.

Affecting the pose of automation, I walk what appears to be the correct route to the dais, evading the large armour suit as it heads outside after dropping off its load for repairs.

Time to start acting openly.

 

17th February 2013
18:49 GMT

Objectives:

1. Liberate and evacuate the prisoners.
2. Revitalise the heartless.
3. Destroy the power armour.
4. Prevent Mannheim and Tlazolteotl becoming aware of it.

Evacuating the prisoners is going to be hard. Not only are there a lot of power armours around with flechette launchers that would easily kill people with baseline human toughness, but the only portal I know which I could use to evacuate them is in the open at the top of a pyramid. The Amazon force following us is going to have to take their suddenly ground-bound flying horses over a mountain of obsidian so I'm not counting on getting reinforcements from them quickly. And there's a limit to how much M'gann can ingest.

Can Tezumak turn the other suits off?

Probably not. Assume that I rip his current heart out of his chest and replace it with one of the ones I took from the power armour we fought, and that brings him to his senses -which isn't guaranteed- then I'll have access to someone who can tell me everything I could want to know about the suits that have already gunned everyone down.

How about… Sneaking hearts into peoples' chests?

I don't think anyone here can detect that, but the change in their behaviour would be pretty obvious. As would the fact that their wounds were closing up. That's also the option most likely to tip Tlazolteotl off.

Can I engage and destroy all of the armour suits?

Hide behind the big armour, bleed the others out one at a time… It's doable, but it would almost certainly take long enough to draw attention from outside. And they might just decide to shoot the prisoners out of spite. Or be told to.

But if the armour collapses when exposed to Mannheim…

I follow what looks like a reasonable path towards Tezumak, following more or less the route the large armour took. It's… Waiting for instructions? Or just-.

It turns and starts walking towards me. Nothing strange about that, it's a straight line between Tezumak and the door out. And-.

It was close to Tezumak and that's clearly an Anti-Life infused heart in his chest. I don't know how to make Anti-Life broadcasters… I mean, I know their physical structure, but the arcane component is… Not something I'd want to rely on being able to replicate in a controlled way.

There wasn't any power armour in Mictlampa. So how could I broadcast..?

…

There must be a better option.

If I take control of the big armour-. No, same problem. Bystanders would die. I could fly everyone outside-. No, there are suits of power armour outside. Grab Tezumak out and interrogate him? No, that just-.

It's nearly reached me. It's going to walk over me.

My armour goes dead as I cut myself off from the honden. As much as I can, anyway. Because this could cause some nasty blowback. And then…

I imagine a universe where everyone trudges through their daily tasks in lockstep with the will of another.

BaBUM.

I push from my mind the possibility of living any other way.

BaBUM. BaBUM. BaBUM.

The giant suit of power armour shudders and shakes-

I accept it as my place.

-and drops to its knees and then collapses towards-.

Chuck the heart away and-. And I can think-. Fire up the armour and wings!

The armoured giant falls, clipping my feet as I try flying out of the way and sending me into a vertical spin! Dizzily I see M'gann vomit up Kon as they both charge over to where the prisoners are bound, M'gann's telekinesis already throwing heartless priests out of the way with bone-breaking force. The power armour suits are collapsing just as the giant one did-. No. Some have retained at least some of their power, just about remaining upright as they try and bring their flechette launchers to bear on any target.

There's a clank as Tezumak gets inside his armour-.

"Kon! Get him out!"

Kon doesn't look around, he just leaps at Tezumak, reaching his dais an instant later and shoving both hands into the rapidly closing armour. He heaves against the shutting mechanism-

"Ah!"

-which sprouts small blades which cut into his fingers, making him bleed.

I-.

I am glad that you know your place. Come to me.

Shit.

I get control of my movement, grabbing hold of a walkway and setting my wings to neutral. I look around-.

"Gimme a hand!"

Tezumak has gotten control of his arms and has used his right to grab hold of Kon's head. It's an awkward angle and he can't bring his full strength to bear, but Kon's hands are both occupied keeping his armour from sealing.

I push off, activating my wings and rocketing towards Tezumak's dais. I land with a thunk, then dash up to-.

Tezumak opens his flechette launchers, trying to pull Kon into the arc of fire-.

I fire a beam of orange light through the opening in his armour, construct hand forming around his heart! Grab and pull!

BaBUM.

It's out, and Kon shudders as he's exposed to the concentrated Anti-Life. Fortunately Tezumak loses focus as well, his eyes going from hard to somewhat vacant. I toss the tainted heart aside and grab one of the hearts from the suits we fought. Construct hydraulic ram, shove it in the gap and push. New heart in, link it up and replace some of the blood that was spilling out.

Would he have blood as a spirit? Or was that added for the magic? Don't know.

"Okay, done!" I step back from Tezumak and look around. M'gann's beaten up the heartless but some of the suits are showing signs of life. "Get the other armour suits!"

"But-." He looks at the hands that are holding Tezumak's armour open.

"I replaced his heart. No more Anti-Life infection. Go!"

He nods and leaps, landing on a suit that had managed to rise to its knees and slamming it back to the stone floor.

"Tezumak." He blinks and I see slight more focus in his expression. "Adom says-."

The armour slams closed and readies itself for combat!

 

6 882 938.M41

"I do not share your frustration." Fio'Vre Lar'shi Gru'oya makes a gesture to indicate that while she doesn't exactly disagree, she doesn't share my perspective. "I found it quite instructive."

"Yes, but you do agree, right? This doesn't make any sense."

"Aliens frequently do things that make little sense to me. As you have observed, by definition, different species think differently. There is more than one correct solution for the equation of sophoncy."

I throw up my right hand in frustration. "So why do you think this ship is a study in different ways of achieving the same outcome?"

She thinks it over for a moment. Gru was given this job due to the way she doesn't get flustered by alien technology, which the Lar'shi fio'ar'tol correctly deduced was going to be to most significant consideration to being assigned to studying the ring. I once asked how they determined that, and apparently they used to use a complex battery psychological test… But found that they got almost the exact same results far quicker by showing the students an Imperial servitor and watching how they reacted.

I was pleased to find out that it wasn't because of her name. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned any rational person should find a servitor weird.

"The possibility which I think is most likely is that it was intended as a test bed for new technology. Putting them in a functional ship would allow them to be tested under load, and give better information than a laboratory test."

"The idea being that they would select the best and install it on future generations."

"Yes."

"Then where are they?"

She considers that for a moment as well. "Warp travel is not something that can be precisely controlled by any known species in this galaxy. While it is usual for ships lost in the warp to coagulate together in a vortex to form a space hulk, it is possible that a ship might find a current which caused it to exit the warp on its own."

"Where's the damage from warp exposure?"

"They had shielding devices. They were the source of our understanding of the technology."

"No crew, Gru. Something killed them. If it was daemons, then the shields failed. Or weren't perfect. There should be some damage."

"Warp dives have a far lower-."

"We know their fuel capacity, and we've scouted literally every system in range of a warp dive based system. That can't have been how they did it."

She watches me, waiting for me to calm down a little.

I bow my head. "Sorry."

She nods slowly. "We know the fuel capacity for the systems we can understand. Your ring had given us full access to some of the databases we could not decipher, but not to all of them. There are still systems we do not understand. You have told us that the ves'ron use drives which nullify inertia in normal space. Perhaps it is something like that, but not effective enough to entirely replace warp technology."

"One of the two would be faster. We know how far that could be for warp diving. Sure, they could have another system, but then why have the warp dive system?"

"The be'gel would make such a system."

"The orks would cobble the systems from captured ships together rather than regularise their ship-building. They wouldn't build it like that from scratch."

She regards me calmly. "Then what do you suspect?"

"Two possibilities. One, despite assurances from the T'au kor'ar'tol, we haven't been given access to everything. They're hiding the bodies, or… Okay, this isn't a fresh wreck or anything, I wasn't expecting it to be pristine, but parts have been removed and not included. Something that would make this make sense." I sigh. "The second is that they're pulling a Krikket and the ship's a fake."

"It was a real ship. We walked inside it."

"I don't mean that it's not a real ship. I mean that it wasn't a fortuitous wreck. Someone put it there for the early tau to find. And… Since they didn't know exactly what your species would be good at, they included a little of everything."

"Why would any species do that?"

"Necrons messed around with ancient humans to create pariahs. They can't cope with warp energy, so they wanted another species around who could dampen the connection between warp space and real space."

"That claim is based on the existence of pariah units amongst the ves'ron. The Tau Empire has not encountered them for some time. It has been suggested that they were only ever used by a single dynasty."

"Or there are a lot more dynasties waking up at the moment and they haven't all had enough time to pick up enough pariahs to form units. If they were even aware of the possibility. The point is, that very long term plans that might pay off are something that happens."

"Very well. Let us assume that one of the situations you suggest is correct. How would you determine the difference?"

"Ah… Test everything that could be a drive in the field. And everything that might generate power. Except for warp phenomena I can scan and replicate just about anything. Then we'd know what the greatest range could be. Then check all worlds within that area for signs of habitation. If anything matches, then we've got an origin point."

"And what would the significance of that be?"

"We might find other examples of their technology. After four thousand years I doubt that anyone there will remember it… If their civilisation is still a going concern. But they might at least give us some way to decode the remaining databases."

"And the only thing that would require your direct involvement would be the creation of the device copies." I nod, and she's been working with me for long enough to understand the gesture. "What else?"

"Hunt down the T'au kor'ar'tol's secure databases, including nudging peoples' minds to persuade them that I need access. And… At this point, probably the T'au aun'ar'tol's databases as well. That would get any records that I don't have access to. I'd need to do that myself, but it would be relatively safe and wouldn't require anyone but me."

"A-ttacking the aun'ar'tol is something of an extreme measure, regardless of other considerations."

"I know how tau get about the aun. If I was planning it, I wouldn't have told you about it. But… You weren't there, but the Admiral had a physical reaction to me showing her the image of Krona. If this ship is somehow one of his projects, keeping that from me is an astronomically stupid thing to do."

Her eyes narrow has they unfocus, Gru clearly going through a calming meditative exercise after my not-heresy.

"Perhaps we should return to a more productive avenue. How would you access the remaining databases?"

"If it even is a database. It scans a lot like some Eldar psychomorphic materials, so I'd… Try getting hold of a psyker. One with skills relating to transferring information. And probably spotting booby traps."

"None of the other databases have active defences."

"Warp-based technology needs to have active defences due to the warp. The daemons will worm their way through any undefended hole eventually, even if it's just to attack the minds of nearby sophonts."

"Do you have access to such people?"

"There are human astropaths I could call on. None cleared for access to this site. The genestealer hybrids are psykers and.. since they're under my authority I could bring one or two here, except that I am not a moron. Not trying to use Gremlin because even if he can get enough waaaagh energy, it would probably just wreck the database. That leaves-."

6 883 938.M41

The Dark Eldar wych prisoners smile near-mindlessly at me, eyes glowing orange. It turns out that that once you take out the sadism and hunger, there really isn't all that much left.

"How may we serve, master?"