The Price of Gearning
Author: Marcus Dreaddlin
Original post: https://redsunindustries.weebly.com/rsi-blog/eve-online-fan-fiction-the-price-of-learning
Entry for the YC116 Pod and Planet Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.
The oddly shaped tritanium hatch shifted minutely, and then slowly opened with a hiss of what might have once been breathable gas, and a low groaning rumble of protest. Considering the hatch had not been opened in somewhere around ten thousand years, Vica LaRousseau was impressed with the engineering. She was tall and shapely, with bright red hair, pale skin and long legs that were the legacy of her mother, and the keen brain and blue eyes she had inherited from her half-Caldari father. She had given up her life as a planet-borne nanotechnologist long ago, along with her mortality. She sometimes wondered if her family were still alive.
The point Dustie jumped through the hatch, his weapon with its laser targeting beam probing the darkness beyond, leaping in before the hatch had time to fully cycle open. Around Vica, the rest of her merc squad stood alert and tense, with the same barely restrained violence instantly at the ready that she always saw in her hunter Hounds back home on Corufeu. Ready and eager if given any opportunity. They were loyal to her, and a small comfort in a universe full of terrors.
Vica stepped through the hatch as it opened fully, scanning with her specially modified datapad. Illegally acquired and assembled semi-sentient drone processor systems, with biotechnology (without doubt formerly human) sensor systems, being caught with this datapad would get you instantly jailed for a very long time back in Gallente space, but here in Wormhole space, they were an absolute necessity, all ethical concerns aside. Knowing that her datapad had on the one hand once been part of a murderous sentient rogue drone, and on the other hand likely contained parts of some poor individual’s vivisected brain and nervous system, did not improve her mood, but Vica was a pragmatist, even though she knew in her heart that her situation often forced her to make compromises that once would have made her shudder with revulsion.
The scanner system was excellent, however it had been built and acquired, and her low light display lit up with tantalizing data as she and her squad of Dusties proceeded down a dark corridor that had not known the footfall of humankind in an aeon.
Killing the drones that had guarded this place had been a serious challenge. The weapons systems that the Ancients had possessed far outstripped the best advances of New Eden’s science, Vica knew. And she realized, as did most other pod pilots, that if the Sleepers ever awoke, if their drones were to be guided by sentient strategy instead of sub-sentient automatic defense routines, sites like this one would become all but inaccessible. Her fleet waited outside, floating silently in the void. Some of them would be salvaging the Sleeper wrecks, she knew, looking for useful ancient parts and components. But the real work, she would carry out, here within this ancient tomb of a station. It had taken years to develop the skills necessary to slice into Sleeper stations without activating the local automatic defense systems, and years more of searching to find a Sleeper base that just might contain something… special.
And this site was very, very special. The configuration of the Sleeper station was unlike anything she had seen before. Elements of what might have been Talocan engineering were evident in its construction. The Sleeper drone contingent guarding it had been large and very well equipped. She had lost two ships. This had better be worth it. She felt a chill of excitement run down her spine and rest in her gut. This was it. It had to be.
Ahead the point Dustie had stopped, staring into a cavernous room at the very center of the station. Vica’s scanners went wild – near data overload. Vica hastily shunted storage over to her own cerebral interface, rapidly saving the data in unused genetic storage within her brain for analysis later. The wireless interface could barely handle the data flow.
At the very center of the room, an odd triangular shaped plinth stood about ten meters high, with a curved spiral walkway built into its sides and leading upwards to a small platform at the top. Suspended there, seemingly in mid-air, was what could only be described as a glowing, blue, bubble. The glow was faint, almost like the bioluminescent glow worms of the oceans of her native Corufeu, at once beautiful and ethereal, almost unnatural.
Vica’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart began to pound a staccato rhythm. She had found it. She had found it! Slowly, the tall red haired scientist climbed the spiral walkway, until she stood, her scanner fairly screaming, within arm’s reach of what the Sleepers had spent a thousand years to achieve. The computer in her datapad had the evidence – it was the Sleepers’ penultimate achievement, the substance they had referred to as the Essence – the ultimate form of nanotechnology ever developed by the hand of man.
Her Dusties had arrayed themselves around the base of the plinth, backs to her, alertly scanning the semi-darkness of the gigantic room for any potential threats.
Vica removed a specially designed container from the tool pouch at her waist. Packaged, the container was only a few centimeters long and wide, and wafer thin. Expanded, it grew large enough that Vica could have fit two of her Dusties inside. The material was nano-diamond, painstakingly grown and adapted with a biological process. Harder than steel and more durable, despite its extremely light weight, and near impermeable, the container was the perfect tool to transport the ancient wonder that she had just discovered. Vica attached a small anti-grav device to the base of the container, and then carefully placed it beneath the floating blue bubble, which pulsed and coalesced with faint blue light, bulging with the ancient Sleeper nanites within. Slowly, she raised the container until it surrounded most of the bubble, and then raised it just a bit higher, ready to close the top tightly around her prize…
The darkness of the room was suddenly lit up with a harsh, fiery orange light, as an impossibly loud klaxon began to wail. From the ceiling, turrets began to descend from the hatches where they had been hidden thousands of years before. With a scream, one of her Dusties disappeared in a mist of catalyzed blood and tissue as one of the turrets locked on to his body and fired. Chaos reigned as laser and plasma fire began to shred everything in the room. Her remaining Dusties scrambled to find cover behind some of the ancient equipment that was strewn about at the base of the plinth.
Vica hit the deck, inadvertently bumping her now mostly expanded container. The side of the container struck the bubble floating over her head, knocking about a milliliter of the material out and away from the nanite cluster. It formed into a small, perfectly round drop, and unbeknownst to Vica, landed with the minutest of splashes right in the small of her back.
Plasma fire scorched the side of the plinth, and Vica rolled off the side of the platform, preparing herself for the impact with the spiral walkway, three meters below. She struck the hard surface with a clang and a very unladylike grunt, and rolled again, tensing for the impact as she fell another three meters to the next stage of the walkway below. This time her roll was awkward, and she badly sprained her shoulder as she hit the unyielding surface. Vica yelped with pain. But now she was very close to the base of the plinth, and the turrets had not yet tracked her position.
Below, two more of her Dusties were disintegrated by the withering fire of the security turrets. Her point man saw her hanging from the side of the plinth, and made a dash for the base of the spiral ramp. One of the turrets almost hit him, but he made it to the relative shelter of the base of the plinth, and dashed up to her side, barely pausing before grabbing her unceremoniously and slinging her over his shoulder. He leapt from the platform, repulsors in his armored boots absorbing most of the shock of the three meter fall, and ran with all the might of his muscled legs and the reinforcement of his cybernetic armor, heading for the large door leading back the way they had come. Only after they had slid at full speed beneath the rapidly closing blast door did Vica realize that had they tarried just a few moments longer, they would have been trapped inside, like the rest of her Dustie squad, the last of whom was at that moment being immolated by the turret fire.
“The nanotech!” She screamed, as the blast doors closed with a resolute clang.
“No time,” the Dustie yelled, yanking her to her feet. “Run!”
With her Dustie pushing her ahead of him, she had just barely made it back to the boarding shuttle. Just as he had shoved her through the doors, some turret fire had finally found him, and he had disappeared in a bright red haze with hardly a grunt. Fortunately, the cybernetic relays had worked, and shortly her Dusties were born again in new freshly cloned bodies, mostly none the worse for wear. But Vica had sat at the rear viewport of her boarding shuttle and wept silently as the Sleeper station self-destructed behind them.
When she stripped off her boarding party armor, she did not notice that the molecular structure of the armor, at the part covering the base of her spine, had been slightly disrupted. She walked naked from her armory into the pod chamber, rubbing and rotating her sprained shoulder, and settled into the dark comfort of the pod interface. Vica closed her eyes as the pod goo flooded over her. The neural interfaces attached, a flood of painkillers entered her system, and all at once, she was again Home, in comfort, at one with her ship.
The blackened space of the void stretched out all around her, impossibly far into the distance. Far off, the wormhole system’s star burned sullenly. To be so close! And to fail! Her heart brimmed with grief and frustrated rage. So the Sleepers had seen fit to place redundant security systems around their prize. The next time, she would have to be more cautious. She berated herself for her overeagerness. Had she been more cautious, perhaps… But all this was immaterial. The past was done. She could only move forward.
Unknown to Vica, deep within her body, ancient nanites spread and multiplied. One by one they clustered at her nerve endings, and thousands more flooded into her brain, swarming around her cybernetic implants. Some invaded her digestive tract, consuming molecules from her body’s waste and converting them, restructuring them, into still more Sleeper nanites. In the space of the few hours it took her to fly back to Empire space with her fleet, her body had become host to millions of tiny machines, all working in unison.
Then the dreams came. The dreams of the Ancients. Long lost memories of far off systems no human had seen in ten thousand years. Ships floating in the darkness between galaxies. Crystalline shrieks as horrors were perpetrated against the sons and daughters of Taloc, atrocities committed in the name of science and of survival. Swarms upon swarms of drones, let loose upon an unsuspecting galaxy by a people who, in the quest to regain their humanity, had forever irretrievably lost it. As Vica had now lost hers.