Born in Darkness

by Thomas Farmer

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said. “For earlier.”

  Victoria growled. She did not have the control over her voice that the soldiers seemed to have. Her throat, dry, cracked as she spoke. “For trying to corner me?”

  “Yes.”

  A moment passed and Victoria forced herself to stay calm, to approach this conversation exactly like she would a combat. Deep breaths, smooth movements, she reminded herself. She inhaled slowly, feeling her lungs expand exactly like they would in a fight. “You acted on the best information you had.”

  Pallasophia started to speak, then stopped. Finally, she said, “that's it?”

  Victoria stepped closer by a single pace. She was significantly larger than any of the soldiers and, having been up close with the giant mastigas types, she knew how intimidating size could be. For the moment, she loomed, playing it to its fullest. “Should there be anything else?”

  Pallasophia's face closed off, not quite a frown, but clearly a defensive measure. “After the way you attacked us, I assumed there would be.”

  “You were an unknown. I had to make sure you couldn't threaten me before we could talk.”

  Pallasophia, despite the underlying threat, laughed. “You did an admirable job.”

  Victoria growled. “I had more than my share of practice.”

  “Another thing I wanted to apologize for.”

  Victoria simply stared at her, an impassive mask of black plastic.

  After a moment, Pallasophia continued, somewhat more formally. “What we put you through was...” She groped for words, shifting in place slightly. To Victoria's surprise, she seemed to come closer. “Immoral, perhaps. But it had to be done.”

  “Because of the mastigas?” Victoria demanded, putting things together in her mind. Her tone was grim and tight, but something told her to keep the volume down, that only Pallasophia needed to hear.

  She shifted again, and Victoria allowed herself to be pushed backward, away from the others. She could kill this woman if she had to, and Pallasophia had to know that. Bringing Victoria out of range of her squad was a measure of trust.

  Victoria reciprocated, moving backward of her own volition. If privacy was what she wanted, Victoria would give her that. A few paces further away, and she spoke again. “I disarmed your soldiers. I could have killed them, and you, back there. And so you locked me down here, with the mastigas, so that I could become the soldier your people can't be.”

  “That's not all there is to it.”

  “Explain.”

  “Walk with me?” Pallasophia gestured with raised eyebrows to the door where Victoria cleaned her wounds.

  Victoria wasted no time considering the offer. She gave her own gesture of trust, turning her back to Pallasophia and taking the lead. That she was their commander was obvious enough, and so her desire to talk where they could not be overheard was a lure.

  She entered the room and continued walking to the far side. There, against the back wall of the room where she could interpose her body between Pallasophia and her weaponry and what remained of her food and water, Victoria unloaded her shoulders of gear piece by piece. Behind her back, Pallasophia's light and measured footsteps followed, stopped, and the door clicked shut as she latched it.

  She turned, ready to speak, but Pallasophia opened first. “First, sealing you down here wasn't part of the original plan. I was telling the truth before when I said there was an accident where the elite and sophont escaped containment. You, or one of your predecessors, were supposed to fight them and learn from them. Eventually, you were supposed to beat them on even ground.”

  “It was that or let them gut me,” Victoria growled, accusatory. “Of course, this damnable place has dangers all its own. Others starved, or suffocated, or were poisoned. The mastigas were not the only killer you left down here.”

  “I know.” Pallasophia paused. Victoria wondered if honesty was warring with a convenient lie, or if she simply had no idea how to proceed. Her eyes darted around Victoria's face, subconsciously looking for human features in the helmet's blank mask. Finally she finished her thought. “I watched them. All of them.”

  Victoria felt a flash of anger. She supposed the story about having set things up for her to fight the mastigas made sense. Now that she knew the purpose for her prison, it was logical that they would have been watching her as well. It was all logical. Despite that, hearing the fact spoken aloud infuriated her.

  Victoria hissed. “And you did nothing?”

  Pallasophia gestured toward the door. “Second Lord Eleni is here because she helped install the conduits that run through the floor. Those same conduits, some of the only ones to survive years of mastigas habitation, ran directly from the labs in the upper levels to the room where you first woke up.”

  “You're the reason I remember so much about those lives, about things I've never seen.” She gestured to the gun where it leaned against her backpack behind her right leg. “Like that.”

  Pallasophia nodded.

  Victoria laughed. The conflicting rush of emotions she felt as things fell into place was almost dizzying. One thought made her want to strangle the black-haired woman in front of her, and the next made her want to trust her. “So, what, you woke us up one by one until I finally killed that damn elite?”

  Slowly, very slowly, Pallasophia nodded. “Each time one of...” A pause while she seemed to be correcting something she almost said, then she continued. “Your predecessors died, that knowledge was passed on. Skills, warnings, each time they survived longer.”

  Victoria growled, feeling her fists tighten at her sides. “That's monstrous.”

  “Yes.” She made no attempt to lie.

  “Why?”

  She spoke slowly. “We already lost one person coming to find you. Isodorus was a trained soldier with years of experience. Your predecessors...” She turned away from Victoria for a moment, then repeated herself. “Your predecessors would have all died if we woke them up all at once.”

  “So they were sacrificed to make me what I am. Again, the soldier your people cannot be.”

  “There's more, but yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I'll tell you when we get out of here,” she said. “I promise.”

  When nothing else came, Victoria said, “I suppose I should thank you, then.”

  “We came to retrieve you. No, we came to protect you.”

  A sharp gesture from Victoria cut her off. “No. Not that. You wouldn't have come unless I killed that elite and the sophont. I should thank you for waking me up so I could stand here now, having done your killing for you.”

  Pallasophia's face grew harder for a moment. “I brought five people down with me. We lost one in a fight against a single juvenile elite. Victoria, you killed a full-grown elite with a knife.”

  With short, clipped syllables, Victoria repeated herself again. “The soldier your people could not be.”

  “I would have gone in your place!” Pallasophia snapped.

  “In my...?”

  “Yes, if you died as well, I would have been the one to take your place.”

  The tension in Victoria's jaw softened. That changed matters. If this woman was willing to put her own life as risk like that, it placed her much higher in Victoria's esteem. She still had no real idea what her purpose was, but her life had been a hell already.

  “Again, why?”

  “That's one of those things I need to tell you later.”

  “Why couldn't you just include it in one of those damnable dreams?”

  Pallasophia turned to face her directly with her face set in a hard mask. “After the Incident, we worked on the method we used to synthesize information for you. We could only pass on so much, and so we focused on combat.”

  Something in her face made Victoria stop for a moment. The expression there was not regret, not exactly, but rather a mixture of it and fear and anger.

  “That's why we're in here, isn't it? You'd rather they think you're a m
onster for locking me down here than they know the truth.”

  “Not quite. The official story is that you were awakened accidentally while we worked on a way to reopen the facility and extract your gestation pod.”

  “But that is still not the truth.”

  Pallasophia nodded slowly. She spoke with equal care. “Project Titan itself is no secret, but the things that went on here at Aphelion were.”

  Victoria's voice was flat when she spoke. “You built me.”

  Pallasophia sighed. The noise seemed not to be directed at Victoria so much as inward, at Pallasophia herself. “Not like a machine, no, but you're not far from the truth.”

  Victoria's fists clenched automatically. Inside their wraps of black mastigas fabric, her knuckles went white as her fingertips dug in. “One more question, then. Why?”

  Pallasophia sighed again, once more at herself, or perhaps Victoria thought she might have been sighing at the situation at large. “You've already answered that question, Victoria. The mastigas...” She paused, looked away. “We don't know where they came from, or why. Nothing we've done has stopped them. We've repelled them, yes, but only with catastrophic losses. It's been thirty years.”

  Pallasophia turned to face Victoria again. She started to reach a hand out, but Victoria pulled away. After a moment she said, “so we created you.”

  Victoria's head swam. To be born into a world of darkness and blood and then told she had been created, literally created, to fight the monsters with which she had spent the last week trapped was almost too much of a whiplash of thoughts.

  She still felt anger; it simmered under the surface, but she had no idea who or what it should be directed at. Pallasophia went out of her way to admit that she was responsible for the torment here in the facility, but Victoria also knew that without Project Titan, she would never have been born.

  She asked herself if she should direct her hate at the mastigas. They, directly, had been the things trying to kill her. The Technocrats might have put her where she was, mastigas hands wielded the knives that left the scars in her skin. Also, if Pallasophia was telling the truth, which Victoria suspected she was, the mastigas's actions had indirectly led to her predicament as well.

  Her thoughts swam until she forced them into a cage in the back of her mind where she could deal with them later. Another question rose to her mind. “What about the others?”

  “Others?”

  “My shell, the place where you turned me into...” She gestured to herself, then forced those angry, frustrated thoughts down as well. She growled to herself. “It was inscribed with numbers and letters. They were all the same except for the symbol for their order. Mine, number one hundred, was last. There was another number; they were all numbered 'six.' Why?”

  “First Lord Tritogenes, Hexarch Tritogenes if you're feeling formal, designed Project Titan to be shared among his colleagues. Six Hexarchs means six branches of the Project.”

  “Then there are five more like me.”

  “Not exactly like you. The other Projects are all different.”

  “I see.”

  After a tense silence, Pallasophia slipped a hand into one of the pockets on her uniform. Victoria watched her with caution, ready to spring one way or the other at the first sign of a weapon. The Technocrat had been honest with her, or so it seemed so far, but they did not mean Victoria was going to let her guard down.

  “I also wanted to give you this,” she said, holding out a small device.

  Victoria examined it without taking it. It was roughly fist sized, with no obvious control surface or way to interact with it. She had seen the Technocrats using holographic interfaces enough to safely assume that was how it worked, however.

  Pallasophia added, “it's medical. It contains a dozen doses of a combination of chemicals and things we call quick heal.”

  Victoria slowly extended a hand and took the device. She tapped it and a floating, blue menu appeared in the air a few centimeters above it. The options seemed straightforward enough, and she skimmed the explanations—oral dosages for light healing over the whole body or apply directly to the wound for more powerful local effects.

  She eyed Pallasophia for a moment. If she wanted Victoria dead, this would be the perfect way to do it. Or, if she was telling the truth earlier, if she wanted to poison her as another test of her toughness, this would also serve that purpose.

  On the other hand, Victoria thought with a bit of a rueful smile inside her mask, how could she expect these Technocrats to trust her if she was not willing to trust them?

  She selected the whole-body option and a port on one end opened. The holographic instructions told her to upend the device and drink from it like a bottle, and she did so.

  The quick heal tasted strange. The liquid was thick, sweet, and had a gritty consistency she found unpleasant. It was also warm, or perhaps that was the chemicals themselves making her mouth and throat feel warm. In any case, that feeling of warmth hit her stomach and spread slowly elsewhere. It would take some time to reach her extremities. She pocketed the device, intending to use a heavy dose on her side later.

  She turned back to Pallasophia and nodded. “Thank you.”

  A look of vast relief washed across the other woman's face. “You're welcome.”

  “Now what?”

  “My people need rest and the quick heal will still take some time. Will you be ready in the morning?”

  Inside the helmet, Victoria raised an eyebrow. “Morning?”

  “We've got to sleep for a few hours before we move on.”

  Victoria did not mention that, excluding the time she slept in the elite's lair, she never slept that long at one time. She supposed the two of them had enough conflict for the moment, and arguing over sleep would not be productive. Instead, she nodded. “And in the morning?”

  “We need to clear out the rest of the facility to prevent the mastigas from coming into the common areas above us.”

  She nodded. Inside the mask, her face split into a toothy expression that might have fallen under a liberal definition of a smile. “I'll sleep in here. Tomorrow, there are mastigas to kill.”

  ***

  Victoria awoke long before the others. As always, she slept in her clothing and helmet, which produced interesting and painful stiffness in her neck and shoulders. A few minutes passed as she went through the stretching routine she learned in her dreams after that first day, and her full range of motion slowly returned.

  When she left the room to rejoin the soldiers, Victoria left her sword and backpack. Judging from the sounds, or lack of thereof, the soldiers remained asleep. She could come back for those things once they were finally ready to move. Until then, all she needed was her usual weapons, the knives and baton, plus the gun taken from Stavros.

  True to sound, only one of the soldiers was awake. One of them stood guard by the door, back facing the sleeping soldiers. Until she moved, all Victoria could tell was that the guard was neither Pallasophia nor Photeos. Pallasophia still slept nearby, while Photeos, the only one with a green stripe of his sleeves, slept on the far side of the room.

  She moved, broad shoulders and long legs, making it obvious to Victoria's eye that Myrto was the one guarding the door. She turned, and her helmeted face nodded in Victoria's direction. Victoria returned the gesture and Myrto returned her attention to the hallways outside.

  For a moment, Victoria considered ignoring her, but the soldiers made an effort to talk to her on their way to this safe-room. After talking to Pallasophia, Victoria supposed she could make an effort at conversation. With Myrto being the only one awake at the moment, her options were limited until the others were ready to depart.

  “You didn't sleep very long,” Myrto commented as Victoria came to stand next to her.

  “What do you consider not very long?”

  “Assuming you went to sleep immediately after the Lochagos left your room? Twenty-three minutes.”

  “It was long enough. When do we lea
ve?”

  Myrto laughed. “Assuming the boss lets everyone sleep a full night? Eight hours.”

  Victoria frowned, aware that the gesture was lost to anyone on the outside of her mask. “And if not?”

  “At least another hour and a half, but after the hell of a time we had fighting that baby elite...”

  Victoria interrupted her. “Baby elite?”

  Myrto nodded. “Shortly before we found you, we ran across some kind of half-grown elite. Stavros was saying there's some theories that they grow from mikros, but that's all I know about it.”

  “You've never studied your enemy?”

  She shrugged. “No one has, really. They sit out at the edge of our system killing everything nearby. The only time they actually attacked was when they hit Kipos about five years ago.”

  “Five years...” Victoria muttered.

  “Yeah. Project Titan started right after that. Hey, so, can I ask you something?”

  Victoria turned to face her, momentarily regretting the concealing masks they both wore. Her tone sounded cautious, but without an actual face, she found it difficult to accurately gauge the other woman's emotions. Finally, she nodded.

  “You were born down here, right?”

  Another nod.

  “Glaukos told us what happened. Things must have been pretty bad down here.”

  Cautiously, Victoria replied. “They were, yes.”

  “Thank Selene you're alright, then.”

  Victoria slowly nodded. She was tempted to tell Myrto what really happened, about the others, their deaths, but bit back that particular retort. She asked herself what good it would do to tell them the version of things they knew had been heavily sanitized.

  Instead, she said, “I'm grateful, yes.”

  “They told us you were trained before birth. Is birth even the right word for what happened to you?”

  Something about the woman's enthusiasm was infectious and Victoria found it hard to resist her charm. Still, without divulging the complete truth, she could only tell so much. “I dreamed a lot. Sometimes when I sleep, I still...”

  Down the hall, Victoria heard a noise that stopped any further conversation. Without consciously thinking about it, she swept up her rifle, brought it to her shoulder, and scanned the hallway through the scope.