Mason Bane
It was good, Mason reflected as he listened to his brother in his minds, chattering about this and that, that he had developed an ability to shield Grayson from truth. Not lie, he was never interested in outright lying to him, but it was important to Mason that he be able to keep the worst of the things about his existence as a cyborg out of Grayson’s head. None of it was his brother’s fault or problem, and he had done the best he could by Mason.
As far as Grayson knew, Mason didn’t experience pain. Why would he? The original receptors in the brain that would have generated the pain response had been reprogrammed – there was nothing to feed them, after all. Mason’s body was five separate minds all feeding into one consciousness, not a bunch of messy limbs flailing about getting bumps and bruises.
The truth was, though, that Mason’s original body had been lost to an act so memorably painful that his mind wasn’t able to get past it. The pain lived in his brain, a part of his past and, in its own way, always there in his present. Certain stimuli sent spikes of ancient agony through his head – the crackle of fire, the sound of metal rasping against itself, and high-pitched screams were some of the worst. The tension of the fresh burns on his face was another one of those stimuli – fairly lowkey by comparison, but the receptors in the cells knew what had happened, and transmitted a series of signals to the brain that he couldn’t help but interpret as “Ow, ow, ow.” It made his remaining limbs stiffen and spasm from time to time, a tell he hoped Grayson was too busy to notice.
That, and not being able to see out of his largest brain’s eyes sucked balls, too.
The pain was slightly soothed by the sheer exuberance in his brother’s voice as he explained their observations to Dr Drexler and Six.
“Look around you,” Grayson said expansively. Mason could sense him spinning in a circle. “What do you see?”
“Um… a mess?” Dr Drexler offered.
“A refinery,” Six said.
“A hangar,” Grayson clarified. “It’s a bloody hangar for these pod-things. That’s what it was originally, right? These were a bunch of escape pods for the Caridians who flew this big-ass ship here in the first place. Sure, it seems like most’ve ’em have been turned into Xenium storage or hollowed out for parts and glommed onto the refineries, but I think some of ’em could be turned back to their original use. We just have to get enough of the right pieces together to make it happen, and make sure the one we pick is already in one of the launch tubes.” Most of those had been converted to smoke stacks, but a few that were farther from the refineries had been happily ignored.
“That’s… huh.” Mason tilted his right hand so the sensor in it could see Dr Drexler. It could only see them in UV light, unfortunately – he really needed some work – but it was better than nothing. “That’s a great idea.”
“I’m a goddamn genius, yeah.”
“If we can find a likely pod,” they went on, “and if we can get the ship to launch it, and if we can make it accept liquid Xenium as fuel, and if we–”
“Y’need to stop being such a killjoy,” Grayson huffed. “You think we haven’t thought of that already? Mason’s been all over the ones that are left in the launch tubes, and one of them looks real good.”
“Oh? Which one?”
“Go show ’em,” Grayson said.
Mason wended his way between the crates to the pod at the very back of the hangar, the others following him. This one had been the clear choice for him when it came to narrowing down a pod to use for their potential escape. It had a different feel from the others – he didn’t quite know how to explain it, but it just seemed like it was built with more of a personal touch. The seats inside were in a wider configuration, the controls seemed more inherently understandable, and even the self-care facilities in the back of it were different from the ones in the other pods. Like they covered more functions than a Caridian’s basic act of cleansing and “expulsion”.
It felt like it had been designed with another species in mind, in fact.
[Do you think it’s possible the Caridians were accompanied here by other aliens?]
“Maybe. Do you actually care?” Grayson muttered.
[We’re just curious.] Mason let his right hand and its extensors spread out over the control panel until he found the power switch he’d located last time. He flicked it on.
“Whoa!” Dr Drexler took a step inside. “I thought you said all their power supplies had been compromised.”
“All except for this one, from what we found.” Grayson sounded satisfied. “Like your lab, this pod came with its own battery power. Six, once you talk to the computer and get it all booted up and we figure out how to open the stack up there so this can actually get out ’stead of running into the shielding, then we just fuel it up and get the hell off this planet. It’ll be close quarters, but way better than all of us gettin’ dead.”
[Grayson… I don’t think this one pod will be enough.]
His brother didn’t say anything. He couldn’t, not without the others being able to listen in, but Mason could feel a new sense of heaviness in his mind, like someone had dropped a marble into the part that Grayson inhabited, pulling all his thoughts in toward it as it rolled down, down, down.
Dr Drexler was speaking. “…amazing find! Gosh, I see what you mean about the controls here, it really is intuitive, isn’t it?” They sat down and reached for the thruster. “Wow, perfect distancing. Six, do you think it’s possible that the Caridians who came here were already in contact with aliens? Not, like, just knowing that they existed, but actually working together with some of them? Would they have brought someone other than a Caridian along with them to Sik-Tar?”
“It is not impossible,” Six allowed, his own eyes bright and assessing as he looked around the inside of the pod. “There have been a few instances of close cooperation between members of the Seethe and those of other species, but they are so infrequent as to be legends among my people.” Mason sidled to the side, closer to his brother as the two of them continued to talk about the escape ship.
“Why don’t you think it’ll be enough?” his brother hissed.
[Weight limitations. We must err on the side of more fuel than less, even with a fairly thin atmosphere.]
“We’re not that heavy altogether – surely we can squeeze in. Leave behind your legs, if need be.”
[Liquid Xenium is heavy, brother.] Grayson’s sense of lowness worsened. [And the question of livability is a viable one. The three of you have far more need to eat than we do, but there are very few rations. That means we’ll have to use the pod’s wormhole capabilities to get somewhere before you all starve to death, which means we’ll definitely need to include excess amounts of fuel.] Mason paused. He didn’t actually want to say this next part, but he was determined to be honest with his brother. [The easiest thing to do would be to leave the others behind.]
“We can’t do that.”
[We can. Neither of us want to do that,] – because they remembered the feeling of being thrown away in their childhoods all too well – [but in the end, saving you is the most important thing. No matter what, we have to stay together.]
Mason couldn’t imagine life without his brother – he didn’t want to. Having multiple minds was nice in that he was never exactly lonely, but listening to himself natter away wasn’t the same as communicating with someone outside of himself. Someone who knew him, cared about him, and took the time to understand him.
Dr Drexler had done their best to understand him during this expedition, too. He was going to be very sad to leave them here and miss out on getting to know them better, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Their importance simply couldn’t compare to his brother’s. [We still need to find the missing components for this pod before any plan can be enacted,] he reminded Grayson. [Perhaps we’ll find something between now and then that will allow us to save more than ourselves.]
Grayson didn’t reply to him, just nodded roughly, then cleared his throat and turned to talk to Six. “You ever flown one of these things before? You got any idea of what it’s gonna need to get off the ground?”
“I have some idea, yes,” Six said, “but there’s no need to rely on my memory. There are surely schematics for these pods in the library. I shall translate the files and bring them to you, and we will discover what needs to be added to this one in order to make it work. I can already tell that several stabilizers will be required, and possibly an extra fuel storage tanker. Or perhaps not – I’ll need to do some calculations on the amount of Xenium needed to get it off the ground.”
“That sounds great!” Dr Drexler enthused, getting up from the pilot’s seat and joining them in the doorway. Mason watched them from his right-hand camera, committing the picture of the three of them to his memories. It would help his brother later on if he could reassure him that he hadn’t forgotten these two. Grayson, for all he liked to pretend he didn’t have a heart, was the softer of the two of them by far. “We should–”
Taptaptap.
The noise was fairly soft, but in the vastness of the hangar it reverberated like someone was striking it with a hammer.
Dr Drexler whirled around. “What the hell is that?”
Taptaptap.
Six’s antennae began to wave back and forth, like they were caught in a strong breeze. “I think it’s coming from the door.”
“But you sealed the door!” Dr Drexler turned their wide eyes toward Grayson. “You did, didn’t you? You welded it shut.”
“We did,” Grayson said, “but–”
Taptaptap. Taptaptap… taptap… CLANG! The door that Mason and his brother had just finished repairing – where they’d laid down so many new layers of metal that it was twice as strong as it had been before – was suddenly ripped straight out of the wall. The tip of an enormous claw poked through the hole, swiveling around like it was searching for something. For them, perhaps?
Mason wasn’t going to hang around and find out. He grabbed his brother by the collar of his EVA suit and threw him onto his back, then scuttled for the hallway that led to their one hope for salvation. He was slower than he liked, on only three limbs, but he still outpaced Dr Drexler and Six.
Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. Maybe those two would die now and save the Bane brothers the guilt of having to abandon them here.
The claw retracted, and a moment later several of the smaller revenant variations swarmed in through the hole. These ones looked the most like Six of any of them so far, slim and fast, except for the third one that entered.
That one was… odd. Bipedal, like the others, but not as tall, and it only had claws on its front limbs, not on all four of them. Its head was the strangest thing about it – oval, not triangular, and the eyes were around the size of the average human instead of the enormous orbs that seemed to come standard on the Caridians. The weirdest thing, though, was that the head itself was growing out of its stomach, like it had been decapitated and clumsily shoved back together.
Was this a new species of Xeno? Mason snapped a photo of it for later analysis but kept running. They were almost to the door. He waited to hear screams from behind him… but instead he heard a “Yeah, bitch, take that!” followed by a crackling bbzzzztt! He twisted the visual input sensor in his left leg around to take a look, and–
Saw the strange, gut-headed revenant that had been less than five feet from him and Grayson suddenly fall to the floor, its mold-covered body steaming from the force of the electricity Dr Drexler had fired through it. “Go!” they shouted, running at them even as they primed their particle detector for another shot. Behind them, Six was holding another revenant at bay with a flurry of surprisingly speedy blows, knocking it right off its pointy feet every time it got close enough to hit.
“Go, go, go! Get inside the lab, then we can activate the force field to keep them out!”
Mason got himself and his brother into the hallway. Dr Drexler and Six followed them a second later, and just after that, they triggered the force field mechanism that Six had discovered in the frame of the door.
Honestly, Mason wasn’t sure how well it was going to work. Relying on ancient technology running on auxiliary power was dicey, and to be something that was supposed to keep out the vast kinetic energy of the revenants? How would that even work? Surely they’d hammer their way through after a few minutes.
He’d underestimated the Caridian tech. The force field didn’t just hold them back – it literally fried the one that got close enough to touch it. More tried, and kept trying, but as the pile of dead – or re-dead – dead again? – grew to the point of obscuring the doorway, they finally pulled back.
“Yeah!” Dr Drexler said. “How do you like that?” They turned and looked at the rest of them with a smug look. “Perfect timing, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not really,” Grayson muttered, getting off Mason’s back and onto his own two feet again. “Now how’re we supposed to get anywhere, huh? Can’t get the parts we need, can’t access the shuttle to put them in place, can’t even think about taking off when we’d have to get through a swarm of those bastards to do it.”
Dr Drexler’s smile faltered. “Ah. Right. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Surely our earlier examinations of the ship must have yielded some ideas,” Six said. “Tunnels or tubes that we could use to traverse to other areas, for example.”
“None big enough for a fully grown person,” Dr Drexler replied. “None connected to the lab, at least. Your people either built really big or really small – they didn’t seem to care much for a happy medium.”
“I’m sure they didn’t anticipate the possibility of needing to give themselves backdoors to get through their own ship.”
“Right. Well…” Dr Drexler ran a hand through their short, tangled hair. “I… I’m not sure what to do. We, um. We might… maybe we could…”
[I can do it.]
Grayson glanced sharply at Mason. “What’re you talkin’ about?”
[I can do it,] he said again. [I have three limbs left that are small enough to fit into those tunnels. One of my arms did it before as we were investigating the Nexeri, another one can do it again. They’re mostly nonorganic. As long as I’m careful, they should be able to gather the parts and take them to the remaining pod. Once it’s ready to go, we can use that arm as a distraction, the same way we did with the first revenant.]
“What is he saying?” Six asked. Grayson relayed Mason’s message.
“That’s a generous offer, but it seems awfully dangerous for you,” Dr Drexler said. “The likelihood of you losing at least one more limb is very high. It’s a lot to ask.”
Mason shrugged. [It’s that or die.]
“What choice do we have?” Grayson said.
“None,” Six confirmed. “Come. Let’s look over the schematic and ensure you know what to look for.”