21 - Re-Awakening - Part 2

In an isolated system of the Intaki Syndicate, in an unregistered cloning bay,  the infomorph calling herself Sandrielle Jaunes emerged from it's liquid cradle in a new body. It was an experience she had gone through many times before. However, the fact that her most recent “death” had ripped her consciousness from inside an advanced strategic cruiser added some complications. Because of the profound link those ships offered to their capsuleer pilots, such an abrupt disconnect never occurred without mental trauma. The ship would take some of its pilot's mind with it into oblivion, leaving the capsuleer disoriented and deprived of more recently imprinted reflexes. Not quite neural damage but still the effective equivalent of a minor stroke leaving the victim with a loss of memory and certain faculties.

Still, Sandrielle knew what that felt like, and it did not account for the severity of the disorientation she felt as she stumbled out of the opening technological chrysalis that had nurtured her clone.

Even in her weakest moments, the Gallente woman had an enviable amount of control over her body, but now her senses were clouded as if she had been immersed in alcohol rather than the viscous liquid of the clone pod. She seemed to be unable to find her sense of balance. Her muscles ached and tortured her with every little contraction. Sandrielle could hardly see, and when her legs buckled under her from pain and weakness alike, she hardly managed to steady herself on a nearby instrument panel to keep herself from falling.

With a pained sigh she fell, more than settled, into a chair fortuitously standing there.

What is happening to me. What's the matter with this clone. Did something go wrong in the transfer of consciousness? Sandrielle wondered while she struggled to think coherently.

Complications in the instant transfer of consciousness from a capsule to a clone were not unheard of. Especially when it came to independently operated facilities like the one Sandrielle had been using to keep her clones off the record. However, in this day and age the statistical odds were extremely low of something going wrong on the scale that Sandrielle experienced.

Sandrielle heard an amused chuckle.

There was someone with her. A man by the sound of it.

She moved her head into the general direction of the sound, but all she could see was a ghostly blur. A smudge only vaguely shaped like a human being.

'Madame Jaunes. Welcome back. Looks like we get an opportunity to balance the books today.' the voice smugly piped at her.

He spoke Gallente, but Sandrielle recognized a distinct Caldari accent. Her brain flickered through barely recovered memories. Sandrielle tried to regain her sense of self-control while slumped in a chair. Naked, weak and exposed like on the day she lost her virginity.

'Tradesman Aluvetti.' she sighed after her mind finally managed to match the voice with a person. 'What a surprise to see you on the site of my rebirth.' Sandrielle's muscles relaxed as her mind crept sluggishly along the paths of her nervous system to re-learn how her body was working. 'I am unaware of any imbalance.” a smile appeared on her face, both tired and menacing at the same time.

'Well.' The Caldari trader began. 'I remember a day when you put me through some rather unsettling experience.' Sandrielle could vaguely make out his shrug that accompanied the next statement. 'I just thought I should be returning the favour.' He paused and the human-shaped smudge moved closer and obscured the overhead lights. Sandrielle could smell him. A spicy fragrance common to male personal hygiene products.

'How does it feel to be completely powerless?' Aluvetti asked whimsically.

'What …?' What have you done to me? How did you find my clone? Sandrielle tried to formulate the questions but her unfocused mind failed momentarily to express them in words.

'What happened to you?' Aluvetti finished the question for her. 'I am afraid I have tampered a bit with your clone.' Sandrielle vaguely saw him straightening as he stood. 'I am not an expert on this, so I have no idea how extreme the effects are, but judging from your state you are pretty much messed up.' Another chuckle followed.

'I guess even in your current state you will remember that there are people who will pay an impressive amount of money for getting their hands on you. I can actually choose between offers. Looks like you made lots of friends during your career.'

Sandrielle's hands clutched the armrest of the chair she was in. 'If I can just manage a few seconds of full control I can kill him. Naked and unarmed as I am, I can still do it.' she thought while trying to muster the necessary strength and control.

'Oooh' Aluvetti voiced with mock pity while pushed Sandrielle back into the chair when she tried to rise.'Are you trying to jump out of the chair and use your famous martial prowess to kill me despite the odds?' Sandrielle could see the smudge moving. Him shaking his head she guessed. 'I am afraid you wont manage.' the Caldari said 'I am not very sophisticated at this, but I am good enough to make sure your body and mind are practically infirm.'

Sandrielle had to concede that he was correct.

***

Deep in the massive Tomb Ship, Keram sat huddled in a blanket before a fluid router console. He cursed himself and his former pirate colleagues for forgetting to put any heating on in the cloning bay. The place was freezing and Keram was as naked as on the day of his birth.

Still, he had not bothered to get dressed. As soon as he had regained some control over his body he had stumbled to the nearby console and wrapped a blanket around himself. It had been left there by an unknown individual. Someone who had recently been sent back involuntarily to the spaceborne cloning facility. Another one of the outlaws and criminals who shared a stake in this ship hidden in the depths of an unsettled system. Far away even from the hunting grounds of the unaffiliated capsuleer alliances fighting over unclaimed space here in the Outer Passage.

The purpose of his hasted attempt to re-establish communication with the outside world was something that had been up until recently almost inconceivable to the outcast Amarrian: A deep-seated care about another human being. A Minmatar no less. All that Keram wanted to know was, whether Alira was all right.

Eventually he managed to establish a quantum-entangled communications bridge to the channels of Awakened Industries. At first he got some random comms-officer on the line who was so inexperienced with protocol that Keram had to assume he was the replacement of someone who was assigned to fill in for the person who was actually supposed to do the job. After several minutes of back-and-forth to clear up the confusion, Keram finally got through to Cedrien. He was relieved to learn that the Gallente commander was still inside the wormhole system. They had prevailed, but at what cost?

'Tell me she's all right.' Keram rasped, still hung over from his recent rebirth. A stupid thing to say, he realized a moment later. Cedrien would not tell him otherwise if Alira wasn't.

'Well, she is still in a very …' The holographic image of the bearded Gallente man inclined it's head as Cedrien groped for words. '… difficult state.' he finished.

'Define difficult.' Keram growled back. His personal feelings left no space for evasive nuances. Part of his mind was amazed at that reaction. It was not so long ago that he had lead a life where the loss of comrades – he had known no real friends – had been something he accepted with a shrug. How he had changed. Keram almost drifted off into a state of reverie, reflecting on that, but Cedrien's voice pinned his attention to the here and now.

'She is still linked with the collective consciousness of the Sleepers.' the Gallente man said. 'At least that is what Torstan tells me. Sylera is too.' The projection of Cedrien furrowed it's holographically rendered brow. 'Right now we are not sure whether we can risk to disconnect them or what would happen if we did.'

Keram pressed his lips together. 'So you are letting this Matari sociopath call the shots now?'

The image of Cedrien smirked. 'I guess he would call you a sociopath too.' The voice of Cedrien turned more earnest. 'We're grasping at straws here Keram. Nobody has ever done anything like this before. Also, maybe your transfer resulted in loss of memory, but we are basically shot to pieces out here. Almost of the civilian personnel has been evacuated. Most of the military personnel is dead. We are doing what we can here and we have very little to go on. I understand you got attached to Alira and …'

Keram cut the transmission and gritted his teeth in frustration. Then he called up the hangar registry of the Stormchasers, his old pirate crew. He needed a ship. A fast ship. Something that could slip through blockades and into wormhole space as quickly and safely as possible.

He was looking for someone still alive among his pirate buddies who owed him a favour.

21 - Re-Awakening - Part 3

A Caldari without corporate affiliation or personal business was worse than nothing. Someone who could not fulfill a valuable or productive function in the greater economic scheme was dead weight, contributing nothing to common prosperity. Such failures would be forced to pledge themselves to others so they might be given at least some role in society no matter how menial.

They would give up the last thing they had. Their freedom of choice.

Some claimed that this was virtually the same as slavery like in the Amarr Empire, but Kassina Vikkonen could not disagree more.

In Amarr society, the masters were personally responsible for their slaves. In that religious value system – which Kassina had always found strange and archaic - the slave-owners had to feed, clothe and house their thralls. The way Kassina saw it – and Caldari society as a whole embraced basically the same view – neither the master nor the slave could ever reach their full potential as human being if they were not individually responsible for their own destiny. The slaves, because they were not free to follow their own chosen path, and the masters because they were tied down by a responsibility which was imposed upon them. Both sides became restricted in their freedom of choice, and because of that restriction, the full potential of the society as a whole could not be reached.

It followed from that view, that corporate executives and directors would gain the highest reward from the business they conduct. After all, they have chosen to carry the majority of the risk. No diligent employee would have a problem finding new work if their corporation went bankrupt. A failed CEO, however, was damaged goods and could spend the rest of their lives without another chance at coming back to the top. They better had savings and shares that yield them dividends, otherwise they could drop from the very top of society's ranks to the very bottom.

That is where Tomoe Sairinen now was. After having lost all the assets of her corporation in a pointless crusade against a group of pirates and the even less sensible pursuit of that group of wormhole settlers, she had reached rock bottom. No surprise that the former young executive had pledged herself fully to Kassina Vikkonen. Not that the Deteis bounty hunter had any interest in making use of the Civire woman, but – and that was a surprise – Tomoe Sairinen was actually worth something to those wormhole settlers she had been chasing.

Or so it had seemed at the beginning.

As things looked now, Kassina was not so sure anymore.

After she had finally located the hidden space-borne settlement of Awakened Industries, she found herself between the fronts of a battle. She had decided that discretion was better for business than misplaced heroics and had decided to wait it out.

After all, she was a bounty hunter, not a mercenary.

When that alien structure appeared like a thunderhead above the fighting ships and spat out a swarm of spacecraft that looked more like living things than something that came out of a shipyard, Kassina knew that she was better off holding position far away from the engagement and hidden by a cloaking field.

Eventually the battle came to a standstill. Kassina was not quite sure who all the fighting parties were, but clearly Awakened industries had remained standing, even if badly battered and surrounded by those unknown biomechanoids which kept buzzing around the burning wreckage that remained like a swarm of alien insects.

Only then, Kassina tried hailing the wormhole corporation on the frequency she had been provided for contact. When she had received her answer she chose ten of her best men, landed her Tengu class strategic cruiser on the flight deck of the badly damaged Gallente carrier ship which was virtually all that remained of the Awakened Industries' fleet, and escorted Tomoe Sairinen to a meeting with the leader of this strange crew.

Things went downhill from there.

'I can only repeat what I have already told you a few times.' that irritatingly calm Gallente commander said tiredly. 'That contract was not issued by my corporation, but by an individual.' He stroked his close-cropped beard as if he were pondering the ramifications of that himself. 'And like I said, her ship and pod got destroyed and we have not been in contact ever since.'

Kassina leveled her pale-eyed gaze at the Gallente from where she stood on the other side of the conference table which dominated the room. Her escort platoon was spread out behind her, facing the Awakened Industry guards who stood behind their commander.

'That individual was a leading figure within your corporation. Her word should be the word of the corporation itself.' Kassina insisted sternly. The way how this man calmly ignored her obvious logic began to test her patience. He seemed to try and find a loophole so he could avoid responsibility. That only infuriated her further.

'That's not the way we work.' Cedrien Roucellis said curtly. 'We are not exactly under the jurisdiction of the Caldari Business Tribunal here.' he added.

Kassina Vikkonen pressed her lips together an took a deep breath. 'You should at least have the common decency to stand behind the commitments of your personal friends.' she suggested. If clear logic failed, Gallente can best be reached by appealing to abstract ideals. She had found that out during previous negotiations.

'Look outside.' The wormhole capsuleer gestured at the wide row of windows offering a view of the smouldering remains that were left from the past confrontation. Those enigmatic spacecraft systematically tugged and tore at the wrecks with prehensile mechanical limbs. 'Does that look like I have time to deal with some small issue like your bounty contract?'

He furrowed his brow and actually began to sound angry. 'My main starbase is in ruins. I have a fleet of Sleeper Drones around me who might decide at any time that we are their enemies after all, and the only thing that keeps them from doing so is the hunch of a megalomaniac Matari scientist and two catatonic capsuleers. Most of my crews are dead. The rest of my capsuleers are stranded out in Empire space and the one you had a contract with has not even answered any attempts to open communication with her. I don't even know where her clone is!'

He stood up and leaned over the table. Still considerably smaller than Kassina herself, he nevertheless managed to bear down on her with his angry dark-eyed gaze. 'So, you can either help me out here or you can wait until things get sorted, or you can take your ship and find your own way home.' He straightened and obviously prepared to leave.

'Aluvetti'. Tomoe Sairinen had been sitting the whole time at the conference table in front of the Deteis bounty hunter who had delivered her here. She had been staring morosely at the table's transparent surface, but at the Gallente commander's outburst she had raised her head and whispered a name.

'Mikkai Aluvetti knows where her clone is kept.' The Civire woman said, raising her voice.

Cedrien stopped and turned to look at her. 'How do you know that?' he asked with rekindled interest.

Tomoe straightened in her seat 'When I was on the trail of your corporation, my first lead was Aluvetti. I found out that he had been in contact with a number of operators running unregistered cloning services in Syndicate. Through another channel I learned that he had been looking for some wormhole capsuleer of a corporation he did trading for. Your corporation'

Cedrien looked impressed. 'That sounds promising.' He inclined his head and addressed Kassina Vikkonen again. 'If you want your money, I suggest you listen to what this woman has to say.' He smiled subtly. 'And if you find my missing capsuleer I'll pay you a substantial extra amount.'

'How substantial?' Kassina Vikkonen asked.

Finally they were talking a language she understood.

21 - Re-Awakening - Part 4

The girl curled up in her grimy bunk to be alone with her pain and shut her eyes. She tried to be deaf to the whimpering, moaning and wailing of all the other children who shared this holding cell with her.

They all still tried to express their misery, their anguish and their fear. The young girl knew how useless that was. The more they cried, the sooner the faceless men in their dark armour would come and inflict more suffering on them. She had learned that, and she had learned to keep her agony inside. 

The faceless men would always select the ones who screamed the most and then they would do things to them, over and over, until they were either dead or stopped screaming. 

Most of those who stopped screaming were just too weak to do so, and then they would die anyway.

The teenage girl had decided that she would not be one of those.

She put all the pungent odours of urine, feces, blood, sweat and the general stink of the unwashed bodies out of her mind, until the whole world was filled only by the pain which burned inside her like a dull furnace, fueled by the many sources all over her body. 

She did not feel where the blood seeped between her legs from the wounds they had inflicted on her insides. She did not dwell on the crushed bones of the fingers they had stepped on with their heavy boots. She did not specifically register the burn marks on her arms or the left eye which was swollen shut.

All of it became one glowing ball of heat and she curled herself around it.

In her mind, she stoked the furnace until it turned from a molten red into an angry orange and finally into a searing white that grew until it filled all of her world. It burned away the memories of what they had done to her, what they had done to her little brother, her parents, her friends. It cauterized her mind and at the same time became a tempering fire. 

Deep inside her, a hard sliver of herself was forged slowly and persistently into a sharpened blade.

One day she would stab them in the back with that blade.

The only thing she needed to do was to survive long enough for that day to come.

When a soft voice with a strange accent called her by a name she did not know, she was confused at first, but eventually Sandrielle Jaunes surfaced from a dream haunted by the past into the drug induced haze of the present.

She did not know for how long she had been unconscious. 

She vaguely felt the strap which kept the osmotic drip fastened to her arm where it constantly introduced a cocktail of substances into her bloodstream. The chemicals kept her body and mind in a state that could barely be considered wakefulness.

Then she became conscious of the other restraints which kept her body immobile.

She remembered being a prisoner of the man with the strange accent.

A Caldari.

If the Caldari wished, he could have her lucid enough to understand his words and follow a sentence or two until the rest was lost in the fog of the chemicals. She could even talk in a way. Simple sentences and short words. Everything else was beyond the grasp of her crippled consciousness.

'Madame Jaunes?' The Caldari jostled her again.

Sandrielle's eyelids flickered open but she could only see smudges of smeared colours and undefined blotches of light and dark.

'Ah, you are awake. Luckily not fully.' Mikkai Aluvetti snickered sarcastically. 'I have come to tell you that your period of waiting has come to an end.' he informed her in a cheerful tone. 'I have finally reached a satisfactory result in my price negotiations with several parties who are interested in acquiring you.'

Sandrielle tried her best to grasp his meaning. She wished he would not use so many complicated words. She remembered something vaguely. A yes, a bounty. 

Who was it again who wanted her? 

There had been so many.

'I am sure you will be glad to be reunited with some old friends.' Aluvetti continued with his mockingly cheerful tone. 'It looks like The Hive is, after all, willing to pay the most for you.'

The faceless men! 

Like wraiths from her dream they suddenly drifted through her fogged field of vision, and Sandrielle Jaunes felt something she had not felt for a long time: Fear.

***

It was impossible to say for how long the information had streamed through the multitude that she had become part of. Astronomical data, technical specifications, the principles of cloning technology and capsule control systems, complex theoretical physics and mathematics, even parts of history. 

It all flickered through the collective mind of the machine creatures that she shared a consciousness with until, finally, there was a moment of silence in the machine collective.

'Life, we have your answers.' the dendrites of the Sleeper mind sparked with impulses which her brain managed to comprehend as words.

Then, without further explanation, in an instant, she was one again.

'Welcome back Alira Tjalgard.' a vaguely familiar voice spoke to her in Sebiestor Tribal Dialect. 'You have been part of something that will enter history as one of the greatest scientific achievements of our century. Congratulations!'

Alira was still confused and disoriented. Where was she? Who was that white haired man with the narrow face and the vividly gleaming eyes bending over her? Then she remembered who she was. What she was. It all came back to her now that she was no longer immersed in the networked alien consciousness. She had been one with the Sleeper Drones, and with another.

Alira turned her head sideways. She was lying on some sort of bed. Instruments glowed and blinked around her. Next to her, in another bed, a young, fine featured, woman with whitish-blond hair stirred and opened her eyes. Sylera, she remembered. An Amarrian. The one she had shared the Sleeper consciousness with.

As if sensing the other woman's gaze, Sylera Alithe slowly turned her head and looked into the eyes of the Matari capsuleer. For a long moment the two women just looked at each other, both unable to turn away. The residual echo of the bond they had shared reverberated through them. Never before had an Amarrian and a Minmatar been so close. They had effectively been the same being, which in turn was part of a collective of living machines. That mutual experience now poured out from one to the other through their eyes. 

Neither of them paid much attention to the enthusiastic rambling of Hegomir Torstan who was now addressing both of them in Trade Basic, or rather gushed grandiose words regardless of whether they listened or not.

'I never knew.' Sylera whispered and she reached out gingerly with one hand.

Alira just nodded and then she also extended one arm until her fingers grasped the slender hand of the Amarrian, bridging the gap between their two sickbay beds.