Antarctica

Gary’s Factory

Anya’s V-200 soared through a ferocious blizzard that turned the air outside into a white wall of speeding ice. Flying in such conditions in any normal aircraft would have been suicide, but the V-200’s stabilizers kept it on course, and the array of scanners and different filters built into the windshield gave Anya a clear view. Pan napped in the co-pilot’s seat as Anya hailed the hangar and tried to message Gary. He didn’t respond save for a simple text that said “C’mon in,” and nothing more.

The hangar doors opened automatically once the factory’s defenses had scanned Anya’s craft, and the V-200’s autopilot landed her securely in the center of a small landing pad. The hangar was enormous: well over twenty or thirty stories tall and larger than several city blocks in every direction. It had always been imposing and spacious, but Anya had never seen it so…empty.

She stepped out of the V-200 just as the hangar doors above her sealed shut. A few flurries of snow worked their way in just as the doors boomed closed and melted before they reached the floor. The hangar only had half its lights on, but even in the dim light Anya could see only one other vehicle present: Gary’s old F-150, sitting in a far corner. In the days leading up to the launch of Gaia’s Saber, the hangar had been full of vehicles from visiting world leaders and hosts and construction projects. It was odd to find it so barren.

“Gary?” Anya asked. Her voice echoed across the cavernous chamber. No response. She brought up her menu as she helped Pan out of the V-200 and tried calling Gary directly. No response.

“Is Gary mad at us?” Pan asked.

“No I think he’s just had his hands full with helping pretty much everybody rebuild since the invasion,” Anya said. She didn’t think Gary was mad at them, or at least hoped he wasn’t, but his behavior up until now didn’t line up exactly with just being busy. As Anya left the hangar, she noticed another oddity: the factory was quiet. While Gary had installed all sorts of sound-proofing measures throughout the factory, there had still been distant humming, the vibrations of machines and the steady clomping of droid feet as they carried materials.

Anya had never heard the factory so silent before.

She had been a little concerned for Gary, mostly hoping he wasn’t straining himself too much, but now a worm of real worry started to crawl into her mind. She held Pan’s hand as they walked down the dimly lit corridor, and she used her heat sense to scan for any signs of life or activity. She felt the huge glow of the factory’s power generator, pulling energy from the Earth far below. There were some machines running, creating friction and warmth off on the factory’s main floor, but it was minimal.

She spotted Gary’s heat signature ahead of her, and down several hundred yards.

I didn’t know the factory went that deep, short of the energy conduction lines, Anya thought. She brought up her menu and called Gary again. No response.

Anya blinked and gasped as she saw Gary’s heat signature vanish from below her, then reappear one level above her, up a flight of stairs and just down the hall.

“What the hell?” Anya asked.

“What happened?” Pan asked.

“Gary just….disappeared and reappeared.”

“Is that what I felt?”

“You felt it?”

“Yeah. My Earth Dominion lets me feel little vibrations through the ground or anything connected to the ground. Something kinda moved from way down there and now it’s up there. You sure it’s Gary?” Pan asked and cocked his head to the side.

It was a fair question. But the heat signature Anya sensed was definitely human. It had a heartbeat, the hot blood ran in the same patterns as every other human she had sensed. And it was the only such heat signature in the factory, save for her and Pan.

“If it’s not him, I don’t know who else it could be. C’mon,” Anya said and hurried up onto the next level with Pan and to the door of Gary’s primary lab and examination chamber. The doors slid open upon her approach to reveal the expansive room. The primary lab and examination chamber wasn’t the largest room in the factory by a long shot, but it was far from small. It could have held several large houses within it, and had tiered levels and balconies that divided the room up into somewhat smaller areas devoted to different projects. Floating drones whizzed by on various tasks, some of them carrying what appeared to be preserved remains of aliens or pieces of the Willis asteroid or maybe the moon to different scanning chambers. Gary was just off to one side, seated in a hovering armchair with a high back, plush cushions, and a number of holographic displays laid out in front of him. He glanced up as Anya and Pan entered and rose out of the chair with a wave.

“Oh, hey kid,” he said. Anya felt simultaneous waved of relief and annoyance wash over her as she approached Gary.

“Thank god,” Anya said and gave Gary a quick hug. He seemed a little surprised, but returned the hug with a firm pat on her back. Then Anya gave him a slow but firm shove back. “Also, what the hell, old man?”

“What? What’s the matter?” Gary asked and squinted at her. Anya hadn’t seen him for two weeks, but he was clearly worse for wear. His cheeks looked sunken, he had circles under his eyes, and his skin looked papery and dry. Gary had always looked old, but never frail. He’d always had the look of a man who could still work a farm or some other demanding blue-collar job without much difficulty. Except now he looked old and frail, like the years had caught up with him all at once.

“What happened, Gary? What have you been doing?” Anya asked.

“Working, same as always. I know I haven’t been in touch but you haven’t either. People get busy, kid. No big mystery,” he said and shrugged.

“You smell tired,” Pan said and hugged Gary’s leg. “You need a nap.”

“Hey buddy, long time no see,” Gary smiled at Pan and gave his head a pat.

“I dunno about smell but you look like you haven’t slept in days,” Anya said. “And whatever you just did with vanishing from down there and reappearing up here is concerning.”

Gary raised his bushy gray eyebrows in surprise, then sighed and nodded. “Ah, heat sense. Right. Look, it’s nothing sinister. I’ve been up to my ears with reconstruction efforts and sorting through the mess those alien freaks have left behind and trying to find a way to create a block on our menu systems to keep those other alien bastards out and maybe screwing us all over. And it’s not like anything was stopping you from visiting earlier.”

“I’ve been busy too! Have you not heard of the new hosts?” Anya asked.

“New hosts?” Gary asked.

“They have a polar bear! She claw-bumped me! That means we’re friends, I think,” Pan said.

“Were these all the hosts that were in hiding?” Gary asked, and Anya gave him a quick rundown of everything that had happened in the last week or so. By the end of it, Gary had seated himself back in the plush hovering armchair and was rubbing his scruffy, unshaven chin. “Mars. I’ll be damned. They got there before I could.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty wild. But I’d like to know what was up with you teleporting just now. I thought you said you couldn’t figure it out before. You said it was too dangerous and you thought the Engineers had blocked you from learning about it or something, just like with FTL stuff. Now, what, you can just poof around the lab?” Anya asked.

“Ah. That,” Gary grunted and Anya grunted back, eyebrows raised in silent anticipation of a more substantial answer. He sighed and looked down at Pan. "Hey little guy, I was actually working on something for you. I heard from a nice lady in the USAIF that you like ant farms?"

"Oh yeah! I like those!" Pan said and clicked his claws as he wide, flat tail thumped up and down on the lab floor in excitement.

"Well I was working on a big one, just for you, actually. It's over here," Gary said and led Pan aside to an adjacent room. He wasn't lying. Anya caught a glimpse of a huge glass pane that was filled with countless ants trundling around about their anty business. Pan squealed and ran up to it and began sniffing around the glass excitedly as Gary left the room.

"You seriously had a giant ant famr just lying around?" Anya asked.

"I built it after the last time he came by and kept bugging me qith questions while I was working. I love the little guy but sometimes I need some quiet time," Gary said.

"Uh-huh. Well you've had enough quiet time for a while now. What's up?" Anya asked.

“Computer, bring up everything on the Staff," Gary said.

“That staff?” Anya asked, then she turned as hundreds of holographic displays appeared before her and Gary. The largest display showed a rotating to-scale model of the onyx staff the phaoronic cobra had used during the last stage of the invasion. It had sliced Chandrali in half, killed several of Anya’s clones, been shoved into Gary’s gut, and nearly killed her, Renn, Samaira, and quite a few others. A panel opened in the wall to reveal a glass tube that contained the staff itself and Anya hissed in surprise.

“Seriously Gary, what the fuck are you doing with that thing?”

“C’mon kid, I know you can be impulsive but I never took you for stupid,” Gary replied. “In any war, you examine your enemy as much as you can, including their weapons. Especially their weapons. It’s just like a gun or a bomb or something. Unless it has an enemy to wield it, it’s just a thing. And I’ve got it under more layers of security than you can imagine. Believe me, I’m being as careful as I can.”

“I think putting that thing in the same class as a gun or bomb is a gross oversimplification,” Anya said. Gary shrugged.

“I know, but you get my point. It’s a tool, more than an actual weapon, I think. Less like a gun and more like…something between a key and a Swiss Army Knife.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“What were the options, kid? Turn it over to the government? Fat chance. Destroy it? I’ve hit it with all sorts of things and it seems mostly impervious. But even if I really wanted to destroy it and were capable of doing so, what then? We lose out on insight into our enemies.”

“So…shit, I dunno, throw it into the sun!” Anya said.

“It could cause some negative reaction, change the sun, make it go nova. Or something else in space could grab it, or maybe nothing happens and we’ve wasted a precious resource,” Gary said and frowned.

“We can kill the aliens just fine, Gary. We don’t need their freaky toys around to help us with that,” Anya said.

“This isn’t about the phages. This is about the Engineers,” Gary said. When Anya squinted at him in confusion, he brought up his menu to the map screen. “Gizmo, show me the space between Earth and Mars the day Anya and Renn attacked Willis, complete with the data I’ve acquired from the staff.”

“Sure thing, boss!” Gizmo replied in a gruff voice as the gray AI appeared. Gary’s menu expanded to the size of a big-screen TV to show Anya and Renn’s orange and purple dots converging on Willis, then flickering and blinking out, then reappearing but not moving.

“This is when you and Renn got within that weird red light. We couldn't contact you, you couldn’t contact us, we didn’t know if your signals were still even there or not,” Gary said.

“Right. It was a pain in the ass,” Anya said. “What does this have to do with you teleporting? Or whatever that was?”

“That staff actually caused a disruption in the menus. It cut the signals from each other. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that’s been able to do it, and believe me kid, I have devoted a lot of my time to figuring out how to tinker with the menu. Every time I do, it’s been just like trying to invent reliable teleportation tech or FTL craft: bupkis. And at the level of intelligence and skill I’m at with inventing things, that should not be an issue, which has led me to believe it’s the Engineers specifically blocking certain routes of learning or information, sort of like they did with those three skills you found redacted in the menu. The, uh…”

“Abyss Dominion, Abyss Walking, and the Speech of Qoth,” Anya said. Felix had first found them when she’d asked about other Dominion skills and he’d told her one such skill was redacted. There were only three fully redacted menu skills in total. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that the Engineers had purposefully “erased” or edited the skills to prevent hosts from learning about other things.

“Right, those. And when the Engineers called us a couple weeks back, saying they might shut us down, I decided I really needed to figure out the best way to block them. They’ve used us, the little rat shitheads. I didn’t let the White House use me and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some alien jackass do the same. So, after fiddling with the staff a bit and replicating some of its…uh, transmissions, I guess would be a good way to put it, I figured out how to block some of the menu’s signals. And I managed to make a very rudimentary teleportation device as a test.”

Anya’s eyes widened. “So if you can get around that block in the menu…”

“Then I can get around everything. No more FTL restriction. No more threat of shutdown. No more cost in the RAC store. No more level cap, and no more need to wait for experience. Think about it kid: we could put every single skill in the entire menu up as high as it’ll go. All because of that thing.”

Anya’s hair rose along the back of her neck as she and Gary turned to stare at the onyx staff. It floated silently in the scanning tube, and its glossy black surface gleamed with promise.