Ravens of Eternity

264 Breaking Free, Pt The crashed corvette sat helplessly on Devolatus soil, and had become little more than a partially mangled wreck on its barren surface. Armor plates and weapons and various sensor clusters had been torn off during its devastating crash, and were strewn about for dozens of meters behind it.

The Peacekeeper fighters had also crashed all around, hundreds of meters away from the corvette, and in every direction. The fighter chassis themselves were torn apart and warped heavily, but the pilots inside were fine. Mostly.

Some were knocked out from the force of impact, others had broken bones. One was furious.

Seraph slammed a fist on his controls, humiliated at how easily they had all been taken out. And of course Eva was involved. She was always involved. He almost felt like he was being griefed himself.

If he had been in charge, he would have been shooting from the get-go. And reasoned that none of this would have happened if he was.

“Fuckin’ protocols,” he cursed.

He attempted to power cycle his fighter over and over, but the fighter didn’t do anything at all. Its circuits had been completely fried and had no capacity for energy. It couldn’t even whine in response.

With a groan, he reached to a side panel, and pulled out the emergency escape lever. There was a loud POP as the armor on his fighters’ chassis blew open and flew in various directions. Then the core underneath opened up slowly as Seraph manually cranked it open.

He panted out of exertion as he pulled himself up and out of his useless fighter, and stood up on top of it. In the distance, he could see the smoldering wreck that was the corvette.

.....

And watched as the unknown fighter lowered itself down next to it.

~

Eva forced open one of the corvette’s outer airlock doors with ease, took a single step out, and smiled at what she saw. Open land, and open skies.

She took a deep breath, and drew it all in.

It didn’t matter that the landscape itself was utterly bleak and lacked signs of verdant life. Nor did it matter that there were prisons in the distance all around her. All that mattered was that she was free.

As she breathed in the sharp cold air, Lucifer’s fighter hovered down slowly in front of her. Its front armor plates opened up – every segment was connected to the other with electromagnetic energy. Thin lines of energy wove between each one as it peeled itself open like an orange.

The spherical core inside also opened up in a similar fashion, and revealed Lucifer sitting in the pilot’s seat, which hung suspended from the core’s ceiling.

“Get in already,” ze said. To which Eva leapt in gracefully.

The moment she was all the way inside, Lucifer closed up the core and outer armor, then sped up and away as fast as ze could.

Eva marveled at the inside of this core – it was far larger than a standard piloting core. She estimated it to be about 5 meters in diameter, which was more than twice the size of a standard core.

The pilot and copilot’s seats were attached to each other, back-to-back, each with their own set of screens, MFDs, and controls. Both front and rear were huge screens that displayed live feeds of everything around the core.

And on both sides were tiny spaces with storage bins, armor and gun racks, medical kits, nutrient packs, and other niceties.

“Take off your jumpsuit,” said Lucifer, hir tone demanding.

“Why?” said Eva. “What the hell for?”

“There’s a tracker embedded in it. We’re not gonna get far as long as you’re wearing it. Soooo, take it off. There’s an empty recycling bin beside you – stuff it in there.”

Eva grimaced, then began to take off her bright red prison jumpsuit.

Not that she was going to miss it – she wasn’t a fan of the color. More critically, the tracker thing made absolute sense to her. The Federation would be fools if they didn’t put trackers on their prisoners. Without them, escaping would mean the ability to roam completely free.

A thought suddenly shot through her – Seraph was still down there, somewhere!

“Wait,” she said. “We need to turn around and kill Nightm... I mean, Seraph – he’s probably completely defenseless!”

“Absolutely not,” Lucifer replied stoically. “We’ve already got plenty to deal with. Last thing we need is to kill some idiot.”

“Now’s our best chance!”

“No, your best chance was when you caught him in the first place! And if we kill him now, not only would we be wasting time, but we’d immediately get even more Peacekeepers coming after us. They seriously don’t like it when one of their own gets offed. Trust me on that.”

Lucifer huffed out of annoyance. To hir, brash and impulsive actions like that always led to terrible reprisals. Such as getting jailed for murder on a core world.

“Our only play here is to get the hell away from this planet,” ze continued, “as fast as we possibly can. If we don’t, we’re both gonna end up as long-term residents. And I’m not keen on that in the slightest, alright? Now stop thinking and strip!”

Eva grumbled lightly as she pulled the jumpsuit off her body, and stuffed it into the trash bin. Then she hit one of the controls above it, which caused its lid to shut tight. The suit inside was completely swarmed by nanites, and subsequently broken down into atoms. The whole thing took mere seconds.

It truly was a recycling bin.

“There’s a pressure suit in the top bin,” Lucifer said soon after. “Oughta be your size.”

Eva flipped it open and found a sleek gray flightsuit, and eagerly slipped into it. It was as tight and form-fitting as her usual suit, a feeling which she enjoyed immensely.

“Fits great,” she said.

Then she realized the suit wasn’t the only thing in the bin. There was also a ballistic sidearm inside of a holster.

“The gun too?” she asked.

“Yep,” replied Lucifer.

Eva didn’t question it, and quickly strapped on the gun. It felt light in comparison to her Handcannon, but it was better than nothing.

“Where’re the Ravens?” she asked. “Figured they would’ve been here for this.”

“Oh, they wanted to,” Lucifer answered. “Almost fought me for it... But I forced them to sit it out.”

“What the hell for?!”

“Calm down. You’re giving yourself an aneurysm for no reason. Look, they’re being watched by the Federation, alright? Feds believe you’re liable to escape, high risk for flight. Rightfully so, I might add. So they’ve got their agents watching over them. There’s more bad news, but...”

“More bad news? Spill it!”

“It’s not my place to tell you. Have a seat – we’re about to exit atmo.”

Eva tightened the straps on her suit, then plopped down into the copilot’s seat and buckled herself in. Frustration had welled into her again – she hated the feeling of not being able to move to the beat of her intuition.

But Miko’s words echoed in her mind again, and she did her best not to let it control her. Still, she ached to see her family.

“Well we’d better meet up with them at some point...”

“Of course. At some point, we’ll rendezvous with them out in the colonies, where the Peacekeepers have fewer resources. They’ll try to follow, but we’ll outmaneuver them. Useless prats.”

“How do I know you aren’t lying?”

“You don’t. But I did sign a contract, and here I am now.”

Eva sighed with exasperation. This wasn’t ideal. She had hoped to get in touch with the Ravens quickly, but it seemed like she needed to stay out of sight. And that she had to trust Lucifer, even if she didn’t want to.

In order to clear her mind, she powered on her MFDs and controls, then set her usual settings across every display. On the large live feed screen, she watched as they blasted further and further away from the planet.

She found the seat itself incredibly comfortable and roomy. The controls were well-laid out, and the screens weren’t crammed together.

A pang of recognition crossed her – she felt as though she had seen all this before. But she couldn’t quite place it. She took the copilot’s control sticks in her hands, and felt their curves.

“I think I’ve been in one of these before,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Lucifer answered. “These are ultra rare cores. You’re a Bellum Player, so you might be familiar with them. They were sold to the game’s whales for $5,000 dollars apiece. For some reason, these transferred along with them.”

“Wait – you’re a Bellum Player?! And you paid five grand for this?”

Eva was astounded. She felt something was different about Lucifer, but couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Now it made sense – ze gave off the same vibe as the other Refugees. There was this preternatural way they all seemed to move and think.

Lucifer scoffed heavily.

“Hah! I would never have paid for this,” ze said. “I had next to nothing back on Earth. No, I borrowed this from a friend. An obscenely rich friend. Rich both before and after coming here.”

It suddenly dawned on Eva where she had seen the core. Or at least a version of it. And she even used it once or twice, back when the game had just launched.

“I have one of these,” she muttered. “I remember now. Barely ever used it. I thought it was hot garbage at the time.”

Lucifer coughed with incredulity.

“You paid five grand? Seriously?” ze asked. “This thing is worth... I don’t even know. It’s probably priceless. There’s maybe a few thousand of them out there, total.”

“No, hell no,” Eva replied. “I was poor too. No, there was a single-seater version, given to the first thousand Bellum players. I was number 108, I think. They hadn’t made any chassis for it, and it was too large to fit in the standard ones. So I used it to transport myself between stations, or do some light exploring. But that was it.”

“Did it come with you here?”

“It did. It’s in my hangar, with my fighter and my mecha. But I didn’t use it – too big for standard chassis. Not that I even knew. I always just thought it was a fancy leisure pod or something. Didn’t think it could do all this.”

Lucifer sighed.

Ze realized that Eva had missed out on a whole lot if she never got a chance to pilot the core. Not in any serious capacity anyway. More than that, the Federation had likely confiscated it. Or, at the very least, impounded it.

“I doubt they’re still in your hangar,” ze said. “More likely, the Feds have ’em under lock and key.”

“The hell for?” cried Eva. “They can’t just take other people’s crap!”

“They absolutely can, and they absolutely do. Besides, you’re not just ‘other people’, you’re technically a convict. And that means you’re technically ‘owned’ by the Federation. At least, for the duration of your sentence.

“Not only do you belong to them, but all your property’s theirs as well. They say it’s to ‘protect’ them, but really, they just want first dibs.”

Eva groaned.

She didn’t just suffer a heap of injustice – she also faced extortion on a galactic scale. Considering how many prisoners the Federation held, it was easy to reason how much they profited off them.

She realized that getting away from the Federation was far more complicated than she originally believed. In truth she could simply hop nations and defect. But that meant leaving behind her friends, family, and her mecha – everything that meant the world to her.

That just wasn’t going to happen. Not without a fight.

.....

She stewed as she thought about her predicament, and wondered if sitting in prison for 5 years was a better option. No way to tell now, though. And no way back.

She hoped the Ravens had some ideas about what to do, because she had zero.

“Your friend lent you a rare, priceless, ship?” Eva said suddenly. “You’ve got a good friend.”

“She trusts my skills,” Lucifer said. “But if I put a scratch on this, she wouldn’t hesitate to brutalize me. Also, you had better start planning on how to get your core back. That’s too many creds sitting in a Fed impound lot somewhere, and that just won’t do.”

“There’s more to life than money.”

“So you’re just gonna let the Federation take it? Don’t be dumb.”

It dawned on Eva that Lucifer knew much more about her than normal. Then again, she had a number of fans, all of whom knew a great deal about her. The commander obviously also found too much information and used it to his advantage.

Perhaps it was time to finally tighten her DI’s privacy settings...

“You seem to know a lot about me,” she said.

“Know your enemy and all that,” replied Lucifer. “Though honestly, I believe it applies to everyone. Clients, fences, fixers. Especially friends. I find out everything I can first, before extending any... future pleasantries.”

“What, you mean research everyone you meet? Or you mean everyone’s an enemy? Sounds impossible either way.”

“Lucky me, I’m an impossible person.”