12 Miles Below

- Two hours prior -

To’Orda had a convoluted scheme he was proud of.

The image generator had gleefully drawn up the slides for him, even going so far as to animate a mini-To’Orda pulling down each slide and pointing a ruler at it.

First, he would capture the Deathless.

Second, the hyper-weasel would come to rescue the Deathless. At which point To’Orda wouldn’t have to walk anywhere to catch the weasel.

Scheme complete. It was perfect.

And then things got complicated.

First, the Deathless had to be negotiated with to not die and cooperate with all this. To’Orda had tried to get some help, but the three Feathers were all insulting each other over the comms channel and hadn’t stopped for the past three hours now.

He’d long ago checked out of that situation. So instead, he’d taken one of their jokes as said and made a small speaker inside a pet rock. Then attached a language generator to his image generator, and a text to speech module for that as well. The program had instantly protested against the extra workload, immediately understanding what those additions would mean, then realized it was overruled and finally sulked away to do the job, borrowing from To’Orda’s hardware to run.

The Deathless did not make it easy for the pet rock to negotiate anything. As such, To’Orda felt this particular plan of his to delegate the negotiations had been the single greatest move he’d ever done.

It took a while but the rock had finally come to an agreement with the Deathless. Or mostly. To’Orda would need to keep the Deathless alive, and let the Deathless move around on his own. So he made a collar with a shock setting, put it on the human’s neck, and called it a day. If the Deathless went too far away… well, he wouldn’t.

Finally his plan was going smoothly. He sat in the fading underground lights, soaking in the passive infrared radiation emitted. It was an incredible waste of energy from the mites, but they were persistent in making all their light sources generate heat of differing levels.

“Hey bud, we got a problem.” The rock said, sitting where To’Orda had left it. Inside his head, the generator was sending more images. Another slideshow panel, and the ruler tapping the presentation. “See, we got the Deathless sorted out yeah, but the winterscar kid doesn’t know we got his friend..."

“Nnnn… so?”

The image of To’Orda fixed his glasses slightly, then tapped the presentation again, this time on a crude human outline drawn with red demonic horns. “So how’s he gonna know to come here for?”

To’Orda groaned out, hand reaching to rub his buried brow. Couldn’t the Winterscar figure it out himself? The human was supposed to be smart. When his friend didn’t show up anywhere else, he’d start looking around. Problem should take care of itself.

“Yeah, eventually. Maybe.” The image dismissed the presentation by pulling the rope ring at the end and letting it go. “But are the other three yahoo’s gonna let you wait that long?” A crude animation of three Feathers all arguing with each other came into view next. Then all three figures stopped and snapped their attention straight at him.

It was a chilling sight.

“Nnnn… bugger.”

No. No, they would not let him sleep in peace.

“Thought the rock was just made to negotiate with me.” Drakonis said from the shade. So far he hadn’t been a pain in the neck yet, but To’Orda wasn’t going to put any faith in that. His gut told him there’d be trouble eventually. “You really talking to yourself now? I’d recommend a rubber ducky for that, tradition.”

“If I got a mouth now, I’m gonna use my fuckin’ mouth." The rock answered back. "Now shut up, the adults are talkin’”

It was oddly effective, as the Deathless did indeed stop talking. To’Orda was impressed at the little image generator’s ability to get pests to stop being pests. Another win for the little generator that could.

But that was where the good news ended. No matter how much To’Orda and his rock thought about the issue, neither of them could figure out a way to inform the weasel. Not without getting yelled at by To’Avalis or To’Sefit anyhow. To’Wrathh would likely be extremely pleased to relay a message for him, but for completely unrelated reasons.

All that changed when he noticed why the Deathless had stopped complaining during his brainstorming session. He hadn’t completely stopped talking, he just wasn’t talking to To’Orda or his rock anymore.

No, he was trying to speak to a bird. Quietly and in hushed whispers, but that was basically shouting out loud to To’Orda’s senses. Deep within his shawl, violet eyes turned to the left, locking on the human. Then turned up for the first time and narrowed down on a being he had completely ignored.

The bird was talking back with the human. And in an utterly blizzard occurrence, the bird seemed to know how to speak better than the human did. Drakonis was stuttering with his words, trying to sound things out, or just quietly tapping his chin, as if trying to remember what to say next.

Both the bird and Drakonis seemed to realize they were being watched at nearly the same time. Their hushed whispers came to a dead stop, and the bird even started hopping from branch to branch away. As if pretending to be a normal bird again.

But To’Orda had already overheard enough. The language wasn’t standard. Nothing that humanity currently spoke. So he groaned and downloaded another program. This time a language module, and had it try to recreate the language from the audio samples.

Oddly enough, it didn’t even need to figure out a new language from scratch. Apparently this already existed, old norse. He replayed the audio logs he’d overheard, and found it detailed exactly nothing.

The bird was just trying to ask the Deathless what had happened. And the Deathless was just trying to figure out if hello meant hello or if the bird was asking a question.

He groaned. Waste of effort. But there was still one path to his current problem he hadn’t considered. Maybe finding out why the two humans had decided to adventure around, he’d get a better idea of how to send a message to the weasel.

“Why here?” To’Orda asked, cracking his neck side to side before standing back up.

“The fuck are you even asking about now?” Drakonis bit back.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“He means why the fuck were you and the weasel kid doing here?" His pet rock angrily answered back. "You're both schemers, don't pretend you're not. So this had to be part of your scheme. What’s the scheme human?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

To’Orda hadn’t needed to install a voice pitch detection software since he never cared what any human had to say to him. Up until recently, by order of his boss. Fortunately for the Feather, that had paid off quite a bit thus far. And now, all that software was telling him that this human had just lied. Violet eyes turned to the giant tower behind him. “Nnnn… Is this ship part of your scheme?”

“It’s the only cover for miles. What, you think we were going to pick a fight with you out in a forest instead of a protected metal tower?”

Not cover, the Deathless had just lied about that, trees and rocks would have worked fine for a battlefield. They were using the ship for something else.

He decided to see if someone smarter than him had the answer. “Nnn… what were they doing here?” He sent over the chat channel.

He got no good answers back. To’Wrathh just wanted more info on Keith, and what he was doing. Which was exactly what To’Orda wanted to know in the first place.

To’Avalis told him he was busy trying to fix something To’Wrathh was breaking, and he should figure things out himself.

To’Sefit was just laughing away in the background, poking both of them every chance she had.

“They’re idiots and you should mute them.” His pet rock said flatly.

“Nnnn…” To’Orda agreed. Nothing good was going to come from those three. The only guidance he had gotten so far had been from his pet rock, and To’Avalis. Who told him to figure it out himself, but it technically was guidance.

Well. Bugger. That was also technically an order.

To’Orda lumbered over into the ship’s shadow, passing through the open gate until he was inside. His vision showed power was still flowing through the ship, and upwards, where most of the interior was smashed with holes and melted metal. With a few leaps and some creative handholds, he got to the very top.

The shock collar on the Deathless let him know his captive wasn't taking the moment to scramble away, still lingering around.

The control room of the old human ship was completely smashed down. Not from his fight with the Winterscar kid, but instead the followup with the Deathless. Who had gone on an utter rampage breaking down as much of the structure as he could while trying to get clear of To’Orda.

It now made sense. He knew there’d been some oddities in the fight. To’Orda had been played.

“Jokes on them pal, you don’t need monitors or fancy equipment to make things work ‘round here.” The rock said, still held in his outstretched palm. “Show ‘em what you got.”

The image generator paired its message with a crude crayon-like animated image of To’Orda plugging himself into the computer, and then downloading data. Along with a smiling face for good measure.

He loomed over to the first smashed up console, set his pet rock nearby with a small pat on the head for good measure and then turned back to his task. His fingers were a little too big for delicate work, but he managed to pinch the metal and then pull up with it, bending and ripping the entire thing off the electronics like a mildly stubborn cloth wrap. A few parts remained, metal painfully ripped off as the hidden bolts had stubbornly held on.

But the interior was exposed, and soon his nanoswarm were fiddling through, a cable being built from the surrounding metal scraps, then connected with the system.

There was a rudimentary virtual intelligence still operating within the ship, but nothing intelligent and no soul fractal to allow any kind of evolution. It had stayed static from the moment it had been made. As such it was easy to power through it and take control. To’Orda then dug into the history logs to see what the humans had been up to.

Communications. In fact, there was nothing but video messages for the past decades downwards. No navigation logs, no engine commands, nothing but video calls.

And the last one sent had happened just before he showed up to fight. He tried to open it up to view, but found junk data at the expected endpoint. The video had been wiped out, and then the physical data location had been overwritten by static.

He tried to see if he could reverse engineer the overwriting pattern, but found it was wiped several hundred times over.

The rock whistled. “Wow, not often you see the work of a pro in cybersecurity these days.”

“Nnn…” To’Orda grumbled. He unplugged from the console, hand reaching out to grab his pet rock before he turned and leaped back down. The Feather landed with a massive thud at the base of the tower, feet cracking through the dirt and stone ground. He shook free of the hindrance and made his way past the weary Deathless. Then his hand loomed over the discarded chestplate from his hostage’s unpowered armor.

“What are you doing with that?” Drakonis asked.

“Doing the hard part.” His pet rock shot back, angry on To’Orda’s behalf. “If you’d been cooperative, we wouldn’t have to be doing anything right about now. This is all your fault pal.”

“Nnn.” To’Orda agreed, giving the captive one glance before ripping into the old human armor. The wire that he’d built to connect to the human ship worked just fine for the armor, even though the armor’s port was extremely outdated in comparison. The armor could lock a lot of critical functions behind one admin password, but regular items like video logs had be accessed by the armor. And if the armor could do it, then he could too. He fed the dead armor power, and had it light up in it's half assembled state.

Soon, he had the helmet’s full recorded viewpoint of what had gone on.

He downloaded the whole thing, then processed through it, categorizing it out. Most were annoying things. Going through lessers for their power cells. Gossiping on the back of hoversled wagons. Some war scenes against other humans. Endless training sessions with some Deathless that had a gold lion shoulderpad. A fight with the hyper-weasel, in which the Deathless was thoroughly beaten down.

To’Orda felt mild satisfaction at that. At least if he’d lost, it was nice to know everyone else had also lost against the hyper-weasel so far.

He skipped to the very end. And there he found the full log of what had happened in the tower. "Jackpot!" His pet rock cackled, sending an animated image of a mini-To'Orda rubbing his hands together like an scheming victor.

So the human was looking for an old human commercial AI for help? He considered telling the other Feathers about that, but they were still busy bickering with each other, this time with To'Wrathh excluded.

Apparently she was now on approach and To’Avalis didn’t want to fight her at all, claiming his shell wasn’t fully prepared yet for the confrontation. Or he didn’t have enough lessers to hide behind, or her path down was too unpredictable, and so forth down the line of excuses. To’Sefit equally refused to do the job without To’Orda there with her. Last time she fought To’Wrathh alone, it hadn’t ended well for her. And she’d already lost her shell twice now over the last few months, so getting a third shell would likely put her into the waiting line for a year or two.

“Yeah, you’ll probably have to deal with her soon enough bud. No two ways about that. She’s crazy man.” His pet rock said, sending soothing images of To’Orda having his head patted by the image generator's mini-To'Orda, standing on three stools to reach that high up.

He nodded slowly in agreement. If he managed to kill the weasel before she arrived, she’d be pissed off and start a fight. If he hadn’t killed the weasel by then, she’d still be pissed off and then both of them would start a fight with him.

Which would be worse? To’Avalis and To’Sefit coming after him, or fighting To’Wrathh and the hyper-weasel together? It felt like he was losing no matter what. He couldn’t even hide and sleep it off, they were all immortal. Except for the weasel, but To’Orda wasn’t sure that human could actually die from old age. He’d find someway to live long enough to be a pain in the ass. The law of maximum annoyance demanded it.

“Life’s fuckin’ rough bud, don’t I know it too. But you can get yourself out of it. You got yourself out of everything so far, including mother! Think about it, most Feathers that get on her bad side just straight up get the concrete shoe treatment if you catch my drift. This is piece of cake in comparison! Don’t beat yourself up.” The rock said from his palm, sending a crude image of To’Orda frowning, and having that frown be wiped out by a giant eraser, and redrawn as a smiling face. Along with two annoying targets next to him on the ground, eyes X’d out.

His gut told him there was a solution to all this, same as his rock did. And he felt it had to do with the birds. He reviewed the footage again, and realized if the hyper-weasel was on the way to the bird city, then all he had to do was contact the bird city and tell them to pass the message along.

To’Wrathh was likely to arrive within two to four days depending on what turns and twists she took. He just had to bait the weasel here before that happened, and then he’d get his job done and go hide from his feral little sister for a few decades until the girl forgot about all this and had some new obsession.

“Yeah that’ll work bud. She’ll forget for sure. No worries.” The rock said.

To’Orda detected that as a lie.

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