Chapter 14 - The Eyes of God

 “I missed the silence of space” Vishnu whispered in Jim's ear. He could quite literally feel his hot warm breath on the inside of his ear. “I have missed communing minds. I have missed you as most of all, warrior.”

“Haven't been able to deploy. Too busy training up on the head things,” Jim spoke aloud. He was still getting used to not having to actually talk for commands to register.

“They're just so weird,” Jim remembered Molly saying when she first looked into his new eyes. The color didn't deposit right away, but had fully developed when Jim woke up from his pain-killer-addled stupor the next morning.

“Then describe them to me,” Jim had prodded. He had yet to see them in the mirror.

“They're not like Standish's. They're like, silver. I can still see all the furrows and intricacy in the iris, it's just...silver,” he remembered her hand touching his face, “They're ringed in ice-blue sapphire. They almost twinkle, it's just, well, weird. I still love you, though.”

“Touching,” Vishnu said, the memory wafting away on a gust of hot air.

“Hey! That's mine, you're not allowed to see that,” Jim huffed angrily at him. “Why are you even looking there. Shouldn't you be doing Core stuff?”

“I am all-powerful, Jim. I can manage this dismal contraption without a second's effort,” Jim could feel his presence behind him as his voice rolled around inside his head, as though he were standing just in front of him.

“Guys,” Marion spoke inside Jim's head. She sounded off in front and to his left, where her Core was currently gliding through empty space away from the planet next to his. “ETA is another 10 minutes. We'll be meeting Standish a few dozen clicks south of the base. Luna has dramatically less gravity than back home. Your potential reserves will deplete a lot more quickly up here, so remember, economy of motion.”

“Yeah, but no atmosphere and reduced gravity means we need less energy at the same time,” Tomah's voice came through from beneath Jim and to his right. “Just don't have too much fun and remember the training.”

“Hell of short notice to be sent up here,” Adrian responded from Jim's lower left. “We didn't even have a week in the Sims before they pushed us through the mag launcher.”

“Why is it no longer quiet in here, Jim,” Vishnu thundered. “Space is supposed to be quiet.”

“Because we're not alone up here, duh,” Jim thought.

“I heard that. You should show respect,” Vishnu thundered, more annoyed this time than angry.

“Sorry,” he spoke to himself sheepishly. “I'm honestly just excited to be in space,” Jim said, this time addressing the group instead. “Have you guys been to Luna before?”

“Once,” Adrian replied. “Back in the Nexus, our class took a field trip up here. Turns out my ancient ancestors were in a race to be the first into space and, eventually, to Luna. We won space, but lost Luna. Turns out we're the whole cause of the Great Collapse. After fighting each other and stockpiling a ton of nukes, we joined forces and put them all up here for safe keeping during the Holy Aggression. 'Safe keeping' my ass. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“Wait, you're a culture kid, too?” Jim replied in surprise.

“Affirmative, sir,” Adrian's formal speech was beset by casual tone. “Western Colonies. I'm actually the last of my kind.” Adrian sounded almost wistful.

“I didn't know that,” Marion came over, her own tone casual. “I thought the Northern Nexus still had a few generations left. Something happen?

“Yeah,” Adrian began, still wistful, “there are a couple primaries left in the Nexus, but after the scandal, every last one of my kinfolk left. The primaries have already used up their mating treaties, and none of us are willing to use ours on the Nexus. They're currently lobbying the Western Alliance for more mating rights, but there's very little chance they'll be granted, and even if they were, the primaries are getting really old. I doubt they could raise the children themselves. So, that means me and my kinfolk are the last pure generation.”

“Scandal?” Blaize questioned. Jim could feel his brilliant bass from point position ahead of them all, the positional affect flawless through his new augmentation.

“Oh right, you guys probably aren't aware of it,” Adrian's clarion baritone again panged in Jim's head.

“Well, I am,” Marion replied, a bit matter-of-factly.

“Well, of course you know,” Tomah's uncharacteristically high voice flippantly shrilled. “So, do enlighten us, if you're so inclined.”

“Right,” Adrian began. “Well, a little explanation for the rest of you who aren't all up-to-date and shit with Cultural Preservation protocol. We're not sterilized like you guys, and we don't submit DNA to the banks unless we leave the Nexus.”

“Shit,” Tomah chimed. “So you gotta do babies the old-fashioned way, then?”

“Right,” Adrian continued in stride. “We reproduce through traditional intercourse and are required to give birth biologically. No choice in the matter like you folks. So, that means male-female pairing, no question, either.”

“The Old World was honestly pretty terrible about all that,” Marion cut in herself.

“They really were,” Adrian traded back. “I mean, most everyone these days is pretty annoyed with the forced-sterilization and relentless population control, anyway, even if we do all agree on its necessity based on the lessons learned from our past, but the cultural enforcement of Old World stereotypes is taken to the next level in the Nexuses. Editing of genetic material is strictly prohibited as well, which is where this whole scandal begins.”

“I see where this is going,” Marion traded back, sounding extremely grave.

“Yeah,” Adrian started, himself sounding very despondent. “A reporter decided to do a profile of Nexus life as a generic fluff-piece for their news outlet, and noticed the absolutely abysmal infant mortality rate and incredibly young birth age in my Nexus. They did some investigating and found similarly terrible rates in the Desert Nexus and the Southern Nexus as well. The primaries, it turns out, had been sexually abusing the younglings. I mean, the REALLY young younglings.”

“Oh no,” Blaize cut him off with a boom, “If this is going where I think it is, I honestly think I'm going to be sick.”

“It's going exactly where you think it is,” Marion confirmed.

“Yeah, it gets darker, though,” Adrian continued, the sadness blackening his voice. “There were only a few hundred people left in the Nexus any more, as people tend to leave nowadays, so the genetic pool had been folding in on itself for hundreds of years.”

“You don't mean,” Tomah began himself, catching the drift.

“I do. Because of the population control and crazily deep in-breeding,” Adrian continued, “genetic defects at birth were crazy high. Trisomy, hereditary illnesses, general formation failures, the whole lot. We're talking less than one in ten births were completely healthy.”

“Culling,” Jim cut him off as he felt the blood drain from his face and a knot form in the pit of his stomach making him want to vomit.

“Culling,” Adrian confirmed deadpan. “'Failure to thrive,' is the technical term. They found a legal loophole for Cultural Nexuses where people who gave live birth didn't use up their birthing credits until the child was issued a birth identity. So, the doctors who were delivering the babies would 'prevent the child from thriving' if it was 'genetically unfit.' They'd also fake birth identity certificates to hide any in-breeding, as well.”

“How did you guys not know? Were you ever...?” Marion allowed herself to trail off.

“We all knew,” Adrian responded. His comm picked up a wet sniffle and his voice sounded teary. “But my Nexus, like the others caught in similar scandals, was extremely isolated. We had limited access to the global networks and have almost complete autonomy from the Great Union or the Western Colonies. We all just thought it was normal. That that's just how it was. A primary's word was law. They were just doing what had been done to them by their primaries. The Nexuses are all about 'tradition.' We had no idea that life was different. We all just accepted it as 'just how it is.'”

“That's evil,” Marion deadpanned herself. “It was pretty bad at my Nexus but that is just evil.”

“After all of this came out into the open, the authorities descended on our Nexus with a wrathful fury. Military was called in; I was really young, but I remember the troops storming through and rounding up most of the primaries and a ton of secondaries, too. Most of them were executed on the spot, the rest were excommunicated into the Outside. There were a lot of secondaries who had objected to the practices and never participated, and they became the new primaries. Me and all of my kinfolk were relocated to foster families or put into institutions and had to go through extensive “re-education.” I lived in a home until I ended up at Lyceum in the IA. My birth parents were some of the ones who made it past execution but both were excommunicated for their compliance in the scandal.”
“I'm so sorry,” Jim said, “we didn't know.”

“No one does, really,” Adrian's voice sounded calmer and more collected. “The trials were all held in secret and the news story was suppressed almost instantly after it was reported. I've looked on the global networks and I've only been able to find a couple text references and the original article buried deep in my query results. That's why I don't mind talking about it. People need to know, but most of us don't remember much of it or are under a gag-order to not talk about it. I only learned after digging deep, myself. It's actually the reason I stayed on through enlistment and joined the program. So I could confront my parents. I knew the only way I'd get access to the Outsiders was through here.”

“And?” Jim questioned, his head was pulsing. He tried to shake it into place, but it just wasn't un-jumbling.

“Standish did me a favor and tracked them down. They died in a raid a couple years before I joined up,” his voice sounded angry and regretful and happy all at once. “I never wanted revenge or retribution, I just wanted to meet them. To know why. How they lived with themselves. But I guess they couldn't,” Adrian chuckled darkly.

“Well, we're your family now,” Marion replied consolingly. “We'll be ready to land soon. Everyone prep your systems and get ready.

“I am sorry for this man,” Vishnu's somber voice startled Jim. “He was not granted his sacred right of vengeance. His birthers died cowards and demons with no chance at salvation or atonement. This story distresses me, warrior.” Vishnu sounded grave and angry. His voice was so thunderous and decisive it legitimately scared Jim. “You should be honored to fight along side this man,” he continued. “He is a true soldier.”

“I already was,” Jim confirmed, his voice misty and prideful, his skin prickling with gooseflesh. “more so now than ever.”

************************************************************************************************************************

Standish, in Musashi, met them at the shallow impact craters the team had landed in. The gears were all clad in tight, form-fitting fabric to keep out Luna's gear-destroying regolith, even the typically-bare-chested Heimdall and Cúchulainn Tomah and Adrian piloted were clad in tight, specially designed space suits. Even Vishnu's dhoti and stole had been replaced with a body hugging fabric jumper.

“Good to see you all here,” Standish greeted them as he approached. The cores were programmed with ad-hoc rangefinders such that “within earshot” was built into the comms unless you were using a secure, private channel. “Glad you could join us, Mister Ross. Missed you on the Western Colonies mission. Heard you're wet now. How's it feel?”

“Still getting used to it, sir,” Jim took pains to use an official tone. This was the first time he'd ever worked with Standish in an official capacity and it was hard to not use his friendly lilt. “Still a little weirded out by it all, if I'm honest. The fact that they're streaming the video feeds directly into my brain instead of filtering it through my eyes, and then extracting my movements directly from my brain instead of getting it from my muscles first is all a bit scary.”

“They set your filters up, right?” Tomah inquired. “I felt the same until they showed me about the signal filters. I have like a zillion. I'm so paranoid about eavesdropping and mind control, but once I learned how the filters worked and Standish showed me how to set them up, I spent a couple days just filling my transmitter with them.”

“Yeah, Standish gave me a break down a short bit ago and I put in a ton of filters. The firewall they give you has weaknesses if you know what you're doing,” Blaize interjected nervously.

“I'll set you up, kid,” Standish replied with his typical borderline-condescending-but-not-quite tone. “Anyway, we're on the edge of the light side, we've gotta get over to the dark side where the base is, Let's get moving.”

“I'm not getting anything on my tracking system,” Adrian questioned confusingly. “Where's our waypoints? Our mission line?”

“Well,” Standish's voice went high and squeeky as he drew the syllables out. “This mission isn't, strictly speaking, 'on the books,' as it were.”

“Excuse me?” Marion's concerned voice trumpeted from the rear of the crush.

“Well, the IA technically isn't aware that New Roman is operating up here,” Standish took special care to emphasize the “technically.” “We're running a bit of an unsanctioned mission, if you will. Call it a favor to Dyman.”

“So,” Tomah said warily, “you essentially just made us complicit in a conspiracy?”

“Only if someone finds out,” Standish confirmed with an audible wink. “Now, keep an eye out for land mines. There's an active missile turret a few hundred meters forward. We cannot,” Standish was very emphatic with his “cannot,” “destroy that. We need it for defense once we're done here. So, Blaize, I'm going to need you to Chameleon cloth into there,”

“No can do, sir,” Blaize cut him off. “and with all due respect, sir, could you please use my mission alias? I'd prefer to minimize any record of my presence here, sir.”

“Sure thing, Blaize,” Standish quipped back, very pointedly. “But, do tell, why can't you Chameleon cloth?” He sounded extremely restrained, as though he were holding back a torrent of anger.

“There was no way to get a gear bag into orbit and the cloth would have been damaged in the 0-oxygen atmosphere up here, so the Commander said that there wouldn't be any need for it up here anyway, so we won't be encountering combat...” Blaize trailed off, “...you know, now that I think about it, she actually said 'shouldn't,' not 'wouldn't...” he trailed off again.

“But, she..”Standish paused mid-sentence to take a shallow, punctuated breath, “I told her...” he did this again, the anger more evident in his voice this time. “She knew...” He said the “knew” very loudly before he paused for his breath with a snort. “Ok. Ok, ok, ok,” he said through a heavy exhale, the effort to sound at ease rife with undertone. “Alright, new plan, then. I'm going to need Jim, Tomah, and Adrian to cut forward and engage the turrets. And you guys,” Standish was said the last two words very loudly, and continued in a very clipped and emphatic tone, “You cannot destroy the turrets. Just can't do it. Can't even damage them,” he got progressively louder and more aggressive as he went through the order. “Just pepper their shields when they start disengaging, and get behind cover. There's a crater lip just inside their engagement range. Marion:” the audible shift in attention was subtle, but unlike with his rig, the “feeling of presence,” Jim felt in the conversation because of the Augs, made it detectable, “you, Blaize and I are going to sneak around the rear flanks and and disable the turrets from their rear console. We're like a zillion times bigger, and disembarking is a terrible idea,” he said very snarkily, “use the EMP charges I gave all of you. Once they're placed, recconoiter here, those things are strong enough to wipe out our sensors if we don't get outside range beforehand. We all clear?”

“Roger that,” everyone responded in chorus.

With a visible break in huddle, they all began scrambling up the steep curved edge of the crater. The low gravity made and loose regolith made it hard for them to get purchase, but with a couple forceful leaps, the group had made it out of the deep impact crater. Over the horizon, just inside the dark surface of Luna, they could see a large geodesic dome underneath a powered-down life support umbrella-generator.

“A base?” Blaize questioned from the front.

“A base, Mr. Obvious,” Standish retorted. “This is why we're here. We have a small unit in there and the systems have gone hay-wire. These computer systems are arcane, even by Old World standards. They predate the Technological Renaissance. That's why I said to be careful of the landmines. They probably won't do a much damage,” Standish emphasized “much” very dramatically, “ but enough of them could probably hurt pretty bad. Anyway, we need to disable the turrets. Once those are taken out, I can get back to my drop ship so I can disembark and restore the computer systems.”

“There are people in that base?” Marion was flabberghasted.

“Yep. IA's Nuclear Defense team,” Standish quipped back. “They're currently trying to restore functionality to the base so we can hold a sustained detachment up here. They have a couple dropships outside the base's perimeter they've been living out of and we were just about to get the life support umbrella powered on. They're currently running low on supplies and this is really our only shot at getting this base operational before we restock and have to actually report our activity to the IA. We wanted to have everything ticking away before we told them what's going on. Help us make a solid case for keeping a unit up here.”

“So not a conspiracy,” Jim added.

“No, Mr. Ross, not a conspiracy,” Standish condescended to them all. “We've only been up here for a few days and the IA is aware we're exploring the surface for this base. The commander talked me in to letting you all help me with this minor cock-up in the name of 'training in space deployment and operating in a low-gravity theater,' or some bullshit.”

“Why didn't you mention any of this before?” Adrian skeptically inquired.

“Because you're all my subordinates and you're supposed to just do what I say?” Standish responded, rife with indignance and contempt. “Because Dyman asked me to keep this 'need to know?' Because the IA probably doesn't want a bunch of punk kids knowing we're scouring the surface of Luna for nuclear silos for fear that they'd get all political activist on us and 'put a stop to this?' Shall I continue?”

“Nuclear silos?” Blaize responded horrified.

“Nuclear silos,” Standish replied mockingly, making his voice sound audibly idiotic. “The SU info dump that you guys secured last month uncovered some information revealing that the majority of the Old World's nuclear devices that triggered the Great Collapse were stashed away up here. NRI has been hurting bad for a new nuclear source that wasn't asteroidal. The results from that terrorist base you trashed turned up negative, so we're preparing to convince the IA to let us decomission the remaining warheads' fissile instead.”

“So, the opposite of a conspiracy,” Marion snarked.

“So, the opposite of a conspiracy. A lucrative deal in both NRI's and the IA's interest,” Standish calmly assured. “Now can we finish debating this and get started?” Standish pointed Musashi's hand to the large crater ahead of them. There was a vast open expanse ahead of it, scattered with anti-vehicle barriers that looked like pick-up-jacks and ensconced by twenty-foot-high anti-personnel fences. “Be careful with those fences, guys,” Standish halted as they reached the first waist-high barrier, gingerly stepping over it, making sure not to touch the area where his legs met to the top by standing on tip-toes. “Like I said, this gear is arcane, so the life support dome actually uses it to generate the gravitational and magnetic fields used to hold in the micro-atmosphere. We found that out the hard way and had to waste a ton of time repairing it.”

“What would happen if it got broken?” Marion inquired curiously as they all gingerly stepped over it, following Standish's lead.

“Well, the fence is used to attract the force lines of the barrier, pulling the current back down and generating a bubble. So, like we saw earlier, there'd be a hole in the gas shell and the atmosphere would slowly escape through the leak. The perimeter fence has sensors to detect those breaches. The base's AI saw the hole, scanned the area, and labeled us as unrecognized intruders. Hence why the defense system kicked on, the base went into lockdown, and my team is stuck in there now.”

Just inside the fence, they were all standing on the edge of a giant, deep crater. Well beyond the farthest lip Jim could make out the small shapes of the turrets. “Mapping data is showing that there's a series of tunnels running underneath the planet's surface,” Blaize began reciting his analysis. “Records show that in addition to housing the nuclear warheads, this base also operated as an early mining facility for Helium-3, used in early fusion reactors. There is an access shaft at the nadir of the crater, a defensive compromise made for the miners that we can exploit to neutralize the turrets. Adrian and Tomah, you will push forward and use your energy weapons to clear out any mines present. Jim,” a mission line appeared on Jim's HUD. Unlike in the flight-rig, however, where it looked like an overlay, it looked as though it were actually a part of the terrain. Like someone had painted an orange line onto the ground. “You'll spearhead the push at point. Watch the explosion patterns and follow the path the other two out for clear for you. I've finished my scans and will push up the locations of the landmines I can detect.”

Jim saw the far wall of the crater turn into a red-speckled nightmare, bombs peppering the assent like sprinkles on a doughnut. “Now,” Blaize continued, “I have fed mission lines into the your mission dossiers, Standish and Marion. They show the optimal route to take to get behind the turrets. As you can see, there are mine fields behind each, so use caution. I have factored in that Simo is currently outfitted in hybrid gear and not sniper gear, and it looks like you'll both be light on energy reserves by the time you get to your lateral positions, so please take that into account as well. Once we rendezvous back here, we will need to rebuild our energy reserves before we can fall back to Terra.”

“Affirmative,” everyone, except Standish, confirmed, because he had already begun his progress toward his turret, completely ignoring his mission line.

“Come on babies, let's get this show on the road,” he whistled back. He was making swim-dives into the reduced gravity, catching himself on his fingertips and collapsing into a forward somersault, bounding into another dive forward as his momentum rolled him onto his feet.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Marion hollered over as she took slow, bounding strides forward, careful not to get lost in the direction of her momentum and center of balance. Enlil, conversely, was making huge ballistic leaps past her, using his impulse adjusters to maintain trajectory.

“Fastest way to move up here, chaps,” he said as he tumbled his way across the landscape. The mini-map hovering in Jim's lower periphery like a hologram showed he was leaps and bounds, no pun intended, ahead of them all.

Tomah and Adrian both shrugged visibly and bounded forward off the ledge of the crater and somersaulted the down the parabolic ledge, rolling the whole length like Jim used to do down the hill in the park when he was a young boy. Once they reached the nadir, they locked into a kneeling position and began training their shot computers on the little red dots. After a second or two of painting the locations with their energy weapons, a small explosion would burst a plume of regolith into the air as the low gravity slowly sucked the particles down. The targeting computers and path-predicting algorithms were quickly cutting a path up the far wall of the crater, just as quickly as they were creating a cloud of vaporized earth and gritty ejectas.

Jim squatted down and felt the power build up in his Core's quads like they were his own. With a monumental push, Jim sailed high and gracefully through the air, legs split open, and floated along his own ballistic trajectory, reaching a crest just behind the center of the crater as the gravity pulled him down from the peak of his arc, summoning him at intense speed to the far wall of the crater, into a hazy cloud of dust.

“Ah, battle summons us!” Vishnu bellowed triumphantly from above Jim, a voice from the heavens, as it were. “Poor human, your vision is obscured. I shall show you what my eyes see.”

With a disorientating flash, the dust cloud turned into a ghostly blue dimming of the now-completely-visible terrain. All the details that were once obscured by the dust were now clear as if the dust weren't present, the only indication that it still there being a layer over his perception at a few-percent opacity. It felt like he was wearing glasses and just needed to wipe away the hazy accumulation of fingerprints. It made him almost sick to his stomach it was such a disorientating jar. “What the hell just happened?” he said to himself, careful not to activate his comm.

“I have shared with you my eyes. I know what the world looks like without this dust. I am showing you what I see,” Vinshu consoled. “These eyes can see more than you could ever imagine. Hear more than you've ever heard. I can see the light of the world in a depth your human mind cannot comprehend. Heard sound, felt pressure, in a way your ears could never handle.”

With his new-found vision, Jim clamored up the side of the crater until he was securely crouched just under the edge. He popped up quickly, and, just as he had been trained, thought about the turrets he was facing having a targeting reticule superimposed around them. Just as the thought crystallized in his mind, a holographic crosshair landed on each of his targets. No sooner had he popped up from behind the ledge than did the turrets swivel quickly into place and began lobbing deathly-precise mass driver units at him. The bullets sailed over the ledge and into the earth behind him, occasionally peppering the regolith in front of him, sending geyserous plumes upward, disappearing into the greasy haze that the Core's visual processors were editing out.

“What are you doing?” Vishnu asked, his voice incredulous from above. “Why not approach these obstacles and end them?”

“What are you talking about? I can't move fast enough to 'approach' them,” Jim addressed to himself, and Vishnu, with equal incredulity. “And even if I was, I am not to destroy them. They're needed for defense once we're gone.”

“Neither of this is troubling, warrior,” Vishnu responded with bemusement. “Trivial tasks. Rise, and approach.” His tone had taken on an almost messianic quality. At once, Jim's world went black, and just as quickly as it blotted out, it returned, though it appeared as though time had stopped. The stiller Jim stood, the slower time passed, until Jim was motionless, as was everything around him. Jim imagined himself standing in front of the tower, and in a blink, the world streamed past him in an imperceptible streak of lines and light, and instantly he was in front of the tower. “Touch it,” Vishnu instructed Jim, who took his order. In another blink, he was again standing in front of the adjacent turret, and reached his hand out, touching the outer steel hull, the dome and barrel on top fixed directly at Vishnu's head, a red-hot bullet hanging motionless in mid-air a meter or so away from his face. In a final blink, Jim was on top of the geodesic dome, behind the slit the final turret was sticking out of. He reached out and touched this again, and just as quickly as his world had gone black, had he experienced the effect again. When his world returned, from his perch atop the dome, he watched as the turrets slowly swiveled back into a neutral position, pulling the barrels of their mass drivers into their arrowslits as the protective cover slid to close it up.

“What the hell?” Marion was the first to break the split-second of silence. “What just happened?” They all had stopped motion and were staring at their mini-maps, trying to reconcile the fact that Jim was now on top of the base, as opposed to behind the crater, and that the towers were no longer active.

“I think,” Jim began sheepishly, “I just did the thing again.”

“'The thing?'” Blaize almost-shouted, excitedly. “What 'the thing' are you talking about?”

“Everything just went black and then I was moving so fast everything was sort of standing still, and now I'm up here,” Jim replied.

“'Just,' he says” Standish replied with his typical comedic indignance. “Whatever you 'just' did broke past the encryption protocols, which were incredibly challenging, I might add, and injected a shutdown command into subroutines. So, no need to even pulse them. How fancy.” Standish made Musashi shrug. “My guys just got back to me, looks like the whole security system is offline. Whatever Jim did, we're all clear up here.”

“Well, that seems extremely convenient,” Marion, as were everyone else, had begun her return to the rendezvous point, somewhat disappointingly.

“I honestly feel a bit wanting,” Adrian replied as he stood up, taking the hand off his rifle support and putting it on his hip, the barrel of his energy weapon dropping downward flaccidly.

“Yeah, I thought we were going to have this big battle and there was going to be a tense climax. This almost feels like cheating,” Tomah vaulted out of his defensive kneel and began bound-rolling back to position.

“I feel like a 'Deus Ex Machina” joke here would be a really cheap shot,” a chorus of laughs regaling Blaize's quip.

“Yes, quite juvenile, really,” Standish sounded like he was feigning agreement, his voice deflated. “Sophomoric irony,” he blustered.

“You were about to, weren't you?” Marion squeaked out through a deep laugh. “You were totally thinking,” she made a few grumbling “harumphs” and lowered her voice to a mock-grandfatherly tone, “'Yes, his core is named Visnhu, and is a machine named after a god, and the dramatic slight is similar to the story-telling faux pas. This is a perfect pun. They will think I'm so crafty,'” she made a few more grumbling sounds as her voice fell from her throat and into her roaring belly laughs.

“I totally was not,” Standish sounded flustered, the strain from the rare chink in his otherwise cool and snarky armor being exploited preventing him from finding a witty retort.

“I hate to interrupt,” Jim interjected after they had all reconnoitered. “How are we supposed to get off here? I don't see any rail launchers or rockets anywhere.”
“Ah,” Standish sounded like he had gotten his composure back, his usual Puckish, haughty tone had returned. “Something much more impressive. I've always wanted to try one of these. Hit it, boys,” Standish's last command seemed to not be directed at them all. After a second, the dull, regolith-covered doors of the access shaft slid open and a short barrel began to extend vertically from the new apeture. “An impulsor cannon. The breech is underground so they could load it with the capsules and shoot them at Terra. Use your aiming computer, and jump into the barrel, and I'll have my crew give you a shot. Then it's just using your ion drives just like you used to get here.”