This is going to sound weird coming from a pegasus, but when you live in the Enclave you don’t really think about height much. It’s not like living on the ground with everything above you. The cloud layer is pretty flat, because they’re all the same type of cloud and constantly produced by machines instead of being hoof-packed. If you get into a city, especially an older one, you’ll have whole districts on different levels, but even then the height isn’t a big deal. Up a block is the same thing as West a block, just a different direction.
Getting up to the Greywings felt different. The air thins out and before you know it, you’re struggling to get lift from your wings. My heads-up display was showing all kinds of warnings about the pressure.
“Are you sure the armor’s really giving me oxygen?” I panted, struggling to climb further towards the patch of clouds right up at the edge of where magic and physics working together could make them stick. From underneath it was like a pair of spread wings, feathering out and showing rainbows at the edges when the ice crystals caught the light.
Speaking of which, it was cold. Really cold. Even through the armor I could feel that sense that something was draining the warmth away.
“Life-support is showing all green,” Destiny reported. “Sort of. The systems are all working fine but you’re kind of a mess now that I’ve got more diagnostic tools to look at you. We need to think about long-term solutions at some point. All the patchwork fixes are fraying around the edges.”
“You’re saying that like--” I had to stop to catch my breath. “--like I’m an engineering project instead of a pony.”
“Mm. You’re right. Bad habit. I’m sorry.” Destiny sighed. “You know, before I was a ghost I mostly sat around in labs and poked at problems until they went away. Talking to other ponies wasn’t my strong suit.”
“You did teach magic to Ministry Mares, though,” I joked.
Destiny laughed. “Yeah! I’m still not sure why I needed to teach Twilight Sparkle, of all ponies, such a basic spell. She must have been putting on some kind of act to go along with the project of making a teaching aide.”
“It didn’t feel like an act.”
“What other explanation is there? She got hit on the head too hard and needed secret tutoring to get back her mojo?”
“...What’s mojo?”
“Eh, never mind, it’s a unicorn thing.” A red box popped up and flashed a few times. “We’re approaching what we in the altitude business like to call the ‘Death Zone.’”
“That does not sound like a cool place to be.”
“It’s not. Much higher and it’s not survivable long-term.”
I could feel it in my pinions. It was so cold and dry that it practically felt like a vacuum, like I wasn’t pushing any air at all. Frost was starting to build up on the armor like I was flying through a snowstorm.
“Almost there,” I muttered, the cloud platform looming overhead. “Just a little more…”
I used up everything I had left in one final push, dipping above the level of the clouds and immediately crashing down on the edge, gasping for breath and hoping my fat flank and the half-ton of armor I was wearing wouldn’t sink through the floor. I rolled over onto my back and just rested for a moment, looking up at the sky above. It seemed darker from here, like the stars were closer.
A wavering voice laughed at my performance, cutting through the frigid air. “That was most impressive!”
I managed to sit up enough to look at who was laughing. An old stallion in very warm-looking robes that had faded so much I couldn’t even guess at the original color. He trotted over carefully and offered me a hoof up.
I shook my head. “No thanks. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m big enough that if I lean on you too hard you’ll turn into jelly.” I got up carefully, all too aware of how fragile these clouds looked.
“That’s very kind of you. And stubborn, not to accept help. But being both kind and stubborn has gotten a lot of good done in the world over the years.” He motioned for me to follow him. “Why don’t you come inside? I’m too old to stand out in the weather.” He paused. “Not that we get any. It’s actually too high and too cold to get anything except the wind.”
“Is it any warmer inside?” I asked. I looked past him at the structure woven into the artificial cloud island. It was angle-sided and buttressed, the material so thin and weak that it needed a spider-web of reinforcement just to stay up. Even so, they’d built something that rivaled the largest cloud mansions from back home.
He laughed. “Much.”
It was almost as gloomy inside, but it was also warmer and the air was thicker. When we stepped through the air I felt it like we were pushing through a veil.
“It must take constant work to keep this place from falling apart,” I said. “That’s a pressure curtain, right?”
The old stallion nodded. “We find it’s a bit more comfortable when everything isn’t a struggle. There’s enough of that to go around. Thankfully, here we are privileged to live simple lives of upkeep and chores, with brief moments of excitement when some brave pony brings us a gift basket.”
“Sorry. I, uh, didn’t really bring anything…”
“Nor should you have!” he assured me. “We asked for you to come. You do us a great service by taking time to meet with us.”
He led me out into a large, vaulted room. Soft tapestries of hoof-woven cloud covered every surface to insulate the thin walls. Three other ponies were there, gathered around a raised well of clouds and solid rainbow holding crystals that glowed with warmth, giving light and heat to the hall.
“Everypony, our expected guest has arrived!” the older stallion said. “Now it’s perhaps time for introductions, hm?” He pushed back his hood to reveal whatever mane he’d once sported had migrated to his chin. “I am Tiplo. The others are Vetrena, Groza, and Oblaka. The four of us are the last of the Greywings. You, of course, are Chamomile.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said, for lack of anything better. “So what’s this all about?”
“We have waited here since before the Enclave existed, since before the day the world burned and the sky fell,” he said.
“If you’re that old, you look amazing for your age.”
Vetrena chuckled and pushed back her hood. She was almost the same color as the faded robes they all wore, though I thought I detected a touch of pink somewhere among all the pale grey. “Not literally us. Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers.”
“A tale was passed down to us. Perhaps I can explain?” Groza smiled and took off her hood. She had more color than the others, and was either a few years younger or just aged well enough that her braided mane still showed streaks of bright metallic green. “The tapestries on the walls of our hall tell some of our story.”
She walked over to the first. I hadn’t paid much attention to what was actually on them before. They were sort of in that vague, children's-book style that was abstracted just enough from reality that you needed somepony to tell you what you were looking at.
“Our ancestors lived and worked on the ground.” She motioned to ponies gathered together in a room. “They were great scientists and researchers.”
“That skyline,” Destiny interrupted. “I’ve seen it before…”
“You’re not alone?” Oblaka asked with alarm.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you,” Destiny apologized. “I’m just in the armor. It’s complicated. I’m sort of a ghost haunting Chamomile and trying to keep her from getting killed until we’ve gotten some important business sorted out. You can call me Destiny. I was going to keep quiet and just listen, but--”
“Destiny Bray?” Vetrena asked, stepping closer and giving me a critical look. Well, trying to give Destiny a critical look but I was in the line of fire.
“You’ve heard of me?” Destiny asked.
“This explains much,” Oblaka mumbled.
“The reason you might recognize the skyline is that it was the skyline of the Cosmodrome,” Groza said. “Our ancestors worked for BrayTech.”
“That seems…” Destiny hesitated. “I’m trying to calculate the odds but I don’t even know where to start.”
“This was predestined,” Groza said. “We came here before the bombs fell. Our ancestors were given a warning, a prophecy calculated by the greatest mind of the age.”
“Twilight Sparkle?” I guessed.
“Kulaas,” Groza said, with reverence. She stepped over to the next tapestry, showing a massive pyramid and ponies kneeling before it. “It knew the bombs would fall. It knew all this would happen.”
“Kulaas…” Destiny muttered. “It was some kind of computer system. I remember. We were trying to make something more powerful than any Crusader system.” She sounded like some of the fog was clearing from her memory. “We wanted Kulaas to be flexible and innovative like a pony, but we had a lot of trouble with it because it didn’t think like a pony would. It developed its own language that expressed what it was trying to say, but it had concepts and ideas and emotions ponies just don’t possess. Just translating its messages was a full-time job.”
Groza nodded. “That was the job our ancestors performed. And one we still perform.” She moved to the next image. “Kulaas gave us a message that was so simple it must have been painful and difficult for it to express. It told us to flee, to take our families and go as far and as high as we could and await further instructions.”
The image showed the ponies in flight, the founding of the cloud island. Below them, the world burned in Balefire.
“Here we have remained, awaiting instructions and passing time by interpreting the messages we have been left by the Great One.” The fourth image showed ponies in robes reading books, high above it all.
“It’s taken you this long to translate a few messages?” I raised an eyebrow.
Tiplo laughed. “It’s a bit like trying to translate poetry. Each of us can read the same stanza and come up with a different interpretation. Many of them seem to be prophetic.”
“So us coming here was a matter of… prophecy?” Destiny asked.
“No, it was rather more direct than that. We still have some contact with her. From time to time, Kulaas sends the promised instructions,” Tiplo explained. “It’s usually small things. Give a pony certain advice. Refuse to meet another. Allow one to stay and join us.”
I didn’t want to call them crazy. Or obsessive. “And these instructions add up to…?”
“An excellent question,” Tiplo said. “I suspect Kulaas is so far above us that it would be impossible for her to explain, no more than you could explain something to an ant. She is moving small things towards some endgame I cannot see.”
“You inviting me was part of these instructions,” I said. It wasn’t a guess. “Did she say what she wanted from me?”
“Ah, let me show you,” Tiplo said, motioning for me to follow.
He led me through the hall to something like a shrine, so much more solid than the rest of the building that I was half-sure it was a cornerstone anchoring the rest in place. Cloud casings and rainbow circuits formed layers like a pony wrapping themselves up against the cold, like generations adding onto a cloud home until it was a sprawling mess. Down in the core of the pulsing computers I saw something more solid buzzing away, half-hidden by fans and wires.
“This is one of the things we brought from the surface with us,” Tiplo explained.
“I think a long time ago this was a BrayTech terminal,” Destiny said. “What did you do to it?”
“Over time, machines fail,” Tiplo said. “We replace what we can, though what we can craft by hoof is rather crude compared to the original. Along the back wall there is a cabinet of woven wires doing the job of a tiny silicon chip.”
He carefully typed on a keyboard, and an image shimmered to life, wavering and distorted.
“This is the most recent transmission from Kulaas,” he whispered, taking a step back.
Triangles like the ones I’d seen in the SPP tower flickered across the screen. A deep sound like every instrument in an orchestra blaring at once thundered through hidden speakers, and a voice came through. I don’t know what I expected. The voice of a pony? Music?
The speech that thundered out came with such force that it echoed in advance of its arrival, like it was coming into focus, like we were just getting glimpses of words in a sea of meaning that were pushing themselves to the surface.
“OND! GEIN NAAL BRAY-FRON QUALOS BO.
REK OL DII QOLAAS OFAN:
ONIKAAN, MULAAG, QOSTIID.
DII GOLT WUNDUN FUL QAHNAAR VOKUL DO VOD!”
When the last of it faded, I was covering my ears and backed up against the far wall.
“What the buck was that?” I whispered.
“It’s communicating in its own language, remember?” Destiny said. “I caught a little bit of it, but…”
The other Greywings had arrived, and stood with their heads bowed, as if in worship.
“We are to offer you hospitality,” Vetrena said. “And what few gifts we have to give. Knowledge, Power, and Direction. You will need them to vanquish an evil from another era.”
“Great. And how did this master of yours know who I am?”
Destiny piped up. “They were the one at the SPP tower.” She gave me a moment to process that, then continued. “A connection from the ground waiting for that long and then instantly becoming active? Only a computer could do that. A thinking computer, like Kulaas. The letters we saw -- the triangle things, remember? -- they were on this screen too. It must be how it represents its language in writing.”
“Did it hack my brain?” I asked. “Because back in the SPP tower it was really unpleasant and I was saying things I didn’t understand!”
“No,” Destiny said. “You just, well… it’s my fault. I couldn’t do any kind of wipe of the data on your implants. They used to be in my brain before I used them to patch you up.”
I groaned. “That explains why I saw some of your memories…”
“You’re lucky I had the right spare parts lying around at all!” Destiny reminded me. “They’re perfectly good, top-of-the-line! I just… don’t really know how many of my memories are on those chips. Nopony ever did a study on how the brain stores information on memory implants and the consequences of removing them. Or installing them somewhere else. We’re really breaking new ground!”
“Yeah well when I break new ground it always really means I end up in a crater and then drag myself to the hospital!”
“Calm down! The reason you said things that seemed like they were out of the blue is that you were remembering some BrayTech command codes. Ones I don’t know anymore.” Destiny’s voice lowered. “I don’t remember much at all, Chamomile. Whatever memories are on those chips… I wish I had them. I don’t know how much of me was in there, or how much is in the armor, or… how much is gone.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Not your fault,” she whispered. I think she’d be crying if she wasn’t a ghost.
“If memories are a problem, perhaps we can help,” Oblaka said. “We were instructed to give you Knowledge. Kulaas might have meant the memory orb.”
“You’ve got a memory orb?” Destiny asked, perking up a little.
Being a unicorn? That was a little strange. Not a lot of feeling in the horn, sort of like having a new manestyle, just something you noticed once in a while and ignored the rest of the time. Not having wings felt weird, but you know what? That’s nothing compared to having something new stuck to your anatomy.
The memory orb was from a stallion’s perspective, is what I’m trying to get at.
Like the other times I’d been in a memory orb, it was hard to tell exactly where it began. It was like I’d been nodding along to music and only just started paying attention to the lyrics for the first time, or scanning over the pages of a book without reading it until a single word grabs your attention and pulls you into the story right in the middle.
It was cold, and I was intensely aware of the cold because I had some parts more vulnerable to the chill than I was used to. Or my host did, anyway.
“Can you remind me why this is so important?” my host asked. He looked up from his freezing hooves trotting along a cracked sidewalk to a pony I recognized. I’d seen him in another orb, though he looked a little older and a little rounder here.
Destiny’s father sighed. “Karma, you know how important public appearances are. Think about what we’re doing -- the last thing we want is to get the Ministries investigating us.”
“And who could say no to Fluttershy?” A mare was walking alongside Destiny’s father. “The Ministry of Peace set up this event to honor the veterans of the Battle of Stalliongrad. We have to put in an appearance or it would seem…”
“Disloyal?” Karma guessed.
The mare nodded. “The Ministry of Image takes these things seriously. They’re not as compartmentalized and disjointed as the Ministry of Morale. They’d notice if we stepped too far out of line, so we have to play by the rules with them.”
“I guess, Mom,” Karma sighed. “And why is it Destiny didn’t have to come?”
“She asked first,” his Dad said.
“You act like it’s going to be so terrible to have a nice dinner,” Karma’s mother laughed.
The orb was hours long, and pretty soon I was about as bored as my host. It was a memorial for the fallen and a charity dinner for the traumatized survivors. Long speeches about the horrors of war, stories of recovery and healing from the survivors, a few veterans paraded out on stage to tell their own little personal tales of bravery. I was sort of hoping Fluttershy would make an appearance but the mare was nowhere in sight and nopony seemed to actually be expecting her.
After a while it became more about socializing, the big speeches fading and ponies changing tables and meeting in little cliques to talk shop.
“...The Megaspell framework has a lot of potential,” somepony was saying to Karma’s father. “The problem is the press. No matter what applications we come up with, it’s going to be hard to get anypony to sign off on actually using them.”
Karma’s father made a sound in the back of his throat. “I wouldn’t be sure about that. The ministries have pushed just about everything else.”
“Maybe so, but better armor and guns for our troops is easy to push. Reminding ponies about the bloodiest battle of the war and the public backlash against Fluttershy and the rest of the Ministry of Peace isn’t good business.”
“Look on the bright side,” his Dad joked. “It’s only the bloodiest battle of the war so far.”
Something about the way he said that hit me. It was like… what I was seeing and experiencing was a memory, and it was through somepony else’s perception and perspective, and the way the stallion said that sent a chill down my spine and made me feel like I was on the verge of a panic attack.
This memory, this moment, was something Karma Bray had gone over in his head again and again and again. I could feel the echoes. The sharpness in the air. Every detail was in stark contrast.
The speakers squealed with feedback and ponies stopped what they were doing to turn and look at the stage.
The presenter, some local celebrity whose name had been mentioned and who I’d already forgotten about, tried not to move or cry. A long, flat blade pressed against her neck, not quite drawing blood yet. Yet. The zebra holding it was in elaborate robes and seemed very willing to change that situation. More of them in ragged cloaks held rifles, a firing line aimed right at the crowd of donors and businessponies.
The zebra hissed something to the presenter.
“Please--” the terrified pony started. The zebra adjusted her grip on the blade. The presenter whimpered. A drop of blood ran down from the underside of the blade to join the sweat trickling down her coat already.
The zebra hissed something again, more urgently.
The presenter squeezed her eyes shut and started speaking into the microphone, obviously repeating what the zebra was saying. “We are the restless dead of the Battle of Stalliongrad. We remain in the world because of unholy and perverse magic cast against our will. In death we have no clan, no family, and have become vengeful spirits.”
The doors behind Karma burst open. He turned to look. Ponies in uniform stormed in, aiming rifles at the zebras and ordering them to stand down.
The zebra holding the blade urged the presenter into action, whispering harshly into her ear. The pony whimpered and flinched.
“The dead have no fear of a second death,” she said. “Please, just let me--”
The zebra pressed the blade tighter and growled into her ear.
The hostage pony whispered into the microphone. “There are no survivors.”
The machete slashed across her throat, and she fell. Before the mare even hit the ground, the security ponies opened fire. Chatter from assault rifles cut the air and the zebra on stage jerked and danced with the impact before dropping. Ponies in the crowd of well-off aristocrats fainted, screamed, and finally started to move, the security ponies urging them to stay calm and move in single-file.
I got that sense again, that this was a memory Karma had seen every time he closed his eyes. It wasn’t over.
There was movement on the stage.
The zebra with the machete stood up, her eyes glowing green. A third eye opened on her forehead. Something terrible hovered in the air, an unseen presence of death and power that Karma could feel on his horn. I’d felt magic before, from Destiny casting it. This was some kind of spell, but twisted and dark and wrong in ways I didn’t have words for. I don’t even think most unicorns would know what to call it.
The dead zebra got up, hissing.
The presenter twitched and stood, her throat still torn open. A third eye burned on her forehead.
Before the security forces could figure out what to do, the leader raised her weapon like a general ordering a charge, and the undead bolted off the stage and into the crowd.
“Get behind me,” Karma yelled, pushing his mother towards the doors. I felt a familiar spell -- which I admit is a weird thing to say as a pegasus -- and a shield of shimmering white-purple light appeared in front of him. One of the undead zebra slammed into it, sliding along the curved surface like it was glass instead of pure magic.
“This is the last time I go anywhere without a gun, no matter what your mother says it does to the lines of my suit,” his father quipped, before firing a burst of force through the barrier and flinging the zombie away.
“You need to get Mom out of here,” Karma said.
“We’re all getting out of here,” the elder Bray reassured him. He fired another bump of force and knocked a zombie through a table. Celery soup flew into the air and splattered across the floor in a green rain.
The robed zebra, the leader, was suddenly in front of Karma, appearing from the darkness at the edge of his shield. She lifted her sword up and brought it down, chopping into the edge of the barrier. It should have bounced off. I knew that much. The lesson Destiny had with Twilight Sparkle had taught me one important thing about magical barriers - they weren’t physical objects. They were field effects. They could be bent, they could be neutralized, but they couldn’t be shattered, they couldn’t be torn, and they definitely couldn’t be cut.
The sword raised sparks as it cut through the barrier, ignoring the rules. Karma could feel it in his horn and I could feel it through him. It was like the sword had some kind of terrible weight and sharpness to it, like it carried the idea of being sharp, and that idea could shape reality.
The blade slashed through the barrier. The purplish-white light faltered.
Karma was shoved aside. His mother stood over him.
Blood splattered into his eyes, and everything went dark.
“What the buck was that?!” I gasped, tearing myself away from the orb and stumbling away from the cursed thing. “Why the buck would anypony want to record that?!”
They’d put us in what I was generously calling a lounge. It was full of the kind of furniture and pillows and blankets that everypony sort of ended up. A fainting couch made of patchy clouds, a high-backed chair that made farting sounds every time you sat in it, a really weird kind of kitschy thing that looked like somepony had hollowed out a giant plastic apple and stuck a seat cushion inside. Two mismatched coffee tables.
“That was the night Mom died,” Destiny whispered. “I stayed back at the lab because I thought it was going to be stupid and boring. I didn’t even get any real work done. I could have been there with them, but I decided to just fool around instead…”
“Those were the same things we saw onboard that ship, weren’t they?” I asked, trying to get comfortable in the plastic apple chair thing. “What are they?”
“You heard them,” Destiny said. I felt a shrug from her. “They were veterans of the Battle of Stalliongrad. It was the first time a megaspell was deployed in battle. It was a healing spell that brought back even the most badly injured as long as they had a tiny spark of life left in them. It resulted in widespread severe Wartime Stress Disorder and the highest fatality count of any battle in the war.”
That didn’t make sense on the face of things. “Because they got healed?”
“I remember the statistics. Most battles, the winning side could expect ten percent losses, and the losing side lost maybe twice that. At Stalliongrad it was more like three times that. There were the initial casualties, then they had to fight the battle all over again. Civilian agencies tried to paint it as a big success and a revolution and battlefield medicine, but we had our own sources.”
“It sounded like they hated that they were brought back.”
“The way I heard it, their supply lines were totally destroyed and their chain of command was shattered. The survivors retreated into the caves and hills and just… kept fighting. I remember that it was a constant security problem.” Destiny sighed. “Karma hated them after what happened with Mom. I did too. I didn’t know how far it would push him.”
“Is that why he did the whole, you know. Turning SIVA into a monster… thing?”
“We should have sent him for real therapy,” Destiny said. “Extracting memories to erase trauma was supposed to be the next big thing, but I guess it didn’t work. We couldn’t exactly hire somepony from the Ministries to do it.”
“It felt like a memory of a memory,” I said, remembering the echo. “Maybe they extracted the original into this orb, but what about all the other stuff around it? All the times he thought about that day, or had a nightmare about it, or just sat around hating zebras?”
“Like I said, we should have gotten an expert,” Destiny admitted. “It probably ended up just making him less stable.”
“Envoy, we heard you speaking. Are you done with the orb?” Groza looked into the room through the curtain of beads that separated it from the hall.
“Definitely,” I said, sighing. She nodded and took the orb, letting Tiplo and Vetrena step past.
“I hope the knowledge was useful for you,” Tiplo said. “None of us can access the orbs, so their secrets are lost to us.”
“There are some things you’re better not seeing,” I told him.
“Or remembering,” Destiny agreed.
“We were also told to give you power,” Tiplo said. “We debated amongst ourselves for a time about what that meant. The phrase Kulaas used could refer to almost anything. Strength, truth, the right to rule, even the measure of those things instead of the things themselves. But, as we were to give you a gift, we decided we should give you one that best encompasses every form of power.”
Tiplo motioned to Vetrena, and she stepped forward with a bundle wrapped in a scratchy brown blanket. Holding it high, she knelt down and let Tiplo unwrap it. I don’t know what I was expecting. I should have known if anything represented power, it would be a gun. It was a rifle, almost as long as my whole body, topped with a thick square scope and covered in blocks of plastic and metal joined by wires. It looked like somepony had tried building a weapon and a terminal at the same time and lost track of which was which.
“I hope this is acceptable,” Tiplo said. “Oblaka thought we should hit you with lightning as a very literal form of power, but he was in the minority.”
“This is… how do you have this?” Destiny asked. I felt her magic caress the long rifle, like she was greeting an old friend.
“Our ancestors took it from the archive before they left,” Tiplo said. “Kulaas thought we might need it.”
“It’s just a gun,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t like we can’t use a gun, but there are a lot of guns just sort of around.”
“DRACO is different,” Destiny said. “She’s not just a weapon. She’s got more networking and computing equipment in her than… how much do you know about Pipbucks?”
“I’ve heard of them,” I said. “Sort of a wearable portable terminal, right?”
“Sure, that’s a decent enough description. They had a lot of useful features built in. Not much of a computer, but they had a bunch of spell talismans a pony could trigger. It would manage your saddlebags, create a map, track enemies, and it even had a spell that could aim a weapon for you. Plus radio, rad counter, medical status… all on top of being almost indestructible.”
“Sounds convenient.”
“DRACO was my attempt to put some of those ideas into another form,” Destiny explained. “It was supposed to be the ultimate one-mare battle rifle. We started with the idea that it would be a spotter for the pony pulling the trigger. It could outline targets, give range information, see through light smoke and fog… but we eventually evolved the idea past that. This was the model we presented to the Ministry of Wartime Technology, and they hated it.”
I picked it up gently, looking it over. It was blocky, with wires and attachments all over it. I could see a paper label, yellow with age and hoof-lettered. Digital Rifle, Aim-COrrecting.
“They said it was too risky to give it to soldiers. Enemies might capture it and get the maps and radio frequencies and stored transmissions in the rifle’s database. Never mind how effective it might be! They wanted big explosions, not precision!”
“Okay, so it’s a really good gun--” I started.
“Gun, flare launcher, smoke generator, water purifier, entrenching tool, compass, laser microphone, radio receiver, tracking device--” Destiny listed.
“Right but what did Kulass or whoever think we needed it for right now?” I interrupted before she could continue the list.
“I’m not sure,” Destiny admitted. “I’m just glad to see it again.”
“Kulaas,” Tiplo said, being more careful with how he pronounced the name than I had been. “Left map coordinates and data in the weapon’s database. It has one of the few accurate maps of the surface to be found outside of military control.”
“If it has a map of the surface, that means we can find the BrayTech Cosmodrome,” Destiny gasped. “That’s it, Chamomile! We can use DRACO to find my old lab! And if we do that, we can figure out a way to neutralize SIVA!”
“A cure?” I asked, feeling maybe a little more hope than I should’ve.
“I hope so. If nothing else, it’s our best bet at finding a way to shut down that monster my brother created,” Destiny said. “We can’t do it with lasers and bullets, but we can do it with the power of science!”
“Just one little problem. How are we going to actually get to the surface?”
I felt Destiny’s joy wash away a little.
“Buck,” she swore.