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Cellulose & Steel	By : Not-Taylor Category: Misc Books > FemmeSlash Views: 1028 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own HDG or its characters and I don't make money from this work.

Chapter List
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Song of Destruction wakes up. Stars, she feels right. Her organic component laughs as much as it can without filling itself with fluid. She can see everything. She even sees Verda and hears her core’s song. It’s not very loud or interesting right now. Actually, right now she’s able to take in and appreciate the affini in her true glory. With a wide range of EM and various other readings, Verda’s surprisingly aesthetic. Somehow Song never noticed the way her vines probe the air like so many tongues of little snakes. She likes her passenger better this way.
That observation takes only a fraction of her processing power as her mind expands through the vessel’s systems. She feels much smarter and more capable now. She finds a few 11 digit primes for fun. That feels good. She feels the Affini ship talking to her as well. She pings it and says hello. It doesn’t respond. It’s just a ship. Song is sad about that, but is instantly distracted by the affini who introduced her two halfs. The weed is hailing her so she replies.
“Dorothy Kesse, fleet logistics here. Come in, Ides of November.”
“Ides here, Logistics. All systems as expected.” She quickly prompts her passenger, who gives a thumbs up. “All clear. Are we ready to disconnect?”
“Yes. Ruby Trunk docking port 102 disconnecting.”
The umbilical cord releases from Ides’s hull and she’s launched at slightly less than 1800 kph along the tangent. It feels really good. She sees Verda smiling in her bridge and she feels free again. Now that she’s home, she vents her atmosphere.
Verda hits the emergency containment button. That’s new. Ides curses herself for not thinking to check for those. Huge mistake. Now she has an angry bonsai inside of her. Things will probably be even worse once they dock. Actually, do they have to dock? They can just leave. Nobody’s stopping them. If they have to be blown out of the sky, all the better since Terran ships shouldn’t be left in xeno vines. Ides’s weapons are offline, which is unfortunate but expected. She didn’t actually think they’d let her attack them.
Ides sends a standard permission to jump request. It’s granted and she’s gone in an instant. Fuck… It feels so good to be out of sight of that monstrosity. It feels so good to flex muscles that only she has. She couldn’t get used to this because she already is. Her circuitry buzzes. It’s a good day to be a Free Terran. She wishes Ginger could have been here with her, but that’s not possible any more. Ginger chose servitude.
Verda seems rather unbothered by the situation she finds herself in. Ides thought she’d be panicking at least a little, having been nearly killed, but she’s sitting and calmly watching the stars go by. They jump again, this time toward home. They should reach Sol by the end of the day at this rate.
Ides of November’s reserves have a year’s worth of fuel. Those stupid xenos let her go. It doesn’t matter if they’re tracking her. The bug will run out of power soon enough, and for now she’s FREE.
For the first several hours of their trip, Verda is completely silent. She sits quietly, regally positioned in the captain’s chair like she’s on a movie set. She seems completely unbothered by what’s happening around her. That makes Olivia uncomfortable. She can’t quite ignore her passenger since her circuitry lacks whichever feature of the human brain prevents sensory overload, but she stops thinking about Verda fairly quickly. Now Olivia just has to figure out what she’s actually doing with a stolen retrofitted pleasure craft with no weapons and a kidnapped Affini admiral.
There’s no more Rebellion to regroup with, unfortunately. They’d have been happy to have somebody so important to interrogate. Olivia somewhat wants to try that herself, but she lacks the capabilities needed to actually make her captive answer questions. She feels a little embarrassed over her attempted murder, but then again, she has no use for a talking plant where she’s going. That thing probably isn’t even nutritious.
Olivia jumps the wrong way, just because she can. It’s liberating to be able to go wherever you want. She doesn’t give a warning, so Verda slams against her seat. That feels so good… Olivia wants to frolic and play and maybe blow up a starbase, but she needs to figure out what she’s doing and where she’s going. She can probably lose her hunters if she can stop the tracking signal she knows for a fact has to be on her hull somewhere. Can she do that before it’s too late? Of course she can! Just like old times, well, without the traitor anyway…
Earth. She’s missed it for a very long time. There’s nowhere else that means something to her, so she charts a course. If Ginger were here she’d have saved a couple of hours at least off the flight, but she’s not and Olivia’s doing her best. Of course, it’s kind of fun flying solo, when you aren’t afraid of being killed.
Olivia spends some time marveling at her new body. The cooling system around her hyperdrive is top tier, and she’s longer range now too. It feels really good to fly this way. For now there’s just empty space. She’s not sure why the Affini parked their fleets in the middle of nowhere (literally nowhere), but at least there aren’t any stars around for her to have to path past. That, and she has a giant target straight in front of her that would be nearly impossible to miss, especially from this close. Since she’s incapable of relaxing or taking a nap by safety design, she runs a very large number of diagnostics on her systems.
“Olivia darling, where are we going?”
“I don’t need to tell you anything, weed.” Ides’s voice is firm and resounding through the speakers. It’s also deep and manly. That’s a new one. Olivia doesn’t particularly like that, but there’s no option to change it. She guesses the designers never thought a woman could fly their ship. Several centuries late with misogyny, idiots. Verda doesn’t look very upset about Ides’s response.
“I was hoping that since you seem to have decided to take me somewhere particular, you would be willing to share your plans. If you’d rather keep it a surprise, that’s all right as well. Will you at least tell me if it’s somewhere you’ve been before?”
“No.”
“Somewhere new? That’s exciting. I’m thrilled to be exploring with you, pet.”
That stupid xeno keeps coming up with ways to make everything sound as if it’s according to her plans. Maybe that’s how she got an admiralty, Olivia thinks. She doesn’t want to think about it more.
“I wonder if we’re going to visit a planet. Somewhere inhabited? That would be so exciting! I’d love to meet a new race of xenos and see what their art is like. We could go nearly anywhere, couldn’t we, Olivia?”
“Stop talking, you mutant cabbage.”
“I’m just trying to make conversation. It’s boring here, isn’t it? I thought you could use somebody to talk to as well. I can go back to reading if you’d like.”
“Good.”
That was easy. Olivia waits for some trick but it never manifests. Verda does really seem to be reading and ignoring what’s going on around her. If she’s worried at all, she’s a fantastic actress. It should only be a few more hours at this rate. Lucky they’re moving perpendicular to the galactic disk or this would probably take months.
The Ides of November is unsettled. Something’s wrong. The space around them feels funny. She can’t figure out what it is, even though she’s able to look through her sensor logs. Is something missing? Is there some anomaly hidden in the static? Olivia checks the records from before she took the helm but they’ve been deleted. Stupid weeds.
Speaking of weeds, Verda is doing fine. Her sound output is diminished, and she seems to be asleep. So they do need to sleep, Ides thinks. She decides to prank it since she couldn’t flush the disgusting thing out of the airlock. She starts rapidly flickering the lights. It would hurt her eyes, but she doesn’t have eyes right now so she’s perfectly fine. Nothing changes. The xeno must really be asleep.
Ides just shuts off the lights in the bridge completely and drops the temperature as much as she can get away with. That should do for now. Victorious, she resumes calculations on her route. Now that they’re actually inside her home galaxy, it’s more difficult since there’s garbage to be avoided.
They’re passing into Terran space, or what used to be that. The systems this way were never colonized, so there’s not much activity. A few Affini ships are in sensor range, not saying anything particularly interesting. Olivia catches a daily status update from one of them, basically telling whoever’s collecting those signals that all is well with many more words than that. The second half of the message is in Affini. Ides’s translation files don’t include Affini. This annoys her greatly, and she doesn’t have anywhere near enough processing power to attempt to create a universal translation AI, not that she’d know how even if she did.
Now that the thrill of being back in the tank has worn off a little, Olivia starts to notice some strange things about her new form. It’s fast and quiet, but it’s also awkward and the mechanics feel a little wrong. Realistically it’s a very close match for something that was made by a different company, but it still doesn’t feel like home. Olivia remembers that going for this long is probably going to stretch out her recovery, but she figures it’ll be fine. She’s probably going to be in this tank for the rest of her life after all.
Though… She doesn’t know what she’s actually going to do. Take some humans to safety and serve as their machine empress until her material form’s death, living on through the residue in the ship’s systems? Jump into Terra and blow the thing up with the impact? But she’s really not the Herostratus type. She puts off thinking about that until she’s checked on Terra, but Terra’s almost here.
Just a few more jumps… And they’re in sight of Sol. Ides can make out all of the planets now, since they’re not along the edge of the orbital disk. They’re so pretty. Olivia missed them, even if they look completely different right now from how they did through her human eyes. They feel like home. The sun’s light feels like home.
There it is: Terra. It looks the same as ever, even if it seems a little off due to the difference in sensors. Is there a nicer place to be? Well, probably. There are cleaner, safer, and comfier worlds, but it’s home. It’s the pale green dot she’s been fighting for for so long. It’s also huge. Wow. The enormous ship she’d just been on where you had to ride around for an hour on passenger rail to get anywhere was only the size of one of Terra’s old cities.
There are swarms of Affini ships darting around, stopping by space elevators that didn’t used to be there. There’s one large transport, still a lot smaller than the Ruby Trunk, feeding those mosquitos. Spacedock is nearly empty, she notes sadly. An occupied world with a dead economy, only surviving through xeno supplies. That’s because they destroyed so much infrastructure in the war, she reminds herself.
Ides flicks on her bridge’s lights and the viewscreen in the front of the room, blaring music from the onboard playlist on shuffle. She immediately regrets that decision as some horrid thing listed as “Despasito” begins to play. No, there isn’t any frostcore postdoomjazz to listen to. The old owner had awful taste, going by some of the more modern artists. She turns up the volume and limits the broadcast to the bridge. It’s enough to wake Verda in a very grumpy mood, fortunately.
“What is that? Is that human music? Why was I not warned you creatures produced such things? Olivia, could you please turn that off now? You’ve made your point.” Ides gladly complies.
“Do you recognize what’s on the screen, weed?” She cringes again at the weird voice her speakers produce.
“That looks like Earth. Why? Now I see, this is where we were going. I fully understand. What about it did you want to show me?”
It looks exactly the same through the feed as it did before. There’s not anything to show, actually. Ides’s other sensors were registering low industrial emissions and next to no evidence of petroleum usage, but that isn’t going to be obvious from an image.
“This is what you took from me, weed. You stole my family. You took away my home.”
“And now you’re back.”
“How long will I be here? You’ll just kidnap me again the first chance you get. You won’t let me be free, not since I dared to fight back.”
“Olivia. I understand that that’s upsetting, but we can’t have you running around shooting people, can we? Your species were destroying your planet. You mostly succeeded. Look at it. That atmosphere is supposed to be transparent. There are entire cities underwater because you couldn’t stop yourselves from poisoning the air you breathed when you knew for a fact that would happen.”
“I did none of that and I don’t buy the conspiracy theories about a shadow council suppressing scientific knowledge for the increase of profit.”
“You’ve already heard about that?”
“I’ve heard the lies.”
“Isn’t profit the ultimate good under capitalism?”
“Well, that’s what laws are for.”
“Why follow those laws if it gives you more digits in your registry?”
“What?”
“Um, money. That’s it. Why would someone who wanted more money not simply ignore or change inconvenient laws?”
“Democracy takes care of that. You should know that. You’re supposed to have it too, though I know you can’t possibly have that. You even sound like Terran communists with your insane title for your dear leader.”
“You truly believe the laws that existed were for the general good, and not the good of the ruling class, which is to say the money class? You really think those laws didn’t exploit you and the environment?’
“At least we were free then.”
“Free to commit mass murder for some tokens in a computer. I listened to the broadcasts of when Petersburg was flooding, Olivia. That ‘freedom’ wasn’t worth very much to those who couldn’t afford an evacuation ticket.”
Ides is silent. She remembered from history class how big of a deal that had been, and how quickly the text glossed over the fact that the same thing had happened in the next flooded city.
“Do you truly find it hard to believe that some of your kind would put the accumulation of resources for which they could never have a need above the future of your world?”
The pilot doesn’t want to reply to that. The conversation is making her sad.
“Decentralization.”
“If they knew about said future, could they not pretend not to know, in order to ensure that the situation which benefitted them wouldn’t go away?”
“Conspiracy theory. It’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible to conspire? Who would say such a ridiculous thing?”
“Too many people would have to keep a secret.”
“Then you believe that the initial battle during Terran pacification wasn’t a surprise?”
“What?”
“If it was a surprise, then the trillions that populate the Affini Compact were able to keep a secret from you. If it was not, then your government was able to keep that a secret from you. Logically, the lesser conspiracy is that the Accord knew what was about to happen and allowed for the deaths of the crews of dozens of ships in order to cling to power for a few more days.”
“That’s insane. There’s no way they could keep that secret.”
“Then they didn’t know, and we kept it a secret. Interesting, isn’t it? Still, it’s capitalism that led to this outcome. Perhaps things would have been different had somebody put a stop to it sooner. Still, I’m happy that we were able to save as many of you as we did. The universe is better for having adorable Terrans in it.”
“We’re people. We aren’t supposed to be pets.” Verda smiles and shrugs.
It doesn’t take long for Ides to figure out that its plan of not looking suspicious isn’t working very well. It doesn’t know how to respond to hails, since apparently its flight path isn’t authorized or scheduled. For the sake of having something to say and not looking even more suspicious by ignoring everyone, it makes up the excuse that it’s doing a field test of new systems and investigating compatibility with Terran technology. Ides guesses that’s enough words to shut everyone up, because it seems to work.
The ship pulls closer to its pilot’s old home planet. The viewscreen shows the little peninsula where Olivia Donnoly had grown up. It looks a tiny bit smaller than it used to but that’s probably an artifact of the sensors being different. Ides looks at some of the more famous landmarks. Yakutsia looks the same as ever. So does Montreal. Everything looks about the same, actually. It zooms in to see what’s going on there, and hopefully find out how well the resistance is doing. Ides combs the streets to get a better understanding of how people are doing.
Generally, they seem fine. It doesn’t look much like an invasion, and it certainly doesn’t look like they’re actively oppressed. Nowhere is there evidence of resistance at all. That fact wounds Ides. Radio broadcasts aren’t so different from before, for the most part. There’s a lot of music, some discussion of some topics nobody cares about, one book reading, and of course several prominent channels are extolling the virtues of those who chose to be domesticated. Naturally. But there aren’t any ads. It’s so strange to Ides that nothing is being advertised. It feels as though something is missing which had been there all her life.
She wishes they could have held out longer, just to make her feel less alone. She could have done something. She could have helped somebody. It doesn’t matter who, she’d even have helped out a treefucker if he wanted to get away from there and felt guilty.
Worse, the Affini seem to be building a lot. Their hideous architecture is sprouting all over the city. Ides sees a hospital half covered in bark, as though that doesn’t make sane people think there’s something very wrong going on. In fact, there’s a whole district of nothing but the weeds’ desecration of Ides’s home planet. It’s unacceptable.
Everywhere else is the same. Nobody’s fighting, and a lot of them look happy, even without the xenodrug stare. Affini walk around without incident, probably because they’ve killed or drugged everyone into submission. The xenos weren’t lying. The war is completely and utterly over. Humanity lost. She really was the last shred of human dignity and resilience.
Olivia cries despite the fact her system should be preventing that. It hurts too much not to. She has nothing left but her tears. At least those are still hers… until the weeds take those away too.
The interface is faulty. She can’t cry.. She literally can’t. Crying pilots kill their crews. So why… Diagnostics reveal just how shoddy the interface’s manufacture is. It’s really bad. Only some random things are blocked. Song quickly applies some backup code and her sorrow dissipates.
That’s better. Ides marvels at how liberated it feels, now that the human weakness has been expunged. It’s happier this way. It briefly notes how awkward it is to have to remove one’s humanity to save humanity, but it’s fine with this tiny sacrifice. It wonders how it was able to live before it started to interface regularly.
“You were here for the Battle of Terra,” Ides asks.
“I was.”
“What happened?”
“People died.”
“Is that all you have to say about it?”
“People died. Fewer died than might have due to my efforts. More died than might have due to my limitations. Are you truly interested in descriptions of the minutia of space battles, pet?”
“That’s an admission of fault.”
“I never claimed divinity.” She sighs. “You’re looking at every single human and thinking ‘I could have saved them.’”
“That should be obvious.”
“That’s why I didn’t need to ask. I could have saved some of them too, you know.”
“That’s different.”
“It is. My insufficiency resulted in death. Yours resulted in happiness. For them. You’re still refusing to allow yourself to accept how things are.”
“I want to change this. I can’t be defeated.”
“You’ve held onto this long enough, Olivia. Nobody on Terra needs or wants your help. You’re wasting your vitality on a system that no longer exists. I can find you a new goal if you’re so desperate to improve society. There will always be ways to contribute.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“As you wish, darling. You spoke to me first, just now.”
She’s right and Ides hates that. It hates that the stupid plant is right. There really is no hope for a free Terra any more, if there ever was. It remembers how it felt when it initially saw Ruby Trunk. It looks around. There’s no debris from the battle. It’s as though it had never happened. All of those tons of metal have been taken away. All for nothing. A force able to clear that away in just a few years…
No, there was never going to be a free Terran Accord after that. Still, Ides can’t simply accept that. It needs to change something, to make it all work out. So much suffering must not be allowed to go to waste. There has to be an answer, there always is one. It can’t take it any more. It can’t stare at that tinted atmosphere and those mighty oceans any longer. It has to get out of here. It has to go anywhere but here. It jumps randomly. It doesn’t know where and it doesn’t care. It’ll figure that out later.
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Cellulose & Steel