The Spiteful (Trapped.7)

I ran. I sprinted as quickly as I could across the surface of Kreet, uphill, back toward my ship. Over the regolith and sharp rocks, through the thin atmosphere. I could hear the static from the Hunter’s radio, his panting voice joining mine as we ran.

“Gonna fucking get you.” He snarled, panting and chasing me. 

His suit didn’t seem to have a booster, thankfully, or he’d already be on top of me. Speaking of… I ripped my suit’s controller off the boostpack, and slammed on the thumbstick. My suit’s weak booster pushed me further and higher with every step. I scaled up the hill, away from the structure, and started fumbling with the controls for my helmet.

“Vasco, can you hear me? Vasco?” I asked over the radio. A second later, I realized how stupid I was.

I’d had him turn himself off, tricking the robot so that the pirates could take the ship without incident. I’d been planning on dumping him. I’d get to the top of the hill, up to the ship… and by the time I got the airlock to cycle, he’d catch up to me.

I heard something clang behind me, and I turned back for a moment. The Hunter had dropped his sword. His palm opened for a moment, and he seemed to ‘print’ another weapon.

This time, it was unmistakably a gun.

Gunfire sprayed from his gun, a rapid spray of bullets. They went in all directions, barely even aimed directly toward me. I slammed my thumb on the thumbstick, my boosters slamming me down, into the cover of the rocks and crevices. I landed on my hands and knees, bouncing a little from the reduced gravity- but I still hit hard enough that some of the rocks seemed to move from my impact.

My scanner noticed a small cave between a few stones- a crevice- and without hesitating, I shoved myself into it, and turned everything off. Radio, suit systems, even my oxygen recycler. I’d be fine without it for a while. If he had a scanner, shutting everything down would be my best- and only- chance to avoid being scanned.

I crammed myself in… and held my breath. And waited.

And waited.

I heard moving. Rustling from the rocks nearby. The sound of boots against the loose stone, the echoey sound of the Hunter’s muttering and cursing through a helmet, through an atmosphere thinner than most.

“The fuck you go?” He snarled, lapsing into muttering. Since I wasn’t hearing his voice through the radio anymore, it was hard to catch what he was saying- both due to the helmet and the thin atmosphere. I could hear him coming closer and closer- and eventually, a shadow stepped up over the only part of the surface I could see.

Any second now, he’d step over the ridge, look, and see me. My suit wasn’t subtle, after all. And then I was dead. I was as still and as quiet as possible.

He hopped down- into my view- and then, before he even looked at me, the rock next to him suddenly stood.

It was the same one that had twitched when I landed- but as my scanner recognized it as the moon’s native wildlife- pincers and talons underneath a rocklike carapace- the predator pounced onto the Hunter, bowling him over.

“Aargh! Get off me, you fucking mutt!” He yelled. He batted and flailed at it for a moment. The gun was on the ground. It didn’t look anything like what I was used to, but.. It had a handle. It had a trigger.

The Hunter hefted the beast off of him. With his non-mechanical arm, I could see a strange, eerie light coming off of him- burning sparks of energy being pulled from the predator on top of him. It was getting weaker, and he was getting… stronger.

In another second, he’d knock the creature off of him- or even kill it. I couldn’t let that happen.

I burst out of the crevice, and grabbed the gun.

I held it in both hands, out toward the Hunter- and barely hesitated before I pulled the trigger.

It bucked in my hands, spraying bullets. It sparked off of his armor, for the most part, but then his visor broke. Then the creature, pincers first, dug into his mask. It twisted and tugged at what was behind it. The Hunter twitched and spasmed, but eventually went still.

The weapon stopped shooting, and beeped softly. I looked down at it… and I realized that I had no idea what this thing even was. I’d never heard of a manufacturer called Tediore before, and I couldn’t name what most of the parts even did. It had a power cell, some kind of electromagnetic propulsion, and a bunch of small, strange components built onto the outside.

The power source was slowly coiling into the side of the gun, and a readout- an indicator on the side- had a countdown.

Two seconds left and counting down.

It was also growing hot in my hands.

Impulsively, I threw the weapon as far and as hard as I could. It soared away, spinning like a discus- and as I watched, I thought I saw small thrusters lighting up on the side of the weapon, boosters pushing it further and faster away in the direction I’d thrown it.

Then it exploded. I ducked behind the rock, and the native creature quailed at the detonation, pulling away from the Hunter’s body. It didn’t even look at me, before burrowing itself into the ground again.

Who the fuck makes a gun that explodes?

I took a deep breath- the first I could, once I turned my suit’s systems back on. For a long few moments, I just stood there, staring down at the corpse of the Hunter- the ‘Starborn’. A cybernetic arm, a suit I had no understanding of, and some kind of crazy alien technology that… repaired stuff? Made stuff?

He was here for my artifact. And he mentioned he was ‘early’. Early for me? For something else?

How did he know I was coming here?

I took a deep breath.. And then grabbed the Hunter’s suit by the arms, and started to drag it down to the facility.

And this time, I kept my scanner on, keeping an eye out for the native wildlife.

===

The base’s emergency lights illuminated the room. Hanging from the ceiling was one of the lamps built into the top of the module, dangling closer to my workbench. The facility used to be some kind of research facility, from what I was looking through, and I’d been fortunate enough that the pirates didn’t end up tossing a bunch of the equipment they didn’t know how to use. It had all been stuffed into closets, of course, but it wasn’t hard for me to find what I needed. 

A medical mask was on my face, and I was wearing thick gloves. The Hunter’s mechanical arm was sitting on my workdesk, the base’s computer attached to the electronics here.

The arm itself was pretty basic. Someone had taken a completely normal robot arm, like the sort Vasco had, and just attached a bunch of other parts to it. A lot of other parts, kind of screwing whatever they could into place, wrapping it in armor. It had taken a bit of doing, but I was eventually able to dig into it and separate off three portions to it.

The first was the most obvious to me- A personal computer. It was both powerful and rugged. Most of it was components off the market, but there were a few pieces that was… strange. Where the memory and data storage should be, as well as the CPU, it was replaced with strange components I didn’t recognize- ones with thin filaments made out of the same glowing purple material that most of this technology seemed to use. Beyond the alien chips, the computer was clearly homemade, and the programming was script kiddie stuff. There were a few programs that were clearly emulators- emulating some kind of distinct operating system, converting instructions from normal code into whatever the external device used.

There were three of those programs running- three emulations piped into three ports, all of them different parts of the arm.

 The first… The cybernetic assembly. It was still attached to the Hunter’s body, the shoulder mount, so I hadn’t taken it off. I wasn’t about to, either, unless I really needed to. From what I could tell, the program would take data from the port, and convert it into instructions for the arm’s movement. Simple and efficient. Beyond that, there was an interface, likely to allow the Hunter to control the other components- and maybe even the personal computer- through just neural control. It was something I could see being theoretically possible, but I had no idea how it actually worked.

The second port plugged into some kind of containment device, one the emulator called a ‘Storage Deck’. It was the pulsating purple vials. My scanners didn’t say it was radioactive, but it looked dangerous. I’d been able to pull up a debug menu for it, and it told me everything it contained. The containment device wasn’t just full of the purple juice- eridium- alone, but other things- polymers, metals, all of it somehow suspended and compressed in the vials. Based on what I’d seen… It must have been how he was printing things.

Which led me to the third thing- the device in his palm. The printer, or ‘Digistruction Device’, his computer called it. When I looked at it, at the software, the emulation, even the way the containment device connected to it, it all made sense.

It’s a 3d printer.

A 3d printer beyond my wildest dreams, somehow. Emitters made out of the strange purple material focused and lensed light, creating some kind of ‘hard light’ substrate, printing out entire objects. There was a lot of alien code, stuff I didn’t understand, but there were files there. An entire database attached to dates and times, encoded in a way I didn’t understand. But the software- the human side of it- was fire and forget. Or plug and play. There wasn’t just a printing function. There was a storage and retrieval function, usable only when plugged into the storage deck.

A lot of it was hidden behind blackboxed code, safety measures, and a lot of stuff I had no idea where to even get started bypassing, but…

The device could ‘eat’ things. Then store them. Then print them out later. Most of the purple stuff was something the device called ‘Eridium’, and the few files I saw that actually used it was a full category of components. Just parts and pieces, like a ‘Fabricator nozzle’, ‘Eridan Computational Substrate’, or ‘Inventory cell’. Those were just the ones I understood. There were plenty more, but those parts were just labeled by number- all of them as alien and strange as the things before.

Beyond that, given enough power, it could print things that didn’t actually physically exist. There was code, or a file at least, a ‘Tediore Quickshot License’, complete with a bunch of marketing terms like ‘Rocket Stock’ and promising the user a ‘Digi-destructive experience’, and from what I could tell… It only consumed the raw materials needed to print the bullets. I printed and fed it back in a few times, measuring the containment device a few times, but it never weighed any less.

Even stranger, when I had tried printing out a second one, the first one… hollowed out. Turned into nothing but light and sparks, a small pile of bullets clattering against the desk where it had been sitting.

“Right.” I said, finally.

I’d been messing with the programming for nearly an hour now. I had an idea, and I really wanted to see if I could get it to work. With the artifact buzzing under my touch, I knew exactly how to program the terminal to do what I wanted, even if it was strangely silent on anything that had to do with Eridium.

I held the rock in front of the cybernetic arm. I pressed the button, and it ate the rock. Elements, silicates, and various metals were fed into the ‘inventory system’. I pressed a few buttons. An error popped up, warning me that the item ‘rock’ was going to be lost forever. I confirmed it. The file deleted itself- and then the rest of my program continued.

A few seconds later, I was looking down at a small, thin ball of iron. A perfect marble of it, extracted from the rock and printed.

I took a deep breath.

This meant I could make anything out of anything. Recycle things to their constituent components, break them down, and make something completely new.

I pored over the desk, still, when I heard clomping from behind me.

I turned back.

“Vasco?”

“I have located the Interceptor Control Device.” It says. It holds out the device. “We are free to go.”

“... Right.” I said, taking it. I glanced at the remote. It was locked, but I’d found a digipick while I scoured the place.

I looked down at the arm, the strewn about components, and set to putting it back together.

“Can you carry what’s in that crate?” I asked, pointing. “I’ve got to finish up here, but I’ll be right behind you.”

“Yes. Then we can continue on to Constellation.”

“Yeah,” I said. As Vasco walked into the airlock, I looked to what remained of the Hunter’s body.

Then I pushed the arm to what remained of him, watching as the suit dissolved.