The Starfighter Invitation

35 station

The next Challenge description, Beneath the Stars, sounded too vague to be a useful guide to how to get through it, but when we entered a thoroughly gloomy cavern, we naturally headed towards the brightest glimmers of light: a dozen glowing circles arranged in an arch.

"Reminds me somehow of the gate to Moria," Silent said.

Before I could manage a joke about The Synergis word for friend, a familiar buzzing sound warned us that was the wrong solution. An arch of blaster ports.

Since it looked like they were guarding the only way out, we chose to triple shield and run at it, straight into an onslaught so intense that each shield went down in turn, and it was only speed that kept us whole.

Unfortunately, we weren’t handily already at the exit, but facing another gloomy cavern with an arch of lights.

"Five layers of shields," I suggested. "If your shield drops, try to put it straight back up."

"So many shields, and we will not fit through the exit," Arlen pointed out.

"One person with a full shield, the rest of us shielding at the front only."

The strategy worked, but we came out of a run of six of these caverns completely exhausted, most of us barely able to raise shields during the last barrage.

"I am finished," Arlen declared. "Let us have done."

"Good thing we have a long break scheduled," I agreed, surveying the rest area. Same layout, same mosaic—now featuring two more aliens—but a distinctly different feeling to the area. "It’s almost empty."

"There’s a reason no group has completed a gateway series so far," Silent said. "Just over halfway through this one, and I’m not sure we’ll manage the next stage."

"We’re not doing so bad," I said, as I found the nearest seat and fell into it. The last two stages had confirmed for me, if nothing else, that I was the weakest member of the team.

I lingered long after everyone else had left, thinking about ways to get stronger without breaking the terms of my bet. I didn’t like being carried. Without a reasonable way to gain ranks, could I contribute by being smarter?

"Dio, could we have put a full Pocket around that drone and floated it off into space?"

[[No. Thankfully. If you Bios could do that to each other, we’d never keep track of you.]]

"Why isn’t it possible?"

[[Your lan is a part of you—you can’t snip pieces of it off. Even if a Bio obligingly allowed you put them in a complete Pocket, the Pocket would still be connected to you.]]

"And they could damage the Pocket from the inside?"

[[Absolutely.]]

I heaved a dramatic sigh, then picked myself up and took the trolley back to the entrance, working out how to get a shuttle up to an orbital station, and how many lux points it would cost me. Good timing meant that I had only a short wait before entering a shuttle only big enough to fit a couple of dozen widely-space and cushiony seats, and with wonderfully large windows that meant I’d be able to thoroughly enjoy the view.

[[Planning on a return trip?]]

Complete disorientation. There was no view, and people were around me, getting up, moving past. Gravity had gone from light to Earth normal. I’d slept through the whole flight.

"You make for a complicated alarm clock, Dio."

[[One with no snooze button. Up with you, unless you want to spend more lux points.]]

Lux felt like the proper term for this wide-aisled vehicle, with its big windows, and cushiony seats. It took me the short trip to the exit to puzzle out why it felt doubly-strange, and it was only as I was stepping through the airlock-style hatch that I realised there was a complete lack of attendants. No-one collecting rubbish, or moving armrests, or hurrying us up as politely as possible.

"Who crews the shuttles?" I asked Dio.

[[Constructs. The planetary and station administrators hand off responsibility for the Constructs as they enter and leave their space, but it’s rare that any intervention is necessary.]]

"Is it ever required to, say, politely greet the local administrator when you enter their territory?"

[[Administrators would not usually greet Bios.]]

"No, not the Chocobos," I muttered, but without heat. We were thoroughly pampered transport, after all.

I’d chosen Red Planet Station, apparently the second-largest. The rules that popped up at the entrance weren’t anything surprising: no duelling allowed, no airing of genitals in public places, no projectiles or explosives.

"What’s the purpose of the space stations?" I asked, as I reviewed the local Challenge list. Then I stopped walking.

Red Planet Station clearly maintained an artificial gravity. It also featured a lot of promenade area with viewport ceilings. And above was Mars, with the grand rift of Valles Marineris blazing blue and green across the pink-cream surface. Enormous, gorgeous, overwhelming.

[[The view, mainly,]] Dio explained. [[Zero-G amusements. Scientific experimentation. Waypoints easier to maintain than anything possible on certain local planetary surfaces. Places to meet that do not involve dropping into a gravity well.]]

Realising I’d once again stopped in the middle of a walkway. I found the nearest seat and gazed at Mars, and then an overlay map of the station, which was shaped interestingly like a crown. The promenade was built into the circular base, while spike-like towers pointed away from the planet. There were three zones of gravity, with Earth-normal at the base, and zero-G at the tower tips.

It was difficult to tear myself away from the business of Looking, to continue to review the Challenge list, applying different filters until I had a list of top contenders to work my way through.

"Is there an actual Janitor Corp?" I asked, as I followed the usual arrow. "It seemed like Constructs take care of all the cleaning and maintenance."

[[The Janitor Corp is a galaxy-wide Challenge series designed to give Bios some glimpse of the support system behind their, ah, stables. There’s a leaderboard involved, achievements, set collection. It’s quite popular.]]

"Sounds like, well, I guess everything non-lan is filler, isn’t it?"

My arrow led me into the zero-G zone, and I took my time on the trip, practicing moving from handgrip to handgrip, and bouncing across rooms.

"What happens if I strand myself out of reach of everything?" I asked, as I glided down what would probably be an elevator shaft if gravity were turned on.

[[After I stop laughing? I could call on a Construct for recovery. Though most Bios simply flail about, trying to generate momentum, then have their own Renba tow them.]]

I gave my sparrow-sized silver shadow a dubious glance, but had to admit the thing moved effortlessly through all the gravity variants I’d encountered so far.

"What about during a Challenge?"

[[Flailing. Until you either give up the Challenge, or the time limit runs out.]]

"Noted."

The arrow took me to a Soup vat, which I found difficult to pull open in zero-G. I swam into the mirror-wall exposed and, after a tiny, confused interval, I found myself swimming out of the same vat, except as a different me, and then I wasted the first few minutes of my timed Challenge gaping down myself. The biosynth. I’d expected a metallic human, but this was…

The body was a navy fibre weave. There were four arms. And tentacles. So many tentacles.

The reflection in the Soup showed that I maintained a humanoid structure. Head, torso, legs and arms in roughly the same position, with some adjustment for the second arm set, which was the source of most of the tentacles, although both my legs also tapered into amazingly long tentacles that writhed and coiled as I watched.

I was wearing goggles that made it a little difficult to see my face clearly, but through them I looked back at myself with massive blue-black eyes, with no visible sclera, and multiple transparent eyelids that slid up and down in double-blink. My visual colour range seemed to be the same. No nose or mouth or hair. Ears that were sculpted indents into the skull structure, rather than bits of flesh sticking off the side. It was a whole step beyond being a different sort of human, or a cat. Jellyfish-octopus-oid.

Not forgetting that I was in a timed Challenge, I noted an arrow pointing in a new direction, but ignored it in favour of methodically testing my movement: flexing tentacles, craning my head back and forth, bending and shifting. I didn’t seem to need to breathe, and had no sense of a heartbeat, but found an extreme awareness of the movement of my limbs through the air around me. Only after I had turned somersaults, and tested moving up and down the corridor, did I head in the direction my Challenge guide was pointing.

To an airlock.

I froze as soon as I recognised it—though continued floating forward. It’s an extraordinary thing to feel extreme excitement, to be at a pitch of nervous anticipation, and not experience any of the sensations that usually accompanied the emotions. No shaky breath. No racing pulse. No sick-tight sensation in my stomach. A biosynth had, somewhere within, the necessary biological substance and support system needed for a Bio to maintain lan, but that was a small part of a much greater whole. In a way I was my own spaceship.

And through this double-door chamber…

Space.