Carcosa Hali
Naqam
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Posted - 2008.06.27 23:13:00 -
[1]
She stepped on the hovering platform and asked the crewman to pilot it towards the underside of the new cruiser. Dwarfed by the size of the distant Typhoon, the assault ship nevertheless grew larger and larger as they approached it, eventually crowding everything else from her sight.
As the lift approached the ship, the pores of her scalp began to sweat droplets of chrome. It hung like dew among the strands of her hair, the beads quivering slightly in the gusting air of the hangar, joining where they touched to grow larger and larger, until they slid downward to pool at the roots. She breathed slowly, her perceptions half lost as she passed the time processing the scattered contents of her mind; answering emails, directing queries, updating market orders; playing her small part in the cacophony of signals that streamed across Stain.
Occasionally she grinned slightly at some joke or bit of news, now running her hands through her hair, gathering every drop, every iota of the shining liquid among her fingers. By the time the lift came smoothly to a halt within reaching distance of the Huginn's armor plating, her hands appeared as if they had been sculpted from purest silver, dimly reflecting the lights that rose along the walls of the cavernous hangar.
The platforms crew stood mutely as she reached out and began running her fingers across the bottom of the ship, leaving mercurial smears along the assault cruisers hull, strolling along the length of the platform until it appeared as if a drunken painter has used it for as the canvas in his latest creation. She stepped back and gazed upward, absently sucking her fingers to make certain she had not wasted a drop.
The energized nano-reactive skin of the ship shuddered as if stung by a wasp, its molecular assemblers first aligning right then left, driving a faint breeze across her face. The smears of silvery liquid began to flow across the surface of the ship in tiny rivulets, each of the trillions of nanites upgrading the molecular assemblers of the ship, which in turn shone silver to reflect their conversion. The overall effect was like watching a bright infection slowly spread across the rust-coloured hull, rendering the rolled tungsten protean in its wake.
She signaled to the lift crew to begin the descent to the platform from which she had come. Within twenty hours the entire structure of the HuginnĘs armor would be disassembled and re-matrixed, then forged into a virtually weightless substance that could withstand a direct nuclear blast without so much as a scratch.
Try as she might, she could never convince her implants to tell her exactly how they did it.
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Sometimes you lose it all...
Sacrifice: The Sansha War |