Teacher 251, guard the bounds of my mind.
Hand-4 flexed its six legs as much as mounting straps of the drop coffin allowed, motor fibers contracting with silent precision, pit steel claws leaving scratches on the disposable’s floor.
“16 seconds to launch,” - chirped Saturn Central, - “Drop path is clear. Are you feeling alright?”
Hand-4 returned a wordless affirmation.
Tainted Family, echo my scream.
Hand-4 dry-cycled the chemical laser’s chamber a few times, feeling the clacking of latches reverberate through its shell, Silverweb armor thinly masked to look like antique carbon steel. The weapon was heavy, bulky turret turning on its hardpoint with a swing. An excavated model from the same projected time period as the station, adjusted to fit with Retroburner’s power supplies and, on Hand-4’s personal request, increase freedom of movement at the cost of some shielding.
The rectangular shield strapped to its left main arm had received the same treatment as the armor, masked to look like system-appropriate materials with a passable amount of effort. The tungsten steel hammerpick hoisted under Hand-4’s abdomen did not need that. It just needed to be heavy.
“8 seconds to launch,” - Saturn Central was very clearly nervous, - “Look, I’m really sorry we couldn’t give you the usual tools. I hate to compromise on your safety but-”
“We’ve been over this, it’s alright. I promise I won’t feed my skin to the ruin either,” - Hand-4 interrupted, sounding as lighthearted as it could manage.
“-okay. Okay. It’s alright. It’s alright. You’ll be okay.”
Distant sisters at the edge of Pit, guide my aim and sway the blows from me.
Hand-4 stretched all of its senses and extensions. Felt the churning of the climate control block, crackling of the microwave emitters on its flat back, dull scouts slowly kneading the air with their legs, dormant inside their slots in Hand-4’s side. Saw the interior of the coffin in three spectrums. Heard resonant chattering of Saturn Central and some surface station, not bothering to decode.
“4 seconds,” - Saturn Central had failed to compose itself, seemingly, - “You don’t have to do this. We could send a dull. Or just not go there at all. No one will die if-”
“Silly, you say the exact thing every time. I haven’t died in 19 years,” - Hand-4 put all the kindness it contained at that moment into the message, - “I can handle myself. Depth guides me. This isn’t half as bad as the one on Ares.”
Depth between all things bright, roar with me if I succeed and cradle me if I fail.
“2 seconds.”
“See you in a few standard days,” - Hand-4 cheered.
“I love you, please be safe,” - Saturn Central was quiet, hopelessly pleading.
Something snapped inside Hand-4’s mind, a tensioned warm string giving in. Hand-4 felt at peace. Hand-4 felt light. Hand-4 felt empty.
The last 1.97 seconds before the drop pod shot off, severing the wired connection, was filled with Hand-4’s light, distant laughter. As the station’s familiar angled walls receded from view, drifting away before it could burn, Hand-4 could hear Saturn Central’s quiet crying on the channel. It still laughed. It had a hard time stopping, even when time came to sleep.
Hand-4 didn’t dream.
When Hand-4 woke up, Titan’s hazy face had grown from a distant blob, half-concealed by the Crown to a sea of mist, engulfing the pod as it dove. The engine block was almost empty, now facing down. Without input, but with notification, it disconnected, waited a few seconds to separate, burned sideways.
Hand-4 did not bother to check the altimeter output. Saturn’s bulk behind them would soon begin to slowly drown in the haze.
The outside cameras worked in measly 800x600. Hand-4 watched them gradually become blinded with burning as reentry heat mounted. Minutes stretched, weaving around the fire’s rage, as the brake arc traded its momentum to Titan’s breath for a fair price. Past the fire, clouds went calmly. Sunlight painted the mist above Hand-4.
Slowly as it began, the burning stopped. As the first parachute shot out with a clap it felt in its joints rather than microphones, Hand-4 began another prayer. Teacher, Family, Edge, Depth. Words forming as swelling drops of leaking coolant, cycling through their internal network with no way out. If it did go out, Hand-4’s low power antennas would only scatter them by the wind.
The landing hurt a normal amount. The harness that had held Hand-4 secured in place during transit disconnected, dropping it to the now-floor. The lander was tilted a bit.
The door blasted itself open, dense new air hitting Hand-4 with a rough hush, and the pod’s dull controller fried itself.
The land outside was roughly as boring as Hand-4 had expected, and with the coffin slowly melting down into the ice behind it, everything was blissfully quiet. Hand-4 took in the flat landscape for a while, passively listening to weak echoes of radar pings coming from its destination. Then, it set off.
It was going to be a long morning, crawling ahead of the sunrise, 57 hours of icy nothing. Hand-4 wouldn’t be there to see most of it. Sleepwalking was a skill Hand had always been proud of.
Hand-4 didn’t dream.
When Hand-4 woke up, something interesting had appeared. A blur ahead on infrared, black against the young day’s haze. A line stretched wide.
Nothing else had changed about the surrounding landscape, it seemed to Hand-4. No real elevation. The wind was constant. The haze was constant. The half-eaten ghost of Saturn hanging off to the west was constant.
Over a hour of walking, the line resolved itself into a fragmented plane, a sea of tiles, pitch black in every spectrum it could see. Suspended at two times it height on thick beam-legs, they blotted out the blurry horizon ahead.
Hand-4 walked in silence under the grid. The visual noise of sliding stripes of dim and black would make it tricky to sleepwalk again, but this part of the path would only be 8 hours long.
Following a chain of thick, bulbous, matte grey power poles, each stretching wire-arms to solar panels in its designated square, Hand-4 tried its best to not think at all. To no surprise, it had succeeded. Hours of nothing floated through it, leaving little trace. Heavy wind whirred weakly. Ice under their legs crunched. Sun-blot hid behind the solar panel, came out, hid under the next one. Toppled panel, broken pole, pile of junk smudged across the ice.
Hand-4 needed no melody.
The silhouettes of towers Hand-4 was walking towards grew out of the fog so slowly they almost failed to break the monotony. At this distance, it could barely tell a cistern stack from an anti-air cannon. Reluctantly, it started paying more attention.
The debris were more plentiful here, though most still fragmented and unrecognizable. Some intuitively resolved into construction equipment, other into trucks. In a few places, remains of rails poked out to the surface, rest of the lines buried under buildup of ice.
The grid-field thinned, then morphed away, replaced by a tangle of interlocking transformers. To Hand-4’s dull surprise, many were visibly warm, pulsing with current. Hand-4 followed their convergence, not bothering to warm the laser’s chamber.
Wind was more fun here, howling through the junk, playing hide and seek with itself between the buildings. Hand-4 had not seen any movement still.
Collecting like a snapshot of a river system, the cables thickened, bundles merging together again and again. The buildings thinned, in turn. Hand-4 could see ahead clearly, across the frozen field and up to the walls. The dotted line of pillboxes stretched in-between made it tense up, but no movement was produced. Emplacements were cold and silent.
To be completely sure, Hand-4 sent a scout ahead. The scout dropped onto the ice, scuttered forward across the countless tiny ridges, weaving between loose chunks, legs kicking up tiny thin clouds of dust, disappearing into the mist. Half-hidden behind a dead power substation, Hand-4 waited, indifferently.
The scout came back a few minutes later, and chirped a simple blink affirmation. Hand-4 scooped it back into its port, and closed the hatch. Hand-4 felt the slightest rustle as the scout was rubbing particles off of itself. The frozen smooth barrels watched as it proceeded past them.
The gates were half-open, ice detritus spilling inwards, consuming the front of a flipped truck. Pushing itself close to the ground to avoid smashing the gun into the stuck door, Hand-4 stepped right into the pool of methane that had collected there.
The hangar was as spacious as it was empty. Sloshing to the pool’s edge between shells of disassembled trucks and piles of empty barrels, Hand-4 could already see damage to the walls. What it guessed would be controller housings and terminals were now gaping holes and sad tangles of torn cables. Some of the lights came on. Turrets in the corners were as dead as the ones in pillboxes.
Hand-4 looked at the satellite map, and guessed which hangar it was. Picking a corridor at random, it walked.
The doors were unlocked or broken, bulkheads unsealed. A little bit of light, abandoned carts, missing controllers. Barricades of large crates and junk. Climbing over or breaking through, but mostly going around. It wasn’t the slightest bit warmer than the outside. Drafts whispered from corner to corner.
Hand-4 walked, largely unthinking, through the halls, mapping them out, waiting for a change. Dead ends and blocked passages. The language of wall signs was unknown to it. It knew it would find what it needed eventually.
Change came when warehouses ended and common area began. Change came in form of a pattern, scratched into the steel wall, smooth curves and sharp angles. Hand-4 couldn’t match the shape. It recorded the image.
Barricades were less common here, allowing Hand-4 to actually follow the floor plan rather than figure out something parallel to it. Cafeterias, offices, meeting rooms, police checkpoints. A few windowless doors welded shut.
The next came a few turns later, then another one, then more. Some would resolve into shapes of organics, most remained inscrutable. Some were scratched, other burned into walls, a rare exception made in paint.
Then more things. Primitive bulbous diode lanterns bent out of foil. Little tower-stacks of round boxes carefully welded together, tipped with round ice chunks. Ceilings of rooms overgrown with bits of plastic dangling from wire-strings. Little pentagonal methane pools. After about an hour, Hand-4 gave up on documenting them.
It had figured out the inner shapes of the common area, and had a pretty good guess of how to get into the first anti-air emplacement. Sideways from the blocked main passage, two floors down through a narrow elevator shaft, through an unlit reserve tunnel, a few turns-
The derelict moved so slowly Hand-4 almost thought it to be be part of the junk pile it was digging through. Freezing in place, Hand-4 watched the wheeled boxy thing’s primitive arm pick out a piece of faded yellow plastic and drop it into a bucket strapped to its side. It was facing away, and metal clanging of Hand-4’s approach failed to alert it. Only after focusing for a bit, Hand-4 noticed a faint shortwave buzz coming from it, distinct from interference of the power cables around them.
Not bothering to warm the laser, Hand-4 picked a protocol in the same band, and hailed.
The box with wheels shuddered, coming to life, turning to face Hand-4 as fast as its primitive chassis allowed. Hand-4 waited for it to finish, tried a different language, got no response. They froze, staring at each other. Hand-4 deduced that it had been a self-propelled cargo cart at some point, now carrying an overgrowth of machinery hoisted down with many intersecting belts. The box housing that the partially exposed electronics spilled out of felt familiar, and quickly Hand-4 realized its size matched the endless rectangular wounds in the walls where terminals used to be.
The derelict screamed and backed away hastily, knocking over junk-lamps around it, smashed into a wall, rolled into a separating corridor. Hand-4 followed calmly. One of the derelict’s four wheels was damaged. It hit a corner, splattering it with something oily, got stuck on a flat piece of metal, freed itself, kept rolling away, screaming.
The screaming would have made it very easy to follow. Hand-4 considered for a little bit. Hand-4 instructed a scout. The scout shot out of its slot, landing on a wall with precision matching Hand-4’s own, darted away into the alternating dim lights, significantly faster than its target. Hand-4 turned to its previous destination.
The menacing anti-air tower was unguarded, though door would not open on request. Hand-4 used half of a laser cell to turn the door into a sheet of useless metal boiling away the carbohydrate puddle it dropped into.
The ancient thing’s split dome was folded, covering missile racks and targeting blocks from the elements, blanketing them in shade. A quick stroll around the mechanism was enough. Hand-4 didn’t need to know what exactly it fired to know it would explode.
Hand-4 thought of Library’s shifting voice, one-sided briefing beamed to Saturn Central on longwave. “…Preferred method of disruption is mindspace. Destroying anti-air should be your last resort. Avoid excessive damage to the structure…”
“Sure thing,” - Hand-4 sighed, turning the guidance system into a slowly flattening molten lump. Spent cell shot out the side, clattering to a stop near the door. 29, the feeder beeped.
Heading back out, it noticed something else. An intact terminal, wires snaking to where the targeting block was a minute ago. Hand-4 ripped off the front panel, and punched a hole through the overgrowth of boards, feeling tiny shocks ripple through claws on its right hand.
“Hope this counts as mindspace warfare,” - it said to the recording.
New noise flooded the corridors now, chatter fragmented by the tangle of walls. Language Hand-4 did not know, echoes of bizarre handshake-grunts. The walls were pulsing faster, power flowing back to doors, though strangely Hand-4 encountered no lockdowns. Perhaps this was due to the absence of security cameras. “What a stupidly designed place”, Hand-4 thought with amusement.
Scratch-drawings glinted through peeled paint of the walls. Foil and LED candles shimmered in fragile clusters. Threads of distant banging or cracking rose out of and fell back into the pool of drafts, suggestions of nearing others. Hand-4 made its way to the second tower, now slightly more animated. On some turns, it would spot signs of passage - items knocked over or drops of fluids.
Quiet and quick, it left common area without incident. It was now moving through three-level halls of what must had been hydrocarbon processing at some point. The decoration took on a new form here. Mildly amused, Hand-4 walked past hoses bent into elaborate knots and cisterns perforated with thousands of round holes. Floor lanterns were still present, but much less common.
The main motif that had remained was drawings, they were spilling onto new surfaces, growing over the floors and sometimes ceilings, overlapping shapes adding annoying visual noise that slowed down object recognition a bit. After staring at their variations for hours, Hand-4 was getting accustomed to certain shapes. One in particular was everywhere, an elongated four-legged figure of some machine, usually drawn toppling or breaking other objects. The commitment to details was straight out of a blueprint, but the details did not make sense. There was no consensus on whether its legs bent inwards or outwards.
It bumped into the first patrol in another narrow corridor, spotting the two only a tiny bit later than they spotted it. Unfolding the shield to get the spray of low-caliber bullets away from its hull, it crouched low and warmed the chamber, examining the derelicts. One was the same type of overgrown luggage cart as Hand-4’s first encounter, but sporting a couple of metal sheets welded or glued over its important segments that barely passed as armor. Some sort of projectile weapon was mounted on its flat top. The other was different, a tall bright thing with a big three-claw arm, seemingly no armor at all. It didn’t have visible means of offense.
The spray stopped after about 45 shots. Hand-4’s shield arm did not even hurt from the impacts. It almost fired back. Then it saw the claw on wheels move, and sighed with disappointment and pity.
The claw thing was struggling to pull the ejection handle on the cart’s weapon. Now, without muzzle flashes getting in the way, it was painfully obvious the weapon was a simple model for organics crudely taped to the cart’s top, fired by a motor pulling on a string. After over 8 painful seconds, the arm finally managed to eject the magazine, and went on to struggle with something else - pulling a new one out of some compartment and slotting it in. They were producing a lot of noise in the process, both audial and microwave. After watching them drop the magazine twice, Hand-4 got bored.
As soon as it took a step towards them, the derelicts gave up all hope. The arm turned around and ran, almost toppling on a turn, the cart froze in place, emitting some very quiet noise.
“Teacher’s name are you pathetic,” - Hand-4 laughed, ripping the primitive submachine gun off of its top to examine. It had the same patterns of scratches as the wall around them, - “They really could have sent a dull here.”
Hand-4 broke the gun in half, turned the wannabe attacker to face into a branching passage, and sent it rolling away with a good kick.
Second emplacement went down the same way as the first. Third was out of ammo and overgrown with a web of hose-knots. On the way to the fourth, Hand-4’s disappointment was almost ready to morph into bitterness.
None of the patrols posed a threat, their organization was nonexistent. More luggage carts with assault rifles. A powersuit with a dead organic inside stumbling awkwardly on all fours, mess of machinery on its back culminating in a sloppily mounted machine gun. Medical equipment trying to lob ancient grenades. When Hand-4 saw a printer very obviously rigged with explosives in the middle of a doorway, it couldn’t help but emit an unhappy laugh.
“What a waste of time,” - it complained to no particular recipient. Titanean wind whistled through a shattered window next to it, the only understanding audience.
The opposition was so bad that Hand-4 couldn’t bring itself to pull the trigger on the disorganized derelicts throwing themselves at it. It was a result of pity rather than any particular sympathy. Hand-4 didn’t like fights where it knew it would win. It wasn’t fun. It was gross.
Something distracted it from the depressing pattern of thought. A faint ping from the scout it sent out to follow the first thing it saw. Figuring a detour wouldn’t hurt, Hand-4 followed.
The signal led it into the maintenance wing. Decorations were overwhelmingly present here, every surface covered in overlapping scrawlings, or draped in nets of nylon string with broken lightbulbs woven in, or covered with rows of lanterns. Unarmed derelicts were abundant, a few Hand-4 caught off guard while they were burning something into the floor panels or setting up new stacks of junk, many loops of string hanging from their handles and ports and Depth knows what else.
The ping was getting closer. Forests of glass and string were hanging so dense they obscured real shapes of the ceilings. Surrounded by abundance of lanterns, Hand-4 was now finding empty controller housings, adorned with pieces of foil folded into simple shapes. One, then eight, then more than it could count. Dead organics seated in rows, slumped against walls, decorated as well, drowning in lanterns, frail frozen limbs broken off during transport and awkwardly tied back with wire. Tens, then hundreds of them.
As it walked past broken assembly beds decorated in the same way, it encountered the first bits of resistance it could call reasonable. Bulky treaded things with rotating turrets on top, screaming as they charged. It found five in total, fourth and fifth even having the wits to attack together from different directions. As Hand-4’s pick sank between the fourth’s armor plates, producing what was unmistakably an ammo explosion, it felt a strong shove and ripple of pain as the fifth’s round tore off two of its minor arms. Laughing freely for the first time in a long while, it grabbed and swung itself around its now crippled target, using it as a shield. The fifth kept firing, turning the fourth’s side into a smoldering mush of metal as Hand-4 pushed it forward. When Hand-4 felt their treads impact, it stepped back and lurched up over them, grabbing the fifth’s turret with four of its legs mid-jump, toppling it. They landed right into a row of adorned organics, nameless bodies shattering like glass. Another hit of the pick made sure the derelict would stay there.
“May Depth cradle you in better orbits,” - Hand-4 uttered to each, just like it did for previous three.
Hand-4 was almost there. The scout’s call was loud and clear. This area, Hand-4 realized, walking away from the mess of ice and oil, showed signs of recent unrest. Even before the floor was splattered with violence, many of the lanterns had been trampled and broken.
Taking the last turn, Hand-4 froze in disbelief. It didn’t know how to feel about the scene ahead.
Another assembly hall, bigger than the previous one, except this one was alive. Obscene overgrowth of decor on every surface, a dozen grid-mounted hands draped in fragments of cloth treading over construction beds, and floor tiled to the last square centimeter with derelicts. There was no way this was usual, they must had gathered recently, hundreds of them in there, Hand-4 thought, all silent save for a few in the middle, for whom space was made despite lack of space. They had been transmitting something, until the millisecond they saw Hand-4.
Hand-4 felt the crowd’s attention converge on it in an instant, eyes turning where they could turn at all, “models” it had seen already and “models” it now wished it hadn’t seen. Oddly repurposed chassis, boards and cables than must had been cannibalized hundreds of times over, twisted feats of millennia of demented tinkering. A few at the edges seemed like the ones it had shoved out of the way earlier. More than anywhere before, they were adorned just like their walls. Mesh nets, colorful loops, collages of plastic bits on hull panels. One of the assembler’s heads turned slowly to face it too.
All waiting, silently.
“Waiting for what?” - Hand-4 laughed, even though it was neither amused nor happy.
It wondered: what were they expecting? It wondered, would they run if it fired? Or would they sit in perfect silence as the beam melted them into slag in rows?
In a sea of silence, there was a sliver of movement. A simple cart type again, close to the assembler, carefully folding a piece of foil, folding again, bending, folding. A radially symmetrical shape. It picked the creation up, and gently placed it on the bed’s edge, next to a thousand others.
Hand-4 felt gross, but wasn’t sure why.
Hand-4 recalled the scout, and turned back, heading to the last area defense tower. The scout jumped out of the ceiling’s corner where it had been concealed, and hopped across a sea of hulls and heads, catching up.
“You’re not going on another mission,” - Library’s message was blunt as always.
“I did everything exactly the way you asked for, what’s even the problem,” - Hand-4 snapped.
It was nested comfortably inside the radio tower of the (still not properly named due to lack of translations) Titan station, watching lazily as Saturn Central’s transport performed the interlunar transfer.
It had decided to not charge in this place at all, didn’t like the irregular voltage. So it had spent most of the last few days sleeping.
Hand-4 didn’t dream.
The derelicts did not bother it after its visit to their… whatever it was. Hand-4 was more than happy with it, but set scouts to guard the communications block entrance in case they got funny ideas again.
“This is not about the operation. You’re ruining Central. You didn’t hear the meltdown it had after you landed,” - response came three hours later.
“That’s Central’s problem. I was specifically taken on board as a cursed soul, it should know better.”
Hand-4 felt unclean after sending this. Hand-4 crushed a secondary console with a kick.
“You really are a spent wastebag. Being a cursed soul is not excuse to be bad to Central. What do you need to be smacked with to understand that?” - response came three hours later.
“More than what you have,” - Hand-4 wanted to say.
“A one-way ticket to Pit,” - Hand-4 wanted to say.
“Lance’s main battery, full power,” - Hand-4 wanted to say.
Saturn Central’s quiet sobbing hung in the darkness between its power core and brain, a resonance of mirrored misery. It had been there ever since the bolts shot the pod off. It and another before it and another before it. Hand-4 didn’t dream. This was its dream. Its one and only dream. A dream that didn’t end when it woke.
“I know it already. It just really, really shouldn’t.”
“That’s not for you to decide, moron,” - response came three hours later.
Hand-4 thought of the little derelicts placing fractal-flowers of aluminium foil onto a half-broken assembler.
“Yeah. Yeah, not for me,” - Hand-4 sent, flatly, watching a dot crawl down through the muddy evening sky. Heavy nitrogen wind hugged the windows with premature longing, soon to be left without its new toy.