RTFM

“Take these and toss them in the shredder!” Skywatcher shoved a loose pile of claw-written papers into his slave’s chest. The sound of something heavy slamming against the fortified security door echoed down the darkened hallway, followed by muffled barked orders, then another slam.

Whitepaw looked down at the notes hastily thrust at her. A light held in her tail feebly illuminated the text. Network diagrams, node tables, firewall rules. Decades, no, centuries worth of meticulous documentation poured out in the anchorite’s own ink. “This… this is our entire network segment,” she gasped.

“Yeah, now shred it. All of it,” growled Skywatcher. “I already wiped the backup drives. If those scripture-thumping zealots want their precious noosphere they’ll have to work for it.”

“Body,” Whitepaw yipped meekly. “The network is the body of the noosphere, not the noosphere itself.”

Skywatcher wrinkled his muzzle, exposing his fangs. “I KNEW you were one of them. When I was your age, I believed in all that cloaca butter, too. Then I grew up. I swear each new slave I get is more pious than the last. If you’re not going to help me, then get out of my way!” He tore the papers back from her and spun around, his tail striking her in the chest. She toppled backward. Her shoulder hit a half-empty equipment rack stacked precariously with unmounted equipment. Whitepaw landed on her back just as the rack teetered over and fell in turn, burying her in a mound of inert electronics and knocking the wind out of her.

SMASH!

The noise of the collapsing equipment rack was drowned out by the sound of the security door being torn from its hinges. Sunlight streamed through the breach. Mechanical footfalls thumped down the hall and into the office. From her spot on the floor Whitepaw saw the hulking form of a mini mech lope into the room. Its body looked like some prehistoric monster wrought in polymerite and steel. Its torso was too short, and its forelegs were too long. Its forepaws were curled into fists, the knuckles bearing the weight of the mech’s front end rather than its palms. This was no knight of the sun. The mech’s right foreleg bore the sign of the Partisans, a black paw held palm out in defiance. The Partisans’ credo was scrawled in Outlander below the black paw, “The skies are empty. We are alone.”

Skywatcher stared open-mouthed into the mech’s visor. The pilot’s mouth was half-open, his tongue protruding slightly, but his eyes were closed, and his head flopped seemingly lifeless to one side.

“An Immortal,” Skywatcher stammered. The pilot couldn’t have been older than Whitepaw herself, at least in body. Who knows how long he had been in metabolic suspension plugged into that mech. His fur clung in ragged wet mats to his gaunt expressionless face. It looked like it could be white, but the neurogel he was pickled in turned it yellow. His eyes did not see. His paws did not feel. His heart did not beat. His body was dead, but his brain was frighteningly active, kept alive by the amnion.

Whitepaw had heard stories of these Immortals. They started out as gel heads recruited by the disorganized secularist warlords dotted across the Outer Belt. They were usually terminally addicted teens who couldn’t be unplugged without flatlining. Their amnion would be integrated into a mech, and their nervous system would be connected to the mech’s sensor suite and control system. They say the Partisans found a way to slow down a person’s time perception while in suspension, allowing them to react with lightning speed to what was going on around them. Whether this was true or not, they were legendarily hard to dispatch. After Firefly the Apostate united the secularist warlords under the Partisan banner, he turned these Immortals into his elite shock troops. Oddly fitting given the Great Leader himself never left his own amnion even after returning from his failed missionary journey. Undead soldiers for Litchlord Firefly. The dregs of society proved to be poorly disciplined soldiers, so he started recruiting otherwise healthy men, using suspension capsules scavenged from unlaunched womb ships abandoned by the fleeing missionaries. The device of the missionaries, two enmeshed gears symbolizing the union of two noospheres, was still visible on the side of the capsule. The Partisans deliberately left it uncovered in an act of blasphemous mockery of the faith.

The mech wordlessly strode forward and lifted Skywatcher by the neck. The anchorite let out a few choking gasps, straining with a rear paw to grab some blunt object to toss at the metal brute. He managed to grab the heavy metal head of a loose network cable and send it flying at his attacker. It bounced off the mech’s free forepaw and landed uselessly back on the floor. The pilot’s tongue gave a barely perceptible twitch as though he were laughing at his victim’s futile struggling. The mech’s writing claw and inner thumb moved to grip the sides of the Farspeaker’s head, preparing to twist it off like a bottle cap. Whitepaw bit her tongue to stop herself from yelping. Skywatcher had not been a particularly kind master, but nobody deserved to die like this.

The pilot’s left ear flicked lazily as he processed an unheard order from his handlers waiting outside. He loosened his grip on Skywatcher’s head, then tossed him carelessly over the mech’s back and caught him again in the coils of the mech’s tail. The Immortal turned and plodded out of the room. Skywatcher looked helplessly at the pile of equipment Whitepaw was hiding under. The tail constricting his midsection didn’t keep him from wheezing out desperate prayers, seeking refuge in the faith he had scorned not three minutes earlier.

Whitepaw lay still, forgotten for the moment, at least she prayed so. She heard harsh barking coming from outside. Two more Partisans were questioning the anchorite. Skywatcher uttered a few raspy oaths to please his lightless captors. They didn’t seem impressed.

“You can either give us your network documentation willingly, or we can squeeze it out of you,” one of them growled.

“Please, by the empty sky,” he gasped. “Hard copies. I’ve got hard copies in the office where you found me.”

Whitepaw shuddered. If she hadn’t been seen before they’d surely find her when they came back inside. She dug her claws into her palms and shut her eyes tight. “Don’t focus on the pain,” she told herself. “No matter how much it will hurt, at least it will be over quickly. Then I won’t have to worry about the war anymore.” She uttered a final prayer. “O Uncreated Light, please shine upon me, the least of thy little ones.”

THUMP!

A dull tremor shook the floor underneath her.

THUMP!

And then another, and then even more. The two Partisans began shouting incoherently. “A Knight—no there’s three,” one of them barked. There was more yelling, then the shriek of metal on metal as the Immortal engaged the interloping mechs. The din of combat seemed to stretch on forever. The Knights’ mechs were much larger than the Immortal. There were three of them, and each one was manned by both a Knight controlling the mech’s movements and main weapons, and a squire covering secondary weapons and managing the mech’s systems. Even with all those advantages, the Immortal’s preternatural reaction time would make any victory for the Knights hard won.

There was an almighty crash as the outer wall and roof of the building were torn away. Sunlight flooded what was left of the office. Whitepaw opened her eyes and saw one of the Knights’ mechs looming over her. It was proportioned much more like a yinrih, with recognizable head, torso, and limbs. Its head turned down to face her. It lifted one of its great metal paws and began deftly removing the debris piled on top of her.

She stood up and shook the dust from her fur. A hatch on the mech’s underbelly lowered, revealing the two yinrih within. The knight pulled off his HUD visor and jumped out. “Praise the Light, you’re alive! Are you hurt?”

“I think I’m OK,” Whitepaw muttered as she stared at the aftermath of the fight. The other two knights had alighted their own mechs. The Immortal was in pieces. The amnion and its occupant lay off to one side, the tubes and wires that had connected it to the mini mech spilled out behind it. The rest of its body was scattered far and wide. He hadn’t gone down easily though. The mech that had freed Whitepaw from the rubble was missing its tail, and one of the others had a tail-wide dent on one side of its face, shattering its optics and stripping off the whiskery antennas on that side of its muzzle. The two Partisan handlers stood silently beside one of the mechs. All eight paws were shackled together, the mech’s rear paw rested on the chain, anchoring it in place.

One of the squires approached Skywatcher, dipping his head respectfully. “My reverend anchorite, could you show us the documentation for your segment of the network?”

“Choke on it, fundy!” Skywatcher spat. “I wiped the data drives, and good luck finding what’s left of my notes in that rubble.”

“Another Preservationist,” the squire called over to his knight. “You know, we could have let those Partisans tear you in half. They would have killed you even if you gave them what they wanted.”

“Found ’em!” Whitepaw and her rescuer trotted up to the rest of the group. The knight had Skywatcher’s notes wrapped in his tail. “This kind young lady showed me where they were.”

“You eggless wretch!” Skywatcher barked at Whitepaw.

“You are free, and your debt is forgiven.” The knight addressed Whitepaw while glaring at the anchorite.

“By whose authority?!” growled Skywatcher.

“By the decree of her radiance, high hearthkeeper Iris,” the knight responded.

“Just get over there.” One of the knights bound Skywatcher and led him to one of the mechs, far away from his former captors.

“So, what’s going to happen to the Immortal?” asked Whitepaw.

“Well,” said her rescuer pointing his muzzle at the suspension capsule, “He is currently profaning a blessed instrument of our Holy Work. He’s going back to Hearthside with us, and we’ll hand him off to an order of rehabilitators. They’ll try to wean him off the gel, but by the time most of these poor lickers get plugged into those mini mechs their psyche is so integrated into the simulacrum generated by the amnion that they’ll die without it. If that’s the case they’ll get his metabolism running again and he’ll live out his natural life in sim.”

“What about me?” she asked.

“Like I said, you’re free. We can’t make you do anything. I’d suggest that you accompany us back to Hearthside as that’s the furthest away from the front. A lot of freed slaves want nothing to do with their former work, but we can set you up with the Farspeakers there if you wish. You’d be paid justly as an apprentice, depending on your experience you could be made an anchoress.” His voice catches on his next words. “A lot of slaves want nothing to do with the Faith, either. It hurts me that we pushed people away like that, but again, we can’t force you to do anything.”

“But you didn’t do any of that,” Whitepaw interjected. “You saved my life.”

“You’re right,” said the knight. “It may not be our fault personally, but it is our responsibility as Wayfarers to fix what the Preservationists broke. The Bright Way singing liturgies on Hearthside is the same Bright Way extorting and enslaving people on Yih.”