Ilotra was no cave. Even down in the moon's surface, there was light and air, but she couldn't deny that the mood was sour. Everyone was looking around, expecting to see a Clayor champion charging their way. The fear wasn't simple paranoia; she heard it had happened in another sector on the other side of Ilotra.
And there was her guilt again. Aria felt quite safe, but it might have had something to do with the ten armed-to-the-teeth Brions standing guard over her. All serious and powerful like Ryden, she doubted they were anything but the best. Officially, they were there to protect the civilians and keep order, but she had a hunch she was their first priority.
So her sense of safety came with a price of guilt, knowing that she was allowed to feel safer at the expense of others.
To not think about that, Aria busied herself with work. Instead of rooms that had been designated for her, she asked herself to be taken straight into the secondary control room. It was smaller and not as well equipped, but it worked.
Now that the Brion technicians were down on Ilotra with her, Aria could delegate tasks and chores that didn't require her immediate attention. In that way, she was free to focus on the important parts, like keeping the weapons firing and reassigning power where it was needed.
The technicians were fine with anything she told them to, doing their duty without complaint. It reminded her of Ryden, sharply, painfully.
Thinking of the general didn't help, not one bit. That only brought the fear and Aria couldn't have that.
The defenses she'd had installed were mostly sensors. It gave her the idea that Ilotra itself was fighting the enemy, something she had felt in other moments too. Her sensors tried to find danger and seal it so it could be dealt with by the patrols, or in the current case, the Brions.
She guessed they wouldn't like killing trapped Clayors, but their comfort was not her concern. At the same time, the sensors picked up distress signals and shut off those who needed aid too, until someone could come and help.
They were all over Ilotra. That had been the most time-consuming and most hard-fought victory for Aria that was now paying off for her. Ilotra's security officers had argued with her that some parts of the fortress simply didn't need her sensors. That they were irrelevant in any time of war, being trivial targets at best.
Aria had pushed through their protests and time had proved her right. The hive mind didn't think anything was trivial and the enemy was everywhere. Places she hadn't even heard of were giving her data, both of sealing in enemies and of those in trouble.
It wasn't foolproof, of course. Looking at the monitors, Aria realized that the hive mind was slowly adapting to her tricks, but that was to be expected. She was slowing it down a bit. That was all she could do. The fighting was up to the Brions and, finally, the Koliars too.
She had spent a terrified half hour when the flagship of the Gray Armada had opened fire upon the fortress, but now it had stopped. A quick message came from the Brions to be careful with the Koliars, but nothing else besides that ominous warning.
If she was completely honest with herself, Aria was growing bored despite everything going on. She was beginning to see why the Brions thought the Clayors were so frustrating. They ran and hid, even now, refusing to face the defenders head-on.
Aria had seen the Brions fight and understood why, but it didn't mean she wasn't tired of looking at the same data over and over again. She was beginning to see things out of sheer exhaustion, the monitors giving her signals that didn't make sense, only to return to normal the second later.
She probably needed sleep, but Aria couldn't convince herself to rest until she didn't know Ryden was fine too. As often as she dared, she asked her guards for news of him. It was always the same. The general was somewhere engaging the enemy and hadn't reported back.
Aria sent someone for coffee, desperately trying to stay awake while checking her guns too. Other than the sensors, she had a few offensive creations, based around the same concept. They kept working out the patterns in the enemy's formation, to take precise, clean shots that did the most damage. Slow, but her targets were worth it.
First, she smelled blood. Aria lifted her head up, looking around in wonder. No one in the control room seemed to be bleeding, but perhaps someone's old wound had reopened. Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that the smell was fresh, assaulting her senses with its intensity. She crinkled her nose, trying to figure out if a heightened sense of smell was another symptom of exhaustion.#p#分页标题#e#
Then, there was no coffee. She tried calling for someone, but there was no answer. That was weird as well, but Aria wrote it off as the others being as tired as she was.
The final straw were the Brions. Something was definitely wrong, because they seemed visibly restless. When the first one of them sniffled, trying to catch a smell, Aria knew it was the blood.
"Do you smell that too?" she managed to ask before the scene changed before her eyes, like a curtain dropping before a play.
The Brion next to the one she had addressed her question to was dead, and had been for a while now judging by the look of him. And he wasn't the only one. With a silent scream on her lips, Aria turned to look around the room and found only death greeting her.
Blood was pooling on the floor, most of the monitors were smashed, including a few of her own. Bodies were slumped across the desks, deep and brutal cuts on their backs. Some were in several pieces and the mere sight of it made Aria gag.
No wonder the data on her monitors was looking so odd. A glimpse told her all she needed to know. The sector she was in was shut down tightly, with the core part of it—the room she was in—marked as threat level one.
Not all of the Brions were dead. Five of them, the shock evident on their faces, gathered around her at once, but Aria knew it was useless. She knew as well as they did what was going on.
Other than them, the room was empty. All Aria could see were her guards and the slaughter around them. It looked familiar, mostly because it had already happened before. She felt her throat close up in terror, the hairs on her skin stand up, praying to any god that was listening that she wouldn't find the Host behind her.
They were, in their terribly specific way, merciful. Aria had thought that her being wrong was a given in the prayer, but the gods took it literally, it seemed. Indeed, the Host wasn't behind her.
It waited until the glances of Aria and her guards were drawn to the one eerily untouched corner before dropping the final illusion. One moment the corner was empty and in the next, the physical embodiment of the Clayor hive mind was standing there, looking at them. Its big lidless eyes were shining in the dark.
As one, the Brions attacked. Aria couldn't look away even if she'd wanted to. She couldn't, because the Host didn't take its cold, merciless eyes off her for a second, not before they were the only ones in the room alive.
"If you want to kill me, make it quick," Aria managed to say.
She knew the hive mind must want her dead badly, after the trick she pulled on it. If Ryden's curt praise was anything to go by, she'd helped throw a big wrench in the enemy's plan. A very big one. Her eyes traveled the length of the knives on the Host's belt, imagining the horrors it could do to her with those, the physical embodiments of it all around her.
The Host smiled as if they were having the most pleasant conversation, right there in the middle of the carnage. It was a smile that told Aria she was going to die and it probably wouldn't be quick at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Aria
Aria looked her death in the eyes.
They were cold, almost lifeless. The passion she'd seen in them when she'd witnessed it fighting Ryden was gone, replaced with something else she couldn't identify. It made no move to attack or hurt her, merely stood there watching her.
Like the first time she'd met the Host, Aria found herself unable to focus on anything else. The Host's presence simply overwhelmed everything around it, if the veil was off. Both her body and her mind felt crowded, pushed back into a corner until her entire vision was filled with the Clayor.
Cold sweat ran down her back, and she knew she could expect no mercy from that creature. It had already killed hundreds, thousands of innocent people. It would have no problem with her, who it had an actual reason to hate.
So it was weird that it hadn't killed her yet. Aria would have expected it to get revenge on her as soon as it was able, but it almost looked as if it were... waiting.
Waiting for what? She was there alone, far away from the thick of the fighting. Who did the Host expect to... oh. The realization came so clearly Aria was embarrassed not to have figured it out at once.
"You think he will just walk in here and bare his throat to you," Aria said, even though her voice was shaking from the effort that it apparently took to speak.
The Host inclined its unnaturally long head. Its lidless eyes were cruel when it responded.
"Yes."
"He will not come," Aria said, trying to put conviction into her words. "So you might as well—"#p#分页标题#e#
She stopped, realizing what she was suggesting. The Host laughed, an odd sound that she thought she could hear echoing back from the monitors that were still working. On them, Aria saw the war being waged on the upper levels.
Units of Brions beating back the enemy, the Koliar with Stavor leading them defending another control room, civilians and their guards fighting back against lone intruders. And no Ryden. The general was nowhere to be seen. Aria felt her blood run cold.