Chapter Text
“Careful. Erik used to hit his head on the doorframe pretty often. I could hear him cursing from my quarters.”
Aloy nodded her acknowledgement of Beta’s advice. Seeing the doorway and high ceilings for herself as they came down the hall away from the airlock where the shuttle had been docked with the Odyssey made her question why in the world a man would make himself so tall, he would struggle with getting through the doors on his own ship.
As massive as the Odyssey was, slowly wandering through its empty corridors—the white and gold hybrid of seemingly living metal off-putting to her eyes—evoked nothing but dread and the feeling that someone or something was watching them. Since arriving on the shuttle minutes earlier, where Beta had used data from the dead Zeniths’ implants to disable the security measures on the airlock, they had not encountered anyone onboard. Still, Aloy was glad she had asked Seyka and Alva to come along. Sylens was a formidable fighter, but this was quite literally uncharted territory for them.
Aloy had seen many things in her life that she had to suspend her disbelief to comprehend, but being in space, looking out the wall-sized windows of the Odyssey and seeing the bright blue of Earth’s oceans and the clouds that wrapped around the planet in swirling bands—it was beautiful and terrifying and wondrous all at the same time. She knew of gravity, knew from some of the Zeniths’ records that escaping the planet would be a rough ride despite the advancements in technology in spaceflight since the 21st century, but reading and experiencing it weren’t the same. In fact, they were nothing alike and she was still feeling rattled from the entire launch experience.
She must have been staring out the window for a while because Beta had to give her a light nudge to get her attention. “Aloy? Are you all right?”
Aloy blinked—just in case this was all a crazy dream, and they weren’t actually in outer space on a Far Zenith ship staring down at the Earth. “Yeah…I’m fine. Just a little hard to believe we’re here right now.”
Beta let out a short hum. “You know, I’ve never seen it either.”
What? “Really? Even though you…?”
Beta shook her head. There was something about the haunted look in her eyes as she looked out at the planet below them, the vastness of space around them, that tore at Aloy’s heart. It did not come as a surprise, however. This was no more than a prison for her. “They never let me out of my quarters. When I left for Earth, they used the same nanotech to mask what I could see.”
Aloy wasn’t sure what to say. What she did say hardly sounded sufficient, but it came out anyway. “I see.”
“Ugh, did he have anything to make this awful nausea go away?” Seyka’s face had taken a slight green color after they arrived. Beta explained to them earlier that the rotating rings of the Odyssey kept gravity intact but the chance of getting “space sick” was a possibility.
“I admit I’m a little surprised. I thought you marines never got seasick,” Alva said. She and Seyka took the back of the group as they continued to make their way through the ship’s entry corridor, following Beta.
“Yes, I’m a marine,” Seyka clarified. “As in ‘water’. I don’t know about this place, but it feels a lot closer to flying than water.” She grumbled under her breath. “Why does every dangerous place we go in these days involve flying?”
“Technically we’re orbiting, now. It’s not really flying. We are moving at a very high speed around the earth, though, which I suppose could be considered similar to flying.”
Seyka groaned. “You know, Beta…” For a moment Aloy thought she would lose whatever little breakfast she had eaten before they embarked on the shuttle from the Zenith Base. “I think right now it’s okay to keep that kind of information to yourself.”
“Enough idle chatter.” Sylens’ scolding carried more fear than annoyance and Aloy couldn’t blame him when she noticed how tightly he clenched the spear in his hand. They hadn’t encountered any Zeniths yet, but who knew if more were hiding out in other parts of the ship? What if they saw us coming? She couldn’t panic though, not if she was making Beta return to this awful, cold place where she’d been locked away her entire life. We just need to find the APOLLO database and get back to the Base. Simple enough.
“A-Aloy.” GAIA’s transmission was hard to understand amidst the static and interference crunch. “Unfor---tly the distance does not allow for re-re-liable visual exchange. I-I am transmitting th-the coordinates extracted f-from Tilda’s impl-a-a-nt.” Anything GAIA said after that was too garbled for Aloy to understand and judging by the blank expressions on the others’ faces, their Focuses also could not decipher the rest of the message. Her Focus interface did flicker with the updated coordinates from GAIA, the guidance system indicating the APOLLO database was located somewhere in the center of the ship, but on a lower floor.
Beta had her Focus activated—chewing her lower lip as she analyzed the coordinates. “Could be the data center. I was never allowed in there, but I remember the servitors mentioning it whenever they needed to perform an upgrade.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.” Aloy pulled up the schematics of the Odyssey’s layout. More corridors. Looks like they span the entire ring. How big is this ship? Highlighted in a bright purple, the data center appeared to be below a much larger room—possibly a control center of some kind. “Come on. It’s not far.” That might have been true, but the twisting of the gold-plated metal framing the ship’s interior gave the illusion the corridors stretched on forever.
“This place is…unnatural,” Sylens muttered. “I had thought perhaps…” He shook his head, as though ridding himself of some preconceived hope. “The sooner we get off this ship the better. For all we know Nemesis is almost here. We are sitting ducks out here, Aloy.”
No shit. “You don’t have to tell me twice. Just need to find the right door and—” She noticed Beta was no longer walking at her side. Turning, she spotted her sister several feet behind Seyka and Alva at the back of the group, staring at a closed door. “Beta?” Approaching Beta, she could easily make out the distressed lines on her sister’s face. The shadows in her eyes told Aloy everything she needed to know about why Beta had stopped.
This was her room. Where they kept her locked up. Their personal…clone. No. Their slave.
Seyka was there first, despite her temporary nausea—her hand on Beta’s back. Alva stood near, keeping watch in case a Zenith somehow suddenly appeared, but the sympathetic frown of concern on her face gave Aloy some reassurance that she wasn’t the only one there for Beta. They know where she came from. Why she was made. Even Seyka had admitted she didn’t completely understand all the details around the Zeniths, but she didn’t have to.
Hearing Seyka’s gentle tone, Aloy wouldn’t have thought they were in any rush at all. But of course, she knew better. “Hey. Do you need to take a minute?”
Hugging herself, her fingers hiding beneath the interlocked pieces of cloaking metal in her light hide armor, Beta shook her head. “N-no. I just want to leave this place.”
Aloy decided to speak up. She didn’t need Beta reliving any more nightmares and Sylens was right—they needed to get off the ship as soon as possible. “We’re going to, I promise. We just need to get that database and then we can go, okay?”
Beta whispered a weak agreement, and they started moving once more. The door to the control center was obvious—it was the only entry with double door panels. A console stood to the right of it, the light on the main button flashing green.
Aloy nocked an arrow before hovering her hand over the button. “Be ready for anything,” she said. “If we run into a Zenith, remember the plan. Beta—”
“I know, I know. Cloak and get out. I know what to—” Her next words were drowned out when Aloy’s Focus emitted an agonizing screech, forcing her to clutch at her ear in pain.
“Hello?” A voice—distressed and weak, as though it had been suffering for so long this could have been its final call.
“Aloy?” She could read Beta’s lips—she was saying her name but there was no sound. Some setting on the Focus? No, that wouldn’t affect people’s voices.
“Please…you need to leave. Now. Before it’s too late.” It was layered, jumbled with static and metal, but underneath the interference Aloy thought she could make out a woman’s voice. Shaking off the last of the ringing in her ear, she blinked a few times before focusing on her friends around her, all of whom looked very concerned.
Seyka reached out a tentative hand and placed it on Aloy’s. “Are you okay?”
“I—I thought I heard something or someone on my Focus. Someone calling for help,” Aloy said, the voice still echoing in her head and leaving behind a gnawing chill. “I’m fine.”
Sylens was less sympathetic. “Your Focus is probably on its dying breath after the constant usage you put it through. Now, can we please get on with this? That database is probably our last hope to reacquiring HEPHAESTUS.”
But Seyka wasn’t so easily convinced. “Aloy, are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’ll um, let you know if I hear it again.” Once again, the feeling of something watching them irked at her. She sent Seyka a faint smile to let her know she was good to continue. “Stay close.” She hesitated, her hand hovering over the glass-encased button, its green flashing light beckoning them to enter. What was that? Who was that?
She pressed down on the panel and the doors slid open, revealing a large, round room with multiple exits not unlike the common area back at the Base. Thin bars of blue lights wrapped around the wall just below the ceiling. In the center of the room on the floor was a closed hatch, likely the entry to the data center. Consoles with an array of virtual interfaces had been installed in front of most of the standalone chairs while a stack of video monitoring feeds of the entire ship took up most of the wall on the opposite side of the room. A quick scan of the feeds showed uninhabited rooms. They really were alone on the ship.
Alva must have read her mind. “I guess only a handful of them really did make it.” She gravitated to one of the consoles, where a blinking blue light near an intricate chart provided data on what Aloy surmised was some subsystem of the ship. “It looks like all their foundational supplies are still stocked here. Seeds, cloning facilities, animal DNA—everything they would need to make a planet livable.”
“Had they successfully kept GAIA they would have had the final piece,” Sylens said. He took a seat in one of the white leather chairs and began browsing the data on the console before him. “Perhaps there is a way to extract the database from here. In the meantime, Aloy, I suggest you and Beta go downstairs to this data center and see what you can find there.” After searching for something on the console interface, he pressed a button and the hatch in the center of the room slid open. A ladder led down to the lower floor.
Aloy almost argued with him, but his suggestion was actually sound, especially as it didn’t involve anything insane such as mass murdering an entire tribe or founding a cult. She exchanged glances with Beta, who nodded and followed her to the hatch. She took the ladder first, then watched from the bottom as Beta made her way down. “You good?”
“Yes.” Beta took the ladder much slower than Aloy would have needed to, but she wasn’t going to complain. They were already in the last place she wanted to take her sister to, there was no need to make it more difficult for her. “Go ahead—I’ll be right there. If the database is anywhere, it will be in that storage unit in the middle of the room. It would be the only thing powerful enough to store it.”
“All right.” Turning around, she took in the data center for the first time. Apart from the constant wash of white and gold over virtually everything, it wasn’t too different from the server room back at the Base. Boxy metal units with hundreds of blinking lights on them surrounded a cylindrical tower attached to the floor and ceiling. That must be it. Scanning it with her Focus, she sorted through a lot of suites and programs that were either unintelligible or unrelated.
Beta joined her. “Anything?”
“No.” Nothing. Not related. Not sure I want to know what that is. Nothing. Once again Aloy couldn’t fathom how a group of Old Ones with a thousand years on their hands failed to do anything good with them. “There’s a lot of…strange stuff here.”
“Given how deep the Zeniths were into virtual reality, I’m not surprised,” Beta said. “Try using ‘Zero Dawn’ as your search query. Maybe it’s still under there.”
She gave it a shot. There. Hidden in the lowest nested directory of the “Legacy Builds: Zero Dawn” folder she spotted it: “apollo_0.1.174”.
“Beta, I think I found it,” she said. Her eyes widened when she saw the file size. “Shit. This is going to take a while. The database is pretty big.” She moved to turn off her Focus but rather than obey her deactivation command, the device beeped several times in a row, the sounds overlapping each other before coughs of static were the only thing she could hear.
“…here. Can you hear me? Please leave—”
Shit. This time, she tore the Focus from her head. Beta looked at her before her eyes went down to the device—she could hear it, too. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Aloy said, the Focus resting in her palm as she stared down at it. “It sounds like someone could be in trouble but…I don’t know. Could be a transmission it’s picking up.” She gestured around them. “But out here?”
“There are a lot of satellites still orbiting Earth. Maybe it’s an old message on one of those?”
Then why did it sound so real? It sounded less like a message she’d picked up and more like someone was talking to her. “Maybe it’s on the ship. There’s no one else here so Seyka and I could check it out—just to make sure.”
With a nod, Beta held up a familiar small, clear cartridge. “I can get the database then. Be careful, Aloy.”
“I will. Be right back.” The climb back up was brief, and Aloy emerged on the top level to find her friends in the same positions where she left them. Sylens was still pouring over the data on the ship and its systems while Seyka and Alva stood guard near the exits of the room.
“We found it. Beta’s downloading it now,” she reported. She realized the static sounds and beeping from her Focus had ceased and set it back on her temple. “There’s a…message of some kind that keeps trying to get through on my Focus. I’m going to see if it’s coming from anything on the ship.”
Seyka didn’t hesitate. “I’ll come with you.”
“Me, too.” Alva stepped forward. She gave Sylens a nervous glance. “Um, will you be okay here?”
Sylens rolled his eyes. “I don’t require a babysitter if that’s what you’re asking. But hurry up. As soon as Beta completes the download we should be on our way.”
The doors on the other side of the control room slid open on detection, leading the three of them to the other side of the ship’s main corridor. Doors lined the hallway—more of the sterile white and gold swirling metal—and Aloy guessed these were all bedrooms or labs for the Zeniths while they were traveling to Sirius. “My Focus just started letting out static and then there was a voice. Someone was calling for help and telling me to leave.”
“That room had eyes on all the other places in the ship. There’s no one else here, Aloy,” Alva said. “Are you sure you—”
A signal. It emanated from a room further down the hall, four doors away from where they stood. A scan from Aloy’s Focus simply returned a single word: unknown. “This way. I think it’s coming from here.”
“Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s worried we’re going to find some Far Zenith monstrosity in there,” Seyka said as they approached the closed door.
Not the most impossible thing that could happen. “I don’t know. It sounded distressed and it knew to send out a signal. So, it’s either a person or…” She hit the button next to the doorframe, the puff of air from the panels sliding into the walls cool on her face.
The room was twice the size of Aloy’s personal quarters. Hanging on the walls were projections of paintings Aloy recognized and a few that she didn’t. A large bed and a long L-shaped desk took up most of the space. This was Tilda’s room.
A beacon glowed on the desk—spherical in shape and encircled by orbiting bars of white light. The pulsing glow was not constant, the light would be interrupted at sporadic times as though glitched.
Aloy tried a straightforward approach. “Hello?” No response at first. Seconds later, the light gave a strong pulse. The voice came through her Focus, clearer than it had been earlier in the data center.
“You…you can hear me?” A woman’s voice…and a familiar one at that.
Aloy looked back at Seyka and Alva, who both shrugged. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
“No,” Alva said. “But I have a feeling you can?”
“Yeah. It’s—well, this probably sounds crazy, but it sounds like…Elisabet Sobeck,” she said. She pointed at the beacon. “I think it might be an AI that belonged to Tilda.”
“I was to be her companion. Her muse. But…she wasn’t happy with me. She couldn’t be.” The lilt, the fatigue, that hint of sadness that was strewn throughout all of the audio logs of Elisabet she had listened to countless times. It had them all. So Tilda made an AI of Elisabet. Definitely not creepy at all.
“And then she left you here,” Aloy said. Maybe it knows something about Nemesis. It was worth a shot. “We’re looking for information about something called Nemesis. Do you know anything about it?”
The world flashed red before the thin overhead lights shattered, sending a hail of sparks everywhere and leaving scorch marks on the walls. Someone screamed—Aloy couldn’t determine who. Need to get back to Beta. Her vision flickered—one second they were in Tilda’s room, the next she was surrounded by red light. Pain exploded in her head as though her skull had been drilled with metal. Alarms sounded off across the ship.
“Critical failure. Self-destruction of primary module activated. All personnel must evacuate.”
“We have to go! Aloy!” Seyka. Paralyzed but still aware, she knew Seyka and Alva were panicking—something about a locked door. The room shook from the roar of…something. Aloy didn’t have a word for it. It was raw, blistering with rage and a hunger that could never be sated.
Elisabet’s—no, not Elisabet—voice pierced through the blaring alarms into her Focus.
“GO.”
Strong hands grabbed her arm. A muttered “sorry” was followed by dizziness—the world spun around her. She was supposed to do something, but she couldn’t remember what. The ground was no longer under her feet, and in the seconds her vision would return it she could only see the sealed door back into the control room getting farther away.
Beta.
“I got her! There! That’s the way out?” Seyka? “Stay with me, Aloy! Open the door, come on!”
“I’m going as fast as I can. I’ve never used one of these!”
She thought she heard the hiss of metal sliding. A door? Where were they taking her? Her back against a wall, she was sitting now. A small, round window was next to her, its backdrop dotted with stars.
“Beta…”
Soft hands on her face, the familiar voice still far away. “They went out the other way, Aloy. We’re locked out from them, so this is what we’ve got but we’re going to get them back, okay? H-hang on.”
A garbled feminine voice resonated in the capsule. “Critical Failure. Core engine compromised. Self-destruction of primary module imminent. All personnel should continue with emergency evacuation. Do you wish to detach?”
The screech of metal tearing sounded from outside the sealed door.
“Yes! Do it! Detach!” Alva screamed. The capsule lurched, pulling away from the doomed ship at high speed. Aloy thought her stomach had flipped as they approached the edge of the earth’s atmosphere.
“Beta…need to get her,” she tried again.
“She’s with Sylens. They’ll probably take the shuttle back. It will be all right, Aloy.”
“Hey. I got you, Aloy. It’s going to be okay.” Arms wrapped around her, a face pressed against hers—the smell of Seyka’s hair familiar and comforting. Fire filled the window as the capsule shook violently. The stars faded with the blackness of space giving way to harsh orange flames that licked at the thin barrier of metal protecting them from oblivion.
“What…is this?” None of this made sense. She needed to find Beta, needed to get back to GAIA with the database.
“Stored geocoordinates not found. New destination locked on. ETA set at five minutes.”
“I-it’s taking us somewhere else. Shit.” Aloy had rarely heard Alva panic but maybe she was mishearing her. The world didn’t feel real. “Oh, there’s a map. There’s a map—Seyka, it’s taking us h—”
“Once we land, you’ll need to get back to GAIA as soon as possible. It’s the only chance we have at stopping this.”
The flames receded, allowing bright blue skies and sunlight to light up the capsule interior. Something pressed against Aloy’s brow and above all else she just wanted to sleep. “…stopping what?” Her head still spun as she clung to consciousness.
“ETA in thirty seconds. Warning: reentry system malfunctioning. Parachute Unit Three is inactive. Please brace for impact.”
“Well, at least it says ‘please!’” Alva cried.
“You saw it. You must have heard it.”
Now? They were supposed to have more time. “No…”
“ETA in ten seconds. Brace for impact. Six…five…”
“Hold on to something!” Seyka yelled, her grip so strong Aloy was certain her ribs would bruise. “This is going to hurt if it doesn’t kill us outright.”
That red light.
“Three…two…”
“Nemesis. It’s here, Aloy.”