Babel Contingency

Nchọ hadn’t had a waking this painful since a weekend morning in university, more than 400 years ago.

The primion event had left them reeling in their seat. Barely able to make sense of left or right, they slammed the freighter’s retrograde thrusters to full burn, the old instinct to stand on the brakes when losing control of a vehicle. According to telemetry from the black box, the burn held for 34 seconds, dropping the hauler onto a ballistic trajectory that intersected the Slumbering Empyrean hard and fast. Some instincts are malformed for spaceflight.

Obi-me would have pulled emergency control, but the same excitation spike had knocked it out. It stayed dark for a little over 7 minutes, its POST refusing to boot with the neural lattice running too hot; the titan’s synthetic patterns had channeled the primion flux into brutal heat, dumping most of its water as superheated vapor, vented as emergency coolant. Nchọ’s frame shared the same safety architecture.

The freighter’s terrain avoidance system kicked in at 6 kilometers, flipped the hull retrograde, and lit the main drive at full tilt. Obi-me cleared POST, and the titan had barely 3 seconds before impact to grab its Nchọ, brace them both against a bulkhead, and lock its limbs.

A splitting headache racked Nchọ, the first in decades. The familiar phantom distress of missing touch, control, and proprioception dragged at them; their left foot and entire left arm were simply gone, sheared off in the crash despite Obi-me’s best efforts. As they shifted and pushed themselves upright, broken shielding scraped and crunched, heat soaked from the beam, smashed during the crash. Several ceramic panels sloughed off their chassis and tumbled to the Slumbering Empyrean’s surface below.

Old instinct again: they clutched the crushed stump of their left shoulder, trying to guard what wasn’t there, and adjusted their stance by extending their left leg past its usual digitigrade bend to make up for the missing foot. Looking themselves over, they realized their torso was impaled on a mangled spar from the ship, passing through the left side of their midsection, tearing through whipple shielding and punching a massive hole in one of their water tanks. The coolant they bled had flashed to vapor in vacuum, then frosted onto nearby wreckage in a thin, glittering rime.

They pushed the spar backwards the way it came, bleeding more water from the ruined tank.

⚠️ EMERGENCY: FREIGHTER_17C CRASHED``⚠️ EMERGENCY: ONYE_NCHỌGHARỊ LEFT ARM SEVERED``⚠️ EMERGENCY: ONYE_NCHỌGHARỊ LEFT FOOT DESTROYED

“i’m here, i’m here. fuck, my head…” Despite Nchọ’s state, Obi-me was even worse off. The titan was barely distinguishable from the debris field. Its minor arms were crushed, pinned against its lower chassis, while its left arm and right leg were mangled beyond repair. Through a rent in its chest plating, its fusion core glared white-hot, dumping vapor through both its designed vents and the crater punched through its side where broken structure pinned it to the ground.

> distress beacon: ACTIVE As Nchọ reviewed the telemetry, they stitched together their own sensor logs, Obi-me’s internal recordings, and the freighter’s black box feed, replaying the last clean seconds before impact as they hobbled toward the titan.

They dropped to one knee beside the crumpled AI and leaned against its unbroken side, palm resting on chest plating opposite the cratered hole. Obi-me held as still as it could, debris nearly touching its vulnerable, exposed core, but its optics shutters ticked closed and it leaned infinitesimally into Nchọ’s touch. “you did really good, Obi. looks like i would’ve been crushed to death if you hadn’t grabbed me.”

For a moment, they waited for the familiar presence on their comms array that always followed a waking. “…the Antikythera is offline, isn’t it? i still haven’t gotten a good morning packet. and the primion excitation that took us down…”

The realization settled in, cold even through heat alarms. This was the Babel Contingency, a situation where the Antikythera was disabled.

Obi-me shared a magnified feed through the cracked sapphire of its long-range optics: Nysa’s Wake hanging dead in the void above, haloed by the invisible primion torrent that was frying the minds of all onboard. Thermal scopes showed the radiators already starting to heat. Nchọ pushed the thought back, and leaned against the titan.

The freighter’s computer automatically restarted the connection to Nchọ’s tool bus, the wreck attempting to report its own ruin. “‘Several subsystems offline’, no shit. i don’t think we’re gonna be able to recover much from this thing. looks like even its core was dumped, glad it failed safe.”

They killed the link and pinged for their kit. The beacon returned from under a section of the main drive cone a few dozen meters away: spare limbs for every joint, a full complement of shielding panels, and a handful of tools, including a cutting torch just big enough to bite into the hull’s shattered bones. Relief washed over them as the kit ponged.

They limped over, each step a controlled fall on one good leg and a bent stump. After a few minutes of fiddling one handed, they disconnected the remnants of their left shoulder and locked the spare arm into the somatic bus, feeling joint encoders and haptics flick from dead void back into their body. With two working hands, they removed the main pin of their ankle, replacing the stump with a fresh foot and toe assembly, and reset the positioning of that leg’s joints to accomodate. In a functional body again, they plugged their tail into the kit’s resevoir, refilling their intact tanks. They could finish repairing themself after making sure Obi-me was safe.

Torch holstered on the magnetic hardpoint on their right thigh, they made their way back to Obi-me. The titan’s temperature had finally dropped enough that the holes weren’t constantly ejecting vapor, giving way to occasional bursts as trapped pockets of water flashed out through whatever orifice remained open.

“any luck on the distress call?” Sparks kicked a brief storm of light into the near vacuum as Nchọ started cutting away the ribs pinning Obi-me in place.

The titan highlighted the jagged ruin of its comms array in Nchọ’s HUD; beyond-the-horizon communication was gone. Local radios only. Before they could curse, a crackle slid across Nchọ’s receivers, “Nchọ, Obi-me, you there? Your transponders say you’re online, but we’re close enough to the beam that I don’t trust my readings. Gnarly crash site, but at least you didn’t come down in the beam itself.” The carrier struggled at the edge of its range, but V3N’s voice threaded through.

> 🚑 Obi-me threw the tiny glyph into the shared channel over Nchọ’s transmitters.

”glad your sense of humor survived the crash, titan. yeah, we’re alive down here. i’ll be fine, but poor Obi here nearly died keeping me in one piece. …you said ‘a beam’?

“Baku says it’s basically a laser of primion excitation, aimed right for Nysa’s Wake.” Nchọ stopped cutting and shared a look with Obi-me. is it-”

The pilot’s tone lost its friendly warmth, deadly serious. “The Babel Contingency. Delta’s an angry beehive of activity; Talus is already mapping paths towards whatever’s causing this, and Amur wants you two back at site yesterday, ideally in one piece. …One of Beta site’s survey shuttles tried cutting across the beam and the pilot was reduced to slag in a half-melted frame. It’s gonna be a long day.”

“you’re tellin’ me. owe you one, V3N.” Nchọ glanced up once more at Nysa’s Wake’s silent silhouette through the titan’s optics, then down at Obi-me’s pinned bulk and the gouge their impact had carved into the Slumbering Empyrean’s strange surface. Between them and Delta, the primion beam burned, unseen.

They tightened their grip on the torch and kept cutting.