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Chapter Text

If he waited much longer to take his shot, not only would the Narmer Deacons finish up veiling the captive Ostron man, but they'd go looking for their next victim, find out that the cages were empty, and spread the alarm that their little camp in the wild forests of Earth had been hit by one of the few remaining pockets of resistance to Narmer rule. Then, if Cephalon Ordis was right and the interference on the comms marked the presence of a Narmer Archon nearby, the Drifter was about to become ashes drifting on the wind.

"I'd rather avoid that," he muttered, edged out from the doorway where he'd been hiding in the shadows, aimed down the Sirocco pistol's sights, and blew a hole in the high deacon's mask.

The rest of the fight wasn't so neat or simple. His Sirocco pistol could only overcharge one shot at a time on a reload. There was a lot of dodging, throwing smoke bombs to cover his retreat, shooting from behind cover, and  running for his dear life until the Deacons and their other veiled minions were dead.

He patched himself up with one of his limited health restores and headed back to the Ostron captive. The veiled man bent over the high deacon, searching his pockets. 

"Don't-" the Drifter warned. He didn't want to shoot the man, since he wasn't really doing this of his free will. The damned veils sapped the mind and made men minions slaved to Narmer's will. "Whatever you found there, put it back…"

The man held up a communicator. The Drifter shot it out of his hand. He screamed and clutched at shattered fingers.

"Too late." Ordis reported over their ciphered comms. The next moment, alarms went off in the camp.

"Well, crud." The Drifter jogged towards the sobbing man anyway. "Come on, let's get that veil off you and get you home."

Ordis' voice went staticky. "I warned you-"

He got his fingertips between the mask and skin. It suctioned on like glue. "Sorry, this is gonna hurt." The man struck back at him, shrieking that he was an apostate and blasphemer. 

Not for nothing did he wear a reinforced hood and thick leather armor. He shrugged off the blows. "Come on, you stupid fucking piece of metal."

Something heavy landed nearby, over to his left.

"-It's an Archon!" Ordis cried.

He dropped the man and ran back for the door he'd entered, zig-zagging to the right as he went.

"I suggest running for your life!"

"No shit!"

At the doorway, he threw another smoke bomb and risked looking back over his shoulder.

The Archon was right on his heels. At first glance, he only had eyes for the golden cobra snake with fangs that dripped poison. That was more than sufficient to spike his body with every bit of adrenaline he could ask for. Terror gave his feet wings and he hardly touched the stairs leading out. 

He raced by a patrol of veiled Grineer. They stared at him, looked at each other, raised their rifles to shoot him in the back and only then considered what he was running from.

The crack of a whip split the air like lightning, followed by screams.

The death of that hapless patrol bought him just enough time to scramble up a ledge into a maintenance shaft last used when the Grineer Queens owned this labor camp, not Narmer. Inside, he crouched and watched his jerry-rigged radar. The red marker of the Archon turned around in a slow circle, then began to search in an expanding pattern.

"Oh, it's looking for me, alright. You've got the ship ready to go, right?"

"Yes. But there's a bombard rocketeer watching it."

The way this night was going? "Figures." Narmer forces were so enthralled by the siren song of their Veils that they were easy to avoid if they didn't know if he was there. But once they did know he was coming, they got very cunning, very quick. It was just like Narmer to not worry about chasing the Ostrons he'd freed. Instead, they'd just let him take off, think he'd gotten away scot free, then blow him out of the sky with a single rocket. Assuming, of course, that he got back to the ship in one piece despite the Archon hunting for him.

Well, there was nothing for it. He couldn't wait around until that golden snake decided to investigate the vents and he got a way too up-close-and-personal meeting with those fangs.

As fast as he could while being somewhat stealthy, he crawled through the shaft. Judging by the intermittent radar scans, his little shortcut was going to get him back to his bolkor dropship before the prowling Archon found him.

He slipped out back into the shadow of a giant tree's trunk. The bolkor was tucked away under a camouflage net between two more trees. 

The patrolling bombard strolled back and forth along the forest floor in the clearing between ship and the camp wall. Judging by the way he kept cocking his head to listen to the squeals of radio chatter from the comm unit on his chest, he was more alert than  usual among veiled Grineer. 

On the other hand, judging by the contents of those radio squeals, the bombard was probably more nervous than usual. He paid a lot more attention to the camp than he did the ship, or the human crawling through the undergrowth.

The Drifter waited for him to turn around, thumbed the jolter on Rumblejack to life, then stabbed him in the back. The electrified machete split a weak point in the armor and dumped electricity straight into his spine. His legs jerked, his arms slapped at his chest, and the rocket launcher dropped to the leafy ground.

He'd been slapping at the comm unit. It squealed a question. The Drifter swallowed a curse. This was turning out to be one hell of a night.

The rocket launcher might be powerful enough to put a dent in the Archon. It was also powerful enough to break his ribs with its backblast if he tried to use it. He left it on the ground and started pulling down the camo net instead. "Get the engines going. It's gonna be a hot exit."

Ordis obeyed. The ship shuddered. 

He'd pulled down half the net and moved on to the other tree when he looked back toward the camp. Something golden glinted.

When the Archon swayed into view, he stared. Yes, it - she - had the head of a gilded snake with fangs as long as his forearms that dripped deadly toxins. Yes, she carried a whip that crackled with electrical shocks and whose tip looked like a toxic dart launcher.

The rest of her, however, was a shapely woman's body made of gleaming white metal. Her graceful limbs bore golden rings like ornaments. She did not touch the lowly earth. She floated above it. Her slender waist and hips canted from side to side as she got closer and closer.

"Operator?" Ordis said, simultaneously into his ear and somehow very far away. "Operator, your delta waves are - SPIKING - doing odd things."

Old bitterness at that title saved him from the fate of the kuaka faced with a cobra's dance. "Don't call me that." He snapped and yanked down the remaining half of the net.

Thanks to that unfortunate, uncomfortable, and undeniable physical reaction costing him time  that he really could not afford right now, he dropped the net and ran for the bolkor's open hatch.

The Archon lashed out with her whip. He dove, and toxic darts whistled right above his head. Her hood flared and she spread her arms wide. He threw a smoke bomb at his feet so he couldn't be caught up by the vision of her again. By feel, he found the landing ramp and scrambled up it.

"I'm in. Go. Go!"

The bolkor shuddered and lifted off into the air. Below, the Archon watched him fly off and swayed. The motion imprinted deep into the more primal parts of him; half the quivering fear of a prey animal confronted with an apex predator and half a more carnal response to a seductive woman who knew exactly what effect she had on a man.

Then the ramp closed, cutting her off from sight. He sighed, took a moment to settle his leather cloak so there wouldn't be any awkward questions from the Ostrons he’d pass in the bolkor’s hold, and joined Ordis up in the dropship's cockpit. He took over the pilot's seat from the Cephalon's remote control. Since he'd killed the bombard and the Archon had rampaged through the rest of the camp's troops, they made it out with only a few shots from Grineer rifles sparking off their hull. 

His work wasn't done. Before dawn, he had to drop off the freed Ostrons at one of the few safe villages, spoof a few dropship patrols to keep their location hidden from Narmer, and then make it back safely to his own camp and get the bolkor camouflaged again. During the day, he'd have to check on the Lotus’ condition and make sure nothing had broken on the dropship or the hidden Orbiter. He could distract Ordis from any awkward questions about his delta waves by working on ways to counter that Archon interference before they even thought about hitting another Narmer labor camp. In fact, now that Narmer's heavy-hitters were looking for him here, perhaps he'd even do better to look off-planet.

Maybe by the time he finished all that and bunked down for the night, he'd be too tired to daydream about a graceful body swaying against his. 

Chapter Text

With some effort, the Drifter dragged his attention back to the datascape that the sentient Hunhow had created for his benefit. There were three Archons on display. Created by Hunhow's son Erra from desecrated warframes and sentients, their bodies carried embedded energy crystals that could restore the wilting Lotus back to life. While Hunhow might be willing to help him save the Lotus out of love for his dying eidolon daughter, he wasn't overly fond of man who'd fought his way down to the depths of Uranus' oceans to demand an audience. He certainly wouldn't appreciate the Drifter squandering this precious opportunity to learn about the Archons' weaknesses by spending it staring at Archon Nira's graceful curves and fine ass.

"So that's the Wolf?" He studied the four-armed maw-headed man with flaming daggers. It's muscles had muscles.

"Should you survive Amar's fiery roar and the slashing frenzy of its blades, it will howl to summon the Pack and heal its wounds. Only the true eye can distinguish the alpha." Hunhow warned.

"Sounds like a recipe for sliced, diced, and barbecued Drifter. I'll bring the sauce." Besides, since its codpiece was even bigger than its muscles, he’d hope it was entirely overcompensation. He turned to the other male Archon, who had a more normal physique before he looked at the head. That had four glowing eyes, a vaguely bird-like faceplate, and wings that doubled as mandibles. It bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Ordis' carapace. "Is that a bird or an insect?"

"It's an Owl," Hunhow growled.

"Has Erra ever seen an Owl?"

"I'm almost looking forward to seeing Boreal spit you on his trident, whelp. Or maybe he'll electrify the ground and fry you like your little knife. Or maybe his screech will paralyze you."

"At least those glowing eyes will make for good targets." He said.

"True. You might by some lucky chance escape paralysis, get in close, and strike unseen."

He'd start on a new batch of smoke bombs once he got back to camp. "And I've already seen Nira." Though admittedly, he'd been too stuck on her fangs and the seductive sway of her hips to notice the glowing crystal stabbed through the base of her neck.

For a long moment, Hunhow paused as if disbelieving the evidence of his own senses that such a brash human had indeed seen Archon Nira and now stood in front of him. "You have fought her and lived?"

He snorted. "Fought? Please. I ran. I'm not actually stupid."

Of course, he was about to go do something very stupid indeed. He rolled his shoulders and checked that the Sirocco hadn't been damaged when the Stalker hauled him down at scythe-point for this audience. It was fine…just rather dinky looking compared to the three sentient-warframe amalgams on display. "Thanks. I appreciate the heads up on how to kill the three of them. Its time for me to get going on doing it."

"Vainglorious whelp!" Hunhow thundered. "To meet Nira's gaze is certain death."

"Yeah, I know." He muttered, making his way towards the elevator back to the surface. His daydreams were not going to make killing Nira any easier. "No offense, because I'm sure that you and the Stalker are excellent conversation partners, but I really do have work to do."

"You have nothing to fight with. Erra's Archons will rend you apart, and then he will find his sister, and he will kill my daughter only to raise her again for Narmer's own ends."

He turned and glared back at Hunhow. "You said I could save her with those Archon crystals. So I'm going to go get those Archon crystals, restore her to health, and then we're going to make sure that Narmer can't exploit her ever again. As long as I live, Erra won't have her."

"You're going to die."

"I'm not dead yet. And if I do die, well, it's not my problem anymore, now is it?"

The Drifter out of time and place stared down the once warleader of the Sentients. He was confident, not necessarily in his own ability to defeat the Archons with scraped together weapons and the best makeshift bomb he could craft out of limited supplies, but in the resilience of a reality that seemed determined that at least one version of himself would succeed. 

Hunhow broke first. "Take Nataruk. You'll need it, whelp."

After a grueling series of tests in which Hunhow drilled him until he could practically fire a perfect charged shot from the bow Nataruk while dangling upside down over an elevator shaft while the Stalker choked him, the Drifter staggered back onto his stolen Corpus Condor ship. He took off right away, eager to be gone before Hunhow decided he needed more homework.

Once they reached the space lanes, got their plates and hull number past Narmer's very lax orbital security, and lined up for their turn at the Solar Rail, he leaned back in the pilot's chair and said, "Ordis, you didn't warn me that the Archons were warframes."

Ordi's owl-like shell made a startled noise. "They are? Ordis did not get a good look at the Archon on Earth due to the sensor interference."

He briefly described their appearance so Ordis could identify them. 

"Rhino, Loki, and Mag. Uh, the Operator has each of those warframes, but, um…"

He flexed his fingers, "I still don't have Void Powers to transference with them. At least I get a sweet bow to make up for the lack. Hunhow says it can kill the Archons and I have no reason to doubt him."

Ordis's owl head spun around. He swooped down to stare the Drifter in the face. "You are going to k-k-KILL AN ARCHON? Have you gone crazy? Do not a-ab-aba-abandon Ordis, please." The last bit was more like a whimper.

"Hey," he held out his hand. Ordis bumped gently against his palm. The little Cephalon had come a long way from the lonely day it'd tried to kill him for coming too close to the downed Orbiter, then thrown him a completely over-the-top "Welcome Home" party once it realized he was (kind of) its beloved Operator. "Hey, I'm planning on coming back in one piece. So if you've got any other ideas or weapons I can actually use tucked away in the Orbiter's Arsenal, now would be a good time to share."

Ordis' eye-lights flickered. "There is…Umbra."

Alone of the Operator's warframes, Umbra didn't need void-channeled transference to animate him in battle. He could and would fight as well as a Dax warrior on his own, if he wanted to.

Unfortunately, he hadn't been as willing as Ordis to accept the Drifter as a different version of the child he'd pledged his loyalty to. In hindsight, the encounter with Nira wasn't the first time he'd run for his life escaping from an angry warframe. "I think we'll let Umbra stay happy playing the shawzin in his corner of the vehicle bay."

Ordis nodded. 

But thinking of Umbra and his cracked helmet that revealed the human eye of the Dax warrior once consumed by burning memories that only the Operator could soothe sparked another thought. "These Archons were made from warframes and sentients who fell during the Old War. Nira, the one you call Mag, was human once. Right? Human, just like Umbra."

Ordis nodded again.

That realization didn't shake his purpose. If anything, it made him angrier. Erra and Narmer meant to consume the Lotus and rebuild her according to their designs to serve their purpose, just like they'd already done to Nira. To Mag.

When he shot her down and took that life-giving crystal from her neck, he'd right an ancient wrong and bring her peace.

Chapter Text

It was all well and good for the Drifter to play at being Nira’s white knight come to save her from Erra, but the truth was more like she was the dragon guarding the castle. When she wasn’t getting sent off after little ol’ him on Earth or searching for the Lotus, she ruled the Gas Cities of Jupiter with an iron fist and a cracking whip.

Using the Orbiter’s greater tracking capabilities and the thinning network of Tenno void-cloaked satellites throughout the system leftover from the war, Ordis tracked the major source of Sentient energy signatures to the gas city of Narmer 5. “Serves Alad V right. One snake in the grass deserves another.”

The high winds demanded most of his attention as the Condor dropship bucked and fought the controls all the way down onto a backside landing pad. Judging by the amount of cargo crates scattered around, the bay crew was more lost in their Veils than eager to get to work unloading his non-existent cargo. Which suited him just fine, since the only answer he had for a nosy customs inspector was Nataruk.

Outside, he wrinkled his nose. “It smells like piss.”

“This facility processes Jupiter’s gases. If you start smelling bitter almonds, I suggest - NOT BREATHING - finding a gas mask. There should be emergency stations throughout the city.”

A breeze and a whiff of rotten eggs mixed in with the general odor of too few cleaning products used to wipe up too much old urine had him moving on quickly. “I’ll get into the city and grab a mask. Or a couple for good luck. You start tracking that Archon interference. I need to go wherever it’s strongest.”

He made it off the landing pad without incident and into the middle tier of the city. On the approach, he’d noted that the city was built like a blocky, upside down pyramid with a huge rack of fans hanging off the bottom like a flag. Jupiter’s atmosphere was mostly hydrogen and helium gases that floated, so the processing facilities were housed in the broad umbrella of the uppermost level. Meanwhile, Themisto’s people lived and worked in the middle tier.

In comparison to Fortuna, Themisto was a city of towering hab blocks connected by narrow stairs, catwalks, and balconies who’s handrails were utterly inadequate to cope with the winds that whipped upwards in the narrow gaps in between buildings. How many inattentive people listened to their Veils so closely that they walked right off the edge? Narmer symbols and banners adorned every surface and electronic system. All of the guards wore Veils as did most of the men and women in crewmen suits. Some of the civilians didn’t (yet) and they hurried about their business with their heads down while the broadcaster tower amplified Narmer’s hypnotic voice over them. He copied their attitudes and gave any Deacons a wide berth.

If it wouldn't break his cover to pieces, he'd shoot out that broadcaster like he'd broken that mask back on the Orb Vallis. Just to hear anything else beside Narmer droning on about how all Profit was evil, he asked Ordis, “Any luck on the interference?”

The comms crackled back, which was a far more dulcet sound and a sign that he was getting closer.

“I’ll try up, first.” It took him a while to find one of those promised gas masks and there were only a couple spares left, which he pocketed. It sealed well enough, its just that number of masks was wholly inadequate to the needs of the civilians around. “Alad V really didn’t spare much budget for safety measures, did he?”

Somehow, Ordis' crackle managed to sound like an insult.

He climbed upward pausing every few stairways to rest his legs and hands, unaccustomed to this type of exertion and clinging for dear life to handrails when a gust came through. The higher he got, the more patrols he saw, until he couldn’t avoid them or backstab them anymore. Ordis was just a faint, intermittent crackle.

At the next opportunity, he hacked into a Narmer computer system and looked for a facility map. He’d climbed high enough that he theoretically had a straight shot at the reactor core through a series of hallways and catwalks. If Nira wasn’t sitting on the powerhouse for the whole operation, he’d check the nearby helium-3 processors or the elemental condensers.

He unslung Nataruk. In the first hallway, he scanned the Veiled patrol’s route, noting the number of unsecured barrels of toxic gas and a number of exposed pipes. That wasn’t just Narmer laxity. Alad V really hadn’t prioritized the safety of his own people. No wonder Ordis called him a snake in the grass.

He fired his first charged shot at the pipes. Gas spewed over the lead men in the patrol, and then caught fire. Once it burned itself out, the only mercy he gave them was to make sure they were dead.

His comms chimed brightly. That was not the usual sound-

For a moment, he thought it was Hunhow. Then the beaked Sentient turned enough for its comm pickup to catch the red reflection of kuva orbs where its eyes should be. 

“I am Erra. That is a curious weapon you’ve found, scavenger.”

The next room was a laboratory and its veiled MOA guards were considerably less distracted. Apparently Narmer’s voice didn’t hypnotize bipedal robots, who knew? He rolled into cover behind a couple lockers and replied in between charged shots, “Hey, unlike the warframes you scavenged from the Old War, I came by it honestly.”

Erra leaned forward, trying to be intimidating. It didn’t work particularly well, since he was far away, and the Drifter was considerably more worried about the three crewmen who’d just entered from outside, alerted by the dying MOAs and explosions. One charged shot decapitated the leader. But that told the other two where he was and they poured back suppressive fire on his cover. "If you know about that - if you mean to fight one of my Archons with that weapon - then you’ve made a powerful ally for one so insignificant. Interesting.”

He winced. Hunhow probably wouldn’t appreciate him ratting him out. Then he unsheathed Rumblejack, rolled out of cover, and threw the machete overhand. It spun through the air and split the Veil of one of the Crewmen. The other man gaped at the blasphemy. Then Nataruk hummed and its charged arrow cut him in half. “There’s a lot of people who don’t like you, Erra. A lot of people who don’t like Narmer,” he said, trying to muddy the waters.

Then his comms chimed for a second time and Hunhow made it all moot. “He has me, Erra, for as long as he defends your sister and you do not. You don’t have the common sense I birthed into you, or else you’d realize that Ballas is a parasite using you both to sustain himself.”

Ballas. Now, there was a name he hadn't expected to hear. Put that name with the face of the man yammering at him from that Narmer Veil on the Orb and-

As a child before the Zariman’s failed void jump, he’d sworn allegiance to Ballas and the other Orokin Executors during their daily pledges. Afterward, when he'd learned Executor Tuvul was responsible for restricting all of the colonists onboard to one meal a day as punishment for the dissent of a few, their portraits made excellent practice targets.

-he'd already hated Narmer before the Veil shoved that ugly mug in his face, and hated him even more for pretending that he could somehow replace his dead father. So finding out that Narmer was Ballas, and moreover was the one responsible for the Lotus' perilous state was just the cherry on top of a long list of grudges.

He didn't like Erra that much more, but figured he at least owed Natah's brother and Hunhow's son the warning: "If Ballas is anything like Executor Tuvul, he'll drop you the second things don't go his way. Ask me how I know sometime."

Erra made a rude noise. "If that's the best advice a scavenger and the rotting hulk backing him can muster, I made the right decision. My Archon will flay the hide from your bones and take Nataruk from your cold, dead hands." He signed off. 

Hunhow groaned with disgust and signed off as well. Alone at last, the Drifter peeked outside. It was a series of completely open catwalks. They bounced in Jupiter's high winds. On the very far side, a squad of Sentients winked into being. 

He could crawl across the catwalks, clinging on for dear life so that the wind didn't pluck at his cloak and fling him off into the roiling orange hurricane clouds below where he'd suffocate long before the depths crushed his body to a paste. He could shoot down these Sentients like he had during Hunhow's brutal tests. Just not both at the same time.

"Think. Even Alad V couldn't afford to let all his men get blown off into the abyss." He freed Rumblejack from the crewman's helmet. Those three had come in from out there without being blown away. Did they have mag-grip boots? A safety line? He searched the bodies and found both. 

Once he'd fit the mag-grips onto his boots, settled into the safety harness and line, and stowed the spares, he cut his way through Erra's reinforcements and made his way to the reactor core. It was a very square room, with the large core at its center and an elemental processor in each corner filled with swirling gases.

For once he was pleased to see more stairs, catwalks, and heavy pillars. It was a long way from the forests of Earth, but cover was cover.

He was less pleased at Nira's personal touch to her lair. A giant sculpture of a snake's head opening wide to bite and devour the lowly blasphemers and apostates who opposed Narmer now crowned the reactor core's housing. 

He took a moment to roll the tension out of his shoulders. Yes, he had a bow that could kill her. Yes, Hunhow had drilled him until he could kill her. Yet there was no doubt in his mind that unless he were very good, and very lucky, she was going to kill him instead.

Not that it was going to stop him from doing what was needed. Certain death never had before.

"That's an ugly old face you've got on, Mag," he called out as he walked toward the sculpture. "If there's anything left of you in there after what Erra did to make you an Archon, I'm apologizing in advance for what I'm about to do."

Nira dropped down from the ceiling rafters. Her snake head and spiny tail uncurled. Her whip unfurled.

He turned tail and ran, but this time he had a plan: run, turn, shoot.

She shot a spray of toxic darts at him. He rolled, then rolled again between the patches of corrosive slime they left on the floor. He led her a merry chase around the reactor and the processors, each charged shot gradually chipping and eventually slashing away at her sentient head and warframe sword-steel body. 

Not that it was one-sided. Not at all. She caught him in the side with a whip-crack that slashed right through his leather cloaks. Blood flowed more freely than it ought to, and it took several of his precious health restores to knit up the wound. 

Then she leapt back up into the rafters, where he lost sight of her. A trio of Erra's sentients flew in, their limbs showing damage from his previous fights.

"Hunhow warned me you'd try to raise the dead," he called out as he shot them down as fast as she could call them. "Come on, Mag, Nira, or whoever you are now. We both know what it's like to keep living long after we should've died. Let them go."

She dropped down behind him. He ran, but she'd had enough of that plan. Mag's hands grabbed his shoulders from behind. Her legs wrapped around his waist. He stumbled and barely kept his footing. If it weren't for the snake neck curving around to face him, he might have been distracted by the feel of her armored breasts pressing into his back or the strength of her thighs. As it was, Nira's glowing red eyes and yawning fangs demanded his full attention.

He dropped Nataruk as she lunged for his throat. He caught the gaping fangs with his gloved hands instead.

"Mag, let me go!"

It was a wrestling match he was bound to lose. Nira was far stronger than he, even with having given up much of her leverage to tackle him. Her jaws gnashed and twisted with the combined fury of a Sentient and warframe turned Archon, and inevitably, his grip slipped. Mag yanked his hood back, exposing his throat for the kill. 

He really only had one chance left to survive. He threw himself and his clinging burden onto the ground and rolled, praying she'd miss.

She missed…and a dagger-like fang pierced his left arm instead of his neck. It went in like a red-hot needle and by the time he opened his mouth to scream, his arm was already numb.

Mag released him. She strolled away, white-gold feet clicking on the metal floor as she coiled her whip. Nataruk she dismissively kicked to one side. Nira's snake head twisted around to watch his final moments.

At least it didn't hurt, he thought. He just didn't feel that arm anymore, his shoulder, or the left side of his face. His eyes closed of their own accord, blotting out the vision of those swaying hips.

Surely, the sword-steel hands turning him over were a dying dream, as was Hunhow's voice urging, "Shadow, do not let him fall."

Chapter Text

The Drifter sat up on his knees, took a couple deep breaths through the spinning lightheadedness that followed, and then pushed himself up to his feet. As the Shadow watched, he collected Nataruk from the ground, inspected its limbs for damage, and fired a few test shots into the walls. The charged arrows slashed as deep as ever and, best of all, his left arm was completely healed. No, better than that, he felt completely refreshed. The knitting wound in his side was gone. All the strain in his back and shoulders that built up when repeatedly firing the bow faded like they never were. So had the inevitable bruises, scrapes, and grazes from combat.

Whatever power the Shadow had lent him, it was something else. “Thanks.”

The Shadow nodded back, then vanished into smoke. 

“Hunhow, if you can still hear me, I appreciate it.”

The comm chimed. Hunhow said, “I am not about to lose Natah to Ballas again. Which means that I am not about to lose you to Erra. You wounded his Archon enough that she retreated from the Shadow.”

Crud. He needed that crystal. “One moment, Hunhow.” He switched the comm channel to Ordis’ frequency. Nothing but crackling static. He took a moment to pause and appreciate both the relief coursing through him and the ludicrousness of what he was about to say, before switching back to Hunhow. “Good news, she’s still nearby.”

“She lies in ambush. I cannot risk the Shadow in open combat with a warframe, even a desecrated one. You have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” he said. He hadn’t always understood that. He’d spent far too much of his life so hounded by the needs of immediate survival to question his own actions or even to believe that he had a choice. But if he’d learned one thing from the repeated lessons of his time in Duviri, it made a world of difference when he chose to do what he must. “But hey, I’m a vainglorious whelp, so what do I know about making sensible choices?”

He headed out of the reactor looking for another computer system he could hack for a map. If he were Nira, having now tangled with Nataruk, he wouldn’t want that bow firing anywhere the expensive equipment in the helium-3 processors or the elemental condensers. She’d try to fight him somewhere else. Far better that he pick his ground instead.

There were a few more Crewmen patrols in the hallways ahead. The cramped hallways were more terrifying than the Crewmen, if he were honest. For one, there were a bunch of  barrels marked “Toxic - Reserved for Testing” lying around. For another, he was shit outta luck if Nira dropped out of a vent behind him. If that happened, there was nowhere to run. She’d just whip a barrel open. No gas mask would save him. So it was a nerve-racking exercise in fighting with one eye glued to his radar.

When he got past the hallways all and into a laboratory that his radar showed was empty, he blew out a deep breath. Then he looked up.

A tall, thick Sentient hung on a rack suspended from the roof. It was about half as tall as the giant Teralysts that roamed the Plains at night and twice as solidly built. It looked like it could crush him with one swipe of its four arms. For now, it was dormant, and was held there by chains as well as various bits of tubing and machinery.

“Hunhow?”

His patron groaned, an eerie sound that was at once inhuman and completely relatable. “More desecrations. Erra experiments on his kin for Ballas like an Archimedean dog begging for scraps of its masters’ affection.”

It wasn’t trying to kill him immediately, so he turned his attention to the computers. Narmer used a tricky bit of reverse hand-eye coordination to guard their secure files. Unauthorized people distracted by their Veils couldn't manage it. Once he was through, the whole system was open to him. As he memorized the map for the likely future when he’d be chasing Nira through another warren of tunnels, blowing up a couple more labs to draw her out, or battling her in Alad V’s grand presentation hall just beyond this very lab, he asked, “Awkward question: Ordis told me once that the Lotus was based off of the Archimedean Margulis?”

“The Orokin took both my children from me. I sent Natah into the heart of their Empire, that she might destroy them from within. The Tenno warped her into a false mother and then Ballas took her for his lover. Through sheer courage, she overcame them both and returned to her mother to lead our people in a New War,” Hunhow declared proudly, then made another eerie groan. “Alas, she was betrayed again by her own brother.”

“When I feed her three Archon crystals and she’s back to her old self, you’ll remember that I’m basically Tenno without the Void powers, right?”

“I won’t forget her true friends.”

“Oh good.” 

Alad V’s presentation room was just beyond the lab. It was completely open to the whipping winds of Jupiter except for a central plinth that was somewhat more sheltered by a double ring of large square pillars. No doubt the shredding clouds and snapping banners made for dramatic backdrop as the Corpus Executive made presentations to the Board or investors. Erra had made his own improvements: another giant snake head sculpture adorned the outermost pair of pillars. He could just imagine the spindly Sentient strutting around out there, gesturing at the lab experiment while Ballas nodded approvingly. It was the best arena he was going to find, and Erra would have to send her to stop him messing around in the lab.

He switched out his gas mask for one of the spares, double checked his safety line harness and the backup, and triple checked that the mag grips on his boots were still good. Then he went back to the hallway and carefully, oh so carefully, rolled a barrel of biogas out to one of the pillars.

On his third trip with a barrel of spent radium, he asked Hunhow, “Another awkward question: can I destroy this experiment without it waking up and killing me? I’d hate to deal with the Archon while leaving this guy behind for Erra to use up.”

“Know your limits, whelp.” Then he deigned to explain, “We were created to endure unimaginable harsh conditions in un-terraformed Tau. Our life force does not leave us easily. If you kill it here, it will rise again. You do not have the Void powers to overcome an Eidolon.”

“Not yet.” Though when he did, there was a particular nest of vomvalysts who were in for some payback. Then a nasty thought interrupted that pleasant revenge fantasy. “If this experiment will come back as an eidolon, what happens when I kill the Archon?”

“Erra bound the life force of a Sentient together with the revival systems of its Warframe host.”

A thrill of pure horror shot down his spine. “So I kill her, and then she gets back up again?!”

“Now you see why the Warframes were such fearsome foes. I have killed the same one four times and seen it leap up for more punishment.”

Numb with terror, he set the barrel into position. He’d already died or nearly so just to gravely wound her once. Four times?  “I hope the Shadow is on standby, just saying.”

“Subdue her and take the crystal from her body before she revives.”

Slowly, his heart rate settled back down as the situation went from flatly impossible to merely nearly impossible.

He went back into the lab and stacked up more barrels of spent radium inside. Then he set the lab to lock behind him. There was always a chance that Nira would try to raise the dead lab experiment, and if that happened and it broke free, he wanted it as confused as possible. Mind, it was completely wishful thinking that it would charge out, swat Nira from the sky, then give him the chance to rip her crystal out and make a run for it. That’d be too easy.

As he rolled his final barrel towards one of the inner pillars, there was a flicker of motion on the outer ring. No more than a snapping banner. 

Instincts honed to a fine hair trigger had him sprinting and rolling for cover before he could even articulate just what warned him. Three darts punctured the rolling barrel. Plumes of hissing gas sprayed all over the central plinth. The winds whipped it onward and outward. His gas mask whined. There was a brief bitter almond scent and then it was gone.

Nira had ambushed the most obvious target. She hadn’t noticed that he’d prepared his ambush in turn, nor the barrel of spent radium at the foot of the pillar she circled.

Nataruk’s charged shot slashed the top off, spraying her with buckshot made of radioactive metal. 

Her snake head whipped around to track him. She sparkled with a purplish-aura as her Sentient adaptation tried to cope with the influx of radiation. Her whip slashed out…and tangled on her spiked tail. 

As she staggered around inflicting deeper wounds as she tried to untangle herself, he fired spot after shot into the weak spots where he’d already damaged her armor and the seam where the Snake’s head met Mag’s body. One red eye was dark from the buckshot. He made sure it wouldn’t relight.

After an eternity that lasted only a few seconds, she unfurled her whip and darted away from the radium barrel. Realistically, it was a trick that could only work once. She’d be on the lookout for more barrels, and indeed, she let him get in a few more cheap shots while she hunted down the other gas barrels and blew them up. Then Mag started to sway back and forth while Nira stared him down with one good eye. 

He threw down a smoke bomb and ran behind one of the outer ring of pillars. Out here, he was far more exposed to the wind. If not for those scavenged magnet packs, he’d have been blown away. All she had to do was knock him over and he was done for.

But since they both knew that, he could pull yet another trick.

They continued their deadly game of cat and mouse weaving around the pillars. When he had the chance, he threw several smoke grenades. Rather than shooting at her, he used the precious seconds before the wind whipped it away to attach his spare safety line to the outermost two pillars at roughly the correct height where Nira’s head met Mag’s body. He attached his own safety line to a pillar too, since he was given to stupid plans made up on the spur of the moment, not suicidal.

Then he stood on the outer edge. The safety line was next to impossible to see except that he knew what to look for. To ensure she wasn’t looking too hard, he taunted, “For the Eldest Archon, you’re just old and slow!”

She screeched in a long, echoing cry. Too late, he saw the shockwave of her scream ripple towards him.

It hit like a punch in the gut. Then the second wave bowled him over like an ocean breaker and rolled him into the abyss.

Falling down into fathomless layers of clouds, he resigned himself to death. The safety line was going to snap. The harness belt was going to break. Shadow wasn’t going to swoop in and save him. Ordis was still parked at extraction. He couldn’t even say goodbye.

The line caught with a wrench, a jerk, and a crack that was probably his ribs. Oh, he’d feel that in the morning. For a few terrifying seconds, he swung wildly back and forth in the winds before the harness’ retractor kicked in and hauled him upwards. For an added miracle, he’d even held onto Nataruk with an appropriate deathgrip.

Hand over hand, magnet clamp over magnet clamp, he clambered back up onto the platform, wincing at the pressure climbing put on his ribs. Mag had started her regular patrol; now, she turned around. Nira’s working eye went as big as a plate.

“That’s right. I’m not dead yet. Better finish me off with your own hands this time.”

She rushed at him, hands outstretched like claws, fangs bared. When she hit the safety line, it and she jerked hard from the impact. It sliced deep into her neck. The snake head flopped to the right. Exposed sentient “bones” gleamed wetly as the line cut to the spine.

Still, despite the devastating blow, she still staggered around. He charged Nataruk for a shot right between the exposed vertebrae.

Mag fell to her knees. Nira’s head lolled on the ground, lifeless.

For now. He stumbled toward her, though his treacherous body insisted that his foe was dead, the fight was over, and so he really didn’t need that much adrenaline pumping. His knees grew weak and his limbs felt like water.

“Get it together,” he grabbed Rumblejack with nerveless fingers. “She’s not dead until I’ve made sure of it.”

Red sentient energy gathered along her limbs. Before his horrified eyes, her wounds started knitting together.

“No, please, I can’t do this again.” 

His exhausted muscles heard his plea and ignored him. Nira’s head twitched to life. Both red eyes slitted in his direction. He froze, gauging how best to get to the crystal in her neck without taking a deadly snake bite.

Too late. Mag surged back to her feet.

“Fuck my life.” He used a health restore and traded Rumblejack for Nataruk. This was going to be a short, brutal battle. He’d still put up a good fight before he died.

Archon Nira bared her fangs. Mag sprang into the air once more.

Except this time, there was a black hook protruding from the center of her chest. Nira’s red eyes went huge, then dark. With a wet, sucking noise, first the crystal was pulled from their neck, then the scythe from her back.

As she fell to the wayside, the Shadow held out the crystal to him in offering.

“Thank you, I-” Words failed him at that moment. He took the crystal and wrapped it up securely in his cloaks, then lashed it to his waist so there was no chance of damaging the precious thing.

“Tell Hunhow I’ll make sure Natah eats her veggies.”

Shadow nodded, and vanished. 

Hunhow said, "Be careful. My daughter will not be the same. Death leaves its mark, even for us." Chimes signaled his departure, leaving the Drifter alone on the platform with a dead Archon.

Chapter Text

"Yeah, death leaves a mark," the Drifter muttered to the inert Archon. "So do near-death experiences. I'm not going to forget this one anytime soon."

As he spoke, the snake’s head dissolved into a wisp of eidolon energy. He watched the wind snatch it up and carry it away without even enough energy to worry about it coming back to bite him later. That left Mag kneeling with a stump of a neck where her head should be.

The rest of her was exactly as he'd been, well, fantasizing about pretty much since the  encounter on Earth and then Hunhow's little show. Except that in his fantasies, she was very much alive and (unlike Umbra) willing to be his warframe. 

Those power fantasies clung on deep in his mind with sharper talons than mere lust. Ordis' beloved Operator had an arsenal of willing warframes that allowed him to battle Grineer and Corpus in their legions. Their powers and prowess meant the Operator never failed to rescue his hostages. 

Not so the Drifter. 

He'd even knelt in front of a warframe a hundred times over, trying to form that same bond, and failed every time. He just didn't have his Void powers yet. In the meantime, rejection stung, and one of those warframes who'd rejected him was a non-Prime Mag. 

"I'm not bitter, Mag, really," he sighed. "It'd just be nice to be wanted for myself once in a while instead of as a discount Operator who can't possibly save everyone without help."

Of course there was no answer. "Ah, whatever. Ordis has probably worried himself into a frenzy. I hope he's safe with as long as this has taken."

The Archon's interference should be gone. Retreating to the relative shelter of the inner pillars, he commed Ordis. "Hey, are you still there?"

"You're alive!"

Even Little Duck's additions to their ciphered voice masking couldn't hide Ordis' surprised delight. He broke into a contagious smile. "Yeah. I'm still kicking. Pretty banged up though. Can you pick me up or do I need to fight my way back down to you?"

"I will warm up the engines."

"My cracked ribs say you're the best ship Cephalon ever."

He turned back to the decapitated warframe. He couldn't just leave her here for Erra to desecrate with a new Archon head or tie up in some experimental lab like that other sentient. It seemed a real shame to give her a burial in Jupiter's core.

When he went back out and lifted her wrist, it was as heavy as he expected of synthesized flesh as hard as sword-steel, with just a hint of resilience. She wasn't human anymore. Perhaps she was something more than human; Orokin biomechanical engineering at its finest. He let her wrist fall. It dropped limp to her side. There was no reaction.

Death left its mark, even for one brought back to unlife against her will. Not certain what he'd do if the answer was "no," he asked Ordis, "Theoretically, could you repair an archonized warframe?"

Ordis took so long to answer that he repeated the question. 

Very reluctantly, he answered, "Yes - NO - Theoretically. She'll need her systems and neuroptics completely rebuilt, and a new undamaged chassis. The Operator did not have any blueprints for Mag Prime. The Operator could brave a Void Fissure to crack their spare relics, but you - WOULD BE INSANE ENOUGH TO TRY - would not survive the Void contamination without your powers."

"But she can be repaired." Therefore, he definitely couldn't leave her or bury her here in good conscience. He steadfastly ignored the small voice of common sense that said, 'That's not your conscience, dumbass. You're thinking with the little head,' and the parts of him that liked the feel of her sword-steel body against his as he gathered her up and slung her over his shoulder. 

"Sorry, Mag, but you're way too heavy for a bridal carry." As it was, his back and ribs protested at the effort of hauling her out of the wind.

At the whine of engines, he stashed her behind a pillar and drew Nataruk on the approaching Condor dropship until it got close enough to see his own hull number. Ordis guided it up to the edge and lowered the landing ramp. He heaved her up again and trudged towards the ship.

Then the landing ramp started retracting, stranding them on the platform.

"Ordis, what the-"

"I cannot let you bring THAT THING onboard. Dump her over the side."

He stopped dead, one hand on her cool, smooth back. "What are you talking about? She's a warframe. Once I get my Void powers, crack those relics, and you repair her, I should be able to transference with her."

"She is UNACCEPTABLY DAMAGED and there may still be Sentient inside of her DRIVING HER CRAZY. She could hurt you. Ordis cannot allow you to come to harm."

"Oh really? Then land the fucking ship so I can get my ass out of here!"

Slowly, in reluctant fits and bursts, the landing ramp lowered once more. He waited a few extra seconds to make sure Ordis wouldn't get cold feet, then marched onboard.

Out of the wind, he was shaking not with relief, but with anger. He strapped Mag down in one of the crew seats so she wouldn't get "accidentally" ejected. Then he stormed up to the cockpit and got up in the small Cephalon's face.

"Don't you dare play games like that with me in a combat zone. Ever. Again. Are we clear?"

Ordis dropped about a foot in the air. If he could wilt at the scolding, he would look like a kicked dog. His running lights, however, flashed wildly like he had something to say or wanted to burst into tears. Nonetheless, he scooted out of the way so the Drifter could take the controls and make their way through Customs.

Dealing with Veiled bureaucrats was a surprisingly effective outlet for his anger, so as they latched onto the Solar Rail and flung sunward back to the Lotus, he reconsidered the incident. In all the time they'd spent together since he stumbled on the Orbiter,  never before had Ordis actually worked up the courage to flat out tell him 'No', no matter how stupid or dangerous the plan was. Playing petty games with his safety simply wasn't in his nature.

Ordis' running lights flashed and flickered when he pulled back his hood and made eye contact. "Hey. I think you'd better tell me what's the matter."

The little Cephalon fluttered back to the crew compartment. He followed over to the headless Mag strapped into her seat and put his hand on her slender shoulder.

"She's dangerous."

"No shit." Everything ached. "I'm going to need a warframe eventually."

"Not this one."

"Why not? Help me understand."

"She is like Umbra. An old warframe in pain - FERAL, CRAZY, UNACCEPTABLY DAMAGED and DANGEROUS!"

"Like Umbra?" Far from killing his interest, that warning only fueled the fire. "So you're saying that if I earn her loyalty - and I've already rescued her - I'll have a battle partner who can fight alongside me too?"

"NO!" Ordis wailed. "Operator, don't do this to me again!"

His plea was like a bucket of ice water poured over lust and power fantasy alike. "Again?"

Ordis quivered in misery. "I rebuilt Umbra after Ballas blew him to pieces. My brave Operator insisted on transference even though I warned him not to. Umbra - he, he hurt the Operator! CUT HIS HEAD CLEAN OFF. Right in front of me. I couldn't help. Please, don't do that to me again."

Never in his envious fantasies had he considered that Void powers would not be enough for successful transference. Never thought that she might still reject him, violently…and he really hadn't been thinking with the right head, had he?

He wasn't some white knight to her, rescuing her from a dragon like he’d imagined the Operator putting Umbra back together. No, he'd killed her after barely surviving those two fights. If he tried to transference with the arrogant attitude that he could repair her, kiss her, and make all that pain better, he'd be lucky if all she cut off was his head. 

He could almost hear Hunhow mocking him for such a vainglorious death. And he'd completely deserve it.

"Alright, I won't do anything stupid," he said, and reluctantly released her shoulder. He held out his hand. Ordis bumped against it. "Thanks for looking out for me."

He wasn't quite ready to give up those fantasies, of power and otherwise. But until he had a willing warframe who wanted him, he'd keep them to the privacy of his bunk.

Chapter Text

When the disembodied hand first plummeted from the sky like a meteor, the Drifter just stood there looking at it in a depressed stupor. What was the point of trying to do anything different in this plane where Dominus Thrax ruled and any attempt to subvert his rule was punished with one death after another? Nothing ever changed, no matter what he did. Nothing ever would.

And so the Dax soldiers collected the hand from the crater and executed him on their way back to Thrax.

When the disembodied hand first plummeted from the sky like a meteor, the Drifter jerked free of the Dax holding him ready for execution and scrambled down the side of the crater for it. Nothing was ever going to change in these stagnant, colorless Planes of Duviri unless he did something about it. 

Later, after he'd made his escape from Thrax's palace guards (he'd been hunted down when he tried to hide, chased down when he tried to run, stolen a Dax's horse and got eaten by the Orowyrm Lodun several times, then found out the damned beast could fly away from Lodun), he examined the hand.

It wasn't human, that was for sure. It's artificial flesh twitched. The amputated wrist blew out wisps of some strange energy he didn't recognize. Far more concerning were the wisps of energy he did recognize: the taint of its passage through the Void clung to this hand like the stench of shit.

Now he recognized the hand. He had seen it before in the dark, claustrophobic hell that his classroom plunged into after the failed jump to Tau. In the beam of his faltering globelight, the mirror image of his own self bared its teeth in a grin no one would call friendly, held out this severed hand in a mockery of a handshake, and offered, "I can save them all. But you have to want it."

He'd looked into his own Void-maddened eyes and known that no matter how bad it was going to get for him and his classmates as fires raged on the lower decks and the howls of their parents got closer and closer to their flimsy barricade, it couldn't possibly be worse than taking that deal.

"I didn't take the deal then. I'm not taking it now," he said, and dropped it over the first cliff face he found into the abyss.

Later, after he'd made his escape from Thrax's palace guards and Lodun on the back of his loyal steed Kaithe, he examined the hand. 

It's fingers twitched with phantom pain and he wondered if the threads of energy trailing from its severed wrist still connected it to the original body. If so, then in a strange way, he already owed the mysterious real owner of the hand for lending him their power to escape from Thrax. 

"I'll bet you don't want to end up as one of the King's toys either," he muttered to it. "Look, I'm neither making nor taking any sort of creepy deal here, but we should totally team up to get out of this fucked up place."

When the hand's power led him to an ally, Bombastine, and then to the mask he needed, he figured they'd agreed to the partnership.

So, when the hand then led him to a rift into another version of reality, he didn't hesitate as much as he should have to step out of colorless Duviri and into a ruin.

Ferns and vines swallowed up stones sheathed in white metal and gilded ornamentation. Rainwater poured down through cracks in the roof and pooled on one quarter of the circular room. In the center, moss-coated statues of two men and a woman knelt in a line.

"Wow, the Orokin really let this place go." What had happened to the Empire since the Zariman? They sent the ship to colonize Tau because the Origin System's resources were overexploited; had they given up the effort? It seemed impossible that the Emperors and the Executors who carried out their wishes could fall, yet here was proof to the contrary.

Something shuffled out of a small chamber to join him. He tensed, but it was only an old man with a walking stick. No, an old Dax leaning on a bladed fighting staff, who'd probably just taken offense to his comment like a good loyal servant to the Executors who'd ordered the children of the Zariman starved for the sins of a few adults.

"Whatever happened to the Orokin, they deserved it," he spat.

"Most certainly," the old Dax said, much to his surprise. "You, on the other hand, most certainly don't deserve the help you're getting."

He looked at the time-worn statues, the mask on his belt, the hand on his hand, and the old man mocking him, and laughed. "What help?" Then he turned around and walked back out of the rift, right onto the blade of Thrax's champion Denphius Dax.

He looked at the time-worn statues, the mask on his belt, the hand on his hand, and the old man mocking him, and frowned. "What help?"

The old man shook his head. "Sometimes I don't know why the you on the Other Side bothers." He pointed at the statues. "Warframes. You will find no better battle partner if you can persuade one to serve as your envoy."

He untangled the male warframe on the left end on the line from his thicket of ferns, and knelt in front of him. 

"Excalibur." The old Dax muttered. 

The warframe's shoulder was smooth metal and ceramic armor. Tiny dulled lights marked where its eyes should be.

"So, uh, do you want to fight together?"

"You use Transference, you dolt."

He glared at the Dax. "You could've said something before I made a fool out of myself." At least he knew what Transference was - rumor said that the Executors could read minds and speak directly into their citizens' hearts.

So he turned back to Excalibur and concentrated. Even though he was no Executor, he sensed a presence right in front of him. It felt like a warrior, not unlike the old Dax. He reached out to it.

The warrior examined him, found him wanting, and pushed him firmly back into his own mind.

"Well, fuck you too," he growled. He stormed back out of the rift, not heeding whatever warning the old, useless Dax called out, and promptly got impaled by Denphius.

He stepped into the water pool to clear the vines off the male warframe on the right end of the line, then knelt in front of him. The water dripping from his cloak and boots didn't aid his concentration, but eventually he found the presence.

That warrior likewise examined him, found him wanting, and pushed him back into his own mind. 

"Oh, come on," he protested, and tried to grab ahold of the presence.

His heart seized up, and when he woke up, he was lying on his back just out of the shallow water staring up at the old Dax.

"I don't think Volt likes you much," the Dax said, stumping away. "When you leave, take my swords. You'll need them to stand a chance against that mockery of a Dax."

He sat up, rubbing his aching chest where Volt had shocked him. "I'd thank you for not letting me drown, but we both know you're doing the bare minimum for me. Keep your swords and your warframes. I'll do this without you."

Even though Bombastine's decree of fire enhanced his fists, fiery punches were pretty useless against Denphius Dax's blade. Dominus Thrax's firestorm head in the sky laughed as he took wound after wound, and then the trees burst into flowering blossoms when he died.

Finally, he knelt in front of the woman. Once he wiped away the dust of centuries' neglect, the depths of her helmet’s faceplate spun with stars. "Mag," he said, mind to mind and heart to heart, "I need your help to get out of Duviri. I know I'm not that much to look at yet. I don't know what I'll do if you reject me too. I've tried everything else and nothing's worked. Please."

Her presence examined him. He held his breath.

She didn't immediately reject him, as the others had. She searched him, looking for something. Some intangible quality that made him acceptable as a battle partner, he guessed.

Whatever she was looking for, he desperately hoped he had it.

As gently as one might handle a bruised reed, she pushed him back to himself.

He would honestly rather she crushed all his bones to powder.

As he left to face yet another lonely death, the old man said, "Go on, wallow in your routine. But take my old blades if you want a chance against that mockery of a Dax."

He paused. The old man sat there, hands clasped around his staff, studiously pretending that he didn't care what he decided. 

"How many more times does it take me to succeed?" He demanded. 

"You don't," the old man said, still not meeting his eyes. "Not here, not now. You've asked me that question more times than you remember. But maybe this time you listen and take my swords."

Denphius died with Sun in his gut and Moon in his throat. Dominus Thrax threw a tantrum (because of course he did) and sent the Orowyrm Lodun after him. And though he'd much rather have a warframe with which to face down Lodun, Kaithe and the dual nikanas would do for now.

He died gloriously.

Deniphius died with Sun in his gut and Moon in his throat. As Thrax started his tantrum, the Drifter guided Kaithe into the relative safety of the caves to wait out the Orowyrm's rampage and made a promise to himself.

Someday, he'd have what Mag was looking for.

Chapter Text

The Drifter's stomach rumbled. He flipped a couple of sizzling protein nutricubes around in the skillet until they were seared.

He wasn't actually hungry. He'd learned a long time ago to go into any potential fight on a full stomach whenever he could, and so this time he'd eaten a hot meal before he offered the Wolf Archon's crystal to the starving Lotus, and promptly been proven wise as she tried to rip his face off, chased him through his camp, and then strangled him.

But that fight had been the impetus for that long awaited event: he had his Void powers now. In that brief handshake with his other self, the Operator, he'd picked up on scattered memories and phantom sensations. He'd probably given just as much in exchange to the teenager (which was all sorts of embarrassment he wasn't going to dwell on too closely), but what really mattered right now was that the Operator was starving.

Literally.

On cue, the door to their dormizone chimed. "Come on in, food's nearly done." He called.

The Operator walked in, then stared curiously between him and the picture of their parents on the wall. The teen was lean, athletic, and tall…for his age, which meant he came midway up to the Drifter's chest. He said, "Oh, I am so jealous that you got Dad's height."

"Growing up is a thing." He held out a pair of chopsticks which the Operator grabbed. "Take a seat."

In this cozy apartment on an abandoned ghost ship long lost to the Void, where multiple versions of realities intersected because they must in order to exist in the first place, they sat down across their kitchen table and dug into twin trays of nutricubes sourced from the Zariman Holdfasts in one of those versions of reality that either had or hadn't happened yet depending on who was asking. It was all chronologically confusing enough to only make sense to an Entrati expert in Eternalism...but no less real for that.

"Thanks." The Operator said, taking small bites from the protein and carbs cubes with practiced discipline rather than gorging himself to sickness.

"Don't mention it." They'd both starved on their Zariman before the Void Jump; the difference was that the Operator got rescued from that fire right into an Orokin frying pan. The Drifter, meanwhile, got stuck in Duviri on his long journey home, only gotten out of there thanks to the Operator's figurative and the Lotus' literal helping hand, and had then done his best to return the favor by saving the Lotus. "I can't complain about how things have worked out for me in the end. Is Ordis okay?"

"Yeah. The Lotus only busted his remote body. He's back on the Orbiter, which I reactivated for you. Or me. Whichever."

"So you got all your warframes back."

"Yeah, and I'm sorry about Umbra. He's kind of an overprotective dad. For good reason, but still that’s no excuse for trying to kill you. We had a talk."

"In hindsight, I really should’ve known better than to push my luck with a warframe when I wasn't wanted. I'm you, and you're me, but-"

"But you're not the me who helped Umbra beat Ballas' sick games and find peace." The Operator gestured between them with the chopsticks. "And I'm not the you who fought two Archons without Void powers to get the Lotus back on her feet, so don't sell yourself short."

"She's not all the way there yet," he warned. "I still had one more Archon crystal to go. Should be quick and easy for you and Umbra."

"Or you and one of my other warframes."

They stared at each other, both feeling the weight of the decision that hung in the air and its far-reaching ramifications for their futures.

According to Eternalism, a choice had to be made: only one of them left the Zariman in this version of reality. Only one of them chased after the Lotus as she rushed off a hell-bent quest for revenge. Only one of them fought Executor Ballas to save the Origin System from Narmer rule.

According to Eternalism, the other version of reality was no less real and remained theoretically accessible.

In another version of reality, the Drifter said, "She saved you. Here's your chance to return the favor, kiddo. Kick Ballas where it hurts for the both of us and bring her back safe."

In this version of reality, the Operator said, "You got her most of the way back to fighting shape. You've more than earned the right to see this through. More than earned the right to my Arsenal and warframes.”

Once upon a time in Duviri, he’d have been very excited by that declaration. Now, older, wiser, and having fought two Archons with his own wits, a dinky pistol, an electrified machete, and Nataruk, he was even more eager. Though desecrated by Erra, Mag and Rhino Prime were an order of magnitude more effective than he was. He was going to fight Sentients on their own ground for the first time, and a purpose-built warframe was exactly the way to do it.

There was only one problem that had him tamping down his anticipation: “You’ve tried to lend me your warframes before. Back in Duviri. Whatever they were looking for in me, I didn’t have it. Are your Void powers enough?”

“No, void powers aren’t enough.” The Operator said.

As he'd suspected, and dreaded ever since that conversation with Ordis after Jupiter. “Then, how do I transference with a warframe?”

“We have a bond. My warframes were made from unwilling ‘volunteers’ betrayed by their Orokin masters. They have to know that you’re there for them like they are for you. Do you know who my first warframe was?"

He frowned at the apparent non-sequitur. It wasn't one of the fleeting memories he'd gotten in the exchange either. "Excalibur? He's the one who looks like Umbra," he guessed.

"No. My first, and for a long time only, warframe was Mag."

Her name brought up old shame and new desire. The Operator's knowing look made it clear he’d gotten enough of those particular feelings in the exchange to know what was going on. He grimaced with embarrassment. "Look, I'm sorry."

"Why? She was the older sister looking out for me that I needed at the time. You take good care of her, you hear me?"

Oh, the Operator knew what he wanted, alright, and he approved.

Setting aside the awkward feeling of asking the younger sibling for permission to date the older, he circled back around to the source of his doubts. “The last time I tried to transference with your Mag, I didn't have what she was looking for. If she's not looking for Void powers, then I haven’t changed.”

“Haven’t you?” the Operator asked, knowingly. “Well, I can’t speak for her. You’ll just have to gird your loins and ask her if you’ve become the man she wants.”

Put like that, either he was or he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, he’d be heading off to fight Ballas in the heart of Narmer power with nothing but a dinky pistol, an electrified machete, and Nataruk, so he’d better not waste time. He held up his cup. "To victory."

"To victory," the Operator drank, and sputtered.

"Good stuff, ain't it?"

"How'd you get some of Hombask's special homebrew stash - uh…how do I remember that? Eh, I'll probably figure it out how you got it by exploring the Zariman here while you clean up Narmer's mess out there, won't I?"

"Yeah, something like that. One of us has to earn this dormizone so we can sit here, and I'm otherwise occupied with kicking in Ballas' face for the next little while."

He showed the Operator where the remaining nutricubes were stashed, pointed him to the elevators up to the Chrysalith where the Holdfasts were once and might be again after the kid did his thing, and then they parted. He whistled as he walked back through empty, dark halls to the Liset landing craft. The small, arrowhead shaped ship was considerably faster and more comfortable than the Condor. Then it connected to the much larger Orbiter.

Fully reactivated, the Orbiter had its air conditioning running, bright lights on, and a pleasant citrus scent that mostly hid the mildew from sitting half submerged in a cave system while the Operator was gone. The Foundry hummed away as its printing arm constructed a curved greatsword nearly as tall as he was molecule by molecule.

"I could get used to living in the lap of luxury," he murmured.

Ordis flew up to him and flashed a couple scanners over him.

“Good to see you too, buddy.”

"Operator! You've returned! But, uh, where is my Operator?"

"Hey." He held out his hand. Ordis bumped it. "Your Operator is safe enough, just chronologically confused. That's sort of 'a feature not a bug' on the Zariman. Once we save the Lotus and beat Ballas, he and I can both freely visit this version of reality, just not at the same time."

Ordis' owl eyes went cross-eyed.

"Sorry, I can't explain temporal axioms and conceptual embodiment in a way that makes sense without an Archimedean's decree in Entrati Void Philosophy that I don't have," he apologized, "But, we know it's true because we've already done it. Just don't ask how."

"YOU'VE CRACKED." Ordis pronounced, then in a cheery voice, announced, "I have taken the liberty of rebuilding Paracesis so you can - CUT BALLAS' BALLS OFF AND FEED - ahem, cut him down to size." He floated off towards the Arsenal. "I have also warmed up a warframe from cold storage. The Operator left specific instructions."

Specifically, Mag. If this worked, he owed the kid more than just a bit of Hombask’s homebrew.

Unfortunately, on the way down to the Arsenal, the first warframe he laid eyes on was Umbra. The black-gold warframe rested his hands on the skiajati nikana’s hilt. Nope, no chance of a bond there.

“Hey, I promise your Operator’s safe.”

Umbra nodded.

“And I promise I’m not going to try anything stupid with you now that I’ve got Void powers too.”

Umbra nodded.

“Uh, are the two headless sleeping beauties doing okay down there?”

Umbra nodded. Then he released the skiajati, stepped way too close, and took the Sirocco pistol from his belt. He headed back into the Arsenal with it.

“Hey!” Protesting at the indignity of being frisked, he followed and Ordis trailed after him. Umbra stopped at a rack of odd-looking gauntlets that he now recognized from the Operator’s memories as “amps” that amplified their innate Void powers. The warframe started taking one apart and fitting the pieces to Sirocco. “Hey, that’s my gun. If anyone’s gonna modify it, it's me.”

Ordis fluttered down between them. “The Operator lets Umbra mod his weapons.”

“In case you hadn't noticed, I’m me, not the Operator. My guns; my mods.”

“We don’t have time for you to experiment. The Lotus is making a beeline from your camp to Cetus.”

That put a rather different spin on things. He’d only seen the lights of Cetus from a distance, but it was a place spoken of by the Ostrons he’d rescued in tones of wonder and grief. Known far and wide as the greatest open market in the System, it'd been a place where peace and prosperity was guaranteed by the spirit Unum and her Tower.

Now it had a Narmer Deacon for every Ostron man in the tribe and a Sentient Murex ship parked on top of Unum Tower like a sentry turret.

He sighed. “She’s hungry. She’s angry. And I think I hurt her when I stopped her from killing me. She’s not exactly thinking straight. Or maybe she is, just thinking in straight lines. That Murex must be the fastest way for her to get to that final Archon and then Ballas. We’ve got to intercept.” Otherwise, In her current state, Ballas was going to rip her nervous system out by the roots and remake her again and again into whatever he wanted.

Which meant he couldn’t dally any longer, fearing one more rejection. He turned to Mag.

She stood in the Arsenal like a warrior at attention rather than swaying like Archon Nira. There was no mistaking the slender grace of her limbs, nor the delightful curves of her very female form, nor her strength. She was as tall as him and held a shotgun that would break his shoulder if he tried to fire it. Stars swirled in her helmet’s faceplate. He could get lost staring at her for hours if he had the luxury.

She was no Umbra, that much was clear. She waited for Transference to bring energy to her limbs. Which was a pity. If it turned out that he was the man she was looking for, he would have liked to sink into her embrace. On the other hand, if he wasn’t the man she was looking for, at least the worst she’d do was push him back into himself.

“Hey, Mag. It's been a while. No hard feelings from last time - okay, that’s a white lie, but I understand now. Back then, I wasn’t who I should have been. I was too quick to give up. Too stubborn to accept help when I needed it and then too quick to wallow when I didn't succeed first try."

"I think I’ll be a better battle partner now if you’ll give me another chance. I'd really like your help with defeating Narmer. But if you won’t, that’s okay too. I’m done with those days of wallowing in routine. Ballas won’t stop unless someone makes him, and that someone is me.”

He reached out to her presence, mind to mind, heart to heart -

-and she met him halfway.

Though he didn't move and neither did she, her presence embraced him. She examined him, as if her hand traced the deep lines worn on his face.

"You've grown," she said. Her voice was low and sweet.

"Yeah. You've-"

Theirs was a two-way bond. Just as she knew everything there was to know about him from the child fighting with everything he had to get off that deathtrap of a colony ship to the man who ached through lonely nights wishing for someone to hold him, he knew everything about her.

She had been a bright-eyed Dax defender on an Entrati research station, eager to protect all that was good in the Empire any way she could, up until the Golden Lords sacrificed her to the Infestation. She'd meant those oaths with every fiber of her being until they warped her into a mere tool under their control: a warframe. She'd been as trapped under their thumb as he was under Thrax's, until she met a child forced into the same predicament. Together, she and the Operator hatched a plan, then led the Tenno through the Old War into rebellion against the Orokin, and afterwards on a quixotic quest to make their Origin System whole again.

She was still that bright-eyed, hopeful woman, hoping the Drifter would help her protect all that was good in this shattered System. Just like she sensed his carnal desire for her, he knew her desire for a lover's companionship in that monumental purpose, not a little brother.

"-You've waited a long time for me." He said, and then they were one flesh, mind and heart beating in tandem, sharing the same purpose.

Chapter Text

With the Orbiter's sensor suite, Ordis determined that the Lotus was approaching Cetus from the fastest straight-line approach - over the sea. To make up for lost time, they abandoned the Drifter's usual cautious approach of spoofing patrols in his Bolkor dropship. Instead, the Liset lander screamed through the high atmosphere with Mag nestled into a warframe-shaped wall in its hull. 

That was all well and good until the wall  started rotating. She had a firm grip on the handles already, but when the wind shrieked through the gap and he got a good look at Mer-Sah Bay, Cetus, and the tower of Unum looking no bigger than toys below, that grip went white-knuckled.

"Relax," she advised, amusement flowing along their transference bond like a rippling brook. "If heights aren't your thing, I'll get us down safely. I do this literally all the time."

Kaithe, like a sensible flying horse, never flew this high. "Uh, hang on-," he said, but then the rotating segment exposed them fully to the wind. She let go, plummeting toward their drop zone hundreds of meters below. 

On Jupiter, there’d been nothing but fathomless depths and swirling clouds to worry about. Here, instinct had him spreading his arms and legs apart like a starfish before he'd even made a conscious decision that he didn't want to splat across the grasslands.

Then the wind resistance caught them and tumbled them through the air. They were still falling nearly as fast as before, except now he couldn't see the drop zone for the landing, had no idea where he was in relation to the ground, and that was far worse.

"Relax." This time, she made it an order.

"Sorry." He did his best. It wasn't easy when land and sky tumbled together.

Back in control, she folded her arms and legs back together, righting them until they fell straight down. Carefully, she spread herself out to control the descent and line them up with the landing. "I am the hand and you are the will. Together, we fight as one."

Put like that, it sounded like this 'battle partner' business was closer to learning to ride a horse than he'd thought. When he first stole Kaithe, he'd been a controlling rider with a heavy hand on the reins. "Look, fair warning, it took me a couple dozen loops in Duviri before I figured out that Kaithe did in fact know everything about how to be a flying horse.”

The ground was fast approaching, quick enough that he couldn't help but tense up in anticipation of impact. "And we don't have a couple dozen loops for me to practice."

"I'll help you." Despite him, she landed on her feet like a perfectly balanced gymnast. "See?"

On the first step, she stumbled. He mumbled, "Yeah, I see your center of gravity is a lot lower. Sorry, I'm trying."

Their dropzone was just outside the rocky escarpment that normally marked the beginning of Unum’s protective, pacifying field over Cetus. Narmer had done away with the field quickly. According to the Ostrons he rescued, the first shot of the war had been when Narmer dropped a Murex battleship right on top of Unum. Since then, they’d been rotating their fleet through Cetus, not to trade at the market but rather to recharge their ships from Unum’s essence. 

In a rather sick way, he supposed it wasn’t too different from what Erra did to make Nira or Ballas intended to do the Lotus. To them, the Unum was nothing more than a source of temple kuva to be exploited to their ends.

It certainly sickened the Ostron, many of whom resisted Narmer and either got Veiled or died trying. It sickened the Quills more than most. They - or so the Ostrons he’d rescued reported in reverent terms - were adherents of Unum and Architects of her Will, and they were either dead, in hiding under her orders, or absolute legends of the resistance who bombed Narmer encampments or rescued people who went on to be legends themselves. So naturally, half the people he rescued assumed that he was a Quill no matter what he said otherwise.

Presumably, the Lotus wanted to steal the Murex currently recharging itself so she could take her revenge on Ballas.

So they looked for the hidden door in the escarpment through which the Quills got in and out of Cetus unseen. He was a little hopeful that when he finally met a Quill for the first time, they’d be everything rumor painted them and not just a mystic cult making up a ghost in a tower.

She got him to the door with a series of movements that were uniquely Tenno, leveraging his Void powers and her athletic strength to leap, bound, and cling to the rock walls. At her touch, the door slid open. The cave under the escarpment was empty, lit by a single lantern of lanx oil that had burned halfway down. At the far side, another door led into the markets.  "The Quills were here not long ago," she said. "I had hoped they'd help you work out how to use your Void abilities before you had to fight. We'll look for Konzu, the tribal elder, instead."

But halfway through the room, they hit an invisible wall. It flashed red for an instant, and then with a splitting headache, it tore them apart. She collapsed to her knees, inanimate as a statue. The Drifter stumbled free. The pain in his head was gone as quickly as it had come on, but so was Mag. There was emptiness and aching silence where she should be.

He grabbed her shoulder. Staticky bursts threatened to overwhelm his vision, but at least he could feel her presence again. "Are you okay?"

"Orphix fields," she gasped. "A Sentient adaptation that suppresses transference. You'll have to go in alone."

"Alone?" Despite Nataruk and everything else, he felt oddly bereft. "But we only just found each other."

Through the static, she sent back a feeling of utter confidence in him. "Destroy the orphix generators or, better yet, reactivate Unum, and I will rejoin you from trasference."

As much as his gut instinct was to argue there was no way he was going into a Narmer stronghold without her, she certainly hadn't waited centuries for a man who'd fall apart because he suddenly didn't have a warframe anymore. This mission was no less daunting than fighting an Archon alone, so he'd get it done. 

As he crept through the back alleys of Cetus, the sprawling market was eerily silent. Just like the Solaris in Fortuna, veiled Ostrons stood listless at their stalls while Deacons prowled around.

He spotted a elderly man with a more ornate Veil than most near the high gate to the Plains, presumably Konzu. There wasn't an easy way to sneak to him. He'd have to use smoke bombs and hope for the best, unless those Void powers he needed to learn how to use could do something here. Could they?

Instead of smoke, he called the Void in a cloud. It deadened his footsteps and enshrouded him like a cloak. The Deacons' fiery gaze glanced past and through him, and never noticed when he crept up behind the old man and grabbed for his Veil.

The old man had a sharp elbow. Worse, the ornate Veil had a tighter grip than any he'd broken before. Then Konzu headbutt him hard enough to crack his hood's visor and knock it loose.

Through the pain, he recalled that Mag used his Void powers to cling to the rock walls. He used it now to stand his ground, hold firm, and wrench the Veil free. 

That wasn't all. In the moment that it came free, his connection to the Void spread out over the old man like a shield and sank into him like a healer's salve.

"Ai yo," the man groaned and stretched, standing upright and then, after staring at him, demanded, "How long has it been?"

Long enough that the old man should have been disoriented and befuddled by the loss of Ballas's guiding voice like so many others, but there was none of that expected confusion in sharp eyes that recognized his face, looked down to his amp, looked around for an absent warframe, and then scanned his town with mounting fury. "How long have they desecrated Unum?!"

"Not as long as you fear, Konzu." There'd be time later to explain that he wasn't the Operator all grown up. "I need to save her and get up onboard that Murex."

"Of course we need to tear down that overgrown Sentient leech. Are there any more of you Quills around?"

So the Operator was a Quill? In hindsight, that explained a lot. He repeated Mag’s vague assurance that “They were here not long ago," and hoped she was right.

"Then they'll show up where we least expect them and most need them," Konzu said. "Free Hok and the other members of the militia. We'll be the backup you need."

Hok was the Cetus blacksmith. A Deacon personally guarded him and the Zaw weapons hanging on the wall of his stall. With every blow of the hammer on red-hot metal, he declared "All as one. All as one."

This time, the Drifter took no chances with a man who's hammer could bash his face in with a single strike. Gripping with the Void itself, he wrenched the mask free and poured in the same protective, healing energy that had so invigorated Konzu. 

Hok shook him off, already looking for the Deacon. "Where's Pedlak?" He roared at it.

It screamed back at him, "Blasphemer!"

He hurled his hammer. It bounced right off just like pretty much every weapon that wasn't overcharged like Sirocco did.

The mask in the Drifter's hand heated up. Remembering Little Duck's warning on Fortuna, he hurled the mask at the Deacon right before it detonated. The small explosion rocked the fanatic back on his heels long enough for him to grab Hok's shoulder, order him to "Run," and throw a smoke bomb to cover their retreat. He cloaked himself in the Void.

Groping blindly in the smoke, Hok's searching hand found the handle of a axe-headed Zaw held out to him by another man clad in armor grown from the wall-flesh of Unum. When the smoke faded, that man was gone. Hok lifted the Zaw back over his head in a two-handed grip and hurled it at the Deacon. The spinning axe-head split the fanatic's Veil and skull behind it in half.

The Drifter gaped. "What the hell? If only I’d had that in Fortuna.”

Hok stalked over to the Deacon, wrenched the Zaw free of its body, and nodded to him. "The Tenno gilded this weapon for us. I need to find Pedlak. You free our militia. I'll have more Tenno weapons ready for them."

So he did, using the Void to break Veils and heal the freed Ostrons, while Hok and the gathering militia slaughtered their way through the Deacons and their veiled Grineer bully boys. Then Konzu waved them all to the docks, where they clambered onto racks of hot-air balloons. 

He hooked his safety line onto the balloon's standing platform and held on for good measure. An Ostron woman clad in wall-flesh armor and a masked helmet climbed in after him and took over the heater and steering rudder.

As they lifted off she said, "I am Quill Verru, Ceno of the Quills. We have had and will have a long and fruitful association, Architect, for you are an instrument most perfect, tuned to the pitch of the Unum."

Thanks to Mag and Konzu’s warnings, he wasn't nearly as weirded out as he should be. "That's great. You get me to Unum, I get on that Murex before the Lotus does. Yeah?"

"I shall assist."

The way to Unum wasn't exactly clear. Sentient scoutships patrolled the skies. There was no way for the flotilla of slow-moving balloons to escape their notice.

Quill Verru swung from pole to pole to his side of the hanging platform with the ease of someone who’d done it her whole life. Then, with one hand on his belt and the other for a pole, she anchored him more securely than his safety line and clip could. “Now you are free to do what you must.”

Trusting that someone Mag and the Operator trusted wouldn’t betray him, he took up Nataruk. Charged shots ripped through the scoutships like they were paper and sent them plummeting into the bay far below.

The distant cheers of the Ostrons on the other balloons heartened him. He missed Mag, but he wasn't alone. He had allies again. "So what - or who - exactly is Unum?"

"That's a question you answer by your actions," she said cryptically as she went back to the rudder. “Right now, her temple kuva reliquaries are drained by the sentients. Her great spirit is nearly devoured. You must heal the crystals at her heart before she can aid you as seems best to her."

They landed on a balcony about a third of the way up Unum's flank. The militia piled out in rotation, the tower climbers guiding the balloons so as not to tangle in their guide ropes or dump their burdens in the sea below. In the background, a Narmer propaganda broadcaster started speaking in Ballas' voice.

Hok glared at it. "We're not gonna listen to you anymore."

One of the tower climbers went to tear it down, just as Ballas said, "-Tau beyond my grasp."

The Drifter froze. "Wait. I want to hear this."

As the militia established their beachhead, he and Quill Verru listened grimly as Ballas announced his plans to burn down the Origin System in order to make a new start in the Tau system.

"He can't actually burn the System, can he?" Konzu asked.

Quill Verru shrugged. "He believes it."

The Drifter was far more concerned with the Tau System. Could he do it? According to the Archimedeans, it was theoretically possible to make it to Tau in a big, bold leap just as the Zariman had tried - as long as he had enough energy to fuel the journey. If he succeeded, he'd do to the Sentients there what he'd done to them here or worse. If he failed and wound up lost in the Void…that might even be worse yet, since the bargain a man like Ballas would make with the Man in the Wall didn't bear thinking about.

Mostly, it just filled him with fury. Not content to first enslave the Sentients, then sacrifice a colony ship full of millions as his advance guard, Ballas now proposed to slaughter billions to power his "great ascension."

Besides, he too was damned tired of that honeyed voice dripping venom.

He shot out the speaker to the cheers of the militia. They rushed ahead inside Unum, heading for her Temple Kuva reliquaries.

However, they weren't the only person who heard the proclamation. The Lotus put on a greater turn of speed. From their high perch, they could just see the arrow line of her wake over the water. As he watched, she grappled with a Sentient drone, took it over, and flew directly up to the Murex.

"Ordis, can you talk her down?"

"She's ignoring me."

"Then we're running out of time."

A shout from the militia and the chime of Sentient scouts arriving rang out inside. He'd brought his allies here; he wasn't about to let them get slaughtered.

Sensing his resolve, Verru advised, "Whenever you protect us with the Void, you will heal us and do more damage to your enemies."

So it proved, thanks to the arcane mods Umbra had put on Sirocco. When he spread his Void power across the militiamen like a shield, Sirocco overcharged long enough for a full magazine of Void-empowered shots. The first time it blasted the limbs off Conculysts, he'd stared amazed, because no way were Sentients more vulnerable to his dinky little pistol than to Nataruk. But it wasn't exactly dinky anymore, was it? 

The closer they got to the reliquaries, more Sentients massed to stop them. Brachiolysts swarmed into melee range, backed up by flying Battalysts with lasers. He and the Ostrons had Tenno weapons, but not Tenno armor. His Void protection was their best defense in this sort of brutal face-to-face fighting. 

Worse, Zaws were melee weapons and the flying Sentients were the most dangerous. Sirocco and Nataruk could only bring down one at a time for the militiamen to hack to piece...and without Mag, he simply couldn't kill them all fast enough. Inevitably, he and the others took wounds that he had to draw on the Void to heal. Each scream was a brutal reminder of why he'd stuck to lone stealth missions, shooting from the shadows, and facing the Archons one on one at sites of his choosing. This sort of battlefield needed a warframe.

His connection to the Void felt like a well that was going dry. He needed to stop drawing on that connection to let his reserves refill. But if he did, someone was going to die. He kept healing and shielding, and prayed for a break in the fighting.

Instead, they found the crystal reliquaries made of clear Plains quartz, drained and empty.

"They've plundered her." Konzu groaned.

Quill Verru gestured for him to approach the crystals while the militia spread out to protect them as best they could from the waves of oncoming Sentients. "Kuva is the heartbeat of Unum's Oro, that which heals Cetus and the Plains beyond. You have chosen to focus your powers through Vazarin, the School of the Protectors. Tenno like you trained to counter everything the enemy had done."

When he touched a reliquary, it was bone dry, cracked, and parched. 

He'd refilled a bit of his own reserves in those few seconds. Would that be enough to heal Unum? 

There was only one way to find out. He poured every bit of Void power he had into healing the Tower, envisioning it as life-giving water pumped from a well and offered to a parched throat.

Blue light glimmered in the heart of the reliquaries. It flickered like a heart beating again.

"She lives," Konzu shouted in delight, and then shouted again in pain as a Conculyst's laser scorched him.

"For Unum!" Quill Verru shouted, echoed by the other fighters. She dragged Konzu back out of the fray to safety.

Though he was completely drained, the Drifter stepped into his place anyway.

The blue light at their backs beat more steadily, more strongly. The Sentients swarmed, sensing that they must snuff it out. He fired at them again and again, holding them at bay for precious seconds.

Unum's light flared - and so did a spinning Battalyst's beam, slicing across his chest. The laser ripped right through his leather cloak and the Zariman suit beneath, right through flesh and bone.

He tasted blood. He folded over, falling as if through tree sap in winter. Falling as if into a deep well of the Void, connected to the vast ocean beyond comprehension-

-and as he did, he felt the three women connected to him.

The Lotus tearing her way to the control systems of the Murex, had not a thought to spare for him dying. Neither did Natah, nor Margulis. She was wholly focused on revenge.

Unum felt like a buried beacon bursting from the tomb, like a lily blossoming in the rains of spring after a long winter. She sought for her lover. Not finding Gara, she instead found the child of the Zariman 10-0 who protected her now in Gara's stead. 

And finally, there was Mag, reaching for his hand as he fell. He clung to her. Dying was no mystery to him. Not dying alone? That was refreshingly new.

She cried out, "Unum, help me save him!"

At Unum's command, the Orphix static blew away as if torn by storm winds. Her protective shields once again surrounded Cetus. In the markets, Veils dropped from battered faces and confusion cleared from their minds. Former Deacons who'd survived the purge fell to their knees and wept.

Unum's presence rang out through the tower like a sweet, clear bell. 

Hands clasped firmly, the Drifter called and Mag answered. Their transference bond smoothed out like two instruments tuning to the same pitch.

Where he'd fallen, she sprang to her feet. Manipulating gravity itself as her weapon, she pulled the spinning Battalysts down out of the air away from the Ostrons and towards her. The militia, accustomed to working with warframes against the Grineer, cheered as they got out of her way.

The Brachiolysts were pulled close enough to flail at her in melee range. She let her shields take the battering for the moment it took to enclose them in a magnetic field. As if they were made of iron filings and she were a lodestone, every Sentient in the swarm was sucked inward to a tight grouping.

They made a perfect target for a blast from her Boar shotgun. First, she restored her shields by polarizing the magnetic field with an energy pulse, which shredded their armor in the process. Then she unloaded the shotgun, and her magnetic fields sent the buckshot ricocheting through the whole mass.

Then she did it again to their reinforcements.  And again. And again, until the reliquary room was clear.

The Ostrons, no stranger to a warframe's capabilities, cheered and swarmed up the stairs and ladders to the higher levels of the tower.

When he could manage something more coherent than awe at how effectively she’d pulverized a small army, he simply said, "You're amazing." 

Without her, he never could have vaulted past the climbing Ostrons to the next level and the next reliquary crystal. She crumpled ancient Sentients like they were so much cheap metal and then crushed their bones to powder for good measure.

“We were built for war,” she said.

Their bond carried her ambivalence about that. Yes, she was a warrior, and so appreciated that her skill and power enabled her to do what no Dax could. Yes, she was proud to fight with him to save the Origin System once more. No, if she had it all to do again, she’d rather die than become a Warframe.

He knew that feeling all too well. "When we're done, I've got a lovely lakeside retreat with good fishing."

She laughed at that description of his camp as they reached the next reliquary. He stepped out to heal the crystal. When he transferenced with her again, she said, "When we're done with Ballas, there's still work to be done. I'm ready to keep fighting. Do you truly need a break from fighting Narmer?"

Truthfully? "No." He couldn’t fix what had already been done to her with a fishing trip. However, he did know something about having it all to do again - and how the only way out was forward, doing the best one could, no wallowing. "You're my Lady, made for war and ready to keep fighting. With the both of us together, Narmer won't know what hit them."

Despite his brave words and the brightly glowing light of Unum’s heart, when they stepped out onto one of the tower’s balconies to look upwards to the Murex, the clear sky was as dim as a cloudy day. 

He sighed. Whatever Ballas was doing, they had a long way yet to go to stop him.

"One thing at a time." She assured him. "We'll face it together as partners."

Chapter Text

The Murex on top of Unum trembled as Natah gained control.

Behind her, Unum’s light gathered strength, creeping upwards as Mag, the Drifter, and the Ostron militia drove the invasive Sentients away from her Temple Kuva reliquaries and healed her.

Across the bay from Unum, in Cetus, Saya ushered her people into the relative safety of the Quills enclave. Working alongside her, saying nothing, Quill Onkko smiled beneath his mask at the thought of the good future waiting for her and Konzu.

When Nakak discarded her Veil, she’d pulled on her Mag mask instead and took up the task of handing out more gilded weapons to the Ostron women stepping up to defend their town. “Unum lives,” she’d assured them, and now she’d been proven right.

As Unum’s core glowed one level higher, closer to that awful Murex leeching her life, Hai-Luk raised her Peram fishing spear in salute. Built for slashing through the tough hides of lungfish, she’d already cut through the armor of several occupying Grineer who hadn’t gotten the message that the Ostrons wanted their home back.

Unum answered her. A pulse of protective light reignited the great barriers that held back the Grineer, ghouls, and wandering Eidolons. Every Sentient drone hovering over the bay dropped like a rock plummeting into the waves below.

“Unum lives!” At her battlecry, the remaining Grineer fled.

Then the Murex shuddered to life. Its enormous engines lit up. Great plumes of steam billowed out below it.

Inside, the tower shook hard enough to knock everyone but Mag to the ground. In the time it took her to finish off a downed Conculyst with two blasts from her shotgun, the temperature rose faster than a frying pan's. 

"It's powering for orbital launch," the Drifter warned. "Either we get onboard before the Lotus takes off, or we're ashes in her wake."

Quill Verru pointed upward. "Go, Architect, and build our future with Unum's help. Heal her completely and she will shield us.”

So Mag leaped and bounded upward across struts and catwalks. When he clung to the wall too tightly with his Void powers as they scaled the tower's walls of flesh, dodging burning jets from the Murex's engines, she only chuckled. "Believe it or not, you are getting the hang of this." 

“I haven’t dropped us in the bay yet.”

“I’ll count that as a win.”

The Murex engines went into their second burn. The temperature rose high enough to eat away at her shields. She shook her head, grappling onto a balcony railing and swinging inside and away from the scalding steam. “The Lotus didn’t used to be like this."

“She’s hurting.” He said, “She’s not thinking about all the Ostrons she’s going to fry.”

"No, I meant she's not thinking about you ." There came a brief flash of memory: she knelt on the floor of the Orbiter, pain coursing through her chest where she’d been impaled by a large sword. She'd broken it in two to save her Operator, but now her strength was spent and her limbs like water. He lay on the floor nearby like a baby bird that fell from the nest far too early to fly.

Then, there were footsteps at the chamber's door. She strained, but without his driving will, her hands could not protect him from the Stalker’s third attempt to kill him.

Instead, it was the Lotus, come down from her distant throne, garbed in royal purple, and ready for battle. Finding that the Stalker had wisely fled, her gentle arms scooped up the Operator’s weakened body and deposited him into the safety of the somatic link. While they talked, Mag sank back into a pleasant haze waiting for her own repairs. He was safe at last.

“She loved the Operator as her own child. I've never seen her endanger a Tenno like this before.” She said. “I don’t believe for one moment this is who she wants to be.”

“Ballas did a real number on her.” Ever since he'd felt the complex meld of the Lotus, Natah, and Archimedean Margulis going on in one wounded body and traumatized mind, he couldn't hold a grudge over her evident confusion. "She'll figure it out, if we give her the chance."

Accepting that, she gained the crown of Unum just in time for the engines to start their third and final burn. Her armored flesh smoked and burned. He transferenced out for a second to wrap her in Vazarin protection, and even that was enough to dry his leathers to the point of cracking. However, it bought her a couple seconds of invulnerability to leap to the nearest reliquary crystal.

This close to the engines, if the heat didn't flash-fry him, the smoke would choke him. They both knew he couldn't possibly survive long enough to heal Unum completely in one go.

Did it matter? No. He’d endured death loops before, and this time she waited to catch him. He'd heal and die, heal and die, as many times as it took.

He transferenced out. The instant before he burned, the engine's flames stopped in place. 

Smoke literally stopped billowing. 

Unum herself spoke in a sweet voice, cooling the air in her tower like rain on the Plains after a drought, “Dreamer. Let them defile no more.”

In that eternity while Unum stopped time for him to restore her Temple Kuva, Quill Verru led the militiamen into the shelter of the tower's lowest level. Quill Onkko helped Hai-Luk, Nakak, and Saya into the Quills Enclave and sealed the door. Every Ostron was safe within.

In that eternity, Unum called a warning to the descendents of the Plains animals who’d once served as her eyes and ears against the ravenous Sentient. Emperor Condrocs took to the wing, calling their committees to follow them to safety. Kuaka and Kavat packs burrowed into their dens. The Mergoo among the coast ceased their squabbling over nesting sites and dove into the cracked cliffs. 

In that eternity, the Lotus stood at the helm of her Murex, weighing her options. 

Natah wanted revenge on the parasite riding her family, no matter the cost. Margulis grimly accepted that Ballas was beyond redemption. He must be cut out like a cancer before he metastasized to Tau.

The Lotus knew who was chasing her: Tenno. Thanks to the implanted memories of Margulis, the experience of Natah, and her own time spent as Ballas’ captive, she knew him better than anyone alive. She knew he wanted her to kill her child - her friend - for his amusement.

So she knew what she must do. Alone.

Eternity ended. The Drifter finished healing Unum. He transferenced with Mag. A beam shot upward from the heart of Unum into the Murex above.

Natah hammered in the launch sequence. Her Murex shuddered underfoot and then pushed for the sky and space beyond in an earthshaking rumble of thunder and flame. The sea below quivered; the towering waves it produced crashed against Unum's barriers. Other coasts far across the sea were not so fortunate - whole Grineer encampments drowned in their Veils.

Mag stepped fearless into the beam of light. She flew upward, faster than the Murex, and landed on the black bones of the Sentient who’s body formed the ship.

“We’re here.” He said, then admitted, “Uh, I have no idea where to go now.”

She unholstered her shotgun. “I fought on these during the Old War. I remember the way.”

She remembered the way well enough to unlock the warp gates. Though the sensation of traveling unprotected through deep space only to land on a foreign area was even worse than Jupiter's catwalks, he relaxed into her confidence and switched to a task only he could do. "Ordis, can you comm the Lotus?"

"Yes, but…you aren't going to try to talk her down, are you?"

"It worked with her father, didn't it?"

As Mag chased beams of red light to unlock the next set of warp gates, the Lotus acknowledged his call as Natah. Her attention was on the Narmer fleet blockading the Solar Rail from Mercury. Usually, her Murex would use the Rail to slingshot around the Sun for faster travel to the outer system. Now, she pointed at a blinking target hiding in the outer layers of the Sun itself, and screamed at the other Murexes in the fleet, "Out of my way!"

From what he could see of her battlemap, they indeed got out of her way. Her course sliced down towards that target, a huge Sentient ship larger than any Murex yet.

He appealed to her. "Natah, believe it or not, I'm a Tenno who's been helping your father Hunhow. You're probably starving right now because I didn't finish-"

With his distinct chiming call, Erra joined their comm link. "Sister, you're alive!" Then he spotted the Drifter and changed tack smoothly, "Scavenger, thank you for healing my sister and bringing her to me-"

He interrupted, "I didn't finish killing Erra's last Archon for the shard that can restore you fully. Your father's right. Erra is Ballas' Dax in all but name."

She hailed the mystery ship near the Sun, frowned, and then rounded on her brother. "She's dead. You let Ballas defile our mother's corpse."

Erra tried to defend himself. "Praghasa was already dead before Narmer brought peace to this System. You have her spirit. You alone can finish what she started."

At the name Praghasa, Mag started. She remembered the Old War ship that fed on derelicts, spaceports, and even rogue moons to fuel the Sentient armada, singlehandedly repairing shattered Murexes and keeping them going under the Tenno onslaught. 

"So let me get this straight," he said, feeling the pieces come together. "Ballas needs a ton of energy to fuel his jump to Tau. Praghasa can devour the Sentient fleet that the Tenno fought here before they vanished, take that energy, but then he needs you, Natah, to control her and make the leap."

Natah looked at Erra. If kuva-mirror eyes could reflect terror, his would have.

"Do I have that right?"

"No, Tenno," she said. "That dead fleet doesn't have enough energy. He means to devour the Sun."

That sent a chill down his spine strong enough to make Mag shudder. Without the Sun, the Origin System would end in ice, not fire.

However, there was a simple solution: "Have you considered just not running right into his trap? I've got my Void powers and a warframe. I can handle him."

Oh, he knew as soon as the words left his mouth, that'd been the wrong thing to say.

"Keep to your place, Tenno!" She shouted at him, and cut the signal.

"That went well," He muttered. "Ordis, you tracked her signal, right?"

Ordis highlighted her location. Mag had the warp gate open and jumped onward toward the mark. "We're not far." She suggested, "This time, remember this is as much her fight as ours."

Indeed, they burst onto the helm of the Murex. Natah was flanked by a couple battalysts sustained by her green energy. Thankfully, Erra wasn't on the comms anymore.

Her hard face softened into something far more motherly. "My friend? Tenno?"

Time to take Mag's advice and try a different tack. "Yeah, I'm Tenno, finally. Can I please help you?"

"Ballas is cruel," she said sadly. "He would like nothing more than to make us fight for his own amusement. That's why I must do this alone."

"That's a bad idea-"

She opened her mouth and that green beam of light shot out at him, too quick to dodge. Back in his camp, it had fried Ordis. Now, it hit Mag in a burst of transference static, and then they were ripped apart. The warframe collapsed to her knees.

Vazarin countered the enemy. Rather than let her fry in a second beam attack, he gathered the Void to his hand and caught it.

"I said I have to do it alone!" She shouted. The Battalysts accompanying her curled up into their spinning, laser firing configuration.

Without Mag's powers, weapons, or even able to use Sirocco while holding that beam, he relied his new Void powers. Vazarin countered. It took an enormous amount of focus, but he forced her beam back in on itself. From his hand, it lashed out at her Battalysts, frying them instead. They fell apart, smoking. She stared at him, wide-eyed, and the beam faded.

He drew the Sirocco, though he was loathe to point it at her, and made a second appeal. "Lady, after that, you can't tell me you're up to fighting weight. If I can do this without a warframe, what's Ballas gonna do to you? Its not safe for you."

"It's not safe for you either. I couldn't ask you to."

"I'm asking you to let me." Then, he added, "And look, I couldn't fight Dominus Thrax on my own. I wasn't ready. But you helped me with Thrax back in Duviri, even if you don't remember it. So let me help you fight the Archon, and then Ballas. Together."

The Lotus shook her head, not wanting her friend hurt. Neither Natah nor Margulis remembered the truth of what he said about Duviri. And none of them liked what he said (any more than he'd liked admitting that he needed help in Duviri, except that they didn't have the benefit of dozens of timeloops to come to terms with it.)

She blasted him again. Though he redirected the beam harmlessly to the deck, it was only a diversion for her.

Instead, she grabbed Mag's inert body and flung her back into the open warp gate. The tunnel whisked her off to Void knew where, leaving the Drifter gaping and alone.

"That'll keep you sidelined." Natah declared.

He could stay and fight alongside the Lotus; after all, he'd proven he didn't need a warframe to defeat an Archon. But that meant abandoning Mag.

Just as she'd come to him in the Tower, he was there for her. One flesh - both of them now hurtled through the flashing warp tunnel that carried them through the Murex at a breakneck pace.

Natah commed him, laughing. Then she cut the warp gate's connection to the Murex. "Stay out of it, Tenno!"

They tumbled out of the Murex and into open space. The enormous ship dashed past them until it was a mere pinprick in the distance before they lost sight of it as it crossed the Sun's edge.

Without gravity, they drifted. Slowly, they rotated until they were staring up at Mercury. The Narmer fleet that Natah barged through was a disordered series of lights millions of kilometers away.

"I couldn't stop her." Mag said, and he felt her shame at being helpless once more while he was attacked. "I'm sorry."

He sighed. "Its not your fault she played me like a fiddle. I'm sorry I got us stuck out here."

Hard space began to wear down her shields. She did the math and said, "I have an archwing, but she jettisoned us so far out it won't matter. It'd take hours for me to reach those ships."

"Hours we don't have. Can Ordis pick us up?"

"He'd have to make it through the fleet undetected. The void cloak is the Orbiter's only defense."

He really didn't want to sacrifice Ordis for real, this time. But if that was their only chance…

"There's another way," she said. "I have six revives. The seventh time I die, you'll reconnect with the Somatic Link in the Orbiter."

And in dying, he'd leave her body to drift into the Sun's gravity well and burn. "Mag, no."

"It's my choice," she reminded him. "It'll hurt - both the dying and the reconnecting - but you will take another warframe, sneak through that fleet with Ordis, save the Lotus from Ballas, and save this System. I have faith in you."

He wanted her, not another warframe. But she was right. This was his best chance. It'd be a series of long, slow, agonizing deaths for the both of them, filled with shared regret that their partnership was cut short too soon. 

Then she started, with a thrill of hope she instantly quashed. "No - I'm a fool. There's no way they survived. The Operator took them on a deathride just to get close enough to Ballas the first time-"

Neither of them wanted to suffocate to death, so she acted on that fool's hope. An omnitool formed on her wrist. She quickly tapped in a code, saying, "I'm sure the Sentients shot them full of holes. But then again, if anyone could get his crew out alive, its Cephalon Cy…"

Their comms crackled. A red Cephalon appeared. "Tenno, on your six."

She twisted around. Emerging from the Void below through a tear in real-space was a railjack. A by-Void genuine Orokin railjack, all hard white ceramic armor and primed gold decorations, shedding Void energy as it steered toward them.

He gaped. She laughed with delight and relief. Together, they archwinged inside the side hatch. 

"Tenno on deck," Cy bellowed. Three men and women in different uniforms saluted. 

So the Operator's crew had made it out afterward. Unfortunately, he needed to ask them to make yet another deathride. "Ballas' flagship Praghasa is going to devour the Sun if we don't get there in time to stop her."

"The safety of the crew is paramount." Cy said. "That close to the Sun, we'll fry."

Silently, he asked Mag, "Can I fly this thing myself?"

"Yes, but not easily."

To the crew, he said, "Anyone who wants to leave, head to the escape pods now."

The Engineer turned tail and headed down into the Foundry Bay. The Gunner headed for her turret. The Pilot gave him a slow nod and sat down in his chair.

Cy said, "Crew, I am proud of you. That includes you, Tenno."

Mag took up position next to the pilot as they boosted towards the Sun. Soon, the fiery outer layers and the wreckage of the old Sentient fleet covered the whole viewscreen. Huge plumes of gas licked out, straining their shields with heat and radiation. 

As they hid from a flare-up in the shelter of some wreckage, she checked to make sure he was alright. "How are you holding up? This isn't something Duviri or fighting Narmer could've prepare you for."

"Look, I'm not gonna say that the pucker factor isn't saying "I should've stayed in Duviri' right now-""

She winced, knowing exactly what hell that meant.

"-I'm right here where I'm meant to be, here, with you." He reassured her. "And we're not finished yet."

Chapter Text

Even the stoic Cephalon Cy let out a sigh of relief when the Railjack slotted into Praghasa's massive shadow like a remora nuzzling up to a whale; a whale that was slowly being blasted to pieces by the Sun's fierce energy being siphoned off for power. "Ballas doesn't have much time before his ship takes unsustainable damage. Of course, we don't have much time either," the Drifter agreed, but for a different reason. The Lotus had docked her Murex with Praghasa well ahead of them. If she went straight for Ballas, he might already be bending her to his will, convincing her to control her mother’s ship-corpse to make the leap to Tau and leave the rest of the Origin System to die behind them. “Once I’m onboard, get your crew out of here.” 

Through transference, he and Mag held each other. Praghasa was blanketed by Orphix fields. He'd be going in alone once more - well, in the Operator's necramech, which was a low-tech, absolutely unintelligent warframe that wielded incredibly heavy weaponry with an incredibly bulky chassis to match. For all that, it was far inferior to her. The only good news was that the mechs were purposefully rebuilt by the Tenno to disable the Orphix generators, so they’d be reunited as soon as he could.

They were both warriors, her honed by Dax training and Tenno warfare, him by Duviri. This mere moment of tenderness on the cusp of battle was the best goodbye they could afford.

Reluctantly, she pulled free of the embrace. "Focus on your task, not me. Ballas must not escape or this is no victory at all.”

One more fight, and he’d finally have the life he wanted with a willing, loving, battle partner. “I won’t fail you . ”

Then he left her for Voidrig and crouched in the railjack’s slingshot. "Necramech in the barrel. And folks, when I see the Operator again, I'm gonna tell him he's got the best railjack crew in the System." Sure, they were probably the only crew left alive, and their survival was by no means guaranteed even if he did win. Still...the very best.

The slingshot slammed into his feet. He soared through space and landed on Praghasa’s scorched deck like a falling star.

In the first darkened room inside, he came face to face with none other than Erra.

He charged his archgun. Erra raised his spindly hands in surrender. "I couldn't stop him. Or her. Not alone."

Considering that he certainly hadn't done any of this alone either, it seemed a little churlish to hold a grudge now. He pointed the gun away. "Welcome to Team: Kill Ballas. Which way did your sister go?"

Erra cocked his head like a quizzical bird. "You'd trust me that quickly?"

"You're going first," he pointed out. The massive Mauselon archgun made for a great pointer. "But you can start by telling me how Ballas wound up in charge. When last I'd heard from your father, you Sentients hated the Orokin as much as you do the Tenno."

Erra turned tail and led the way to the  Orphix generators as he spilled out a sorry tale of manipulation and lies that were only evident in hindsight. "It's too late for me," he admitted gesturing to the kuva implanted in his chest and eyes. "Father was right. I am a Dax in all but name. I cannot fight back against Ballas. Natah might have been able to, if she were stronger."

"If only I'd finished killing your Archons."

"I brought Boreal onboard after he failed to find her before you did. He will be guarding the way to Ballas." 

“Change of plans, Erra. Once I bring down those generators, Boreal’s got to die so she can live.”

Erra nodded unhappily. The three Orphix generators were in a huge room open to space. His necramech made short work of the battalyst and conculyst guards along the way, then he paused as Erra pointed them out.

The shadow on the ground warned him. Behind him, something flew up and out of the abyss. Voidrig had none of Mag’s smooth movement, and his instinctive bullet jump was more like a dragging slide.

Wings that bore more resemblance to mandibles spread out as it dove, holding its sparking trident ready to strike.

"The Owl!" he shouted. Erra ducked behind the cover of a staircase.

Boreal’s spear punched through Voidrig’s outer carapace, sending shocks all through his systems. Unfortunately for the Archon, the Drifter had a lot of practice getting impaled and fighting on anyway. He triggered the necramech’s storm shroud. Its own wreath of lightning licked out at Boreal, who fought to rip his trident back out of the necramech’s now invulnerable skin.

But the damage was done. That one strike had disabled his turrets. Once the storm shroud’s power ran out, he would be better off fighting with Nataruk.

Erra ran out of cover. He grappled the Archon, pinning the mandibles down. 

He transferenced out, drawing Nataruk as the two wrestled. He didn’t have a clear shot. If he missed in the melee…Hunhow hadn't given him Nataruk to kill his children, but to save them.

No, he couldn’t take the shot. He needed Mag here, more than ever. That meant the Orphix Generators had to go.

He'd learned something from trusting Mag to move like a Tenno: he didn't need a warframe to move through the Void. Like a stone in a slingshot, he flung himself toward the nearest Orphix Generator then shot out the generator cores with Sirocco. Then he did it again to the others. All the while, Erra fought his creation, and from the glimpses he got, he was losing.

Boreal screeched. Waves of power flung Erra back against the wall. 

Then Mag landed between him and the Archon, untouched. “This,” she said, “is what a real warframe can do.”

With one hand, she pulled Boreal down. His Sentient powers of flight couldn’t keep him in the air when gravity itself obeyed her. She leashed him to the ground. Those mandible-wings flailed.

She crushed them. Then her polarizing field stripped his shields. Finally, she enclosed the Owl in a magnetic field…and gave the Drifter a tiny push out. "I don’t fight alone. Take your shot."

He fired Nataruk, and had to close his eyes against the blinding radiance of the charged shot as it bounced and whirled around the globe.

When Boreal fell, the Drifter ripped the crystal from his neck and returned to Mag. Before the archon’s head could dissolve, she drew Paracesis. She cut the head off and tossed it at Erra’s feet. “This desecration ends here. Loki is free.”

It dissolved. Erra sighed. “So is Boreal.” Then he staggered to his hands and knees. The orb in his chest had cracked sometime during the brutal wrestling match and kuva trickled down his flank.

Despite the grudges they both held against him, she held out her hand to the fallen Sentient. “You helped us. He can heal you."

He shook his head. “I’ll only slow you down. If you heal me, he’d drip his poison in my ears, just like he’s doing to my sister. He’d order me to fight you and I would obey. I can’t repay your trust like that. Go on without me.”

Now, she gripped Paracesis. The Drifter offered, “I can end it quickly, if you’d prefer. No one should have to suffer while being unable to truly die.”

“There are worse places to wander as an Eidolon than with my mother, hoping you save my sister from the suffering I helped inflict on her. Perhaps Father will think better of me for the penance. Tell them I loved them in the end.”

“I will.”

They took the next warp gate onward and landed in Ballas' throne room. The sunlight glaring off that golden throne left spots in his sight. When he could focus despite the searing heat, he saw the worst case scenario he'd feared: Ballas and the Lotus staring soulfully into each other's eyes while he murmured sweet nothings in her ears about how it was all her fault he was killing the solar system because she'd loved the Tenno more than him. He kissed her, and all that shining archon energy sucked out of her body and reinvigorated him. The shard the Drifter held dissolved as well, trailing toward Ballas.

“Oh come on. I bled to get those for her, not you.”

Ballas looked up and saw Mag. He cast the Lotus from him like she’d suddenly become unbearably disgusting. She hit the deck. Then her softness faded, replaced by hard resolve. Though weaker than ever, she still scrambled to her feet through sheer will, backing away from Ballas. “You’re a monster.”

Ballas took on a sorrowful mien. “I loved you once. You were so like her.”

“She chose DEATH over you!”

“Easy…” the Drifter said, going to help the Lotus up as soft and gentle as he would soothe a skittish, mistreated horse. “Easy.”

Of course, like the horse, she could still kick. She whirled on him once again. “I SAID to stay OUT of this.”

“He can’t,” Ballas said. “The Drifter. You never knew what she really needs, but just like a little white knight you can’t stop stepping in where you aren’t wanted, can you? Pity you didn’t just drift away. I’ll have to take care of that, since she’s useless as long as you’re around.”

He grit his teeth. Leave it to Ballas to figure out - on the basis of ten minutes yammering at him through a mask, no less- exactly how to jab him in the weak spots. A white knight, always trying to save someone who didn’t want him, indeed.

Mag poked him through their bond. “Hey, what am I, chopped murkray liver? I said I want you. Now are you going to listen to me, or do I need to break out the earplugs for you too?”

Right, don’t let Ballas get in his head. “I’d rather listen to you any day.”

“Good,” she said, as Ballas raised his golden staff and a dozen Narmer Deacons flooded into the throne room. “Lotus, we’ll hold them off!”

While she sliced her way through the Deacons, Natah unleashed one of her green beams at Ballas. He blocked it with his staff, redirecting the beam into a scorching scar on the deck. The next beam, he parried back at her. She screamed as her own energy tore a hole in her shoulder. 

Ballas rose from the throne and began to stalk towards her. Natah gathered her energy for a last strike.

The Drifter saw the trap coming. At his direction, Mag threw her magnetic field to entrap the remaining Deacons. Then, trusting him completely, as Natah fired her beam and Ballas threw it back at her, she leaped in between them.

Mag died. Transference made it hurt - or was that just the burning pain of superheated air washing over the deck? 

The blast staggered Ballas too. He looked down at his burns. “You see what harm you’ve caused me? If you really love me, make this right. Heal me.”

Shocked and newly traumatized, she - Margulis, now - poured what energy she had back into him, healing him as she had once healed the traumatized Tenno.

The Drifter was in no shape to stop them, having resorted to hiding in the Void to prevent himself from burning to death. Instead, he triggered Mag’s revival systems, transferenced, and took a precious few moments to come up with another plan with her. “If we attack him, he’ll try to redirect it to hit her instead. We’ve got to cripple his ego.”

She glanced over at the pile of dead and mangled deacons. 

“That’ll do.”

She plucked the golden mask from a deacon’s face.

“Hey, Ballas!”

When he looked, she crushed it. She threw it at him. It bounced off and rattled to the floor.

The physical impact was as nothing. Ballas’ perfect Orokin face mottled with rage. “Infested puppet!”

As she crushed more masks, and Ballas shouted about how her Operator was nothing but an ant, the Drifter kept his eye on the wounded Lotus. “So you know, your family still loves you." He assured her. "No matter what’s happened. No matter what you’ve done, or he’s done to you. Your brother died to get you that final crystal so you could fight back. Your father loves you so much he’s stuck around hoping to free you.”

”Nobody loves her like I do.” Ballas snapped.

“Cause that’s not love, you ass.” He snapped back.

“And what would you know about that, boy?”

For a moment, that question paralyzed him. Love was more than the physical attraction he felt for Mag. It was more than the emotional connection of transference and the fierce joy of fighting with a fellow warrior who had his back as much as he had hers. All his old doubts rushed in. He was the battle partner that Mag desired. Could he be more than that? Could he truly love her as she deserved?

Margulis gathered her courage and stepped away from Ballas, clawing back her power. “Love is my child and my friend risking everything to help me, no matter the cost."

Natah turned wondering eyes on the Drifter. “Love is my father making peace with his ancient foes to save me.”

The Lotus spread her arms, sheltering him in his moment of weakness. “Love is protecting them from your lies.”

“Love,” Mag told him, as gently as she might handle a bruised reed, “is a partnership. We’ll grow into it.”

He would kiss her if he could, but first they had a battle to win.

Thus refuted, Ballas seethed. “You never appreciated me.”

No, he surely didn't, but if he appreciated one thing, it was how absolutely captivating those manipulative words were. There was no greater example of that than the Deacon Veils. The next Veil he threw at Ballas's feet wasn't crushed. Now, all he needed to do was get close enough to use it before the man figured out his plan. Somehow, he didn't think smoke bombs were going to cut it.

“I’ve spent enough time indulging you,” Ballas decided. He pointed at Mag and his eyes glowed. His voice came through their transference bond. “I made you. Now be a good girl and bring me my sword.”

She writhed. In a brutal amputation, their transference bond was cut off, leaving only a phantom memory of her scream. 

He tried to rejoin her. Static wasn’t the word for it. More like blinding pain, and through it she pushed him away shrieking, “Get out! Get out before he traps you in here!”

He let go, and knew that he’d failed her.

Unlike every other time, she didn’t fall inert. She didn’t struggle to defend him as she once had the Operator. No, this time, she marched with the precision of an oath-bound Dax warrior to Ballas’ side.

Smirking at them all the while, he pointed at the deck. “Kneel.”

She knelt.

The Lotus put her hand on his shoulder, sheltering him with what remained of her power. With a shudder, he realized that he was burning, and hadn’t noticed. He’d been too consumed by the horror of watching Mag forced into slavery once more against her will; this violation of her mind and body.

“You were right,” the Lotus whispered. “I can’t do it alone. Help me kill him.”

“My sword?” Ballas sneered. Mag offered Paracesis up without hesitation. He swung it around, testing the weight. "How fitting. Your Operator- your son - your other self - forged this. It will be your undoing.”

Another man might have raged. The Drifter wanted to. He wanted to tear into Ballas with the Void, with Rumblejack, even with his bare hands if it would bring Mag back. He wanted to weep, for he’d now lost everyone he loved to the Executor in one way or another.

Duviri had taught him all too well to bide his time. Taught him to not give up. To not reject the help offered. He’d grown since then.

And so he did not lunge at Ballas, only for Mag to pull him off his feet, enclose him in a magnetic bubble so he had to watch as the Lotus died, and then crush his bones to powder at her new master’s command.

And so he did not sit on the deck in bleak despair as Ballas took the Lotus’ hand, led her to the throne, and together they initiated the jump to Tau.

Instead, he reminded his hurting heart that though he could not help Mag now, she herself had told him to defeat Ballas at any cost. Even at the cost of herself. 

He met the Lotus’ eyes. “I need a distraction.”

She nodded. She let him go and stalked toward Ballas. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Ballas screamed at her with the fury of a narcissist denied. “You will not have me, you miserable bitch!” 

Knowing he had no other choice, the Drifter waited until the very moment that Ballas committed to the strike. Paracesis, the Sentient-Killer, lashed out.

He dashed through the Void, passing through the strike harmlessly, and scooped up the mask he’d thrown earlier. A vision rose up before his eyes as he touched it. “My child?” Ballas asked. “Why do you do this to me? Why do you make me hurt you? I’m doing this for you.”

Then he hung onto Ballas’ neck as the half-man, half-sentient bucked and kicked like a fresh horse. He slapped the Narmer Veil over his eyes.

Ballas stopped dead in his tracks, caught up in his own captivating vision. 

The Lotus staggered, bleeding from a deep wound in her side. Her hands couldn't staunch the blood. His Vazarin healing helped the wound knit a little, but the best of Void healing didn’t mean much for the Sentient’s weakened body struck down by the sword built to kill her.

The Sun’s burning heat had nothing on his rage at that moment. Ballas would not win. He would not take this last loved one from him. He jabbed a finger at the mesmerized man, and demanded, “He took your shards. Can you consume him instead?”

Natah flared to the forefront. “Yes!”

He helped her up. She leaned heavily on him for support. 

“Margulis?” Ballas asked. "You - you've returned to me?"

“Yes, my love.” Margulis said. Her blinded eyes could not see him, but her lips drew into a very thin line, then turned up in a pained smile. “I am here.”

Ballas’ veiled gaze turned to him. He wondered what he saw. “You. You’re my…?”

After the vision on Venus and here, he knew what Ballas wanted to hear, even though it was beyond bitter to say it. The least he could do was match Margulis' courage, and lie. “I’m your son. Father, we’re here to help. We’ll do anything for you.”

Beguiled by the thought that he was finally loved and appreciated as he ought to be, he let them approach. His Dax guardian, Mag, did not oppose them.

“We’ll do anything and everything for you,” the Lotus said. “Now kiss me.”

He did. In that lover’s embrace, the Mimic Natah took everything from him.

Chapter Text

“Docking at Lua,” Cephalon Cy announced.

“Thanks,” the Drifter said. He scooped the exhausted Lotus up in his arms and carried her out of the railjack and into the void-shielded, geologically-stabilized Orokin facility that served as her control room and home on the shattered moon.

She deserved that care. Though devouring both the Archon shards and Ballas’ Oro life-force had healed the deep wounds from the battle, she’d spent much of her remaining energy to control Praghasa long enough to move her mothership away from the Sun so that Cy could rescue them.

Truly, he had the best Railjack crew in the whole damned System.

They’d braved Praghasa to rescue the two of them. They’d recovered Mag’s limp body when his transference attempts failed to rouse her. They’d even collected the desecrated Loki, though they’d found no sign of Eidolon Erra or the Archon Boreal.

As worried as he was for Mag and what her emptiness meant for him, right now the Lotus needed him.

He settled her into her throne's Somatic Link. It connected to her vitals. Gradually, then with increasing speed, she regained alertness. 

"Thank you, my friend," she said.

"Thank you," he said in turn. It took a huge weight off his shoulders to see her smile and sit up straight rather than loll about in wane decay as she had under his tending in the Orbiter. She’d come through this alright. "I have to ask - are you sure you want to stay hidden in the Void here after that “man” came out of it?"

Natah looked at him blankly. "What man? I don't remember. It doesn't matter; if he's a threat to my chosen family, I'll destroy him."

"Right - uh, I'll warn the Operator later." The kid deserved the warning that Albrecht Entrati's Untime Un-Twin had showed up out of the Void as if to celebrate their victory by belting out something incomprehensible that made his ears bleed. If Natah didn't remember her own part in it when the Lotus, radiant in her own power, had protected them both - well, maybe that was a mercy for the Sentient who was still as vulnerable to the Void as any of her kind. "The question still stands. Ballas is dead. You don't have to stay here if you don't want to. It's your choice now."

Blinded Margulis touched the controls and viewscreens. Lights blinked rapidly as more and more Tenno came back from the version of reality where they'd been thrown into the Void. Her fingers ran down their engraved nameplates, stopping every now and then over certain names. "They made my precious children into soldiers. I can help them bring peace to the System from here. This is where I belong."

The Lotus sighed. She held out her hand to him and he clasped it, glad to feel it warm, alive, and attached to its proper owner at last. "I don't know.” she said. “I feel confused and torn between the three of us. How can I be a good mother to the Tenno when I don't know who I am?"

"You're asking someone who's very much a work-in-progress himself," he warned, "As you well know. You gave me a helping hand at one of the darkest points in my life and that's saying something between the Zariman and Narmer."

She squeezed his hand. “I don’t have to take your advice if I don’t like it.”

“True.” He thought hard about what to say. "You don't have to be at war with your selves when all three of you can choose to be your best selves, working together. It won't be easy, but like me, you've grown."

She nodded. "It was me who told the Tenno to dream not of who they are. To dream of who they want to be. I should follow my own advice."

Natah's green energy turned golden. "I want to speak to my father again, though not as a biddable daughter. I will stand before him as a queen in my own right."

Margulis adorned her robes of royal purple with prime gold ornaments. "The best of me survived the worst Ballas could do. The mistakes of the Orokin will never be repeated, for I have learned better."

All three as one, they settled into the Lotus, radiant in both power and confidence.

"We're still here," she said. "Each of us have our wisdom to share. We will lead the Tenno as one."

She'd be just fine. He, on the other hand…

He hadn’t lost everything to Ballas. He had his Void powers. He had the friendship of the Lotus Radiant. The entire system was open to him. There were plenty of wild places where he could make a quiet living. The Grineer and Corpus customs would be more vigilant now, but he'd wager that he and Ordis could still run rings around them as a smuggler. Between the returned Tenno, the freed Ostrons, and the rebellious Solaris, he had a number of favors to call on. The Narmer Cult wasn’t finished yet. There’d be jobs that only “The Drifter” could do.

He had won so much.

He’d only lost Mag, the one woman he wanted above all others.

.....................................................................

Ordis floated out of the Orbiter to where the Drifter stood watching the river run down through the forest. “Her Helminth check is complete. She is-”

He bent his head as Ordis pronounced what he’d already guessed. 

“-unacceptably damaged. As traumatized and feral as Umbra’s mind was when I rebuilt him, though she’s rather less autonomous. Like a very angry statue.”

It was one thing to let Ordis dissuade him from stupidly trying to force a bond with an archonized warframe he’d just killed. No matter how damaged, this was Mag. He’d do whatever he could for her. The danger simply didn’t matter. 

He headed down to his firepit. “Give me time to eat some stew. Then bring her out here. You’ll close off the Orbiter and wait for me there.”

“What? Why?”

So that if she tried to kill him like Umbra or Volt, Ordis didn’t have to watch his Operator die again. “So I have plenty of room to run away."

“But running away from the Lotus didn't work-”

“Ordis, thank you for reminding me that this is insanely dangerous. I’ve taken that under advisement, and I’m doing it anyway. She’s worth it. Now go make sure you're safe."

He held out his hand. Ordis bumped against it and reluctantly left to do his bidding. Reheated old stew made for a pretty good pre-battle meal as far as his standards were concerned. Then he checked that the Orbiter was safely sealed up and went to the clearing where Mag knelt.

Ancient trees and dappled sunlight made a better backdrop than the Orokin ruin where they’d first met out of Duviri. He settled down on his knees in front of her. The stars in her faceplate whirled on erratic and dizzying paths. He reached out for her presence.

She was a whirlwind of turmoil, shame, and rage. Old pains from Orokin tortures layered with the new ravages Ballas inflicted on her during the brief moments he was in control. The shame of ancient atrocities committed under the command of the Golden Lords surged to the surface, bearing with it fresh shame that she’d almost killed them. Almost killed him. Above all, rage burned and trembled in her still limbs, yet she could not act on it. She was as still as a statue; nothing more than an infested puppet.

“Hey,” he said, as gently as he might to a spooked horse, “What am I, chopped murkray liver? Listen to me, not Ballas.”

Though he had only the vaguest idea of how the Operator had helped Umbra find peace, he knew that he must not force this Transference on her. It was her choice, just as it had been when she chose him. Just as it had been when she rejected him in Duviri.

“You’re not a puppet. You’re my partner.” 

She searched him in turn. Transference laid them both bare to each other; she knew the depths of his shame that he hadn’t saved her first before tricking Ballas. She knew his inmost fear that he had and always would prove inadequate when she needed him most.

Knowing all that, forgiving him and knowing that she was forgiven, she reached out to him, mind to mind, heart to heart-

-and he met her halfway, until they were one flesh kneeling on the forest floor in beams of sunlight shining in bright defiance of the man who’d tried to tear them apart. Minds and hearts beat together in tandem, reunited in purpose.

Together, they vowed to each other, “Love is a partnership. We’ll grow into it.”

.....................................................................

As they tackled the work of dismantling the Narmer cult, there was only one flaw in their relationship. While they were one flesh in transference, they couldn't really touch each other without it.

They couldn't hold hands, no matter how much they wanted that simple pleasure. If he tried, her hand was motionless in his.

He still slept alone in his bunk and she in the Arsenal because what was the point of cuddling with a beautiful statue? It just frustrated them when they both wanted more. 

Despite their battle prowess, they were still lonely. The pleasures of the mind and heart could not entirely fill their needs.

After a couple months of aching for him and being unable to have him in any physical sense, she metaphorically put her foot down. “I have an idea. I need to talk to the Operator and Helminth to figure out if it is possible in the first place.”

He didn’t know nearly enough about the intricacies of warframe construction to help her. So he debriefed the Operator on the state of Narmer’s activities on the Plains and the Orb Vallis, they shook hands, and he took over the kid’s job of making sure that Void Angels didn’t eat the Zariman’s reliquary drive and the Holdfasts too.

After a couple of weeks, there was a warning tug in the Void as he was cooking in the dormizone. He turned the heat down on the stove. Then the Operator strolled through the door. "Hey," he said, “Sorry the research took so long.” He stuck out his hand.

"Have a bite to eat before you check in with the Holdfasts." Eager to see her again, he took the hand, leaving the kid to finish dinner. Meanwhile, he opened his eyes in the Orbiter's Somatic Link. 

Instead of Mag, there was a note slapped on the Link’s armrest with his mission in his teenage self’s messy handwriting: "Collect somatic fibers from Lua Disruption. Take Umbra."

He raised an eyebrow, and then went to the arsenal to check with her. "You okay if I take Umbra?"

"Yes," she said, but she wasn't telling him everything. When he pushed, she pushed back with a bubble of delight. "Hey, if you keep asking questions, you'll ruin the surprise."

"Right…" With no little trepidation but trusting she wouldn't lie, he went to Umbra. "So…"

Umbra drew his skiajati nikana, pointed it back towards the Somatic Link, brought it down in a slashing motion, and sheathed it in a flashing move that was pure Dax.”

"Right. No transference. I'll grab Nataruk."

Whatever “Lua Disruption” was, it meant meeting up with a team of three Tenno and a familiar face from Fortuna. Little Duck eyed him from head to toe. “I thought you’d be taller,” she said.

The other Tenno in their prime warframes, a Rhino, Loki, and Mag all looked over at him and Umbra. He was as tall as they were.

“On second thought,” Little Duck chuckled, “If you were any taller, you might not fit in the vents. Let’s go hack some conduits, uncover some Orokin secrets the Corpus want to steal for themselves, and dance on some faces, shall we?”

Once they landed, he looked at the other Tenno again. Yes, their warframes all bore scars on their necks and upper chest where a large crystal once impaled them joining the Archon to its unwilling host. “So, no hard feelings, right?”

Rhino Prime met his gaze, triggered his iron skin ability, and then held out his fist to bump. It was like rapping his knuckles on a steel bar. 

Loki Prime saluted and then faded from view. Soon, the sound of screaming Corpus drifted in from the gilded hallways.

Mag Prime bowed. She leaped off to join the killing, leaving him and Umbra to take up the rear.

They wound up guarding the conduits while the three Tenno butchered an entire facility’s worth of Corpus soldiers and scientists, their suicidal demolysts, and their reinforcements. Between Nataruk and Sirocco, he made a good accounting for himself even without his own Mag. While he and the Tenno searched for conduit keys and fought the demolysts trying to destroy them, Umbra methodically butchered each dead demolyst, pulling out gleaming threads of neural fibers and placing them in containers of stabilized cerebral fluid to preserve their somatic qualities.

It was a little macabre, but he reminded himself that Mag didn’t want him asking too many questions about why she wanted it.

Eventually Umbra had a full load of somatic fibers and they told Little Duck they were done kicking the clown car for the day. While waiting for extraction, he gave in to some of his curiosity, and asked, “So, are you three doing okay?”

Rhino and Loki nodded. Mag Prime shimmered, and her Operator stepped out. Mercifully, he didn’t recognize the teenager as any of his classmates or the other children he’d known on the Zariman.  

“Thank you for bringing her back after you killed Nira,” she said. “The other you - uh, the Operator - he asked around until he found us. I never thought I’d find her again after I lost her during the Old War. I don’t intend to lose her again, but if I do, these fibers should help.”

Now that intent was a sentiment he understood. “They’ll help her resist an Archon if she’s defeated again?”

“Any sort of unwanted Transference, really.”

No wonder Mag was interested. She’d never have to worry about being a puppet again. He glanced at Umbra, who tapped the transference bolt screwed into the base of his cracked helmet.

She explained what he couldn’t vocalize. “Its old Orokin tech originally used to make the warframes into biodrones under their command. With dumb AI, it works. That’s how the Corpus make their demolysts suicide to blow up the hacked conduits. But warframes are way smarter than the Orokin gave them credit for. Implant enough somatic fibers, and they can resist their transference bolt. My Mag still wants me for a partner. I want her to be free and whole. If I fail her, she’ll never again be forced to do something she doesn’t want to.”

Oh, he felt that, alright.

After he’d returned to his camp, he and Mag went fishing. She handled the Ostron fishing spears even better than he did, so he took a rare chance to relax into their bond and let her wrestle bigger fish than he could manage by himself. “How long will it take Helminth to install those somatic fibers?” He asked, hopefully casually enough that she didn’t notice he’d been asking questions he wasn’t supposed to. 

Transference being what it was, he might as well have hung a flashing neon sign on it. She laughed at him, and said, “You didn’t ask the right questions. My surprise is still a secret.”

“At least I haven’t ruined everything.”

“It'll take a couple more weeks, at least. The Operator says transference may feel different the first time. It shouldn’t be too bad,” she reassured him. “Unlike Umbra, I want you as my partner.”

“And I want you whole and free, never again forced to fight when you don’t want to. I’ll wait.”

.....................................................................

The Operator stuck out his hand, grinning like a kid in a candy store. “Go on. She’s waiting.”

“I don’t remember being nearly this smug in my universe when I was your age.” the Drifter said, as tension began to coil in his gut despite the assurance that things obviously hadn’t gone catastrophically wrong with Mag’s surprise. It’d been a long couple weeks without her. He’d had plenty of time to worry.

"Technically, I'm older than you."

"I'm taller, so…"

"Quit stalling. You don't want her to think she's got to come get you herself."

Butter wouldn't melt in the kid's mouth. Hope now warred with worry. She'd hinted he didn't understand. What was her surprise?

They shook on it and he stepped out of the Somatic Link, ready to find out.

The door across from him slid open. Mag stepped through.

Her steps were graceful and light, clicking on the deck. The sway of her hips caught his attention exactly as she knew it must. Then she was right in front of him, catching his hands. Finally, he could hold her hands. 

At first, she squeezed too tightly, then as their transference bond played back their dual sensations to each other, relaxed her grip to just the right amount of comforting pressure. “This’ll take some getting used to. I’ll learn.”

Her body pressing against his was all he'd dreamed about. He could fall asleep staring into the swirling stars of her helmet. He wouldn’t spend another lonely night in his bunk because she’d be beside him.

Eventually, he wet his lips enough to stammer, "How?"

Sure, it had something to do with the somatic fibers, and Helminth, but somehow they'd remade her into someone more akin to Umbra, except she was alive and very willing as she ran her fingers over his cheek and through his hair.

She didn’t answer right away; her tender touch was answer enough.

He rested his forehead on her helmet. Through their transference bond, he asked again, "How?"

She was absolutely giddy with delight. "Those somatic fibers you collected don't just help me resist the transference bolt. They also strengthen my sense of self and enable me to control my own body. They let me do this." Her hand left his hair and trailed down the back of his neck, then down his spine.

He ran his hand over her back. She shivered. "Do that again."

He did, and she chuckled. "Oh. It feels even better than when I was alive since I know you're enjoying it as much as I am."

There was nothing and no one in the System more desirable than this willing woman who wanted him.

“I can fight at your side now. And so much more.” She promised and gave him a little push towards his bunk. Their bunk, now.

Just as giddy with delight, he obeyed her push. At last, they could walk through the Orbiter together, holding hands. Soon, holding hands turned to cuddling, and more.