Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

36. Connection

It had barely taken a minute to hotwire the electronically secured door to the General's office, and once they stepped inside and it closed behind them again, he could feel the tension in her muscles relax a bit. She looked around and scanned the room briefly, before she settled down in front of the desk.

As she sank back into the chair and took a deep breath, Lars couldn't help but feel like it all had led up to this moment.

Do you believe in fate, Null? he asked her.

Fate? What do you mean?

He took control over their left hand to put it on the keyboard and hesitated another moment.

Well, fate, coincidence, call it what you will - what are the odds that we would end up here?

As she placed their other hand on the terminal, he could feel a shiver creep up as their skin made contact with the smooth surface. It moved up from their spine and along the back of their neck, while images appeared before their mind's eye. Memories of what had happened on Six, and Aneara. Memories of the beach in their mind. Evelyn's memories, which they had seen in their dreams. And a memory of how it had all begun: the moment a hunter of Orion's Reach had killed her on Thanatos 3.

And that I would end up here... with you, he added.

Another memory manifested inside their mind at his words. It came crawling out of the darkest corner, that strange black space that had once been his CPU.

It was a painful one, one that somehow hurt him even more now than it had back then. Everything had happened so fast, almost too fast for him to process, but not too fast to now clearly remember every detail of that moment. There had been no warning, no indication of a threat. Just a strange recall order. When they had disembarked the ship, a group of men wearing grey uniforms had already been waiting for them. One had raised a weapon and pointed it at him, and he had instantly recognized what it was – an EMP gun. In the split second before he had lost consciousness, the last thing he had seen was his Captain step in front of him, as if to protect him. A futile effort. The EMP had passed right through him, deactivating his augments, and deactivating Lars.

In a sense, Orion's Reach had killed both him and Null. And yet in an ironic turn of events, here they were, about to bring them down. They both had their reasons to hate these people. After their conversation on the beach during the fight on Six, he had found it a bit easier to deal with this human emotion, but he wondered now how much of that hatred he felt for them was truly hers, as she claimed.

Null shook her head softly, and the memory scurried back into its dark corner like an insect fleeing the light.

The odds... I don't know. Probably not very high. Then again, what are the odds to survive one's own death? Repeatedly? she thought, and her lips curled upward in a faint smile.

We've really become quite good at that, haven't we, he noted.

There was something else he wanted to say. Even after all this time, they still didn't share everything, and she would never know if he didn't find a way to spell it out. He couldn't quite tell yet if he felt more uncomfortable about hiding it from her, or telling her. Either way, he suddenly found himself unable to give any shape or substance to his thoughts all of a sudden, and so the words hung unspoken in the subatomic space between them.

Well...let's get on with it, she suggested, interrupting his mulling. Before we get another chance to try our luck at not dying...

He shook off his strange thoughts and proceeded with the hack. As most of his self slipped out of her body and into the cyberspace of the computer, he could feel her presence following him for a short part of the way, until it came to a halt behind him as he crossed the border of the body and the outside. She never followed him outside, claiming that it was impossible for her. Perhaps she really couldn't, but right now, he had a feeling that she wished she could.