Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Empyrean Iris

SYSTEM_REBOOT

Waiting...

SYSTEM_

80%

FUNCTIONING

REBOOTING SYSTEM

Adam was confused for a moment. Floating in the blackness before his eyes he watched two small letters spinning side by side.

SE

Was he in the Matrix? After all this time he thought he was discovering some elaborate plot about an ultrapowerful alien race, only to learn that it was actually all a lie.?

He was just coming to terms with this new reality when the SE logo vanished and he came back to his senses lying face down on a marble white floor. Oh..... yeah no, that wasn't the matrix that was just the fealty system Reboot. It was a good thing no one else spent so much time in his head or they would be appalled at how stupid he could be sometimes.

Inside the suit and at the periphery of his consciousness, he could feel Fealty, the suit IA, having a near conniption. It was getting tired of having to reboot constantly and was now creating firewalls and other protective failsafes do avoid it. he doubted it would work to any real extend, but he let the little artificial intelligence keep on with what it was doing.

Slowly, he reached out a hand and hauled himself to his feet body groaning under the armor. The marines took a little longer to wake, but it wasn't long before they too were moaning groggily. Adam for his part, was already standing and surveying their surroundings. It was hard to remember what happened before this. He had the vague recollection of walking through a small white canyon and then.... Just the memory of an infinite blue space speckled with little colored lights, but beyond that it was hard to remember. It wasn't that he COULDN"T remember, but it was almost like..... almost like the memory was painful.... No that wasn't the right word either.

The memory was too, heavy?

Yes, no that was a better word. The memory was too heavy, and he couldn't.... lift.... It from the vault in his mind.

He shook himself in frustration replacing his struggling memory with the view around him. At first, all he saw was white, white to his front, white below him, but when he looked up eventually the white vanished into blue, and there was sky above and behind him. It was disorienting, and he continued shaking his head to clear his mind.

As his brain began to fire again, he leaned forward and became aware of, something strange, The wall of white ahead of him was not, in fact and unbroken wall, but now that his mind was working properly he could see panels and seams and, no it wasn't a wall at all.

Adam took a step back just as the last piece of his conscious mind found its place.

He stared upward and then turned to the right and then to the left.

"No way?"

The others had stepped back to join him now, Ramirez standing at his side, "Yo, is that?"

"That, my friend, is the biggest damn spaceship I have ever seen." Though it was NOT in fact the biggest man made object he had ever seen. Lord Avex's Imperial Cruiser was about half the size of this thing. It was bigger than smaller port space stations, but not as big as something like the HUB. Nothing like the Deathstar, in fact, Adam would have put its size at the upper edge of practicality.

"Now how are we supposed to get inside?" Ramirez asked.

Adam paused and then stepped forward, resting the palm of his hand against the hull, and just like that one of the panels depressed inward, and the door opened with a hiss.