Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Flesh and Metal

The metal was cool and cold in Sunny's hand, the shaft of her spear both a comfort and a reminder to her as she stood on the bridge of the Empyrean. No one had argued when Ramirez made the executive decision to take them through the portal, in all honesty she probably would have argued If he hadn't, not that that was ever a concern. She sort of half expected to find them in some sort of dimension of darkness and incomprehensible horrors but was surprised to find themselves floating above a tranquil blue planet with oceans stretching off from horizon to horizon.

Before Ramirez could give the order, Sunny already had their orbital survey team taking a look at the planet running spectrographs, emissions typography scans and atmospheric composition arrays. As it turns out, while life is theoretically possible in different kinds of atmospheres, nitrogen heavy carbon/oxygen mixes were the most prominent to some degree or other. Often it was the degree of oxygen or other trace elements that made a planet unsafe.

The planet below them was not one of these cases.

"Another habitable planet/" Sunny wondered gripping the back of the seat in front of her. It did occur to her, and continued to occur to her every day that she was no longer living in a world familiar to her. She had grown up without the aid of technology on the fertile plains of Anin only to find herself with her feet perpetually off the ground in new territory.

Though that was fine by her.

New planets meant new lifeforms.

Which often lead to more fighting.

She flexed her fingers around the shaft of her spear. She felt odd, unusually nervous and on edge. She chalked it up to the portal taking them somewhere unknown and unexpected. She was likely to have been less worried if they had been thrown somewhere more inhospitable.

"What do we know?" She urged, and the scientist below her continued to flip through the scans being fed to her by a lower deck scientific crew. Sunny could sense the nervous posture of the woman's body tense about the shoulders and torso, to straight, to controlled.

Something was wrong.

"If Adam came out the same place we did-." Her voice was low, unsure.

"What!" Sunny said urging the woman to spit it out.

Ramirez was the one to answer, "He was inside the gravity well..... which means."

"He fell?" Sunny finished

Ramirez nodded from where he floated high above her, "Probably."

"Can' we track him" She demanded, "Didn't Krill put some sort of tracking devise in him that could monitor his vitals."

She was surprised when it was Krill who answered her question standing in the doorway behind them, his antenna buzzing gently, "I did, but his conversion to Anima power fried the electronics during his visit to president Hunt."

Sunny had forgotten about that, though she certainly shouldn't have. After all, she was the one who repaired his mechanical eye and mechanical leg after the whole ordeal, whose electronics had also been fried despite being mostly on the exterior of the body. If only she had thought of the tracking device beforehand.

"Lets hope his jetpack was still working." Ramirez said mildly.

He didn't sound worried, and usually Sunny wouldn't have been either. Adam was known for surviving. He was notoriously difficult to kill, and now that he was part Maker than unkillability was probably tenfold, but for some reason she just couldn't shake off the nervous energy.

"The suit would protect him. "She said, hearing more conviction in her voice than she felt, and her statement was true enough. Adam liked to buy expensive toys, and in the end it was HER job to repair and maintain them. Adam didn't know the first thing about maintenance on the steel eye suit. It was a good thing she found him cute otherwise she might not have put up with his tech illiteracy. But she did feel better knowing about the suit's jetpack, and barring that its lockout systems.