The Mech That Buried Nine Worlds

Chapter 6 - What He Found

Chapter 6 · 1,385 words

Tavian's hands would not stop trembling.

He sat on the edge of his bunk in the crew quarters, elbows on his knees, staring at his fingers. They felt foreign. The tips tingled, a faint, persistent buzzing that had nothing to do with cold or exertion. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt the ghost of a texture that wasn't there: the smooth, light-absorbing surface of black alloy beneath his palms, the subtle give of a hidden panel opening to his touch.

The impressions from the contact were fading. He could feel them slipping, the way a dream dissolves in the moments after waking. Vast structures. A sense of being seen. Something enormous and patient pressing against the edges of his mind. The specifics were already gone, leaving only the shape of what they'd been. The emotional residue of a presence too large to hold.

What remained was his body. The tingling fingertips. The headache behind his eyes. A dull, deep pressure, the echo of something withdrawing. His mouth tasted of recycled air and the metallic tang that never left the Drift's ventilation system, but tonight the taste was worse, sharper. Something in the ship had changed.

He'd come back to the Drift on autopilot. Suit off. Face washed. The shift horn would sound in two hours, and he needed to at least look like he'd slept.

The crew quarters were a narrow box: bunk, storage drawer, a bolted-down desk that no one ever used. The walls were close enough to touch from the mattress. He'd spent four years in rooms exactly like this one, and always the ship's systems hum had been comforting. The Drift breathing, the steady pulse of a vessel that kept its crew alive in the void between stars. Tonight the hum felt inadequate. Too small for what he was carrying.

He got up. Couldn't sit still. Paced the three steps from bunk to door and back.

Then he went to find Dex.

The mess hall was empty between cycles. The lighting was dimmed to night-setting, a low amber that made the scarred walls look almost warm. Dex was there, as Tavian had known he would be. Dex was always in the mess hall between shifts. A creature of routine, of comfort found in the same seat, the same meal pouch, the same quiet hour before the next round of labor.

He looked up when Tavian approached. Calloused hands wrapped around a steaming pouch. His face was open, unhurried.

"You look like hell."

Tavian sat across from him. Wrapped his own hands around a pouch he didn't intend to drink from. The warmth was something to hold onto.

"I found something."

Dex set his pouch down. Leaned forward. That was the thing about Dex. He listened with his whole body. Shoulders angling in. Eyes steady. No impatience, no performative interest. Just attention, given freely.

"In the debris field?"

Tavian nodded. "Deep. Past where the team's been working. I went further during a break." He paused, trying to arrange what he'd experienced into words that would make sense. "There's a mech. Buried under the wreckage. Intact."

"Intact?" Dex's eyebrows rose. "In that field? Everything out there was pulverized."

"I know." Tavian's fingers tightened on the pouch. "That's what I'm saying. Everything around it was destroyed. But the mech — it was protected. Like something put the wreckage there on purpose. To cover it."

Dex was quiet for a moment. "You report this?"

"No."

The word came out too fast. Dex didn't push. He waited, the way he always waited, giving Tavian the space to find the next sentence without filling the silence with judgment.

"It's not like any mech I've seen," Tavian said. "Black alloy. I can't identify it — not in the database, not from anything I've worked on. No visible weapon ports. No cockpit I could find. No civilization markings."

"Size?"

"Four meters, maybe a little more. Bipedal. The proportions are —" Tavian stopped. He was describing the outside of the thing. The physical form. The parts he could talk about without his voice cracking. "There's a port. Hidden. At the base of the skull, under a panel that only opens to specific pressure."

Dex's eyes narrowed. "You connect to it?"

Tavian's throat went dry. He took a sip from the pouch. The liquid was lukewarm and tasted of iron.

"There was a signal," he said carefully. "From inside. Like a warmth."

The words fell short. What had happened was a flood. An overwhelming rush of alien impressions, structural awareness, the sensation of a vast and patient presence pressing against his consciousness and reading him even as he read it. But the words for that didn't exist. Or they existed, and he didn't know how to use them without sounding like he'd lost his mind.

"A warmth," Dex repeated.

"It's hard to explain." Tavian set the pouch down. His hands were still trembling. He pressed them flat against the table. "The port opened when I touched it. I connected the diagnostic cable. And then — something came back. Something that was neither readout nor signal."

He looked at Dex. His friend's face was calm, attentive, completely free of the pity or disbelief Tavian had braced for. That calm was what kept him in the chair. If Dex had laughed, or looked worried, or started asking the careful questions people used around someone they thought was unstable, Tavian might have shut down. Might have decided the whole thing had been a hallucination, a malfunction of his broken zero-sync brain.

But Dex just listened.

"My hands feel different," Tavian said. "The tingling. It hasn't stopped. And there's a headache — right behind the eyes. Like something pressed there and left a mark."

"You think it's still doing something? Even disconnected?"

"I don't know what it did." Tavian rubbed his face with one hand. "I don't know what any of it means. But the mech — it's not dead, Dex. It's intact. It was preserved. And when I connected to that port, something happened that wasn't a malfunction. I know what a malfunction feels like. This was —"

He stopped. The impressions were fading even as he tried to hold them. The vast presence. The sense of being read. He couldn't articulate it, and the gap between what he'd experienced and what he could say was a wall he couldn't climb.

Dex watched him for a long moment. Then: "Are you going back?"

The question was simple. Practical. No judgment embedded in it.

"Yes." Tavian said it without hesitation. The word surprised him with its own certainty. "During off-shift. Tonight, if I can get away."

"You need someone to cover for you."

"I know."

Dex nodded once. "I'll handle the seal checks on C-deck. Halden won't notice if they're done by a different set of hands."

"If we get caught —"

"We won't." Dex picked up his pouch, took a slow sip. "You found something out there. Something nobody else knows about. I'm not going to ask you to leave it buried."

Tavian looked at him. Four years aboard the Drift, and Dex was the only person who had ever treated the discovery of a zero-sync maintenance apprentice as worth investigating. They both knew the evaluation records, the thirteen tests, the consistent zero across twenty protocols. Dex treated him as someone who might find something real. That was why.

"Thank you," Tavian said.

Dex waved it off. "Don't get sentimental. Just tell me what you need covered and when."

The shift horn sounded. A low, resonant tone that vibrated through the deck plates. Morning cycle. The Drift waking up around them.

Tavian's hands had stopped trembling. He hadn't noticed when it happened.

"I'll let you know," he said. "After tonight."

Dex stood, stretched. "Same time tomorrow. Mess hall. You tell me what you found."

It was a plan.

Tavian watched him leave, then sat alone in the amber light and finished the lukewarm liquid from his pouch. The metallic taste was still there. The headache still pulsed behind his eyes. The impressions from the contact were almost gone. Wisps of something vast that he couldn't reconstruct no matter how he tried.

But the mech was real. He'd touched it. The hidden port had opened. Something had reached back.

And he was going back tonight.

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