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In the beginning was pain.
Minra felt her way along the hallway, her breath heavy in her throat. Each heave for air was a struggle, as the atmosphere in her one-person ship drained itself of oxygen.
Technocyte.
The reliquary drive was malfunctioning. There'd be no way to land safely, no way to get anywhere for repairs. Even if she did… she'd be shot, and her ship razed, in order to prevent the virus from spreading.
Minra felt at her neck, the small piece of metal embedded in her brain stem. Ballas had called it a 'Mind-Shell'. He'd promised it would heal her of her visions. Six years after the Tenno betrayal, they had only gotten worse.
A horrific screech of metal sounded from the drive bay. The virus had spread to her reliquary drive. With any luck, it'd jump them into the void, and Minra could die of something faster than oxygen deprivation.
She pulled herself further into the dim hallway, and arrived at the cockpit. Minra slid into the chair with a huff she instantly regretted.
Slow breaths. Waste no air.
She dragged in another lungful of air, and held it with the same desperation that a soldier would clutch a deadly wound. Minra keyed several buttons on the dashboard, tried to bring up a navigation map, failed. The display flickered and died.
She leaned back into her chair. The effort of staying upright far too much.
Minra stared out the window, looking out at the starless sky. This far out, she'd never have made it anywhere regardless. No solar rails, no junctions, no reliquary drive. Her experimental scout ship was destined to fail.
"The first human— no, the first living being!— in Tau, Minra. Can you imagine it?" Ballas had promised. He was always making promises to her. "You'll be history itself. Your body will be in such high demand, it'll never be taken. They'd spend too much time fighting over it."
It was that last part that had convinced Minra to go through with it. Being pardoned from the selection pool for Continuity. Safe from the diabolical theft of her flesh and blood for the satisfaction of her Golden Gods.
Then, a report on her ship's radio filtered through only a few years later. The Tenno, the warriors who had slain the Sentient threat, had turned on the Orokin, and wiped them out. Minra's journey had been for nothing. There was no need to fear Continuity any longer, the Orokin were gone.
She waited, hearing the infestation fighting against the metal bulkhead that seperated her from oblivion.
"It will not harm you," Ballas had promised, as he loaded the deadly strain of technocyte onto her vessel, the Golden Dream.
Ballas was always making promises to her.
The metal wrenched apart, and Minra knew only pain.
Then, there was fear.
"No, no no, no please," Brean whispered, his hand clutching tightly to the Lato-Mk1 pistol the stranger had given him. He cowered behind the half-wall that seperated him from the Grineer Lancers who prowled the area. The promise of a revived and terraformed Earth after the Old War had been meant to be a new start for the colonies, the chance to live a life free from terror.
Brean had lived his childhood unbothered, until his colony had been the first to have its overseers 'replaced' by the new Grineer empire. Then he had been forced into slavery for years, until his thirteenth birthday last week. It seemed he'd never escape.
Then a woman had come along with a pistol and a promise.
This was his only chance.
He ducked low, racing along the thin walkway. Below him, he saw the canyon which held the factory he'd been forced to work in for almost a decade.
Never again, he thought. He stepped lightly, but the metal under his boots creaked nevertheless, and soon shouts rang out from below and to either side.
"Clem! Clem! Grakata! Skoom!" The simple brains that the cloned Grineer troops were provided with didn't provide complex vocabulary.
Brean abandoned his attempt to hide, and raced out from cover, rushing for the elevator that would take him to a landing pad. A landing pad he'd been promised held a ship for his use.
"They will not harm you," the cloaked stranger had claimed. But the bullets that whizzed past him as he sprinted were very real. Strangely though, they always seemed to miss by only inches. Soon, Brean felt a wind at his back, and his stride lengthened with every step, until it seemed as though he was moonwalking, seconds lapsed between his graceful leap, and landing with a gentle thud, before repeateing. Leap, land, leap, land, on and on. He covered dozens of meters, then hundreds, racing through the forest, always with the Grineer at his back. Brean laughed out loud as he did so.
"I'm flying! I'm flying!" The wind whipped through his hair, like a loving mother rifling her fingers through it. Like his mother…
He arrived at the elevator, and keyed for lift. In the short time it took for the elevator to begin rising, the Grineer caught up. All at once, the wind at Brean's back seemed to dissipate, as though it had lost the will, or the energy, to continue.
The Grineer lined up a shot as Brean rose rapidly on the elevator, and he spread his arms, filled with the rush of invincibility he'd felt as he fled the clones.
They will not harm you.
The next bullet pierced his chest, directly opposite his heart.
Brean collapsed instantly, his legs gave out from under him like a puppet without a hand.
Unconsciousness came and went. He felt the warmth of the sun, and the chill of the night air, time after time, day after day, for a million years. His bones turned to dust, and the dust stirred the air, and resettled back into his shape, and he coughed, and the cough made him hurt so bad that he slept again.
He didn't know how many millenia had passed before he felt the stranger's hand close around his, and he opened his eyes again.
"Dammit kid, I left you alone for two minutes!" She said.
Brean just looked at her. She was pretty, like, pretty pretty.
"Are you one of the Golden Gods?" He asked. His parents had told him stories about them. People that never died. People that were beautiful beyond imagining. He couldn't imagine a more beautiful face than the woman who looked at him from under her hood.
The woman grunted. "I might've been, once. A long time ago. They decided to give me a different job." Her hands were cold on his chest, but Brean didn't mind. His whole body felt cold now, so it didn't make a difference.
"I don't think I can fix this, kid." She said. And Brean should've been afraid. The woman looked afraid too, but he didn't feel worried at all. "I'll get you to the ship. Maybe old Ceppy can help where I can't." She didn't seem convinced.
"I'd like to stay here, ma'am," Brean said. He noticed the words were harder to find, his lips didn't quite work together how he was used to. He reached up, on impulse, and tried to touch a finger to her cheek. The woman recoiled, stretching out of reach. "Earth is my home." He finished, letting his arm drop limply.
"I know, kid," the woman said. Her cold hands found their way beneath his body, and she lifted him effortlessly. "But home isn't safe anymore."
And she carried him somewhere a long way away, and Brean fell asleep again.
He didn't wake up.
In the center was fury.
Minra leaned against the sink in the bathroom of the modified crewship she'd stolen from the Corpus a few years back. Wasn't much point to having a bathroom, considering that she didn't need to use one anymore, but it was the sole room in the whole of the vessel that had a mirror.
In the mirror, a woman of nearly thirty years looked back. Dark skin, silken black hair, it lay bunched in endless curls around her face. She couldn't remember the last time she'd tried to brush it. Her vivid argent eyes followed a path down to her body, which appeared to be encased in a sleek, form-fitting suit, but that was hardly the truth of it.
She touched a cold finger to her cheek, and watched her reflection mimic the action. She traced a metal finger along the seam between her jaw and where the metal carapace that had replaced her skin began.
Proto-cyte. It was a much more benign strain of the virus. Programmed to seek out living subjects and convert them to Warframes, but not fully. Whatever Minra was, she wasn't human anymore, but nor was she a mindless killing machine. Yet.
But each day, the metal rose higher. Each day, when she checked in the mirror, she never saw a difference, but after another few months, she likely would have the infestation up to her nostrils.
Minra didn't know why she kept fighting it.
There's never a point. I never move the needle. For all her incredible durability, for all her nigh-magical powers, she couldn't kill enough Corpus or Grineer to halt their slow advance across the Sol system. Her trip to that Grineer factory had been able to shut it down, and get most of the slaves freed, but that kid… he died in her arms. He died trusting her completely.
"Ceppy!" She called out. "Find me something to kill."
"Right away, madam!" A voice echoed over the ship's speakers.
It was a common enough request from Minra, and it had taken a lot of reprogramming of the cephalon to get him to actually fulfill it, but her time abroad had allowed her to familiarize herself with many aspects of Orokin technology.
"There's a Grineer galleon flotilla making its way toward Venus, ma'am. Radio chatter implies they're intent on conquering the city of Fortuna."
"Set a course." Minra fastened her ammunition belt more securely across her chest. "Time to go to work."
Knife, flesh, carve, kill.
Bullet, blistering, puncture, tear.
Blast, stun, rupture, rend.
She raced through the ship at breakneck speeds, the bullets fired by desperate Grineer not quite managing to drown out their shouts of: "Tenno! Skoom!"
Grenades flew from her outstretch hand, scattering lancers. She parried a strike from a butcher with her knife, and let it sink deep into the unfortunate soldier's brain. Her pistol pointed at the remaining three Scorches, and three propane tanks went up as the trilling pings rang out from its ionized rail launcher.
She stopped a moment, her breathing heavy, her memory flashing back to the Golden Dream for a moment.
Not weak. Never again.
She looked around.
There was nothing left to kill.
Sixteen hours after she'd left, Minra stepped back into the bathroom. Her body covered in blood, her hair soaked through with the stuff. She wished the shields that her new body equipped her with extended beyond protecting her from energy bolts and bullets.
She stepped into the shower, cleaned the blood as well as she could, but her heart wasn't really in it anymore. She just stood under the running stream. Fortuna was safe from the Grineer for the moment. They hadn't spread much further than the colonies on Earth yet.
The Corpus, though…
They'd control Fortuna through credits alone, if Minra couldn't stop it. And she didn't think she could.
She looked into the mirror again, studied the seam of metal on her jaw. She could've sworn more of her chin had been visible the prior morning.
Maybe her earlier prediction of a few months had been overly optimistic.
"Ceppy, how're you doing on that anti-virus?"
"Estimated completion is still at two years, ma'am. Same as when you asked yesterday." There was no sarcasm in his voice. Minra thought that Ceppy might've been like that even before his transformation into a cephalon.
Thanks for nothing, Ballas. Minra thought.
"Anything from the Orokin?"
"Scans indicate no presence from either the Orokin or the Tenno, ma'am. Shall I reach out to other Cephalons? They might have information I don't, Ordis—"
"I don't want to hear the same bad news from different faces, Ceppy. Just keep working on it."
"Yes ma'am, of course."
A brief moment of silence.
"Two weeks, ma'am. Until you're… completed."
Minra looked down at her metal body. She knew she wasn't anything resembling human any more. She touched her face again, willing the metal and technocyte away, and nothing happened. She remembered the kid—what had his name been?— reach out to touch her face. It was the first time anyone had done so since she'd left for Tau.
She had recoiled then, frightened.
Now she was angry for having let the opportunity to feel a human touch again slip past her.
The anger shifted to guilt. He was a dying child. I'm just a monster of two monstrous parents.
And it was nearly time for that monster to finish maturing.
In the end, there is resignation, and with it, strength.
It has been two weeks.
Minra hasn't seen her face since the metallic face shield had replaced it, and she knew soon she wouldn't see anything at all. She'd be a monster without thought, without feeling.
"Ceppy, take us to Corpus headquarters," she said.
"Ma'am, respectfully, that's a suicidal proposition." Ceppy's voice holds concern.
"It's alright Ceppy, I've backed you up on Cetus, they'll kick you online back there once they lose your signal."
"I wasn't worried about me, ma'am."
"Did I program you to give a damn?" Minra asked. "Take us out, now."
If she was going to lose her mind, if she was going to become a beast, better to do it with a ship full of deserving victims.
There was a long pause.
"According to chatter, you'll find Nef Anyo and approximately one-third of the board of directors somewhere above Lua at the moment." Ceppy sounded reluctant. "Shall we?"
"We shall."
Wish I had an Archwing.
Minra tumbled through space, inertia driving her toward the large Corpus warship that held her targets. She could feel the infestation leeching into her scalp, the slow transmutation of her brain would not take long after that.
She crashed into the double reinforced airlock door with enough force to shatter bone, but she had none left to break, and the door was far more fragile than her. She tumbled through the narrow hallway until she was in the bowels of the ship, exactly where she'd targetted. Outside, she heard a deafening rumble, and one last message rang out over her communicator as she began stalking toward the meeting room that held her quarry.
"Goodbye, Minra," Ceppy's voice called. The words were enough to slow her, but not stop. Tears might've run freely from her eyes, if she still had them.
Crewmen halted her at dozens of checkpoints, piles upon piles of machines, traps, turrets, and men did everything they could to halt her advance. She killed them one at a time, she savored it. She wished she could still lick the blood from her face.
"Fall back!" Came the cry from the nullifier crewman, his portable energy shield offered little protection when Minra's thrown knife collided with its remote projector, and it collapsed. Her pistol's next bullet buried itself between his eyes.
The rest of her opponents fled, but not quickly enough. Fine, invisible strands of air tripped them as they ran, and Minra's blade and bullet made quick work of those who fell. Crimson torrents pooled from the freshly made corpses, and Minra took a moment to dance within the deep-red puddles.
She continued toward the board room. Man and machine did all they could to stop her, turned aside by a tempest or an airblast.
As she advanced through the ship, her feet began to move on their own. Speed increased, until she was leaping and hopping through the vessel at incredible speed, jump after jump, like a ballerina wearing rocket propelled shoes, chaos and grace met in a beautiful symphony of contradiction.
She rode the winds as a sailor did seas, and she was alive with it.
Monster found her quarry, quivering and fleeing. Kill. Kill it now. Anyo ran like a man posessed, but Monster was faster. She caught him with a flying leap, and raised her knife in one bloody, metal hand, and then everything went black.
After the end, there is hope for a new beginning.
Two years later.
"Ordis, why is this thing tracking mud on my new carpet?"
"I don't know, Operator! Umbra brought it back from a supply raid on a Corpus vessel."
"It's not like any Warframe I've ever seen, and how come it's moving around?"
"Umbra advised you leave it be. He communicated that it was… like him."
Tara took several rapid steps backward from the strange Warframe. "And he brought it onboard!? Without asking me?"
"You said you didn't wish to be disturbed while—LAZING ABOUT— sleeping, Operator," Tara's cephalon sounded nervous.
She sighed. "You're right, Ordis. Just… make sure it's got a transference bolt, and don't let it onto the lander. I don't want any surprises."
"Promise." The strange Warframe said. In an instant, a gust of powerful wind yanked Tara across the room until she was in the Warframe's grip. "Ceppy, Promise."
"Ordis!? Help!?" Tara struggled in the iron grip of the thing. Her shirt was firmly clenched in the Warframe's bloodstained fist.
"I'm sending a sentinel, Operator, try not to antagonize it!"
Tara set her jaw, lifted her arm, and grabbed hold of the Warframe's face. She Transferred in.
Tara saw the totality of Minra's existence, the reality of her suffering. The architect of her pain, and the hope that she had held to rectify it. At once, she understood.
Tara Transferred out, and held out a hand to the Warframe.
"Yes, Minra," Tara said. "We'll find Ceppy, and get you your cure. I promise."
Tara didn't make many promises.