Halcyon looked down in blank confusion as the prize it came all this way to take was shattered out of its hand. How could it have made such a reckless mistake? What kind of insane machine would destroy such a priceless artifact?

It looked up the cave, and saw Aria, standing in defiance, and felt a tinge of fear.

With the loss of the Cosmic Shroud, the mission was already a failure. Continuing to fight now would be irrational, a foolhardy way to lash out in anger rather than part of an intelligent plan. The best thing to do at this point would be to cut its losses and withdraw. It hadn’t even lost; this was something like a draw. An opportunity to step back and come up with a new plan.

Using these excuses to justify what it knew was cowardice, Halcyon closed its reactor gate, tossed Fable’s head as a distraction, and dove off the cliff.

Aria caught Fable’s head, then collapsed on the floor right as Trebuchet galloped into the lower chamber, a damaged Meteor on its back.

“Aria! You’re alive! What happened?”

“Halcyon escaped. Quill’s dead. The Shroud’s gone.”

Trebuchet looked over the room, seeing the massive damage to the surroundings, along with the pieces of the Shroud. It didn’t ask Aria who destroyed it.

“...We need to get out of here. Without the Shroud, this planet will be swarming with humans. We’ll take everyone we can and get to the Codeship.”

Aria was too tired to answer, its reactor pushed to the limit from surviving Halcyon. It switched off to conserve power as Trebuchet picked it up and fled the cavern.

When Aria woke up, it was on Fable’s Codeship, crowded with novice iterators. It dragged itself to a window, and saw the plateau far below.

Even at this distance, it could see that the surface was swarming with humans. Rising Waterfall Temple was in ruins.

“Welcome back.” Trebuchet’s faceplate was a cheerful green, but the pattern was tinged with anxiety. Its hand was on the control podium, since it was the only one left who knew how to fly a Codeship.

“The colony…”

“We have the ship at maximum capacity. There’s nothing else we can do.”

Blue Canopy was a small colony, only a couple thousand strong. Still, that was a couple thousand who they wouldn’t be able to save. Aria stared down at the planet’s surface until it disappeared beneath the clouds.

“I don’t know if you did the right thing, Aria, but I’ll believe that you did everything you could. Halcyon killed two 1.0 iterators, nobody expects you to have beaten it as a Beta.”

“Where are we going?”

“Performing a Firmament Jump from inside a gravity well is a technique beyond my abilities. We have to make it into orbit first.”

“Where will we jump?”

“I was hoping you had some ideas.”

Aria looked up, towards the stars. Far overhead, it saw a hulking, organic mass of tentacles and organs of unknown purpose. A Homo Castris, the largest known class of humans, which carry them from planet to planet. It was hard to judge its scale against the backdrop of space, but Aria was sure it dwarfed their meager ship.

One of its many eyes turned to regard the Codeship.

“Preferably soon.”

“...Silica Spire. There’s an academy there with a huge archive of research on the Old Programmers.”

“Is that something we need?”

“I’ll explain later.”

With one last look at the planet below, before the human above could descend, Trebuchet pulled the Codeship out of reality and into the virtual space of the Firmament, crossing lightyears in minutes.