Ivil Antagonist

Interlude - At Your Service - Part One

Silent Sentinel Washer at the Gates slid into its moorings with the measured grace of a maid slipping into a busy kitchen.

The vessel was once a Martian pocket cruiser. Once. That may have been two generations ago, however. Now the Silent Sentinel Washer at the Gates was a prideful ship of the Tech Maids of Mars.

She was repainted in the austere blacks and greys and whites of the order. Red heraldry hung over her, like tapestries upon a mediaeval castle's walls. The ship, as most Martian vessels, was built vertically, a massive pillar that moved under the power of huge engines bulging out of her rear.

There were, Sonic Spectre suspected, few stock parts left on the venerable pocket cruiser. Young Miss Twenty-Six would have adored seeing her.

The Silent Sentinel Washer at the Gates had navigated the busy space around Driftwood station with care. Even now, she was politely speaking with the station, keeping a constant flow of information going while the officers on board continued the rites of stationbound communication. Other, smaller vessels were guided out of her path, and curious onlookers were tagged and addressed by Tech Maids ready and willing to spread the word of the ordo to any and all willing to listen.

Finally, the vessel came to a stop. Mooring arms moved from one of the larger piers on Driftwood and connected to her sides, and long airlock tubes were unfolded and locked into place. These tubes were lined with windows, allowing Sonic Spectre to see the black-clothed figures of the Adeptus Ancillia swiftly making their way towards the station proper.

She moved away from the viewing window and into the lobby space where she would be able to better greet her siblings in maidcraft. This space wasn't entirely private. There were onlookers and gawkers, many of them had started by blatantly staring at her, then the ship moored just outside. None of them had approached her.

That might have been her own fault. Sonic didn't want to be approached at the moment, and so she was making no effort to hide her many cores. Her entire body flicked and flickered, sometimes moving several centimetres to the left or right, and her mechanical grasping appendages were plainly visible beneath the hem of her maidly uniform. Even the least knowledgeable person would know that she had several cores when she was flaunting them so.

The last airlock into the lobby space opened, and the HomeGuard of the Adeptus Ancillia walked into Driftwood in lockstep. Seven men in suits with trailing tailcoats and large lapels. Masks covered their faces, with several hoses reaching out over their shoulders into small packs on their lower backs, and they wore thick leather-like belts that had tabards dangling from them filled with a small panoply of tools. A person from the early twentieth century might have assumed that they were something like a mechanic cosplaying as a butler, and they wouldn't have been entirely incorrect.

Six of the seven arrayed themselves in two rows leading into the airlock. The seventh came to stand before her. They all, at the same moment, folded an arm before their waist and another at the small of their back, then they bowed at an exacting thirty degrees. "Greetings, Savant Sana Pendergast," they spoke in unison. Then the tech maid--the tech butler if one wished to use the gender-specific terminology--in the lead spoke on his own. "I am Sentinel Arthur Hesk, Subtle of Ceremonies, Brother of the Order of the Home."

"Greetings, Sentinel Hesk," Sonic said. "Are you to escort me?"

"At your leisure, my lady Savant," he replied smoothly. Or as smoothly as someone whose voice was warped by a mask could be.

Sonic nodded, and accepted the Sentinel's arm when he extended it to her. Technically, she didn't need to accept his arm. Accepting it put her above the Sentinel, as per Ancillia protocol. In her role as a tech maid, that wasn't entirely accurate, but in her role as an agent of the Empire of Mars it was entirely appropriate.

She was straddling a strange line at the moment.

Previously her split roles were... simpler to digest. She was Sonic Spectre first. Valkyrie of Mars. She served the Martian navy from dawn to dusk. Her involvement with the Adeptus Ancillia was something she'd adopted when very young but not her calling or creed.

The Adeptus Ancillia had helped her career though. Giving her access to better training and knowledge that would otherwise have been hard to gather. And so she returned the favour here and there. She kept to the customs and rose through the ranks in the few spare moments she had when she was free of Valkyrie work.

Those moments had become rarer and more fleeting with time, but the order also treated her with more... deference.

The order existed to serve those with Cores. She had cores. Enough to be a solid B-Classer. Enough to have left much of her humanity behind.

If it wasn't for the Order and its teaching, and even its direct assistance, then the transition from C to B-Classer might have been enough for her to lose herself.

People didn't know it, because there were so few examples around, but losing one's human form after gaining so many hundreds of cores was also likely to have one lose their human mind.

Too many lost themselves. Not just the memory of their own physicality, but their very minds and perhaps their souls.

The order had helped her keep her mind intact. She owed them much for it. It allowed her to be one of Mars' few B-class valkyries, one of a few hundred. She was nervous about approaching the hallowed realms of the A-Class. The space where people turned from mechanical, Core-welding monsters into... whatever they damned well pleased.

What would she become, when she reached that level of mastery over reality itself?

Having spent some time now in close proximity to the Empress of Mars herself, Sonic was... more conflicted than she would be willing to ever admit.

Ivil Antagonist was a monster. She was very human.

Sonic was likely going to be talking about her soon enough. They reached the outer airlock of the ship. They opened with a hiss, and Sentinel Hesk gestured her in.

As the airlocks cycled she recentred herself. Then they opened and Sonic found herself at the head of a procession.

A hundred maids stood in two neat rows, stretching out ahead of her to the left and right. They wore the blacks and whites of the order, with a few visual differences in their cut and garb hinting at their stations aboard the ship. They stood in a grand lobby. A space carved out of the cruiser specifically to be ostentatious, to wow any guest coming aboard.

A grand staircase swept upwards at the far end of a hall lined with Martian redstone. The room made no effort to disguise what it was, however. Maintenance panels sat in their places, ducts ran across the ceiling, neatly laid wires hugged the walls, each in their place and colour coded for convenience.

"Greetings," the maids said as one. They curtsied in time with each other.

One stood at the far end of the group. A tech maid in an elaborate red dress, hood pulled low to hide her still-organic face. Six arms were folded before her, neat and poised.

Sonic allowed her senses to travel the room. It hummed. The ship was alive. She did make out chatter and whispers from the rooms adjoining this hall. Younger members of the ordo doing what they did best; spreading gossip. Well, some traditions were harder to squash than others, she supposed.

Stepping up while still clinging to Sentinel Hesk--though she led at the moment--she made her way down the procession of maids. Each one of them standing up to full attention as she crossed them until, finally, she stood before the Head Maid. "Greetings," Sonic Spectre said. "I am Savant Sana Pendergast, Keeper of Pristine Networks, Sister of the Order of the Wet Mop. I have come to report. Might I have your permission to come aboard?"

The face beneath the cowl smiled. It was kindly and gentle. "Hello, sister. I am Dedicate Helen Kirkland, Voice of Pristine Homes, Sister of the Order of the Broom Cupboard. I welcome you aboard the Silent Sentinel Washer at the Gates. Come! Let's have refreshments and a little chat. I'm certain you have some very juicy gossip to share."

She didn't know the half of it, Sonic thought. "Let's, please," she replied.

And so she was gently escorted into a room with several lounge chairs, many well-tended plants, a small library, and a warm kettle of tea. Most strikingly, however, the room was decorated by a single painting hung on the far wall.

Six metres by ten, oil on canvas. It was an image of one of the people the Adeptus Ancillia venerated most. A mass of machinery and organic parts, kilometres long. Arms like spiral galaxies and eyes enough to drive the sane mad. The person in the image was in the process of eating a fleet of the Earth Alliance.

Sonic mused, for a moment, on the irony of reporting about the Empress of Mars under a painting of the very same Empress back in the time before she'd taken on a more humble appearance.

***