“So… let me get this straight.”

Remi was on his third glass, but it didn’t seem to help the headache currently pounding against his temples. Listening to Samara spin her yarn was like having a front-row seat to Alice telling of her adventures in Neverland, only with more violence and bloodshed. It had started grimly right out of the gate before spiraling out of control, shooting right past madness and insanity before plummeting straight down to nightmare fuel. Trying to make sense of it all was doing wonders for his digestion, and one glance at his crew proved they were in even worse shape.

It was making for a long night.

“... You find that box, somehow make contact with it, learn its secrets, and then proceed to decimate your clan’s infrastructure while simultaneously poking a very large finger in the Troika’s eye, but not before the rest of your crew got themselves killed. That about sum it up?”

“More or less,” Samara admitted. “We could debate some of the finer points, but that’s the gist of it.”

“Right.” Shaking his head, he took another sip from his glass. It still wasn’t helping. “So what happened after you blew up Altinak?”

“Ah.” The Protean smiled and then shrugged. “Well, Guardian and I…”

“... I’m sorry… Guardian?” he interrupted.

“Oh, yes, of course. I neglected to mention his name, didn’t I?” She graced him with a wry smile. “Basically, he’s the ringmaster of the Precursor Avatars. He’s the one I’ve interacted with the most. I guess you could say we’re partners now.” Samara grinned and leaned forward in her chair. “He’s also the one who filled me in on a few things, information that is going to change everything for us. Us Terrans, I mean,” she clarified before an odd expression came over her face. “Now look, we settled that,” she snapped, suddenly irritated. “You want to stay in your damn box until the universe freezes? Do you? Cause I can arrange that.”

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” Remi snarled, all but leaping out of his seat.

She made a vague gesture near her head. “Guardian. He’s a whiny bitch when he wants to be. He takes issue with us claiming Terra Nova for ourselves. Seriously, what are you going to do with it, huh?” she demanded, apparently switching conversations midstream.

Someone had apparently added a bass drum to the conga banging away in his skull. With a groan, he sat back down and reached for the decanter.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “I know this all must seem a bit confusing.”

“A bit,” he agreed. “So he talks to you then.”

“Are you kidding? The guy never shuts up, not unless I twist his arm… yes, you do,” she insisted, apparently chastising her unseen companion once more. “Now hush. Grownups are talking.”

“You realize you’re coming off like a raving lunatic, right?” Remi said pointedly. “Talking to yourself like that isn’t helping your case any.”

“That’s just it, I’m not talking to myself,” she reminded him, “but yeah, I get it. I’ve been on my own for so long I got used to having our conversations out loud. I’ll work harder on subvocalizing them, I promise.”

“I think we’d all appreciate that,” he answered. “This is weird enough as it is.”

“You ought to try it from this side,” she chuckled before her expression suddenly grew somber. “Sorry,” she apologized again, “this isn’t the first time I’ve had this discussion, and they… well, I’m afraid they’re no longer with us.”

“My condolences,” Remi said sincerely.

“Thank you.” She seemed to take a moment to center herself before forging ahead. “I’m glad you found me, for a lot of reasons, but most importantly, I can’t be the only one holding these secrets anymore. If I die… well, they’ll have to get up pretty damn early to make that happen, I can promise you.” She grinned at that. “I think I made a pretty convincing argument regarding that point when you opened my escape pod.”

“It’s not an image I’ll be getting out of my head anytime soon,” he agreed. “Thank you so very much for that. You mind telling me how you ended up as one of the living dead?”

“I was just getting to that,” she explained. “After Altinak, I was done playing terrorist. I knew that if us Terrans were going to have any chance at all, we needed to find Terra Nova, and since I had a whole gaggle of Precursors riding shotgun, who better than me for the job?” She sighed before shaking her head. “Only with a billion years of stellar drift involved, actually locating it turned out to be a real needle in the haystack. We checked dozens of systems and came up empty. Until the last one.”

“You found it?” Remi blurted. “You actually found Terra Nova?”

“... Not exactly,” Samara sighed. “We were approaching the next system when we got ambushed. Even when I stepped aside and let Erhair Dresh… he’s a pilot, the best I’ve ever heard of… even with him taking over the reins, we were no match for them. We were outnumbered and outgunned. He led them on a merry chase, but in the end, we just took one hit too many.” She shrugged, sipping her drink. “So we had to go with our last option. Put me in the escape pod, along with the Repository, and let the Troika think they’d killed us when they destroyed the ship.”

“And then what?” Remi inquired. “Just hope someone would come along and rescue you?”

“Well, you did, didn’t you?” she laughed. “But yeah. We were kind of out of options at that point.”

“So how the hell did you end up looking like that?” Slavko exclaimed, speaking up for the first time since their impromptu wrestling match.

“They design escape pods for short-term survival,” she reminded him. “Anything more than a few days, and the air runs out. To keep me alive, Guardian had to put me into… well, not a coma, exactly, something more like a deep hibernation. Only problem was that in order to keep my brain alive, he need to steal nutrients from somewhere else.” Samara gave him a piercing look. “Unfortunately, the only thing available was me. He had to cannibalize my body to keep my brain tissue alive, enough at least so I could be revived if someone found us.”

“I’m still trying to understand how you recovered so fast,” Mairead chimed in. “I mean… you were dead.”

“I guess if you want to get technical,” she shrugged, “I suppose I was. But the way Guardian explained it, the whole ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ thing is more of a spectrum, not either/or. When he first connected with me, he flooded my body with nanotech, and that apparently gives him a great deal to work with.” Samara managed a polite smile. “It’s a lot, I know. You should have seen my reaction the first time I got half my head blown off.”

“... the first time?” Xuilan squeaked.

“As fascinating as this all is, I think we’re straying a bit from the topic at hand,” Remi argued, attempting to reroute the conversation. “The thing is Samara, we know where Terra Nova is located.”

“Really?” she said in surprise. “How did you come by that bit of knowledge?”

“A Troika scientist who thought he could play us passed it on,” he explained. “We were en route when we stumbled across your escape pod.”

“You sure it’s genuine?” Samara challenged him. “I mean, him just giving it up like that. It’s got to be their biggest secret. You don’t just hand that kind of info out to just anyone. Especially not to a Terran.”

Remi smiled. “I was very convincing.”

“Pretty sure it was my wrench that convinced him,” Mairead muttered.

“That too,” he conceded.

“Can I see it?” Samara asked. “I’d like to know if it matches the information I have.”

The captain considered her request for a moment and then inclined his head towards Xuilan. The pilot nodded and reached for her tablet, pulling up the system’s coordinates before handing it over.

The Protean accepted the tablet with a smile, glancing at the data. “That’s near where we got ambushed,” she confirmed, before handing the tablet back. “I think it’s legit.”

“It’s good to have that confirmed,” Remi agreed, before regarding their guest. “Samara, you said that… Guardian?... told you something that was going to change things for us Terrans. What did you mean by that?”

“Indeed, I did.” The Protean leaned forward in her chair, her eyes sparkling. “Did you ever wonder how a lone Terran scout ship gained access to the Precursor homeworld, something no one else ever pulled off?”

“All the time,” he shrugged.

“Well, turns out the reason is pretty simple. We’re their descendants,” she grinned.

Remi blinked. “Say what?”

“Yeah, it shocked me too,” she chuckled. “They’re not sure how it happened, not exactly. The current theory is that sometime back in the day when they were still around, they visited Earth and left some sort of genetic residue behind. That DNA was incorporated into our own, as life was really just getting started back on old Terra a billion years ago. All their tech… the Repository, their homeworld’s defenses, all of it… is keyed to their DNA. That’s why everyone else was attacked on sight, but Tsvetanov was allowed safe passage.”

“Holy Mother Terra,” Slavko whispered. “It’s brilliant. Simple, yet foolproof. Without a sample of Precursor DNA to copy, it makes for the perfect blockade.”

“It was,” Samara countered, “right until the point where Tsvetanov arrived at Threshold.” The others just stared at her. “That’s what they called their homeworld,” she explained. “They must have realized there was something different about us, and I’m positive they’ve been hard at work unraveling the mystery. It certainly explains their interest in the Protean Clan, and why all three Troika races went to such great lengths to secure Terran test subjects.”

“You think they’ll try to manipulate our DNA in order to gain access?” Remi guessed.

“I think we can’t dismiss the possibility,” she agreed.

“That corresponds to what we learned from Axchxairx,” the captain mused. “He claimed they’d used captured Terrans to sneak past the defense grid, only it never worked.”

“Yeah, whatever’s guarding that world knows what it’s doing,” Samara said darkly. “The Precursors learned their lesson after their first attempt.”

“First attempt?” Remi inquired. “What does that mean?”

The Protean sighed. “It means they tried creating a watchdog for their people once before. It didn’t go so well.”

The crew looked at one another in confusion until something clicked. “You don’t mean…” their captain began, only for the words to die in his throat. One look from Samara was all the confirmation he needed that he’d guessed right.

“I’m afraid I do,” she said sadly. “The Precursors created the Yīqún.”

“For Terra’s sake, why?” Isi exploded. “Why would they do that?”

“Because they screwed up,” Samara said bitterly. “Their people had fallen on hard times and needed something to protect them from a predatory species bent on conquest. Apparently, it was a rush job, and I get the sense they cut a few corners.”

“And then they lost control of it, didn’t they?” Remi snarled. “I can’t even imagine the magnitude of hubris required to fuck up that badly.”

“In their defense, they tried to correct their mistake,” she explained. “They locked the Yīqún away behind some kind of barrier, and it seems to have worked, at least until we arrived on the scene. But yeah, it’s a lot to take in. The same race that accidentally created us were also the ones who almost destroyed us.”

Mairead rose from her chair and made a beeline for the decanter, grabbing the bottle and topping off drinks all around, before adding a healthy dollop to her own. An oppressive silence filled the room as they digested what they’d just learned.

“Is that it?” Remi said at last. “Any more surprises we should know about?”

“That’s the gist of it,” Samara told him. “There’s other information that’s relevant, but those are the highlights. My turn.” She settled into her chair, sipping her drink. “You hinted there’d been a few changes since I was out of the loop. Care to fill me in?”

“Oh, boy,” Remi sighed. “Well, that battle on Sonoitii Prime? It was a real bloodbath, from what I hear. The Valkyries on the surface got hammered hard.” he paused for a moment, suddenly uncomfortable. “It was Kai and Rúna’s outfit. Kai didn’t make it.”

The former assassin bowed her head. “That’s a shame,” she said simply. “We weren’t friends, not by a long shot, but I respected the man.”

“Yeah, Rúna took it pretty hard, or so I heard,” he said quietly. “There’s a silver lining, however. Somehow the Valkyries leveraged an Alliance against the Troika out of the deal. It’s had some rocky moments, especially getting off the ground, but it’s been building momentum ever since. Seems the Troika made themselves a lot of enemies,” he grinned. “Who knew?”

“Really? That’s great news!” Samara said excitedly.

“Now tell her the bad part,” Xuilan grunted, her expression a mask.

The Protean looked back at Remi. “Do I want to know?” she asked softly.

“No, but you need to,” he answered. “The Yīqún are back. With a fucking vengeance.”

Samara winced and looked away. “God damn it all to hell,” she swore. “How?”

“With equal parts arrogance and revenge,” he told her. “Your old friends the Eleexx resurrected their source code and used it as security software, only for it to be subverted by a secret Chell organization no one had ever heard of, unleashing them on an unsuspecting galaxy. We’re trying to hold the line, but…” His voice trailed off as he took another pull at his drink.

“I see,” she said quietly. “And where is the Troika in all of this?”

“Fighting amongst themselves,” the captain said in disgust. “Joining our cause against the machines might have done them some real good, maybe even swung a few Alliance members back to their side. Squabbling amongst themselves just weakens everybody.”

“Which brings us to this point, I’m guessing,” the Protean surmised. “With everything circling the drain, you came seeking the ultimate Hail Mary. Locate Threshold and stop the Yīqún. That about sum it up?”

“More or less,” Remi agreed.

Samara just shook her head. “You won’t get in,” she warned him, “not in a million years.” She leaned back, gracing him with a cryptic smile.

“... at least, not without my help.”