A Brief Conversation of Energy

[lilacsigil]

Title: A Brief Conversation of Energy
Challenge: brains_in_a_jar
Fandom: X-Men comics
Summary: Many years ago, Rogue gave up her human body and became the core of a spaceship, in order to survive. Along with her ace pilot Carol Danvers, she faithfully enforced the law in a dying solar system. Now wanted criminal Remy LeBeau is at the helm, and change is on the way.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3000
Author's Notes: Thank you to st_aurafina and mofic for beta reading, and to petronelle for proposing this wonderfully creative challenge in the first place!



He shoved his hand deep inside her navigation panel, and it hurt like nothing else, worse than a laser burn, worse than that time she and Carol had to drop into atmosphere with the starboard shieldskin half hanging off. Rogue didn't understand what the intruder could possibly be doing – all her nerves were well shielded in thick plastic sheaths, and the junctions were only accessible with special tools. There was no way a bare hand could be making her twitch and spasm, her lights flickering on and off and corridors reconfiguring.

"Ha!" he cried in triumph, and her crystalline furnaces roared into action, out of her control. For a moment, she managed to activate communications – if she couldn't control her body, at least she could call for help – but he frowned and twisted those agonising fingers another inch further and she was silenced. She flashed her external lights – there were plenty of other ships in dock with her, surely someone would notice – but the man had already diverted power from other areas to the engines. In a last-ditch effort, she reached for the one system that she'd been ordered never to stop, and terminated life support.

"Hey, you don't have to fight me," the man growled, and with a sudden jab of what felt like, but couldn't be, electricity from his fingers, Rogue's control and consciousness collapsed.

Just as suddenly, her awareness was back: the man had closed the navigation panel, finally, and the uncontrolled fluctuations in her systems had ceased. A quick systems check reveals that her engines engaged and they were 140,000 clicks out of the Mars orbiting dock where she had been recharging, and were now heading for the asteroid belt. Rogue knew the area well – most of the pirates either hid there or in the broad corona of the cooling sun. The frustrating thing was that a lot of legitimate and vital industry was out in the asteroids, too – mining and ore processing, including some of the materials used to process the crystals needed to store energy in ships. It was a rookie assignment, guarding the huge freighters – which were completely mechanical and thus manoeuvred poorly – but Rogue had done plenty of time out there. Both she and her pilot Carol had a reputation for being more than a little insubordinate.

Whatever the intruder had done, he knew more about ships than any non-pilot should. Not only were her engines out of their usual energy conservation mode, they were super-charged with energy from weapons and communications. They were defenseless, but Rogue supposed he'd have a good idea where the pirates were likely to be lurking – they were probably heading straight for them. He was definitely not a pilot, though – Rogue couldn't sense the ship interface chip in his brain. Suddenly, she realised who wasn't here.

"Carol! What did you do to her?"

The man leaned back in Carol's chair, smug, and Rogue flexed the chair stem, dumping him onto the floor.

"Hey! I didn't hurt her, if that's what's got you up in arms."

"Tell me where she is, or you're going out the airlock."

"Try it and I'll shut you down, girl." He clambered to his feet and ran one bony finger across the navigation panel, trailing sparks. For one disorienting moment her link to navigation sensors dropped out, and she could have been anywhere in the solar system, spinning, falling, flying into the sun.

Then she was online again, a precisely located dot in a fortunately empty sector.

"Quit that! Where's my pilot? She was onboard when I went into recharge cycle."

"She's fine, back in dock. Knocked her out." The man touched his jaw lightly, and Rogue could see a solid bruise spreading beneath the stubble. Carol wouldn't let someone take Rogue without a fight, even if she had been drinking heavily, as she usually did when they were docked.

"What are you planning? You know you'll get the death penalty for stealing an Authority ship."

"They've got to catch me first! And even if they did kill me, it's better than going back."

He sounded remarkably cheerful, and Rogue needed to change tactics – he must be either mad or so cavalier about the law that threats won't work. She knew the Energy Authority protected her ferociously, like all their highly valuable ships. There weren't a lot of people whose parents would give them up to become ships – even fewer who were suitable – and ships themselves were damn hard to build. The Authority wouldn't just execute a hijacker, they'd hunt down everyone he knew and interrogate them, too.

"You're not going back where?" She reached out and activated a diagnostic routine, to see what he'd damaged and what she could still access. Communications were certainly still offline, and they were heading away from the busy areas where codes and sign-ins were required. He'd have no need to restore them.

"Got caught without ID, which is one thing, but then they handed me over to some scientist. No idea what he was trying to do, but I sure hope it was fun for him, because it wasn't for me. Or the others he had there." His face and posture were still careless and relaxed, but Rogue's sensors could pick up the increase in heart rate and respiration. He was genuinely afraid of whatever he'd left behind.

"What was he doing?"

"Experiments. I don't know." He waved a hand. "So, you've got to be trying to work out some way to stop me and return to dock, yeah? Hand me over?"

"What do you think? You knocked out my pilot, and killed her for all I know. You hijacked me, and the Energy Authority isn't too fond of ships that let themselves get hijacked." Rogue still had access to her navigation and her engines – and even while she'd been unconscious, the delicate balance of energy production and flow had been carefully maintained. It would be difficult to divert energy back where she wanted it while he observed her, and unlikely that he would need sleep in the twenty hours or so it would take to reach the asteroid belt.

"Ah, you're too valuable. They'll put you on mail delivery or freighter escort for five minutes, then you'll be back to shooting down energy-runners."

"You make shooting energy-runners sound like a bad thing." Rogue was pretty proud of her high-disable low-kill record – after all, if you happened to be a ship, being patched up and joining the Authority was far better than the other option.

"Living further out than Earth orbit would've been hard enough before the Sun started dying. The Authority hoards energy, keeps it to reward the good and punish the rest of us. You've been out here often enough to see it."

"Finding it hard to start a revolution without energy to charge your weapons?" Rogue asked, though his political talk was troubling her – she didn't want to be used for some suicide run. They were headed out towards the asteroids, though, not back towards Earth or Venus, and there wasn't anything worth attacking out here.

"Hey, I don't want a revolution! I'm just helping organise a fairer distribution of wealth. Some out to Mars and the asteroids, and some for me. Sound good?"

"Yeah, just wonderful. You steal energy and someone else misses out. It's not like there's enough to go around, is it?" Rogue could feel where he'd shut off the communication systems and blocked her access to life support – he'd be sorry about that if they ran into trouble and she couldn't stabilise it – but the systems themselves didn't appear to be damaged. Maybe she could reroute power from the engines – no human, even a pilot, could notice the tiny decrease in speed.

The man's face turned serious, his grin fading as if it had never existed. "Anyway, got a deal for you. Take me to my contact, we wipe the last twelve hours of your memory and you go free. You don't mess with life support and I don't rig you to explode."

"All you want is a ride?"

"Yeah. It’s not like we can use a ship for anything against its will. You'd just get free sometime and turn us all in."

Rogue hesitated, but couldn't really see anything drastically wrong with the deal. His contacts might try to put a control overlay on her, but they weren't too effective, and the time it took to reach the man's contacts would give her an opportunity to get her systems working for her again. "Okay. It's a deal."

"Good." He slapped her console lightly and grinned. "I'm Remy. May as well introduce myself, since we're going to wipe your memory anyway."

"Remy. You know my name, it's painted up my side."

"Rogue – not a real inspirational name, is it? All the other ships are called the Defiance, or the Eagle or something."

"It's a nickname my momma gave me, so you shut your goddamn mouth."

"And you sure don't sound like a regular ship," Remy muttered under his breath. "Regular ships got clean language."

"Well, I ain't a regular ship. I didn't get switched in as a baby. Not until I was thirteen."

"Never heard of that before."

"There's a few of us around." She tentatively reached for the comms system again, but her bypassing hadn't been enough, yet. "When I was little, one of those energy plants – the ones that tried to supercharge crystals – well, it exploded, and wiped out a whole lot of people. Made a lot more sick. I was too small to remember it, but I guess my family was killed. My momma rescued me and adopted me."

Remy made a surprised noise. "I remember that big mess. Matter of fact, I lived downriver from it. Damaged a lot of people I know."

"Yeah, so in my case, everything Momma did wasn't enough. It damaged my nerve endings, so every time something touched my skin, it hurt like hell. First it was just hot or cold that did it, but after a while everything hurt, even a soft bed. Even a breeze. So they put me in a gel tank –"

"Like the ones they use for sensory deprivation? For torture?"

"Outside the tank was torture for me, not inside it! It kept me alive long enough for Momma to go lean on some important people until they agreed to let me do this. Be a ship. Saved my life."

"I bet she did. Different kind of life, though." Remy had his feet up on the navigation console, and Rogue wanted to flip him off his chair again, but the more relaxed he was, the better her chances of getting communications working.

"I always did want to fly. Doing it myself is better than riding along in a ship."

"Can't say I agree with that, but better than lying down and dying. No real choice, sometimes."

"Nana wouldn't have agreed with you! Momma's lady friend, that is, I called her Nana. She'd say there's always two paths open. I could have chosen to stay with them, at home, and die. Once you're a ship, you belong to the Energy Authority. Choosing to live meant I wouldn't see my family for a long time. Ever, I guess."

His face was more serious now, and, oddly enough, looked more honest. "I guess sometimes you've got just got to survive. A whole lot of people got hurt by those energy plants – not just the one that exploded, but all the others that leaked microcrystals into the rivers."

"Never heard of that before."

"Yeah, well, they don't put the energy plants around the rich folks that you protect, do they?"

"So you want me to start blowing up other ships? Take a shot at something big on Earth? I bet I'm doing more good here than you've ever done. You're some kind of thief? A pirate? Someone who knows the workings of a ship but gets arrested for having no ID doesn't sound like the kind of person who should be giving me the third degree about my ethics!" Rogue didn't seem to be able to slow her engines, and communications were cut off, but the navigation systems were still open.

He smirked. "Thief, pirate, whatever you like. I steal energy, materials, credit – I even stole you."

"Hijacked."

"Whatever you want to call it. You know the energy rations for the outer planets are getting smaller."

"The sun's dying, and the energy plants are already at their peak. Making us waste energy fighting you off while you steal power is going to be a big help. I see that. If we don't share, if the ships can't get out here to distribute the crystals, there'll be nothing for anyone." Rogue had spent most of her life as a ship battling people like him – it was strangely comforting to be opposing him verbally as she would physically, given the chance.

"Sure there won't. And there's no other choice but to bow down to the Energy Authority."

"Well, no. Not unless you really do live up to your opinion of yourself and the sun does shine out of your ass."

Remy laughed. "Funny you should say that!" He wriggled his fingers, and a pink glow appeared around them, tiny sparks snapping and jumping between his index finger and his thumb.

"That doesn’t look like your ass." Rogue kept her voice flat, determined to be unimpressed by this strangeness.

"Could be if I wanted, but I've only got these one pair of pants."

"Is that what the Authority wanted you for? You generate energy?"

The cold, flat expression slid back over his face. "Not just me. Lots of people got changed by the microcrystal leaks – I was the only one dumb enough to get caught, that's all. This doctor, Essex, wanted to graft my genes onto other people, only they weren't taking. The people he put my DNA into just charged up after a few days and exploded. It's weird – I can only work with non-living material. I don't go around exploding people."

Rogue knew, now, that she could stop him. He could work on the electronic components of her panels and junctions, but her organic parts – the chair, the hull, the oxygen generators – were immune. All she'd have to do would be to flex the straps on the chair - designed for high grav operations that were more than the inertial suppressors could accept – and he'd be trapped, out of reach of those critical panels.

And yet she hesitated. Why hadn't she heard of these energy-generating people? If there were enough of them, surely the crisis could be averted. She believed Remy when he said there were plenty of them, if only because he seemed like the type to enjoy it too much if he happened to be unique.

"I was caught in one of those leaks, and I sure couldn't generate anything more than sympathy," she said, skeptically.

"You got hit with a big burst, all at once, so it killed most people and hurt you. Still, you were young enough that your body tried to adapt to it. Most of us just got a low, regular exposure, and our bodies changed. Some of us make energy, others can fly. Or talk to people with their minds. All kinds of stuff. You know that."

An old connection clicked into place in Rogue's mind – if she had still been human, she probably wouldn't even have remembered, but her brain was orderly, now. The memory was of Momma, seen only for a second, her body shaded with mist behind a shower door.

"Sorry, Momma," little Rogue shouts, "I gotta go! Right now!" She dashes over to the toilet and pulls down her big girl pants with a sigh of relief.

"Knock next time!" Momma calls over the noise of the shower.

What her mind didn't process then, it accepts now: in the moment that Rogue threw open the door, Momma's skin was blue like the shower tiles – not blue with cold, but a rich and unnatural hue.

"I know who you're working for," Rogue said, her voice wavering. "Why you stole me, of all the ships."

"Yeah. Irene – your Nana, you said – she told me what to do when I escaped. I laughed at her back then, asked what I was supposed to be escaping from, but she didn't tell me that part."

"I wouldn't have believed you."

"I didn't believe her until I was living it. And here we are."

"Why now? I could have helped them, but now you've hijacked me. I'm security compromised. I won't be getting anywhere near anything important for a year or more."

"That's not why. One of the people I know, calls herself Lila, can get us to other stars, in moments."

"They said that was impossible, that we were stuck here!"

"Maybe by regular means, yeah. But your momma, and others, they've been collecting all the mutated people like me, helping us out, trying to find energy sources and maybe weapons. We found something better, but we can't use her power without the protection of a ship – we'll end up suffocating in deep space."

Rogue wants to laugh – she can hardly believe how far ahead her Nana can plan, how much her momma wanted her to live. "Okay, I get it. That's who we're meeting? Momma?"

"Yeah. You're not turning back to Mars? Rejoining the Authority?"

"Hell, no! My momma wants a ship, she's going to get one. But, hey, I guess I'm going to need a new pilot."

Remy touched his hands to the navigation panel and the last remnants of his systems bypass shorted out – she was in control again. She leapt forward ever faster, engines at top efficiency, towards her family, her freedom and the long-foreseen future.