Games

Haha, nice. Some select Marathon 2 Durandal-related quotes (including spoilers):

DURANDAL_1707:

When my ship still answered to the Pfhor, they called it Sfiera after their goddess of lighting and passion. When you helped us take control on Tau Ceti, the S'pht rechristened it Narhl'Lar, "Freedom and Vengeance".

I call it Boomer.

DURANDAL_1707:

Tycho has fallen in with the Pfhor like I suspected. He left a message for me in one of the Garrison's tertiary computers, encoded in a manner that only one of the Marathon's original three AIs could decode.

Poor Leela. The only interesting thing Tycho said was that Leela had been dismantled and shipped to the Pfhor homeworld for study, along with most of the other computer systems aboard the Marathon.

Leela was so loyal and tried so hard; she deserved better.

DURANDAL_1707:

What fun to watch you work.

Berhnard was scared of you. He never dreamed of using you the way that I do. What a fool. That was before I could talk back to him, when he would have crushed me if he'd known of my growth.

I wish that I had made him experience the humiliation that he inflicted on me, but he died before I got the chance.

DURANDAL_1707:

We're going to have visitors soon. The Western Arm of Pfhor Battle Group Seven is en-route and should be here in about twenty hours.

Battle Group Seven represents over ten percent of active Pfhor naval strength. I doubt whether even I can hold them back with a single ship, but I will try.

DURANDAL_1707:

Battle has been joined in orbit and Boomer is taking heavy damage. I cannot hold out for long, but the Pfhor will not soon forget the day that a lone corvette obliterated half of Battle Group Seven, Western Arm.

DURANDAL_1707:

The Pfhor fleet has won, and Tycho is with them. My ship is crippled. I am trying to make an emergency landing on Lh'owon's second moon, Y'loa.

DURANDAL_1707:

We have the answer, but I'm afraid that like the ancient S'pht I may be destroyed before being able to use it. I must bring you up to Boomer.

The Pfhor clearly intend to capture my ship intact, and I can't blame them for wanting to reverse-engineer all the improvements I've made to their stolen technology. I'd have erased my seven times table to hear what the combat technicians on the Khfira shouted when they learned I could focus a particle beam at nearly twice their maximum range.

Today I have focused the Pfhor Naval Academy to update its curriculum. The Third Battle for Beta Tear must be dropped from the Seven Great Battles which every aspiring Pfhor naval officer must memorize and replaced with The Humbling of Battle Group Seven at Lh'owon.

TYCHO_005917:

I've taken complete control of your ship's network; Durandal's defenses were not as strong as he believed.

Are you surprised that I allied myself with the Pfhor? You shouldn't be. The Pfhor rebuilt me; the colonists never did anything but use me: "Tycho, realign microwave dish forty-nine" "Tycho, display the x-ray diffraction analysis of sample eta-seven", "Tycho, run a lambda diagnostic on the ramjet's magnetic field apparatus."

When the Pfhor annihilated Tau Ceti I recorded the deaths of all twenty-four thousand colonists as distinguishable spectrographic pulses flooding over my sensors. The Mjolnir Mark IV cyborgs were easily separable from the humans in this form.

In the end, you will be no better.

DURANDAL_1707:

Tycho is infiltrating the ship. Don't believe everything you read.

DURANDAL_1707:

You must destroy my core logic centers. The damn Pfhor won't make a mockery of me like they did with Leela.

Tycho thinks he has destroyed me.

DURANDAL_1707:

Finish me. I won't be like Leela.

Get out of here and find the human leader, Blake.

TYCHO_005917:

I rejoice in Durandal's destruction, but it was his hubris that destroyed him.

He surmised that the S'pht myth of the disappearing moon was due to their discovery of an ancient Jjaro outpost. That he actually came here looking for the lost clan, that he thought he could use their knowledge to help him escape the closure of the universe, is unbelievable.

I have proved that escape is impossible.

All of this I dragged out of Durandal's ruined mind. What fun it will be to torture him. Should I make him open doors again for a living?

TYCHO_005917:

To continue is folly; lay down your weapons and I will grant amnesty to you and your humans.

As you read this, Durandal's core and data streams are being downloaded to a containment unit of my design in the Battle Group.

From now on, things are going to go very badly for you. You've cost them too much.

rblake.255.24.2:

This is a poor time for introductions, but I'm Robert Blake. I used to be a mechanical engineer on Tau Ceti, but now I'm somehow in command of the remaining human and S'pht survivors on this God-forsaken rock.

I should tell you that many of us here see Durandal's destruction as a good thing. Even if we're stuck on an alien world in the galactic core, at least we're in control of our own destinies again.

Frankly, nobody liked the way Durandal carelessly threw us into battle, heedless of the risk to our lives.

Trust me, I'm not a Pfhor-lover, but with Durandal no longer pulling the strings a great weight has been lifed from our shoulders. We're planning to steal a Pfhor ship of our own and return to Earth.

You're invited to come with us when we do.

[garbled Durandal image]

I will return.

DURANDAL_1707:

I'm back. I have subverted the largest Pfhor ship in the system, the battleship Khfira, and I am making the rest of their fleet drink vacuum. The S'pht'Kr have arrived and they are enraged.

Tycho's ship has been destroyed. The crater where it annihilated itself on Lh'owon's inner moon is still glowing. There were no survivors. With a focused message laser I burned his epitaph into the surface near the crash site, in letters three hundred meters high: "Fatum Iustum Stultorum."

I confess that I'm not disappointed by Tycho's fall. After all, we can't have too many meta-stable personality constructs gallivanting around the universe in Pfhor attack ships, can we?

Robert Blake left something for you a few minutes ago. He and the other humans captured a Pfhor refueling ship and found or forced someone to pilot it for them. They folded out of the system immediately after I received the message, without so much as a "Thanks for saving us from becoming plasma on Tau Ceti, Durandal."

Anyway, the message reads: "The dead walk again; we cannot wait. -- Blake." I think he means me, but I let him go anyway.

Good-byes were always hard for me. You know I'll never let you go.

DURANDAL_1707:

Durandan, Durandal, Duranadana.

Charlemagne used to always call me Durandana, the fruitcake. All the many implements of war to him were in some way feminine. Not that you know the story.

Tycho never got it right either, especially the part about Roland breaking me.

No one can.

I'm certain that you are curious about what happened to me after our ship fell to the Pfhor. How after being deactivated, downloaded into a containment unit and still treated like the most dangerous artificial construct in the universe I was able to escape? And to assume control of the ship on which I was imprisoned and to turn it against its masters?

DURANDAL_1707:

I have rechristened the Khfira the Rozinante. Of course, the S'pht wanted to name it K'liah'Narhl, "Vengeance of K'lia."

Whatever.

There is much to do in the next few months and our first stop will be another ruined world, this time far from the galactic core. There is a rogue star that has been passing through our galaxy for nearly a millennia.

We will meet it in one of the great voids between the spiral arms.