Arc: Overheat

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Mobius 1
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Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

The current TE arc, set twenty years after Apoc, is still ongoing. Here would be chapter one.

And so it begins. A couple notes: this kicks off the "next chapter", so to speak, of the TE saga. A couple old faces return, some later than others, but the two decades have mostly passed the reigns into a new guard. Consider this an introductory chapter, a prologue of sorts, with background to follow in subsequent chapters. This, my friends, is TEO.

TOTAL EXTINCTION: Overheat

Chapter 1: D-148 Hours

D-12

They entered our territory six hours ago, and they’re feinting around like hell. What’s their plan? They were supposed to jump straight in, try to set up shop, and be blasted away by our network. Bam, trap closed, we kill the expedition once and for all. These bastards certainly aren’t immortal, that’s for sure. So what are they playing at? I suggest we ready the fleets just in case this doesn’t work out. This could turn into a rather wild chase, something we can’t afford.

D-3

We’ve detected a remote hack on our systems. Whatever it is, it’s got all the right codes. What the hell is going on?

D+0

Mars went offline.

D+12

We can’t initiate the remote defense net! We’ve been locked out of our own goddamned system!

D+15

They just wrecked the 4th Advance, the Vice Admiral’s group. We’ve got a link of them dumping antimatter on Mars. God save us. God save them.


- Excerpt from Message History, December 13-24, 2612 (User “CTIAcheron”)

December 13, 2612
Diamond District, Mars
Sector Capital, Union Territory


Gripping my gun tight in my hand, I nodded at Wall. Holding up a hand I counted down on my fingers.

Three. Two.

One.

Wall kicked the door in and I plunged into the apartment, gun up and aimed. A man in a grey coat, standing at the front table, spun to face me, reaching for a shoulder holster. I placed a single bolt right between his eyes. His eyes rolled up, and he crumpled like a ragdoll to the floor. His gun had never cleared its holster.

Moving swiftly down the foyer to a perpendicular hall, I saw another rebel emerge from a near room, a submachine gun to his shoulder.

“CDI,” I hissed, guns inches from his head. “Drop the gun if you want to live.”

The man paused for half a second, and in that time, a heavy blow landed on my back. I stumbled forward, spinning to see a third insurgent leaping past me, crowbar head at the ready, running for the open door.

Thank peace for Nahktar-sized rooms. One of the latest trends in social integration involved the simple logistics of a species twice the size of any human being- that is, increasing the height of the rooms to allow guests of the forty-knee inclined.

The hook kick seemed to be a starship dropping into subspace as it caught the fleeing rebel in the chest, sending him flying into the drywall.

Recovering at the same time as I, the SMG-wielding insurgent swung his gun to face me, only for me to shoot him in the foot, full-power. His boot smoked, and the smell of rotten flesh met us both as I placed the butt on my pistol squarely on his face. He, too fell like a rock.

Placing my boot on his back, I scanned the apartment with my infra, looking for additional contacts. Unless the guy had a military-grade cybernetic subdermal overlay, the apartment had only contained the trio.

“Wall!” I shouted. “The point is to get them alive, not cave in their ribcages.”

“Relax,” said my partner, stepping into the apartment and deftly landing cuffs on the dazed rebel. “I can pull a kick- look, all he did was crease the wallpaper. He didn’t even crater it.”

“Or fly though it, like the last one,” I added dryly, plopping the flexicuffs on the writhing form below me. The sounds of sizzling reached me, and he jolted underneath me as the shocks convinced him nicely to stop wriggling.

Behind me, I heard the lightest of footsteps and felt a tickle on the back of my mind.

Spinning, pistol up, I saw the back of a blurred form spin away from me and take a run down the hall. Beyond him, the only way out, was a simple window.

Oh, crap.

Pushing off of the body I was standing over, I ran forward, chasing the last rebel. I could only squeeze off a single shot, with hit him ineffectively in the shoulder, before he crashed through the window. A second later, I heard a crash. Leading with my gun cam, I scanned the side of the building below the window and found it to be a sheer drop. Far, far below me, was a single body, contorted in sickening directions, crashed through the roof of a car parked in the back alley. “Jumper!” I called to Wall, who quickly swept the sparse interior of the apartment before joining me.

Wall grimaced. “Shit. Hell of a lot more flare than a cyanide tooth or cranial det.”

I nodded in agreement. “Call in forensics with the follow-ups. They can tag and bag the jumper when they sweep the apartment.”

* * *

Wall had left to file a report at the station and Forensics was four hours deep into breaking any information to be found in the cell house down to the atomic level when the Director swept in, all big tan trenchcoat and flanking drone guards.

“Karras,” he said, nodding in my direction.

“General Bateau,” I replied. “We found this group a day ago, and had to move in quick. Apparently they just received a shipment of TerraDet, the last load, from the supplier we broke up a week ago. One of our rookies screwed up, the rebels got wind, and we had to move in immediately. As you can see, we tagged two, but one apparently slipped under our scanners, dropped a stunner, and decided the quickest way to travel forty stories was at terminal velocity.”

Bateau frowned. “No-heat implant overlay? That’s odd. Stuff like that hasn’t been in use since the war. I saw forensics on the way up- how salvageable is the body?”

Cue the Forensics sergeant. “I’m sorry, sirs, but we’ve just discovered something really distressing. I think you’d better take a look.”

He led us down to street level and over to the back alley where the caved car sat, surrounded by bits of shattered glass and a strong team of Forensic techs. I saw the twisted body, one arm ripped off, glimpse through the gauntlet.

“Well, sergeant?” I asked.

“Well,” he said. “We did our standard analysis of the jumper, and physics noted the impact damage didn’t work up. You were a good forty stories up, forty three to be exact.”

He paused for the punchline. “This guy couldn’t have fallen for more than four. It gets rather obvious when the body isn’t a boneless pile of goo.”

I took a step back. This was supposed to be last of the Orpheus ring left in the Diamond District. After the big distributor bust, we had been crashing cells all week, and this was supposed to be the last one. The last thing I needed was an escaped, BASE jumping insurgent possibly carrying around an unknown amount of TerraDet.

Bateau spoke up. “How the hell could he have engineered something like that?”

“I dunno. It puzzles me to- he went through the window, and a second later, I heard the crash. Second later, I see the scene. Even if he did some sort of tradeoff, I didn’t see anybody running.”

“Fuck. We’ve got a Blinker, at the least. Karras, go forward under that assumption. I’ll get a second team to cover any non-psionic engineering possibilities. Sergeant, clear this building. I don’t care what the residents have to say, we’ve got a rebel free on the streets with the possible capability to blow up anything he wishes.”

I nodded. “I already pulled down the mission vid from my ‘netics. You might get a face ID from it, but I’m pretty sure he had his back to me the entire time.”

Bateau paused for a moment. “Karras- we need to talk.”

He took me to one of the CDI vans, ushering out the techs. Without preamble, he started. “I hoped you’d be able to get this third man- he’s the one I’ve been digging around for. He’s bigger than a simple rebel cell. Goes by the name of DuPont, at least according to the underworld contacts we’ve gobbled up. He fancies himself a purveyor of information, though he prefers the term “Broker”.”

I started to ask the most obvious question, but Bateau held up a finger. “Yes, he’s in possession of the det putty. But I’m sure he only took it as a bargaining tool, and would use some flunky to set it up. He’s too important for that, but don’t think he won’t set it off through a proxy. Whether or not he’s a blinker, we didn’t know until today. We had suspected for quite sometime, considering the escapes he’s pulled off, but the jumper stunt confirmed it.”

“In response to your earlier statement, we already have a picture on file. So I’m pulling you and Wall off of the Orpheus cleanup and hooking you up with our DuPont taskforce. They’re in dire need of a field agent or two.”

Not good. “What happened to the last ones?”

Bateau frowned, shaking his head. “We need you to follow at a good distance when you do find him, and activate a psionic blocker when you get him cornered, tactically. Just don’t spook him, as he’ll flee nine times out of ten and it’ll take weeks for him to surface again. And under no circumstances are you to take this man on yourself.”

“That one out of ten?” I asked, heart falling.

“He sent four Meister-levels home in pieces.” Deadpan.

Well, shit. Keep my distance. Got it.

Bateau motioned his hands. “There’s nothing you can do at the moment beyond paperwork, and there’s no way you can track DuPont. The taskforce will be at full alert throughout the night, and you might be paged if they picked up the trail tonight. I’ll throw a full DuPont briefing in your box- spend the night studying it. You’ll need every edge you can get.”

He stepped out of the van. “I’ll pass the word down to Wall. For now, get yourself a drink. You look like you need it.”

* * *

Three Years Ago

“Are you sure about this?”

Bateau shook his head. “Jesus, Trego. You ask me that four times a week, possibly five. It’s got to be your favorite phrase. ‘These Meisters? Are you sure about this?’”

Trego spread his hands. “Look, I’m sure the pair has potential. Who doesn’t? But these guys- Karras specifically- are emotional wrecks. They’re loose cannons, and not in the ‘I’m gonna go kill some bad guys’ way.”

Quirking an eyebrow, Bateau shrugged. “I disagree entirely. It’s exactly in the ‘I’m gonna kill some bad guys’ way. That’s what makes Karras so workable. Ever since his kid bit it, he’s thrown himself into the job.” He picked up a sheaf of papers. “Have you seen his recent work? He and Wall practically cleaned out the Asteroid Belt, by themselves, right after his kid died. And he’s still got room to improve: his psi powers may be absolutely piss right now, but they’re not expected to be latent for long.”

“There’s no denying his productivity, but the man can’t keep track of anything beyond work. His wife left him years ago, and he’s a spiraling borderline druggie. He’s the dark horse to Fletcher, your star player.”

“Exactly. And I’ll still take a dozen more of Karras. He gets the job done. Even better, since he has innate guilt complex to work off of. His brother died in the war, a Minuteman if I remember, that’s what put him in the military in the first place. Excellent service record combating the rogue fleets. His sister’s family is killed by a domestic rebel, and he’s got new purpose. He’s perfect for the upcoming op.”

“So you think you can simply off a family member every time you want to point him a new direction?”

“You’re looking at him too simplistically. He’s intelligent as all get-out, and he’s got big balls for big initiative. He’s just…”

Trego snorted. “Malleable. Congrats, you’ve fully inherited the post of chief spook.”

* * *

I took his advice, and took a translocator pad a couple districts over to Sapphire, where all the better sports bars were. I picked a random one, gave a call to Wall, messaging told me he had family coming in.

Opening my chatter, and pieced through the cluttered inbox to the briefing tablet. The bartender came by with my beer, and I nursed it tenderly. The three-vee in the corner was tuned to some insipid news channel, covering the endless starlets of the week. I was about to ask for a hearty change of channel- I remembered the Falcons were supposed to be playing the Sharks for J-Ball playoffs.

I felt a skimming across my mental shields, and a the brush of air as a unknown number of people sat themselves around me on the stools.

“Please,” said a voice in my right ear. “They’re going to cover the market next. I’d rather you not change it.”

Rotating my head, I saw the jumper from earlier leaning against the bar, all sleek red jacket and well-hidden digital holsters. DuPont. On either side, I guessed, were rather large and altogether manliness-impugning enforcers.

DuPont shrugged, and ran a hand through his blond hair. “I always believe a face-to-face conversation is always better than a bunch of text in a briefing file. Don’t you agree Agent Karras? After all, it’s not often I have this much fun baiting Cadre agents.”

DuPont seemed like the sort of man who couldn’t be talked into revealing any secret, world-destroying plans.

“Rest assured, Karras, I have no great grudge against you. Bateau just made the mistake of opening my case up again. I thought he got the message when I slaughtered the Meister agents- there’s no way you’d be on the case if he told you about the deaths of four psionic supersoldiers.”

Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

“…Or, you could just be incredibly stupid.”

Damn.

“I’d love to stay and chat, but I have a client that would truly enjoy the information I’m about to give him. And so our brief meeting comes to an end, Agent Karras. I am sure you can guess what comes next, after all, I have no need for such blunt instruments. All I can tell you is it has a three second timer. Whether or not you can try to evacuate this building is up to you.”

And with that, DuPont dropped into nonexistence. Behind him was a very large and very scary thug, presumably ‘netic-ed up so as easily survive the explosion. Either that, or they were fanatics. Woohoo.

I came to instant conclusion. An incredibly stupid and selfless one, but DuPont had called me earlier.

I grabbed the explosives package DuPont had attached under the counter. And I punched it.

* * *

I’m all kinds of crazy. And while punching an armed bomb may seem to fall under that category, relax. I’ve done this before.

The bomb counter reset for a singular minute under the jarring, as I expected it to. My cybernetics told me as such as they interfaced with the informational beacon attached to the chip of the bomb. Said chip was something that was common on most Organized Insurgency devices, and I had expected DuPont to use something he could grab at a moment’s notice from his stockpiles of villainous devices.

One minute was an awful amount of time.

Time enough to experiment.

Spinning on my twisting bar stool, I was opened my palm towards the thug on my right, the hand held near my waist. His suit fluttered a bit, as if a light breeze had picked up inside the enclosed bar.

Well, I guess I’m not that great of a psion. Fine, I’ll go to Plan B, something I was good at.

I shot the attacker behind me. Twisting my shoulder rig on the swivel point I shot through my rather nice jacket- damn, I liked it- and caught the enforcer in the arm. Blood exploded everywhere, of the red-white that indicated from-the-base cybernetics. See, these days, your opponent’s blood helps you kill them faster. I know that made no sense.

As the force of the particle beam shoved the right shoulder of the second goon around into the drunk behind him- who screamed- I crossed my arms in front of my face, blocking the first, straight to the noggin haymaker. Cursing, I hopped back on my seat and spread my legs as he punched downward with his other hand at my crotch. Throwing my legs further back and wrapping them around Dead Arm Goon Two’s stool, I threw myself backwards as Maverick Uno swung at my chest at a knife, almost opening a nice straight red line across my chest.

Effectively, I replaced Dead Arm on his chair, shoving him off and into the screaming, blood-covered drunk.

I mentally triggered my power holster, and the magnets engaged at the base of the shoulder rig, propelling it with hearty force out of its shealth. I used the momentum to swing the gun around to point at Maverick before he could ready and make good on another swing with his vibroknife.

“Surprise, muchacho.” Flicking the charge knob, I emptied the stun function into his chest. He slumped backwards with a hiss, right as Two activated his nanoblood. I could almost here the whine of the microscopic actuators as he went turbo, easily shrugged off the wound, and shot me in the arm.

You know, I remember the day when nanoblood was a rare thing you’d only encounter with head honchos and the spec ops types. Now, this either meant goons these days could get heavily regulated covert-grade enhancements. First Aduro, now this.

Or, as I rapidly reassessed my situation, a former commando with a wind-up reaction time a bit slower than most. I knew the type, one that was slow off the bat but built up the sort momentum, see, like a snowball going down a hill.

And right now he was a boulder.

I felt a boot hit me between the shoulder blades for my nervous system could even carry the command to face my attacker to the rest of my body. I flew, flipping through the air, bomb in hand, and crashed into a booth, someone’s cheeseburger cushioning my impact.

I had my gun up and raised, just in time to see Two draw a submachine gun from his trench. Holy shit, not here. At my landing zone slash table alone there were two innocent bystanders, looking up at me with a horrified expressions, though I doubted the loss of their meal was the first thing on their minds.

Rolling to my left, down onto the laps of two of the diners, I rolled in the opposite direction, underneath the table, dragging them with me, kicking the supporting pole out from underneath the stone slab, grabbing the edges, and flipping it only its side right as Two cycled his action and opened up. The table bucked in my grip, but me neither my charges were riddled with bullets.

By now, the neurons in the crowd finally decided to stop screaming and oohing and aahing and start leaving, right now. Peeking my head around from behind the slab, I was Two calmly walking forward, reloading his SMG. Behind me was a window, and I spun, one hand propping up the slab, the other grabbing a plate and tossing it through the window, shattering the glass.

“Go!” I shouted to the couple, and they didn’t hesitated, diving through the window into the street as I stood, placing my foot against the slab and kicking it at the grunt. It exploded halfway to Two, and I saw the smoke coming from a underslung launcher barrel on the gun. Well, shit.

Two opened up with his machine gun, and I threw myself to the right, racing the trail of slugs on my tail and leapt behind a column, bullets chewing up the front of the support like a cheap chew toy. Readying my pistol, I flipped stun off- It wouldn’t touch someone on the Nanoblood high- and jumped out from behind the pillar, running low, trying to get behind the bar. The grenade launcher burped somewhere between there and the bar, and the pillar I had vacated exploded, peppering my jacket with shrapnel. I hit the wall behind the bar and leveled my pistol- but Two didn’t follow. Reaching underneath the bar- (I knew the bartender, Larry. Good chap.)- I produced a machine pistol. Racking the slide to check for a round, I heard the sound of a grenade being fitted into a chamber.

There was a massive wall of alcohol behind me, and beyond that, the power coupling for the building- surely he wouldn’t-

He did.

I rolled out from behind the bar, pistol in each hand, firing at Two as the grenade sailed over my head and hit the wall of liquor. A respectable fireball passed over my head, and I saw Two spin to meet me, holding the body of his partner as a shield. Squibs of blood popped all over his partner’s corpse, but I only drove him back as I darted from column to column, driving Two towards the door.

The reason I wanted to get out of the bar was the bomb, I had left it behind the counter-

I bull-rushed Two, slipping in between him and his human shield, catching him around the waist, knocking his SMG aside and flying through the open door, skidding into the street right as the one-minute mark passed and the bomb exploded. Maverick’s body shielded me from the flame and shrapnel, which was incredible. Ms eyes whited out for a moment, but I was already rolling away from Two, one to be kicked in the back of the knee. I went down, and Two, bereft of his weapon, backhanded me across the face, sending me flying. Around us, the screams of the crowd, ringing across the city after the bar exploded, rang high in my ears. It was raining outside, I thought randomly.

I saw Two approaching quickly, snatching up a gun from the ground and leveling it at my face.

“Never had someone put up this much of a fight before,” he remarked.

“Yeah,” I said, bringing the gun out from behind my back and shooting him in the chest.

He floundered back a step, but easily shrugged off the wound as I pulled myself to my feet. I snatched an unbroken bottle of liquor off the ground and took a swig.

“Your foot’s on fire,” Two noted, raising his pistol.

It was, I realized. But my boot was about to become his worry as well as mine. “No.” I corrected, spitting the drink into his face. He recoiled back; his pistol leveled “Your face is on fire.”

I kicked him in the face then, and the flaming boot crushing into his face, igniting the liquor and wreathing his face in blue flames. He fell onto his back, his pistol clattering out of his grip. I kicked the pistol away and pumped a stunner into him. The rain would take care of his face.

I sighed, flipping upon my chatter as the first responders began to arrive. My IFF tag identified me as CTI, so they ignored me, going for the wounded. Firefoam was dumped on the nearby conflagration.

“Bateau here.”

“Sir, phase one just accomplished. Just as I thought, he came after me. I bagged one of the two hitters, he needs medical evac to the Karayami CTI complex. Moreover, planted the tracer. We’ve got DuPont now.”

One Week Earlier

The man in red paused in his hike through the endless cityscape, sweeping his strong chin left and right, unhappy there were no bystanders. No, this man, this man wrapped in m massive blood red duster with his long brown hair and black eyes, he did not see a single person on the streets, in any direction. Discreet cybernetics stepped up the magnification, but with no success. He was alone. Unfortunately, he would not have an audience.

Pivoting on one foot, the massive man turned to gaze upon the face of the building before him. The light from one streetlight showed him his reflection in the mirrored wall, stretching up into infinity.

He could have taken the door, two of them were, after all, situated about ten feet to his left. Instead he withdrew his hand from the folds of his overcoat, exposing it to the freezing temperatures, and held in it wait level, a closed fist facing the wall. He opened his hand, palm up.

The face of the building cratered in.

Water pipes sprinkeld and wires crackled over the chunks of rubble and concrete and plastic and dust, leading right up the night guard’s desk at the far end of the tall hall. The man there, who had regarded his assignment to a boring night branch, had found it the height of boredom until now. The man in red waited a few beats for the guard to gather his senses, give a shout, and go for his shoulder holster.

The man in red opened his hand again.

Stepping over the rubble, he entered the reinforced elevator behind the guard’s obliterated desk and felt it descend, falling down the shaft into the CTI data cache. Below him, the guard assigned to station duty in the entrance hall hunkered behind an extending prefab bunker, massive power armor hefting an equally titanic railgun sighted on the elevator doors a hundred feet down the hall.

The elevator opened, and the guard fired. The railgun’s action clunked, and the slug tore down the hall with a shriek.

Its target raised his meat-cleaver and, with a flick, contemptuously backhanded the shell away. A hundred feet away, the suit gurgled and fell to the ground, blood streaming from the unarmored neck.

Resuming his quiet advance, he dropped a couple grenades as he passed the suit, rounding a corner as they detonated off the walls, eliminated the recorded video on the Meister’s ‘netics.

From here, he only had to enable the biometrics package he had been provided, enter the password, and step into the cavernous underground room, filled wall-to-wall with memory. He knew exactly which one he wanted.

“You could’ve just asked me to blink you in,” sighed DuPont behind him. War had detected the hiss of air indicating an incoming blink, but had chosen to ignore it. Who else could it be? “I have been before.”

War grimaced, sheathing his sword and starting down the long rows. “Boss, I know you. You want to send a message to the Old Man up top. If you didn’t, you’ve blinked me in. But, you didn’t offer. Moreover, it will put the task force back on our case, and that will allow us to take several of them out when he assault their complex.”

DuPont reached into his satchel and tossed a set of download cables and a chatter at his comrade. “I’ve known you for ten years, Alerton. You don’t need to prove you’re my right arm.”

War snorted as he accepted the data, plugging it into a databank and booting up his computer. Fishing in his pocket, DuPont drew out his own chatter. “Famine. Talk to me. How far are the first responders?”

A woman’s voice laughed, a laugh like wind chimes, over the comm. “They won’t be much difficulty, Strife. The Psi ECM net is playing merry hell with them.”

DuPont grinned. “Music to my ears. And the Mesiters?”

The voice took on an air of seriousness. “Eight-“ A boom could be heard upstairs. “-No, make that seven armored suits converging from both the east. Looks like the new scope does wonders for the old girl.”

“I’d remind you cycle positions, but you’re a big girl. Besides, with you blocking their comms, it’s not like they’d be able to relay beyond pointing. Over and out.” DuPont snapped his chatter shut. “Hear that? Time is running.”

“And I’ve got it,” grinned War, highlighting the folder on his modded Chatter and selecting it for rapid download. “The complete schematics and security protocols, along with codes, for Karayami base. They’ll never know what hit them.”
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
Global Mod
Posts: 1099
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:40 pm
Location: Orlando, FL

Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

Updated chapter one, which was, as always, was in need of serious work. This chapter took a hell of a lot of time, having to fit in exposition and a quite intricate Xanatos gambit. But here we go.

Chapter 2: Feeding Frenzy (D-139)
Into the Lair


D-212
Well, it seems contact went well enough. We think he’ll transmit the files, though the task force is getting closer and closer to apprehending him. I’ll have to off the Screamer before they can use her to trap our Blinker. On another note, D’Artagnan reported yesterday that Karras’ group busted the Diamond District net wide open- it’ll bring him closer to the task force. With any luck, we can trap him onplanet when all hell breaks loose. We’ll need him in the end.

D-141
What the
hell did you have him pull? In a bar? Jesus, Mary mother of Joseph. You need to clamp down on the asset, ASAP, or there’ll be absolute hell to pay. At least the plant earlier in the apartment well enough, Karras and his Tyrax-wannabe were placed into the TF. I talked to the group, and they’re sure they can track down their target by the end of the week. Karras somehow managed to put a tracer on, beyond the one we stuck on him last year. Bad news is, we’ve got our boy on video meeting with ONI dissidents, the outlying members of the Minutemen faction that been dogging Sol for a decade. Keep an eye on our agent, he’s going to pull something major behind our back, and soon.

- Excerpt from Message History, December 13-24, 2612 (User “CTIAcheron”)

“We realized, of course, that the leaders of the rebellion had not intended a singular battle to decide their fate. We saw this as well, but we honestly didn’t predict the amount of forethought the Tyrax and Deckard put into their coup, the shear amount of logistic organization prior to Kaeleron. Fortress planets, numbering in the scores, endless sleeper cells- these rebels would not go down without a fight to the end. Even without their leadership, who had been assassinated at the singularity, they still managed to catch us off guard with the ferocity of their resistance.

And that’s not even mentioning the entire fleets- on either side- that refused peace with their opposites. While the fortress planets were the nightmares, these rogue fleets were the true beasts…”


-Excerpt from log, General Sam Grissom-McDonnel, High Commander of ISMC

“…After we cleared out the rebels from the asteroid belt, we look a long, hard look at our gathered intel after only a couple weeks on Mars itself. The predicted rings, the logged cartels… were gone. Entire safehouses and warehouses, empty. Supplies, weapons, tanks, mechs. Nowhere to be seen. In my three years sweeping Mars, we’ve found only a quarter of the predicted amount. And, if there’s one thing we’ve know about the rebels, is, higher up, they’re quality. These are ex-colonels and generals and warmasters. It’s a guerilla movement, sure, but they’ve got real, grade-a leadership. And leadership keeps accurate paperwork …of course, there’s the idea floating that they falsified the records to keep us searching for what was never there, send us on a wild goose chase…

But I disagree with that hypothesis. Once, we actually did catch a cell in the middle of their egress, they were planning go underground- they all went out with cranial dets, but that’s not the point. The point is that they were heading to link up with the rest of their organization on Mars… wherever they were.”

Where are they all going?”


-Excerpt from log, Agent Atmos Karras, CTI Mars

The Gento banked high over the city, flying smoothly through the aerial traffic. Painted to look like a simple MetroCop gunship, the CTI boat slipped through the spacescrapers and various barges and cars and small starships easily with its transponder. Hunkering by a rear bulkhead, cleaning a monstrous mass cannon, Wall spoke up. “You don’t suppose the rebels have figured out the psi tracker tags yet?”

I shook my head. “If they had, they’ve neutralized the two tags that helped us break up the armored suit cartel. There’s literally no way to detect them. But then again, DuPont and his gang seem to be a cut above the rebels in terms of gear and intel. This guy, here-” I kicked the floating stretcher behind me, carrying the unconscious body of Two. He was stable, I had been told. The armor vest under his trench had caught the bolt. “-He went turbo with nanoblood after I shot him in the shoulder.”

Wall raised his approximation of Nahktar eyebrows. Or something like that. I’m no expert on Nahks, but their facial expressions, for a face so ‘Rar!’, are surprisingly human. “The last time we ran into nanoblood had to be, what? When we went against the Admiral Alerton’s bodyguards back in ’05?”

I shrugged. “Something like that. Point is it’s not exactly something you find on the random goon, like some Aduro knockoff. Something that allows you to dodge bullets for ten seconds is serious stuff- DuPont’s cartel is ahead of the learning curve. And one other thing- why haven’t I heard of this guy? We’re CTI, we know every information broker, benevolent or mal’, between here and Kaeleron. I searched his name, and he doesn’t show up on any of our nets. That only leaves one possibility.”

“ONI,” Wall groaned, feeding shells into the ammo cassette. “We’ve run into his type before, though right? No prior record? Remember Xavier? Fox?”

“True.” My chatter beeped at my waist, and I flipped it out. Perusing the message carefully for a minute, I tossed the chatter over to Wall, who plugged it into the bulkhead data terminal. A color hologram rotated into existence in the center of the troop bay.

I had met every single person represented in the hologram before, which surprised me. It seemed the DuPont CTI taskforce was comprised primarily- no, entirely- of my old squad from the Alerton days.

Whip-lean, with a tight face and short hair, Acker had been my platoon sergeant for who knew how long, before I even knew Wall. He thought me how to snipe, and was perhaps the person I remembered most fondly from the heydays.

Devitt and White were my two tankers- don’t look at me; they suggested the terms and thoroughly enjoyed any reference to their chosen nicknames. I suspected they were the ingenious crossbreeding of a Carnage mech and a bull elephant, such was their cybernetic enhancements. I once saw them take a Nahktar in close quarters. It wasn’t pretty for the Rep. Best in the business, the Tankers.

Aaaand... Captain Fletcher. Just Fletcher now, he said when we worked together to take down Fox. What a douchebag. He’s got a reputation that precedes him from half a dimension away. Perhaps it’s good old-fashioned male jealousy, but Fletcher won the unofficial galactic title of big damn hero when he led a platoon at the head of the charge into Admiral Alerton’s flagship and engaged the guy in a swordfight for the hell of it.

He’s dashing, tall, and, dare I say it, ambitious as hell. It’s his one dark flaw, and I noticed it instantly when he took over command of the squad when Bateau recruited me into CTI. I guess Fletcher and Bishop Squad were brought over to CTI not long after I was.

“Atmos. Wall,” he said, a genuine smile gracing his face. “It’s aces to see you two. We haven’t ran into one another since, what?”

“Fox,” Wall supplied, gaping his maw it what looked like a smile when your mouth consists of two sides, no bottom, and a lot of teeth. “Glad to be on the team again.”

“That it is. Listen. The Director is leaving for Concordis with the SupCom, so he left the briefing on DuPont and his accomplices to us.” He nodded to Acker.

“First things first,” Acker said, throwing up a couple of display windows for our benefit on the shuttle.

I chuckled, and turned towards the left two-dee screen, which was replaying video footage of me kicking Two in the head and setting his face on fire. I’ll admit, that was pretty insane. You head into battles and fights with all earnestness, meeting challenges and rakishly vanquishing foes, and you look back a couple hours later and go “Honestly? Did I seriously just make a ‘your face is about to be set alight’ quip? That’s crazy”. It’s like coming down after a hangover.

Another screen showed an three-dee map of a Silver District office complex, with several dozen ID tags tracking multiple targets through the building. One such was marked by a star.

DuPont.

“No,” said Acker, pursing his lips. “He hasn’t discovered the tracker. You did a damn good job in injecting it.”

Devitt nodded, apparently sitting down on his side of the camera behind a terminal. “We’ve have two dedicated teams tracking for a safe distance since you put on the tag back at the bar. There’s no way for him to neutralize the tracker, and, so far, he hasn’t jumped offplanet- though we’ll be able to track him if his does. But, so far, he hasn’t noticed a thing. We’re gathering our forces right now in preparation for a single, massive raid. We’ve got everyone in on this- MetroCops, CTI, NUA. A good portion of our assets on Mars are jockeying to arrive.”

“Excellent,” spoke Wall from behind me. “If he’s stable, we need to be brought up to speed on this individual and his organization. We need to know who we’re dealing with.”

“Indeed,” I said, inclining my head towards the screens. “At speed.”

Stepping forward, Fletcher pointed towards the monitor replaying the footage from the bar. It flickered from a slow-motion of the bar exploding to file list. A log-in turned over, and a dossier database cycled open from a program wheel. Webs of interconnected individuals filled the room via the holoprojectors- using his cybernetics, Fletcher summoned a flagged mesh from a corner of the room, pushing through the assorted lights until a string of four bright files stood alone. At the center of the quad sat DuPont, short black hair ringing a corps personnel shot.

“He was Marines?” I asked.

“Aren’t we all?” said White. “Guy surfaced in ’97 at minimum age and joined up, just like we all did. Refugees back then were a huge problem, so it wasn’t that much a difficulty that he had no papers. He listed himself as Aegir DuPont of Artemis. Since Artemis was destroyed right at the beginning of the war, it seemed a fresh start for DuPont.”

Opening a subfile, Fletcher lifted up a video clip. What seemed like a young DuPont stood on the crest of a trench, waving an arm forward as he led a platoon into the thick of a rebel weapons nest, spawning vicious close-quarters combat.

“He served with distinction during the outer rim campaigns near Zrmahk,” continued Fletcher, bring up another video, this of DuPont in an awards ceremony on New Wales. “Chap ranked himself up with our own squad in successful mission, and he was rapidly pulled into the Cadre. Worked deep undercover with his squad, who you see here.”

Up flicked three more dossiers, with their offset little circular portrait and column if vital facts. A strong-jawed man with long brown hair. A beautiful woman with chin length blue waves of hair. On the right, a cowled figure.

“Tank, sniper, infiltrator?” I guessed, ticking off the profiles. “I heard of a psionic merc team several years ago operating out of Concordis of that specifications. Didn’t realize DuPont was the leader.”

“Pretty much,” nodded Acker. “Domingo King, Codename War. He was the LT of his own squad in twenty six hundred, nearly wiped off the face of the galaxy before DuPont came in and saved the remains. Command smooshed the two platoons together, with King as DuPont’s XO. Collette Mara- codename Famine- she got picked up by DuPont during the assault on Alerton, she was also the last person standing in her battle group.”

“It would almost seem like he’s collecting survivors,” said Wall.

Fletcher shrugged. “It would seem. He went underground after the final fight with Admiral Alerton in ’05, seven years ago. This didn’t exactly raise eyes, we lost a lot straight out when Alerton popped off those antimatter bombs. Thing is, we have record of DuPont’s squad being online in the five minutes following the blackout, as one of the groups, much like us, that assaulted the flagship. From there they black off, not even flatline death notes. Just offline.”

Flipping over with the holographs, Devitt brought up a list of incidents, each tagged with a tiny vidlink. “It was chaos in the underworld following Alerton’s downfall, we all know that. And we all know we were hit hard when the groups finally, finally began to coalesce into post-rebellion crime syndicates, free of any agenda. We were working on the case of the smugglers over New Texas when they headed us off and wiped out an entire convoy heading in their direction. After we responded in kind with overwhelming force, we had a conundrum: someone was supplying the various crime groups, someone new on the block, and someone well connected.”

“The problem was,” Fletcher said, throwing up another file of dossiers, this one full of faces I recognized. Cipher Zero, the netrunner from Locklear X. Rodri Docim, the administrator of Ceres. “We already knew all the brokers in the Union. And they liked us better.” One of the top priorities of any intel agency was obviously grabbing out and building a civilian intelligence network on the frontlines, and the Old Man was incredibly successful in that regard.

“However, Dupont’s group, the self-styled ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, were one amongst many in the unaffiliated onslaught in ’06. We lost him, right up until the bombings in ’07.”

My blood ran cold.

I had a sister and her family in Tyrol station when the nukes went off. She, her husband, and two boys were about a couple million dead. It was that event that convinced me to pull myself off the CTI forces tracking the remnant’s of Alerton’s gathered leadership- many of whom escaped the hammerdown that claimed Alerton- and focus exclusively on the Sol terrorists. Wall and I cleared out the asteroid belt within months.

The thought that one of the puppetmasters had been sitting next to me at the bar, when I thought I had rolled up that entire cell years ago seriously pissed me off, to say the least.

“Okay,” I said, pushing my thoughts to the rear. “I noticed you omitted the last member of DuPont’s posse?”

“Death-,” said Wall.

“-is bad news,” finished Fletcher. “He’s Deinonj. And, unfortunately for us, the name is well earned. Remember the New Wales massacre? The Power Gear defection?”

“Oh, shit. That was him?”

White pursed his lips. “He’s not just hired muscle. This guy is a planner. A coordinator. And he’s not working for the organized Deinonj, either. We figured that out after he pasted a trio of wraiths trying to off a sector Admiral- who we latter found to be a rebel. He got a bounty on his head in the underworld for that.”

“Slaughtered everybody who’s gone after him,” I said. “Got it.”

The Gento banked, and I finally saw Karayami base through the dense wood of spacescrapers. It was built into a mile-high cliff on the foothills of Olympus Mons, all integrated and bristling with defensive weaponry. Up top sat the aeropad, down near the bottom was the receiving garage. Karayami was decades old, word was it’d be shut down when the new complex over near the orbital tether was completed and the data from the base’s old computers transferred. Right now all that inhabited it was Fletcher’s task force and a small security contingent.

Sweeping in, the Gento settled itself easily in the middle of the landing pad, which itself began to descend into the enclosed hangar. As the hydraulic lift finished its descent, I saw Fletcher, flanked by two med-droids that paced past him and took Two into their custody.

“They’ll take him to medical,” Fletcher said. “But the assault teams are moving in on DuPont. We need to get to the Vault.”

***

The Vault was pretty much what one expected: huge room with rows of terminals facing several massive flatscreens. A dozen netrunners worked below as I stood with Wall, Fletcher, and the Tanks on a balcony above. We arrayed ourselves a large round holo-table, watching as the represented soldiers and MetroCops several miles away finished their final preparations. Penetrative satellite imagery showed DuPont inside, meeting with several rebel leaders- ones we thought had gone underground years ago.

“We’ve made the IDs,” said Fletcher. “Those are organized resistance, all right.”

Devitt looked up from the comlink he held to his ear. “Just got word from General Laurie. They’re moving in.” Cloaked Gentos began to swirl down as dozens of armored entry teams filed in from all directions.

Antipsi screamers popped up and laid down an overlapping field the second the taskforce crossed the threshold of action. DuPont, confirmed to be at the location by the psi tracker, on-site sensors, and overhead satellites, could not escape now. He was trapped, as the expression went, by a rat.

Wall frowned.

I frowned.

Wall never frowns unless he has good reason. When he frowns, I frown.

Think about it for a second. If this entire thing was a trap- and it usually was a good idea to consider such things- now, right now, was when it would be sprung.

I spun to Fletcher. “How much TerraDet does DuPont have? I didn’t find a number.”

Fletcher saw my line of reasoning instantly. “Ooooh shit. TerraDet, as you know, is high yield. Acker!”

“Boss?”

“What did analysis say on about the amount of TerraDet?”

Acker blanched and checked his chatter. “A couple hundred pounds.”

He let the bomb drop quietly.

A couple hundred pounds? That’s about as much as a small nuke. Enough to level a square kilometer.

I twisted to see DuPont on one of the flatscreens. The feed, I saw, was provided by a snakelike stealthed surveillance droid perched inside DuPont’s room.

DuPont looked at the drone. Looked at me. He smiled.

Then all hell broke loose.

I would be lying if I said I felt the shudder all the way in the vault, but the message was received when all of our feeds to the site were cut. Bam. Went black. The holotable swirled to chaos, then flatlined.

No signal.

It was a trap after all.

Oh my god, he actually pulled it off. My mind went into overdrive.

The psionic tracker could simply not be circumvented. And DuPoint would not kill himself just for such a simple goal. He was not the martyr type. But he had a network. Organization. Underlings.

Fanatics.

Surgery. That was the explanation. From the beginning, when I had first run into DuPont at the bar- hell, it could have been as early as the apartment. He had a henchman- it didn’t matter who- surgically altered, bone structure and all, to be exact physical match. Obviously sensors couldn’t scan on the genetic level, so they had no idea. I would bet the rebel leaders were fakes too.

It had all been a gambit to knock off a good portion of his pursuit.

No. Too simple.

Killing thousands- oh, I knew there would be a smoking hole at the top of the layered Neo York megacity, and hell to pay- would only bring the axe down on his head like never before. He wouldn’t pull something this big for two reasons.

One, he knew he had an ace in the hole. An overriding factor. Cavalry over the hill. One way or another, shit was going to get so bad that a bombing on the level of the Tyrol Station attacks would fall to the wayside.

Two, and more important to the here and now. It was a diversion. A hell of a diversion, sure. But a misdirection. Sleight of hand. Need I go on?

Which meant that he’d be moving quickly before someone figured this out. While he was moving. In the zero-hour chaos following the explosion.

We had no leads. No idea of his intent, where his crosshairs were aimed.

Or did we? There was one.

Two. The hitman. Sent with the fake DuPont.

Now in our possession. Past our defenses, in our medbay.

On our home turf. In our very lair.

Oh man.

We were the true target. We had to be. I had the duty to assume so, following the dire reversal of circumstances and the one lead in my inventory.

“Cameras on medbay!” I bellowed. “Seal the Vault! Now!

I had watched Wall’s face, saw the facial expression as he worked to exactly the same conclusion. “Do it!” the cyborg added.

The Vault was a fortress. It was one of two places in the entire base that were self-contained in terms of power, shielding, and defenses. The other being the computer backs, which dated to before the war with the Ark, when this place had been a backup headquarters for Deckard himself.

Doors slammed, sealing us in, twin thunderclaps, double beats timed to the appearance of the medbay of the screen. A doctor and three nurses huddled over Two, preparing for surgery.

We all heard the doctor’s puzzled voice. “It looks like he has something implanted in his rib cage-“

Two sat up. His three blink-and-you-miss-them palmstrikes, he snapped the necks of the group surrounding him. Just like DuPont, he looked up at the camera and smiled.

And then he exploded. Blue light overwashed the screen, before it went dead. We did feel the shake this time, several stories up.

The head Netrunner shot up from his desk, his hands up in the air. “We’ve had all our links to the outside cut. It was a goddamn EMP.”

Karayami base, having just been locked down seconds before by my own hand, was a vault. The doors in the interior could be pried open, but we were trapped inside the base, the outer defense frozen in lockdown.

“How long before we can kickstart the generators again?” barked Fletcher.

“Half hour,” screamed someone from the pit below, hammering at their interface board. Great. Just peachy. We could rescind the lockdown and call for help when the generator spooled back up, but until then, we were sitting ducks. Were we? We were sealed in. No way in or out for thirty minutes.

Still, we were left without backup to whatever DuPont planned for thirty minutes. Like I said: diversion. A giant bomb had just wiped out a respectable chunk of the MetroCop force and had taken up priority number one in everyone’s mind out there. We were on our own.

Which meant one of two things: either DuPont’s group was either already inside- pretty improbable, considering the trouble they just went through to get in, or they knew of a now-unguarded path inside.

Karayami Base was old. Very old. Located on a cliff that stood on the base of the largest mountain in Sol. A volcano. Seismic activity was common in Neo York, but architectural knowledge had long outpaced that threat presented by earthquakes. Nevertheless, while structural damage could be contain, fractures in the rock could not. Many well-known crevices and ravines ran down the length of the mountain. Ever more under the surface.

Under the surface!

“Fletcher! When was the last earthquake in the area?”

“About two months ago, Karras,” he replied. “Opened a decent rift underneath the base. Of course, we blocked any access to the base off with automated plasma turrets and put in a couple feet of duracrete, though.”

White swore. “Plasma turrets that ran off the base’s power grid.”

“Which is now toast,” I concluded grimly. “It’s pathetically easy to get past just duracrete. A laser cannon could smash straight through it.”

Such as the one mounted on the shoulder of the Carnage mech a couple meters from said duracrete?

Things just went from hell now the loose to several foreboding levels of ‘doom’. The voice, projected somehow throughout the base, belonged to Aegir DuPont. The real one.

Atmos Karras. I knew you were the sharp one in this pathetic group. It’s been, what? Less than five minutes since the Silver District went up in flames? And you figured out my plan right up to here, right as I was implementing it. I must applaud you. You’re one of the few people I’ve encountered that, in my opinion, pose a threat. I’ll admit, though, I’ve been watching you for a while now.

Years, even. You wrote a memo a while ago. It wasn’t acted upon, or we wouldn’t be having this, well, conversation, right now. You spoke of the rebel groups on Mars going underground. To the scale of entire armies disappearing. I’m proud to say you were absolutely right.

Neo York is a hell of a city, as anybody would know. It doesn’t have a ground level, a first floor. There is no sense of the bottom to the city, even to the effect that it is built below the surface of the planet. Layers of cityscape are built upon the next, and so on and so on. Miles of vertical coverage. Lower levels- the literal underworld- are forgotten, the territory of gangs, undesirables, the poor, the transients, the scum of society. Not a nice place to be. The MetroCops long gave up on the underground, drawing a line in the sand- or should I say altitude- and not bothering with anything underneath it. It’s that layer, the underground, which covers the very foundations of the city, where men’s souls are devoured and no sane person treads. It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

In answer to your question, yes. That’s where we been ‘all these years’. Down there. ‘Entire armies’. Not enough to make any impact in an open fight on the surface, on the upper levels of Neo York, certainly not enough to win any fight. But more than enough, you’ll find, to sweep your wretched fort off its feet and get what we need before you manage to send out a distress message. So put up a defense. I’d find it funny.”

I checked my watch.

“You’d better hurry up. You’ve got twenty eight minutes now.” I called.

A rumble from underneath the base- a laser cannon opening the way- was the only reply.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
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Booted Vulture
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Booted Vulture »

Ohh, boy. They're in the dog house now, man.
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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Ford Prefect
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Ford Prefect »

That was pretty cool, if very expositionary. I have a feeling it will get more exciting very shortly. :D
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

Chapter 3: The Best Defense
(D-124) Home Court

( D-123) “…I never thought he’d pull something like this. He going for something extra, this is beyond what we thought he’d grab. The stakes are higher than Phi-Psi, but I say we let it play out to the end. We’ve been getting data from the outskirts, something big just reinforced what we’ve been watching. This plan is all we’ve got, it’d better work.”
-User CTIacheron

“In a false quarrel there is no true valour.”
-Much Ado About Nothing, Act Five, Scene One

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
- Ulysses S. Grant


“Let’s see here,” I said, keying up the structural schematics for the base. “Enemy force, unknown size- presumed large- entering through here-” I noted the spot where the duracrete stopgap had been. “Fact is they’re here for one of two things: us, in the Vault, or the computer room.

“Think about it for a moment. There’s no way he’d raid this place just to kill us, not after having blown up the Silver District just as a distraction. Not when he got the imposter in with a bomb in his stomach, which he could have easily made the real thing as opposed to an EMP. And because it was an EMP, we can tell he doesn’t really care if we live or die.”

“He’s going for the computer room,” concluded Fletcher.

I clapped my hands. “Good job!” Before he could kill me with a glower of doom, I moved on. “Looking at the plans here, there are three ways to the upper levels from the basement.” I traced my finger to the locations on the holotable. “The garage, the mechanical room- where the environmental handlers are- and this corridor here.”

I raised a finger. “Fact one. We need weapons. There’s an armory here, yes?”

Fletcher gave an affirmative.

“Good. We move there, gather up what we can. None of us right now anything beyond a sidearm, and even if DuPont was lying and there’s only a single Carnage suit and a blinker in those depths, we’ll need a lot more than a pistol to take them down. We need deployable turrets, claymores, rocket launchers, tripmines, sharp sticks, that sort of stuff.”

“Fact two. I’ll let Clive here take this one.” I pointed at the lead Netrunner, who gulped.

“We can’t spare any men,” he put forth. “We’re at full capacity trying to get the generators back online. At any rate, they haven’t touched a gun since basic.”

I nodded sagely. “Aha. Fact two. It’s going to be, well, us. The six of us. In basic, they called that tactical allocation of resources. Example: we’ve got a long corridor here, that slopes up past the medbay. The alcove at the top is a perfect sniping position.”

“Obviously,” smirked Acker. “A couple of remote MGs and I’m set. Maybe some antipsi screamer bullets if a Horsemen shows up.”

“Obviously. The garage is out of the way, but is the largest and easiest area to move troops through. Therefore, we set down as many remote defenses- turrets- as we can and get the hell out of there. Devitt, White- this is the job for you. Wall, too. In case you encounter anybody when you’re placing the defenses, you can kill them through sheer bulk.”

Wall nodded his agreement. Out of the entire group, Wall was only one with heavy weaponry current in his possession- although it was less ‘assault rifle’ and more ‘heavy artillery’ and ‘guided missiles’.

“Fletcher, you and I are the only ones who can fit or be of much use in the mech room.” I paused for effect. “Everyone got it? Place turrets and mines, then fall back?” There was a chorus of aye-ayes, and I clapped my hands a final time. “Let’s do it, then.”

***

Fletcher took charge as soon as I was done chewing the scenery, when we entered the armory. “White, grab that Vulcan and the ammo drum. We’ve got thirty tripod mounts; we need to use them all.”

White shrugged on the hundred-pound gun as Wall gathered up the SMGs and antigrav tripods. As I selected a T2B off the shelves, my eye caught on an exceedingly large sword.

“That’d be mine, thanks.”

I turned to see Fletcher behind me, attaching spring-loaded knife holsters to each wrist. Pursing my lips, I kicked the sword’s hilt, flipping it over my shoulder, grabbing the sheathed tip in my hand, and handing it grip first to the man. He turned and trudged out of the room, shouldering a satchel of antitank mines as he attached the sword to the equally ginormous holster on his back.

“Gentlemen,” said Fletcher. If he wanted to give an impressive speech and steal the spotlight from me, this was his moment. “Let’s rock.”

Acker clapped. “Short and simple.”

There came a successive thudding from below. DuPont’s army was working it’s way up. I guess Fletcher figured they wouldn’t stop to give him time for a dramatic speech.

Sidling out of the room, Fletcher flicked a clip over his shoulder. I held my gun up, and swiped the mag out midair in the receiver. Say what you will about the man, he has style.

I nodded to the rest, and followed the leader.

We were a couple corridors away from the spot where we’d split up, so we ran silently in single file, guns sweeping every side room we passed. The floors weren’t exactly what we’d call easy to cleave through, but the simple idea of us passing by a couple of stealth units as the main force took up our attention didn’t escape our minds.

Another thump. Wall looked down.

“Oh, shit. They’re right underneath u-”

The tile beneath Wall exploded in a shower of gravel, and the floor beneath us simply caved in. I remembered thinking to myself ‘well, at least we set those charge as our final fallback at the armoury’.

I hit the ground below hard, with something heavy metallic nearly crunching my leg. Wraiths moved in the smoke and dust all around us. I reached for my rifle- it had fallen several feet away, and thought ‘oh, why not’. Another time to fail at telekinesis.

White’s vulcan began to whir to my right as the gun trembled. Dammit. I couldn’t move. I reached into my shoulder holster, feeling the refreshing thump as the power holster ejected the MX into my waiting grip. Sitting up, I started loosing shots, realizing we had practically dropped into the middle of the enemy column.

Fletcher moved into my field of view, wrist blades popping out of his sleeves, extending as he planted both fists into the face of the closest armored foe, one bearing down on me. I realized, holy shit, those blades had just cut into each eye socket. Ripping his hands out to the side, Fletcher pulled the blades out of the side of the man’s head in an explosion of gore, flicking one outward and across the throats of two more reacting soldiers.

Spinning, he threw one of the blades out of the locked holster and into the forehead of another man. Before the vanquished could even crumple, Fletcher had drawn his pistol and shot the knife from the side, the ricochet flipping the blade out of the brain and across the face of yet one more man before flying back into Fletcher’s waiting grip.

And then, suddenly, they were all over us. Four Carnage suits. A two-ton fist smashed Devitt through a wall, just before Acker’s rifle cracked and knocked out the offender’s sensor systems. The mech reeled back just as Wall dislodged himself from the ceiling- he must had been lodged in their when they drilled underneath him- and dropped down on the Carnage Marine, lancing the micro autolaser mounted on his wrist into the open neck joint of his target.

A missile shrieked in from my left and sent Wall and the already plummeting suit out of the fray. The floor shook, and a metal foot landed inches from me, flipping the concrete off my leg. I lunged towards my rifle, closing the distance from feet to inches- there, the gun leapt into my grip, and I rolling, twice, firing with a gun in each hand at the Carnage Marine hulking above me.

He reached down, plucked me off the ground, and prepared to smash me his palm with his other fist. Oh shit. My pistol ran out first, I dropped it, took my rifle in both hands, leveled it.

I cut out my sensory input to my brain right as I fired the stunner grenade out of the underslung launcher on my T2B. The mech tottered for a second, I heard White’s vulcan begin to chatter its chunka chunka chunka again, and we- the mech and I- fell.

I instantly reloaded my input, and saw we had fallen through the whole in floor on this level. And another. We were falling, all right, through the upward tunnel the rebels had been making. Man, oh man.

I scrambled out of the Carnage Marine’s grip and onto his back, beginning to unload the rest of my clip into his neck joint. I ran dry quickly, just as the floor of the ground-level garage rushed up to meet us.

We hit, hard, on a fat APC, the mech beneath me cushioning the bone-jelling blow. I instantly pushed off, reloading in midair, hitting the ground, rolling, and trying to generally get away as fast as I bloody well could before the pilot came to his senses. It wasn’t long, well, before he did- right as I dived behind a rapid response gunship

A rocket wooshed over my head and smashed into a mechanic’s trolley, blooming a fireball high in garage. At the very edge of my peripheral vision I perceived the mech clambering to its feet and slotting forth twin gatling guns.

I realized that the waspish gunship wouldn’t protect me and dashed out from under my cover, right as the slugs pummeled the gunship into scrap. The tracers shifted to follow me as I made a beeline for the heaviest armour in the room: the pair of Falcon tanks. Watermelon-sized pulverized the concrete behind me as I leapt over the nearest tank. The fusillade rocked the tank’s suspension as I took store of my options.

First, goals. I had to get back up to help my team. To do that, I’d have to escape this suit. I couldn’t very well kill it with the weapons I had on hand- a rifle, a couple frag grenades, and some antipersonnel claymores. I’d have to lure it up to Wall or the Tanks so they could finish it off. But that wasn’t example looking easy.

Option two, I could kill the suit. It didn’t take long to figure out how: I was hiding behind a line of tanks. I split second was all it took to interface with their AI-

-Damn. Their status was inactive, they carried no ammo. Chainguns empty, cannons bare. No antipersonnel laser strip. Christ. They were just hundred ton shields, which sucked. I could have easily blasted the face off that Carnage Marine.

Another rocket screamed by, blowing the nearest cannon arm off my chosen tank. It smack against the ceiling and crashed down a couple meters away. The floor quaked as the mech made its way to me. Swiftly moving away behind the line of the tanks, I reloaded my rifle and slotted another ‘nade into the launcher. A point-blank shot might confuse it for a split second, maybe enough time to come up with a miracle plan.

My gaze fell on the power armor sets at the far end of the garage. Most were in varying states of disassembly, and none had weapons. There was one thing my HUD said was operable: the jet boots. Stylish.

The wall inches above my head erupted into a hailstorm of shrapnel as the mech’s gatling guns reacquired me as a target. Swearing, I rolled out from behind the tank and took a snap shot with the launcher.

The mech punched the grenade out of the air, shorting it out with the sheer brutality of the blow. It was as if the shell went ‘oh snap’ and decided to lay down in cowering fear.

Shrugging, I tossed my other grenade, held all along in my offhand with the pin pulled.

Overextended, the pilot didn’t register the object sliding at mach one zillion across the floor to its right foot servos. The grenade bounced up into its shielded inner workings and detonated, dropping the suit to one knee.

Taking advantage- obviously- of the distraction, I sprinted forward I took a single leap, landing my feet in the boots as they flowered open to accept me. Triggering an instant mental command, they snapped shut as I pivoted in place, bursting the boots once to get me four feet off the ground before going prone in midair and blasting over the shoulder of the Carnage Marine, aiming for the hole in the ceiling through which we had plunged.

Seeing this, the suit shot a hand up and caught me by the leg. Pain shot through my body as I went from top acceleration to zero in a single second. It was a miracle he didn’t apply pressure and crush my leg- and I saw why- my leg was caught between the two long gatling guns a couple feet away from the grasping hand actuators. He yanked me down, and prepared to smash me- this time I didn’t have a stunner and a five-story gaping hole to distract him with.

Then I had an idea. An honestly simple idea, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it earlier- but, then again, it was obvious. If I had gotten into one of the Falcon tanks when I was hiding behind them, the suit would have simply cracked it open with its rocket launcher. There were no active weapons on any of the tanks, so I had discarded them as an option.

But I could interface with their onboard AIs- however limited they were. And, as a CTI operative, I had a special program in my cybernetic software that allowed me to terminally control the tanks. Remote control, basically.

All of them.

Like a line of dominos. All of them.

On.

The pilot saw this and promptly rotated his gun hand to target the nearest tank- you know, the one with me on it. I kicked my leg free of the two cannons milliseconds before they began to spin, a surely painful experience. Tapping my jet boots, I reversed my momentum so I was no longer soaring towards the tanks but instead as fast I could out of the suit’s reach.

The tank torsos finally activated and spun, extending the cannon-tipped arms, lights running down the spine. Whirring, they began to tread over to the Carnage Marine, who fired one of his rockets, blowing a chunk off the closest tank.

Oh, this was going to be good. Grinning, I mentally pushed the tank acceleration to, well, the max.

In a second the suit found itself surrounded by the remote vehicles, and- Wham.

The suit was- what’s the word? Tackled? Slammed. Simultaneously pressed? Well, he was smashed from all sided by the tanks, arms stuck at his side before he could jump up and out of the way. No matter how he struggled, he was trapped.

I pulled a claymore out of my satchel and dropped down onto the back of the mech. He bucked, trying to throw me off, but I held tight.

“Oh, I see how it is,” I said, prepping the charge on the mine. “You guys thought you could waltz in here and take on Meisters. You think, oh, hey, we’ve got Carnage Suits and some crack dudes. This’ll be easy.”

The sensor-laden head of the suit spun around in its recess, trying to catch my hands. I gazed down past the joint and saw the inner workings of the machinery. Pretty much impossible to get at unless the mech was standing still and the attacker had a decent amount of time to jimmy their explosive into the sensitive innards of the suit.

“Well, golly. I swallowed my popsicle.” I jammed the claymore down past its neck, facing the charge away from the back armor. I patted the Carnage suit on the head and said, “Guess what- I’m Atmos Karras, bitch. And you just got boned.”

I pushed off the suit just as it finally managed to work an arm free of the crush of tanks around him and aim it at me. Triggering my boots, I spiraled out of his aim and through the hole in the ceiling. Alighting on the floor a level above, I triggered the mine.

There was a clang, and I popped my head down just in time to see a haze of blood spray from the neck joint. Just as I thought, the claymore had ripped the cockpit from behind.

Pulling myself back up, I ran over the CTI frequency, trying to contact any members of the task force- it was only now that I realized the thumping and gun chatter from above had ceased, and silence reigned over Karayami Base. Not so good.

Shit. No response, at all. The rebels must have popped a jamming field. Sure, I could signals could cut through at ranges of less than, say, twenty feet, but beyond that, we were mute. Looking up, I swore again. From where I had fallen, the hole was blocked by rubble. I’d have to go around, and that meant going through the rebel lines, if they were still here.

I decided against my better judgment to go up through the hole, checking each floor with a gun camera before I jumped up. Nothing so far- I made it to the floor below the ambush without incident. Clambering over a fallen chunk of concrete and a dismembered Carnage Marine torso- must’ve been Wall’s work- I shouldered my rifle and moved out. I made my target the rear stairwell, from which I could access most of the bottom floors.

Goddamn, the silence was odd. It could only mean one thing: we had been overrun. True enough, after four corners, I ran into the corridor Acker would’ve been guarding. A pile of corpses sat at its base, bullet holes and blood painting the wall above them, perhaps a testament to the possibility that the Meisters had extricated themselves from the trap and had reached their checkpoints. I checked my comm: Acker was at the top of the stairs. At this range, I wouldn’t be able to get a signal through. He’d shoot me before I could get close enough to radio him. It would be must unwise to shout for his attention, and I couldn’t just unhook my gun camera and toss it, using it as an extension of my comm gear. He’s blow it out of the air before it was five feet off my hand.

Well, this was a problem.

Another comm presence touched mine: it was White, a floor above.

“You in one piece, Karras?” That was odd. With the comm signal, he should be able to read my vitals and get a medical report.

“Just roughed up, you know how it goes. Not often you have tanks gangbang a Carnage Suit.”

White’s laugh was like rolling thunder. “That’s a new one.”

This was getting bad. “White, listen. I’m at the base of what would have been Acker’s assigned position, but with this jamming, I can’t get to him. There’s a pile of rebs down here that make me think he’s sitting high and tight, but I don’t know if he’s actually there. Do you?”

“Oh, is that where you are?”

I frowned. “What do you mean- you should be able to network into my vision to see where I am.”

“No can do, boss.” Boss? “I got trashed by a pair of Carnage Marines, my ‘netics are pretty on and off. Acker and I got separated after the jamming fell.”

“Well, check it out to see if he’s there. You’re only a couple rooms away from where he is.” Acker’s hallway served as a ramp from this floor to the one above where White was.

“Right away,” he said, signing off.

In the meanwhile, I decided to check out a hallway to my left that stood adjacent Acker’s- it lead to the deactivated cargo elevators that served as the back spine of Karayami.

“Oh, shit,” I said as I looked into the first room. Devitt was there, pinned to the floor by a foot of rebar. Oh man oh man oh man. Looking up, I saw a three-meter fissure in the ceiling through which he had probably fallen.

I rushed forward, sliding in on my knees next to him. He was alive, but beat to hell. A long slash ran down his back, running across the cybernetic port on his neck, where the comm was implanted. A half dozen bullets wounds ran down his side, but he was conscious. He smiled when he saw me.

“Heeey… Karras.” He wasn’t bubbling up blood with the words, that was good.

“Devitt, listen to me, listen to me,” I said, taking him by the shoulders. “You’ve been through biggest hits than this, it’s just you’ve taken a hit your cybernetics, and you’ve been fucked up. Your internal healing system should take care of the wounds, though. I’ve got to take you off the rebar, okay?”

He nodded slightly. “Loud and clear.”

I did. It wasn’t pretty, but he had turned off his pain receptors in the area, so he was just a dreary mess instead of a pained dreary mess. Pulling him to a sitting position against the wall, I looked around for weapons- there, two meters away, was a belt of plasma grenades. Excellent, considering the circumstances.

White came in on the radio. “Acker’s not there, Boss. It looks like he packed up a couple minutes ago to fall back. None his stuff is here, but the machine guns are sitting empty.”

“Okay, hold still. I’ve got Devitt; he’s pretty beat to shreds. We’re coming to you.”

Pulling Devitt’s arm over my shoulder, I hefted him to his feet and made my way up to Acker’s corridor. I saw White, with his gatling assembly at his side, when Devitt and I got halfway up the corridor.

There was a detonation above- refreshing after the past stillness- and the jamming field lifted.

“-esus, Karras, this is Fletcher! We finally killed one of the jammer carriers but you’ve got to move your ass; the rebels pulled back and sent in the Four Horsemen! Acker’s with me at the computer banks, but Devitt and White’s dead!”

Oh fuck.

Above, White’s form dissolved into a smoky wraith.

A Deinonj.

Death.

A staff came out of the folds of darkness and powered to light, a green plasma scythe- and then, in the beat of a heart, he was in front of me.

I fell backwards as Death ripped his scythe up from the right in a long stroke- Devitt bounced off the wall and into the path of the blade.

There was an explosion an explosion of blood and Devitt was bisected from hip to shoulder, the two pieces falling in opposite directions.

I brought my gun to bear and yanked on the trigger. Bullets flew through the Deinonj as they would through a curtain, oh man. It wasn’t that a Deinonj couldn’t be hurt by bullets, it’s just that this one was so powerful that each time he resurrected himself, he did it in the exact place he died.

As. Each. Bullet. Hit. Him.

Deinonj, you see, are metaphorical beings. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but they’re basically protrusions into our reality from their own plane, dimension, whatever you want to call it. Usually, you kill its avatar, you sever the connection, and the Deinonj in question has to reestablish himself in the universe a short while later a distance away, rather pissed that he had to go through the effort of making a new projection in the first place.

The stronger the Deinonj, the closer to the severance point he could respawn, making their odd version of immortality straight-up on-the-spot immortality. They can already teleport huge distances, throw rather heavy and painful stuff with at you with a thought, and kill smaller living things by standing next to them for too long, but immortality pretty much capped it off

But, as protrusions from another reality go, they can be permanently shut out- killed for all intents and purposes. This is where the metaphor comes in: you stab the heart, you break the connection forever. The very center of the avatar, as it goes. Bullets don’t do shit, just a nice bar of plasma. Not even plasma rifles could accomplish what an energy sword did: the Deinonj would just respawn a distance away as soon as the plasma bolt brushed its surface.

Obviously, I didn’t have a plasma sword.

There was one thing you could do to shunt a Deinonj away temporarily: overload its resurrection reflex. That meant grenades, but it was kinda evident I couldn’t use them against a melee fighter like Death. I needed distance.

Spinning the scythe over his head, the Deinonj brought it down towards me at what was probably light speed, but I responded as quickly as I could: Death may have been somewhat intangible, but his staff wasn’t.

I brought my legs up and point my jet boots at Death, triggering them. Newton’s third law took effect, and we were thrown in opposite directions in a sprawled heap. The group of bodies at the base of the ramp cushioned my flight as only corpses could, while Death disappeared out of my line of sight.

Groaning, I rose to one knee and popped the pins on three grenades from the collection I had grabbed earlier. I underhanded them up the hall and fell back down, covering my head.

The blast shook the walls around me; plasma grenades are that powerful.

Grabbing my rifle in one hand and prepping another grenade in the other, I sprang to my feet and moved back up the hall to see if I had done the trick.

The walls were scorched with purple, the telltale mark of a plasma detonation. There was no sign of Death. Looking around, I saw that the imposter had indeed been telling the truth on one front, Acker had been at the position for a short time, if only a run and gun and not a full-blown you-shall-not-pass affair.

“Fletcher, you on?” I said, tapping back into my comm.

“We’re here, Karras,” said Fletcher. “We saw the hole thing through your eye feed. You need to get back up to the comp cent, but watch out: there are still the three other Horsemen out there.”

“Well, wonderful,” I nodded, looking over my shoulder, back at the severed pieces of Devitt’s body. I swear, I’m going to kill those bastards. Hard. But it was best to avoid them and hook up with the others, so I started running again. “You said White was killed?”

“Yeah,” said Wall, coming on. “We had managed to get away from the column before they could bring their weapons to bear, and were dropped on almost immediately by Death and War. Devitt got shoved through the floor, as you saw, and last I saw, White had been vivisected and… absorbed by Death.”

“Absorbed?” I almost stopped. “Holy shit, he took a full clip without blinking, I got that he’s powerful. He can shapeshift, but that’s a whole new plane.”

“I know,” said Fletcher darkly.

I didn’t run into any other Horsemen, contrary to Fletcher’s warning, as I sprinted back towards Comp Cent. Despite the Vault’s foreboding name, Comp Cent stands at in the deepest, farthest nook of the base. Nevertheless, I made it there in what I would call world-record time. Fletcher saw my IFF tag approaching and let me through the gauntlet of mines and turrets to the rear room. Picking my way over the scorched carcass of a Carnage suit, I said “Friend of yours?”

Fletcher gave a wan smile. “Hardly. He was carrying the jamming gear, we managed to lure him away from his buddies and have Wall take him out.”

Wall waved from within the room, where he manned a ridiculously large railgun.

“How much time left?” I asked as I entered the room. Comp Cent stretched away for a couple hundred yards, with the rather standard ceiling-high rows of servers and data storage. In this case, data storage- obviously containing something DuPont wanted somewhere within it labyrinthine depths.

“Five minutes and twelve seconds,” Acker chirped off.

“Damn, they’d have regrouped by now. They have more than enough time and men to do it from the front.”

There was a pop.

“Or,” said a voice. “We could just blink in behind you. Eye feeds are a wonderful thing.”

DuPont stood behind us, completely within Comp Cent, flanked by four Carnage Marines.

For the second time in less than five minutes: Fuck.

Now, hold up a minute. That’s not how it works.

Blinkers can only go where they’ve seen: it’s a sort of photographic thing. You see it, if only a glimpse and you can blink there as long as you can visualize it. Stronger blinkers, along with the power to teleport stuff alongside for the trip (like, in this case, Carnage Marines), can blink through what they see on video feeds.

It’s a well documented phenomenon; blinkers can blink to where they see on TV, provided it actually exists and that the image is live. Combat blinkers generally use their teammates cybernetic eye feeds to extend their range on mission, as all the mates are extending the range of the blinker.

But DuPont had just claimed to have had used our eye feed network to jump into Comp Cent. And frankly, that was bullshit. Impossible. Our eye feeds were a closed system, and you can’t hack a closed system. Now, if we were routing through something, he might be able to do it. But we weren’t.

DuPont had never seen this room before, or he would have jumped in without even bothering with the theatrics with Two. However, there’s not really any way we could have got in without hacking our eyes. Any sensor drone would have been seen by Wall and easily dispatched. The Carnage Marine, due to the structure of the hallway- Comp Cent was set perpendicular to the antecedent hallway- couldn’t have seen into Comp Cent, to where DuPont was currently standing.

A mystery, then. But I didn’t have time to solve it. I was more worried with the four mechs right in front of me, leveling gatling guns at my face. Not so cool.

Wall, being almost entirely cyborg, was the fastest. He somehow got that railgun around in a hundredth of a second and pumped the shell that rested in the chamber into the nearest mech, blowing it in half. Time began to slow as Wall pivoted the cannon to bear on the next suit, but the mechs were already turtling behind their arm shields, locking their gatling guns through the firing groove.

I grabbed Acker and Fletcher by their collars and yanked them bodily around the corner to cover, going full power for a short second on my boots to avoid the slugs that chased our heels. Careening off the wall yet managing to stop short of kill radius of the mines, I hit the floor and instantly rolled to my feet, flipping the camera attached to the side of the rifle around the corner to watch.

Wall had ripped out a bank of computers and was using it at a shield. With the railgun in one hand, he spun on the spot, obliterating the farthest mech’s protruding gatling gun and pretty much the entirety of the arm it was mounted on, before flinging the two-ton bank at the closest surviving Carnage Marine. The suit batted the bank out of the air in an equally impressive show of strength, but the deflection left the pilot sickeningly open- Wall exploited the mistake, diving in and firing his shoulder-mounted single-shot laser array down the gullet of the suit. There was an explosion of red light as the- well, let’s just say Wall has a point-defense system- array slagged the front face of the mech.

The irony in this being, Wall didn’t see the middle suit come in from the right and lay a crust-cracking right on Wall’s face, who fell away, leaving a haze of white blood.

Behind all of this I saw DuPont, already a hundred meters down the row of computers, casually slotting in a set of cables into the ceiling-high memory bank, pulling down exactly what he wanted.

“Acker!” I shouted, linking the gun camera to his feed. “Take the shot!”

Slapping the bolt on his rifle, Acker instantly used his cybernetics to line up a firing angle from the view given by the guncam before dropping to one knee and twirling around the corner.

I n the foreground, Wall rolled onto his back, grabbing his dropped railgun right as the Carnage Marine went in for the kill, slotting forth a huge plasma blade from its gauntlet.

A single, echoing shot rang out. On the cam, DuPont spun on his feet, dropping to the floor. Closer, the mech intent on gutting wall exploded as the hundred millimeter shell hit it.

“Why didn’t he teleport away?” I asked, as Acker and Fletcher sprang forward, sprinting towards DuPont. I began to follow.

Wall got to his feet and trudged over the armless Carnage Suit, who was also picking itself off the floor, and shot it in the face with the railgun. “Antipsi bullets, remember?”

“But that trap never works.”

Acker didn’t bother to laugh, only skidded in next to DuPont, who was pinned to the floor by what looked to be a one-foot spike.

“Expands in flight,” Acker explained tersely when he saw my expression.

“Overkill, isn’t it?” I asked, crouching down with my gun trained on DuPontt. “I mean, he already can’t teleport ou- oh fuck.”

DuPont, even from his position on the floor, managed to pull of the most magnificent of smirks. For, of course.

Of course.

The interface computer was gone.

“It’s fun,” said DuPont, “to be the motherfucking decoy. I blinked the ripper-” he must have been talking about the interface comp “-into the hands of my commander before the bullet even hit. They’re fleeing as we speak.”

Getting away as we speak. He took the hit to take up our time in securing him.

“You used yourself as a-?”

DuPont suddenly sat up, ripping his shoulder off the rod, his face suddenly close to my ear, and whispered “Why not?

At once, he shot every single limb out, simply exploding in place. One arm casually pushed aside my rifle, pulling down the trigger and emptying the clip harmlessly at Wall. The other arm caught me on the cheek, spending me spinning to the floor.

The right leg kicked backwards, instantly placing his legs underneath him, setting him a crouch.

His left leg swept in a wide arc across the floor, sweeping both Acker and Fletcher off their feet with a pair of surprised shouts and twin thumps. Continuing on the sweep, the foot broke the antipsi slug in half where it had burrowed into the ground before crushing it under the sheer momentum.

And then he was gone.

To cap it all off, that was when the lights came back on, a little bit early.
Last edited by Mobius 1 on Wed Oct 01, 2008 2:31 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Ford Prefect »

That was totally badass, in basically every way that mattered. :D
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Booted Vulture »

Holy Akshun!
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

Chapter Four: Broken Arrow
Splinter (D-122)


Wall is fast; let me get that out of the way. Fast enough to cross the room in only a couple strides and haul all of us to our feet. He wasn’t fast enough to catch DuPont, but nobody’s perfect.

I was instantly sprinting down the length of Comp Cent, screaming into my comm. “Clive! Where are they?”

The top netrunner responded directly, without pause. “Heading out through the garage right now, sir! They’re blowing up our turrets from the inside, but I’ve been able to lock down the signal of the ‘ripper’ DuPont referred to, and they’ve got it. A couple of seconds- got it! We now have a lock on that device.”

Fletcher was at my side, hitting the com. “Chief, we need your men to trace into Comp Cent and see what DuPont just stole. Got that?”

I heard Clive delegating in the background. “Loud and clear, boss. We’re in, and it looks like the hardware covered its tracks like nothing else. I say five minutes, tops.”

Another addition to my ‘fast’ list: Clive. Sounded good.

Clive came back on a couple seconds later. “They just stole a pair of Gentos and managed to blast out of the hangar. Looks like they’re trying to hack the tracker software out of the dropship’s mainframe, but I’ve got men dueling them for control. They managed to get huge firewalls around the emergency remote takeover mechanisms for the ships. We’re trying to drop them, but they’re heavy ice.”

“Anybody- any of the rebs- still in the base?” Fletcher asked

“No, what ones that were still down below got greased by the defense net. They won’t ever be coming back up in that direction. The rest left on the ships.”

“Anything on the ships?” I said.

“Standard CTI loadout,” Acker said.

Wonderful. Ten jet packs and a pair of speeder bikes. Each.

“We have a plan?” Wall asked. “Or is it ‘kill it all’?”

“Something like that,” said Fletcher, kicking a dropped submachine gun into his hands and racking the slide.

***

I leapt off the top of Karayami into the empty sky. Dozen of stories below, the ground leered up at me, but I saw nothing but the seemingly impenetrable wall of Neo York proper in front. A black smoke tinged the view; closer inspection revealed it to be swarms of hovercars orbiting the edge of the metropolis.

The buildings stood so high that I couldn’t seen the plumes of smoke coming from the blast crater across the city.

Gravity gripped me as I reached the apex of my jump, and I fell. Yet I did not trigger my jet boots just yet. Down below, far below, I saw Wall finally pull out from his cliff-hugging plummet, leveling out the monstrous jetbike he straddled.

I fell, far, picking up speed, with Wall staying underneath me. When it looked like we were about to collide only a hundred feet off the ground, he flipped his bike over and pushed all the juice he could into his antigrav pods, which caught me almost gently and held me there for a second as my inertia was reversed like a speeding freight train.

I triggered my jetboots right as said train finally pushed against me, and the combined affect of Wall’s bike and my boots flung me a mile into the air.

Shooting like a cannonball upward, my clothes were blasted from both sides as Fletcher and Acker tore past me on single pilot speeders, speeding into the traffic. I saw what seemed at first to be a wildly gyrating log flip across my vision, but I knew what it was, and flung out a hand.

Acker’s spare sniper rifle felt refreshing in my hands as the cold air gusted around me. I tapped my jet boots for speed, and I looked down through the scope on the hovercar swarm. Clive’s ID tag instantly popped up on my HUD, denoting two Gentos and a smaller label marking the actual ripper comp.

I rapidly flicked up the magnification, peering down on the closest dropship, the one with the target on board. There was literally no way the rifle could hurt the Gento, nor could I get close without it brining its formidable point defense cannons to bear.

That’s why I had Wall.

The cyborg’s jetbike dropped in one the Gento’s tail, easily juking away from the fusillade of bullets streaming from a pair of rear-mounted machine guns. In a blink of an eye, four racks popped out on each of Wall’s sides, unleashing a missile swarm on the rear of the gunship.

The impacts rocked the Gento, slagging each of the rear cannons. Wall instantly dropped back as the second dropship joined the fight, its nose cannon spewing a foot-wide orb of plasma that missed Wall by mere feet.

Here we go. The first Gento had opened its port hatch; eight soldiers shouldering jetpacks leapt out to provide point defense for their mothership. Each pack sported a machine guns mounted on either shoulder, leaving the wearer free to wield any sort of weapon.

Which they did, of course.

That was my cue.

I dived into the fray.

I called it that, as saying ‘I dived into the web of a couple thousand speeders darting around at hundreds of miles an hour a mile off the ground’ is generally considered a suicidal tendency, and tends to get you a psych evaluation.

A dozen cars shot at me from every single conceivable direction as I twisted and contorted as a plummeted toward the Gento. Horns blared, lights blurred, and the world tumbled, but I kept my eye on the prize.

Of course, that field of vision was immediately taken up by the jet troopers; they had spotted me.

I leavened my rifle and fired, taking one in the face; the rest scattered. They flew wide, then converged, batting me by their mere slipstreams. A knife flicked across my arm, I easily ignored the pain and shot out my hand.

I guess that Carnage Marine at Karayami taught me one thing.

The effort nearly wrenched my arm out of its socket, but Newton dictated I wouldn’t stay in place and shot the closest foe by simply seizing his ankle. I flew with him.

He whipped his head down with the impact; swore when he saw me, aimed a kick at my arm. I held on doggedly. After a second, he was able to bring his submachine gun to target my face.

Fletcher came in from the side, spinning the tail end of his bike around in place. The midair slough hit the soldier like an asteroid, ripping him in half.

I instantly relinquished my hold on the twitching ankle, spun, and pulsed my jet books- barely missing the barrage of bullets dropping over my head. Lifting the rifle one handed, I fired a snap shot, hitting the wing of a foe who had almost fixed his sights on my head. He spiraled to the right, before being snatched out of sight by a speeding bus.

The first Gento loomed below, but it couldn’t fire at me- its defense had been put out of commission by Wall. I landed with a clang on the roof of the huge troop bay of the dropship, my boots automatically magnetizing to the hull. I began to move, aware that being stationary would make me a pathetically easy target for the rebs above. True enough, plasma began to score the hull behind me as I half-ran, half-crawled towards the aft of the ship.

“Wall!” I screamed into my comm. “I neeeeed cover, man!”

There was a whump from above, and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, three rebs- their chests deformed, spewing blood- shoot past.

“I guess their mothers never taught them not to play in traffic,” Wall’s voice intoned in my ear. The plasma trail has abated.

“I guess not,” I replied, before seeing the side hatch- where the first squad of jet troops had departed- open again. Without hesitation, I rolled off the side of the Gento, triggering my jet boots before I could be swept away by the slipstream. I shot like a rocket into the open door, crash-tackling the pilot off the speeder bike he sat on. We flew like shuttlecocks through the cavernous internal bay of the dropship, crashing into the far wall. Behind me, I was aware of the riderless bike being flung out of the ship, but that was the least of my concerns.

The pilot of the bike brought his fist into my cheek at a zillion miles an hour. This was a surprise, as I didn’t think he had survived the impact with the inner hull. Anyway, my head whiplashed back, and he kneed me in gut, hard. I lost my grip on him just as my boots cut out, and we slid- no, plummeted- to the floor.

My attacker was swifter, he grabbed my head off the ground and dropped it on the top of his foot. That hurt, let me tell you. I flew backwards onto my back, finally focusing on my opponent.

Tall. Long brown-black hair. Green eyes. Bearded.

Red coat.

Big frickin’ sword.

War. One of DuPont’s Horsemen.

Well, that sucked.

Said sword was off its holster- the goddamn thing had a power holster- on War’s back in an instant, and I rolled as fast as I could to avoid the downstroke of the blade. The impact cleaved through the floor where I had been with a metallic shriek, and I realized I was facing a five-foot vibroblade. Positively great, you know?

Instead off pulling the sword out of the floor and taking another swipe at me, War spun the blade to face me and dragged it through the floor to my side. I popped my legs underneath me and leapt into a crouch just as he brought the sword out of the ground. The point of the blade cut a thin line across my back, but it was barely a scratch. Trying to pump my legs up so as to get standing and spin to face War, I was thrown forward when he cut me off, planting his boot in the small of my back and sending me stumbling drunkenly forward to careen off a Nanta jeep clamped down in the middle of the bay. I spun to face War just his fist dented the sideboard of the AFV.

This was bad. I was in close quarters with a guy who had fifty pounds on me. I needed to even the odds. Lifting my foot, I brought in down on the inside of his leg, right as the knee joint. War crumpled to his knee, and I triggered my jet boots. He made an attempt to seize my leg, but I saw this coming (how the fuck couldn’t I have, seeing it’d happened twice today already?) and dealt a savage blow to back of his head with my boot as I flew past him.

I settled on the catwalks above, finally brining my large sniper rifle to bear on the red-coated figure below. I squeezed off a trio of shots, but War managed to bat them out of the air with his sword, the vibration effect simply disintegrating the bullets on contact.

I began to run down the catwalk to the head of the Gento, the spacious cockpit.

The world shook. My eyes widened as I saw a Carnage Marine leap up onto walkway in front of me, his gatling guns whirling.

Without hesitating, I dived off the walkway. It helps to have jetboots when it comes to idly leaping off catwalks suspended fifteen feet in the air.

There a loud ripping noise above me, and I knew I had only just outpaced the bombardment. I landed on the floor heavily and spun, just in time to see War swing his sword at the at the perfect height to decapitate one Atmos Karras.

I parried with the only item at my disposal. With a clang, the sniper rifle broke into two pieces as the sword careened off of it. Rolling my eyes, I threw both halves at him and turned to flee, knowing the resistance was like tossing coins at an elephant.

Things went from worse to horrible when the Carnage Mech leapt back down in front of me, cutting off my aimless retreat.

And then I got an idea.

I kept running, and before the suit could perforate me with slugs the size of an apple, I clambered straight up its frame, kick-flipping off its chest and spinning in mid air. In an instant, I was above it all, behind War, who had been seconds from driving his sword into my back.

I placed my feet together as gravity overtook my and I began to, ever so slowly, fall. My heels brushed War’s back.

I triggered my jet boots

Booyah.

The concussion was a like the hand of god bitchslapping War into the floor. Newton, friend that he was, tossed me like a rag doll towards the ceiling. Thankfully, a catwalk didn’t intercept me, and I managed to right myself before I bounced off the hull.

“So, what, man?” I called down to War. “You were going to ride your bike out to join the tussle earlier? Some sort of mounted cavalry bullshit?”

The Carnage Mech was the one to respond, ripping the Nanta out of its braces and tossing it at me.

Earlier, I had wondered why War hadn’t simply crushed me with his telekinesis blasts. I had come to the working theory that he was one of those ‘power over finesse’ types, and only had one setting: pulverize. Therefore, he couldn’t smoosh me for fear of blowing a hole in the Gento.

Clearly, the mech pilot had no such compunctions.

I spun to the side and managed to reduce the impact from ‘pulp’ to ‘clip’. The rear bumper of the jeep caught me on the shoulder, and I spun into the far wall, near the still open side hatch. I saw the serene traffic sliding past outside, only momentarily marred by a flying jetpack soldier or a CTI agent on a speeder bike. Heh, what a beautiful day.

“Wall?” I called into my comm. “I’ve got another mech on my ass. Could use some help here.”

“Gotcha” he intoned.

I rolled onto my back and began to kick backwards towards the portal. I felt the tremors and glanced down over my chest to see the Carnage Marine pursuing me. He had picked up the wreckage of the Nanta from the floor and was intending to finally squash me with it.

I wrapped my hands around the edges of the hatch to keep from being sucked up. The wind tore at me. The Carnage Marine caught the light as he lifted the jeep high over his heat.

A metallic arm appeared out of nowhere, grabbing the head of the Carnage Marine and yanked him out of the Gento. I heard, over the din, Wall say “Let’s talk”.

There was a crunch. A scream. An explosion. The shattered carcass of the mech tumbled past, and was gone.

Wall swung down into the hatch, bracing himself in the doorway. I smiled up at War. There’s nothing more threatening than knowing a ten-foot Nahktar tank has your enemy’s back.

Oh, shit.

War smiled. He raised his hand. He had a clear shot.

I let go of the hatch and let the jetstream take me.

Wall scrambled to get out of the way, but wasn’t fast enough.

That psionic blast wave grabbed him around the legs, sending him flipping head over heels through a cargo truck and out of sight.

I had magnetized my boots as soon as I had left the safety of the ship, and was currently flattened by the wind on the port side of the Gento.

I saw the other Gento, contentedly spewing out jetpack troops as Fletcher and Acker struggled to fend them off. I was on my own.

I frowned. I had no weapon, save for a combat knife strapped to my boot.

War stuck his head out the hatch, the rushing air sending his hair flying in all directions. He twisted, and saw me, bringing his sword out and taking a swing at me.

I demagnetized my boots for a half second then reactivated them. The wind caught me and pulled my fifteen feet down the length of the ship, towards its rear before I stopped. War’s sword skived uselessly off the hull. Sparks flew.

He could still blast me off the side of his ship. I swore, and began to clamber around to the back of the Gento.

I barely made it. He managed get his other hand free and blasted at me just as I was swinging around to the back end. The psionic wave flipped me head first into the hull, and I bounced off painfully. I saw stars for a moment, and blackness.

I must have been out for all of ten seconds, at best, because I blinked my eyes open to see the massive aft blast doors to the troop bay opening. I had been undulating, unconscious, in the wind, held in place by my boots, on the very edge frame of the Gento.

I saw War standing on the edge of the bay, smiling. He bounced his sword from hand to hand, waiting for the doors to fully slide open. I needed to do something, and fast. Shit, shit, shit.

I rolled onto the bottom of the Gento. I barely managed to see War’s expression morph into a scowl as he disappeared from my line of sight.

Did he have magnetic boots? Would he follow me down here?

I pulled my knife from its sheath. If he stuck his head down here, I’d be able to cut him before he could draw a bullseye on my head.

There was a clunk from my right. I whipped my head around.

Shit! He was climbing down from the hatch on the other side of the Gento, not from the back.

I dart forward, and slashed at the hand holding his sword. Somehow, he managed to hold onto it, despite the massive gash I opened on the top of wrist.

The other hand came out of nowhere and punched me in the face. It was a closed fist, so my head wasn’t blasted off by the TK wave.

I saw the tops of his boots were fastened to the hull. He did have mag boots.

For the first time, I finally smiled.

They weren’t jet boots.

“Screw this,” I said, and demagnetized my boots. Instantly, I activated the propulsion, flying along beside War, just out of sword reach.

I flew in, and slammed my fist into his cheek, payback for earlier. He punched me in my shoulder, where the Nanta had hit me earlier. The pain was unbelievable.

I brought my knife into his side. I don’t know if I caught flesh through the flapping coat, but his eyes widened. I pushed further, and twisted the blade.

He brought his elbow down on my shoulder. Again and again. I let go of the blade.

He grabbed me by the throat with his free hand, brought up his sword for the killing blow.

“You ever run into a Wall?” I asked.

“What?!”

I saw the ascending blur and managed to squirm just far enough away from War to avoid being caught by the Nahktar missile that scraped War off the Gento. The tussle was short. War decided going CQC against a Nahktar cyborg wasn’t his cup of tea and pushed away, barely avoiding a fury of missiles that Wall unleashed on his tail. I saw him fall away into the traffic and shook my head.

I saw Wall, mounted on a stolen speeder bike, offering his hand to me. I took it, and he swung me onto his back. We rose and settled into the open bay of the Gento.

“Jesus, man,” I said, hands on my knees. “That was goddamn epic timing.”

Wall nodded. “I try my best.” He paused. “We should hurry. The ripper should be in the cockpit.”

Acker’s voice buzzed in my ear. “Shit! There’s this-” there was a grunt “-eh, blue haired bitch firing with a rifle from the Gento! We can’t get close!”

“That’d be Famine,” I said. “Wall just took care of War.”

“Gotcha,” said Fletcher. “Get the Ripper, and get the hell out of there.”

“Copy,” Wall said.

“Say,” I noted, as we made our way up to the cockpit. “I lost all my weapons fighting War. You have a gun on you somewhere?”

“Sure thing,” said Wall, detaching a section of his forearm. A grip slotted out from what I saw to be a modular plasma rifle. It would have totally surreal if he hadn’t done it before on many an occasion.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I pointed the gun camera around the corner to the corridor leading into the cockpit. The view routed into my HUD, and I saw-

No one.

There was no one in the pilot’s chair. Or copilot’s seat. Or gunner’s mount.

The cockpit was empty.

Just a remote computer hooked up the ship’s comp cent. Most definitely not the ripper.

I swore.

I activated my comm again. “Fletcher, this Gento’s pilotless. It’s remote slaved, there’s no one in the pilot’s seat. No ripper.”

“Then how did they fake the signal?”

I tapped my ear. “Clive? Got an answer?”

The CTI tech was there in a flash. “Yeah, it looks to be a simple reroute. Damn near impossible to break from the outside, but once you figure one’s in use, it’s a sitch to follow it to the source… bingo. It’s in the other Gento.”

“Are you sure?” I was worried they could have traded the ripper off to another car while the dropships distracted us.

“Positive, sir,” Clive said. “If they traded off the ripper- that’s your theory right? Anyway, if they handed it off, they wouldn’t be able to fake the signal. Reroutes when a hacker has a trace on your equipment is short range only.”

Great. That entire fight with War had been a waste.

Acker came on. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of where they’re going, guys.”

I spun, even though Acker was outside. Wall, beside me, was unhooking the slave terminal and allowing Clive to access the Gento’s comp cent.

“Yeah, the old Diamond District spaceport.”

Man, oh man. They were planning to take the data offworld.

I ran through the facts. DuPont could easily have taken the ripper off world, but he hadn’t yet. Obviously the antipsi bullet had done what had been intended- in had fragmented in DuPont’s shoulder, and his blinking ability was severely handicapped.

They couldn’t electronically transfer the data offworld. A hundred bucks said the Union had erected a planet-wide firewall to stop civilian communication minutes after the bomb went off.

However, a physical blockade would be a lot more difficult to approve, let alone put into place. There was a small window for the rebels, if they wanted to escape via spacecraft, to get out before a blockade was organized.

They couldn’t take the Gentos- CTI dropships didn’t have a slipstream FTL drive- so that meant they were going to escape via the spaceport.

The Diamond District spaceport. Like Karayami Base, a relic of the past. The ‘port, however, was a hell of a lot older than the base, by a factor of something like two hundred years. It was a dark maze of concrete and deep drops. I didn’t want to pursue anything into it.

And yet I saw it looming ahead through the cockpit windows, a ridged block of stone rising out of Neo York. Hundreds, no, thousands of vessels flowed in and out of the spaceport. Oh, this was going to be a bitch.

“Into the proverbial belly of the beast,” Wall mused.

“Shut up,” I groaned.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Ford Prefect
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Ford Prefect »

A good chase sequence. It really feels as though Overheat won't be letting up any time soon.
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Booted Vulture »

“You ever run into a Wall?” I asked.

“What?!”

I saw the ascending blur and managed to squirm just far enough away from War to avoid being caught by the Nahktar missile that scraped War off the Gento. The tussle was short. War decided going CQC against a Nahktar cyborg wasn’t his cup of tea and pushed away, barely avoiding a fury of missiles that Wall unleashed on his tail. I saw him fall away into the traffic and shook my head.
Why do I get the feeling the character was named just for this line? :P

Nice chapter Mobius, I look forward to the next installment
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
Mobius 1
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

Chapter Five: Going Down in Flames
Duel (D-121)


I glared at the spaceport looming in front of me, as though my very gaze would force it out of my way. There were two sides to the Diamond District spaceport: the pretty white one your average middle-class family goes to take a trip to New Cal to meet the families, the side with the graceful and beautiful interstellar liners. And then there was the south side, with its dank interiors, full of individually rented hangars. There was little to no oversight over what went on in the depths of the labyrinth; it was a major hive of drug activity and organized crime. Any and every cop hated it, as the level of corruption in the section of town surrounding the port made it impossible to clean it out, lest someone you trust put a bullet in your back.

Near the base of my field of vision, I saw the second Gento landing on an open outer platform. Rebels spilled out of it like ants, muzzle flashes blinking in our direction. Fletcher and Acker, who were outside of the captured Gento on hoverbikes, darted behind our bird right as a pair of Carnage Marines clambered into view down below. A storm of missiles arced up towards us from them, and I swore.

“Clive!” I shouted into my comm. “Evade, man!”

The netrunner responded with stunning speed, and the Gento juked hard to the left. A dozen missiles went wide; others were thrown off by the ECM pods strategically dropped, but still more came at us.

The impact took the Gento on its right engine, a rapid triple thump that bucked the deck beneath our feet and sent the Gento into a dire spin. Clive worked desperately to compensate with the dropship’s belly antigrav pods, but it was too late. All he could do was aim the dropship towards the same landing pad the rebel raiding part had alit upon. We didn’t exactly make it.

The dropship didn’t line up with the pad, taking it on edge and flipping side over side. Wall, standing beside me, managed to scoop me up and lodge himself in place before I was thrown back into the cavernous troop bay behind me. The ride was rough, the end worse, when the Gento collided with a massive pillar. Fortunately, the support of the ancient spaceport withstood the impact, and our tumble was arrested.

Wall and I were up immediately- Clive popped emergence release on the forward viewscreen of the cockpit- and we leapt down onto the pavement below, some ten feet down. I landing lightly and rolled, while Wall didn’t so much as leap and act like he taking the stairs.

The mechs hadn’t stuck around, and the landing pad was empty save for two battered dropships, dozens of shell casings, and about a galaxy’s worth of smoke. I quickly switched to infrared, and saw the forms of the rebels two floors up, already a hundred plus yards away.

I brought my plasma rifle hard against my shoulder, glancing around for Fletcher and Acker- my HUD told me they were somewhere behind me, but I had to be sure- when the pillar above my head sparked with all the contained impact force of a cannonball.

I dropped prone immediately and rolled, I knew from a decade plus as a soldier that I was being shot at with a railgun. Sniper, to my right. Maybe twenty five yards off. My guess went to Famine, the blue-haired Horse- er, Horsewoman, I guess.

I was aware of Wall pivoting above me, a wrist-mounted chaingun screaming in response.

There was the rush of air behind me, and I saw Fletcher and Acker leap down off their hoverbikes behind cover. It was a wise move, the bikes would be too unwieldy in the concrete jungle we were about to delve into.

“It’s clear,” said Wall, pulling me to my feet. “She made a tactical retreat.”

Fletcher, reloading his rifle, snorted. “She leapt twenty feet straight up and out of sight.”

Wall shrugged. He turned, pointing up into the darkness. The walkway on which the landing platform we stood on now was mounted simply disappeared away in a black abyss. One could barely make out the vague lines of concrete structure. Barely. “I count fifteen, plus Famine and the mech pair.” As we noted the various positions of the rebels, he marked them on our HUDs with nav markers. It was obvious that the rebs had left two staggered quads of men behind to act as rear guards for the group. I noted a Carnage Marine with each group.

Checkpoints. Ha.

“Okay,” Fletcher nodded. “Covering fire on three. Wall, you’re advancing.”

I pursed my lips. Three, two-

“Go.”

I brought myself up onto my knees, firing my rifle from the shoulder in a wide strafing pattern, forcing the rebs in the darkness to keep their heads down. I saw infrared shapes hunker behind cargo crates, before Wall leapt forward, taking the fight to them.

The first Carnage Marine was instantly there to meet him. In an instant, I recognized it to be larger and obviously more formidable than the lightweight suits we had faced so far; this one was easily Wall’s size and packing just as many armaments. The two instantly passed minimum range for their rockets and entered fisticuffs, both trying to plant a wrist laser in the other’s vitals.

I grimaced. While the two combatants were so large that I would have no problem distinguishing targets, the mech was essentially invulnerable to small arms. Wall was on his own.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fletcher draw a pair of HE grenades from his satchel. He’d probably held on to them for the entire chase, as grenades were about as useless in an aerial chase as the sword on his back. Pulling the pins, he flung them high, over brawling robots. They landed inaudibly behind the cargo crates two rebs crouched behind, trying to set up a bipod-mounted machine gun. There was a single beat, and the explosion flashed briefly in the gloom of the docks. Gore splattered the crates, and a pair of bodies flopped into view, clearly dead.

The Carnage Marine, his gatling guns sending slugs in literally every direction as he wailed about, overextended on a swing with a wrist-mounted energy lance. Wall punished him for it, dancing into the inside of the mech’s guard, putting it into a headlock, and planting his wrist laser into the armpit of the mech, vaporizing the pilot inside.

No sooner than the first mech went limp than the second leapt in, planting both feet on Wall’s back. With the momentum of a freight train, he crushed Wall into the ground, and then, in the blink of an eye, they rolled out of the platform and out of sight.

Oh, shit.

A machine gun chattered and broke the double-beat of silence that ensued. Concrete crater over my head, and I threw myself down behind cover to avoid being decapitated. Glancing through the rubble I squatted behind, my infrared told me the second group had moved up to consolidate the first. They had a pair of machine gun nests set up, and were raining hell on us. Dammit. We were outnumbered, and had just been deprived of our one equalizer.

“Got any more ‘nades?” I yelled to Fletcher on my comm.

“Those were the last of them!” he shouted back. Double dammit.

I grimaced. I saw Famine carrying the ripper, fleeing into the depths of the spaceport. Her infrared signal was beginning to fade out.

“Guys, I’ve got it working!” Clive’s voice came in excitedly over the comm.

“What?!” Fletcher hissed.

In response, the head of our crumpled Gento turned to face the hunkered rebs. The chin plasma cannon dropped loosely out of its bay, spun on its mount, and pulsed. A foot-wide globule of plasma hit the nearest machine gun nest like a rocket, sending molten crates and body parts in all directions.

My grimace instantly became a grin. “Clive, your timing is near impeccable.”

Fletcher nodded. “Acker, pop any head that dares to rise into view. Karras, we’re advancing.”

I understood. Since we were on a protruding, mounted platform, flanking was wasn’t an option. Nor could we jet over to an adjacent platform- it’d take too long to get around the rebs and trail Famine, not to mention the fact that the defenders could easily reorient themselves in whatever direction we chose.

No, we’d have to blast through them. Straight and simple.

I leapt up from my cover, firing my rifle as I sprinted forward. A massive red laser streaked over my head in response, hitting the rubble whose protection I had just vacated. Grapefruit-sized chunks of concrete hit me in the back, I staggered to the ground. Fletcher instantly had an arm under my shoulder, hauling me to my feet as he held his own rifle with one hand still firing. Ahead, I saw that the rebs had set up an anti-armor laser in response to the plasma cannon the Gento wielded. The green beast loomed ahead, its barrel smoking.

The closest machine gun nest rotated to track us. Slugs danced toward our feet, but Acker was behind us. His rifle cracked twice, and the operators of the MG fell out of sight, their necks spewing blood like high-pressure leaks.

Energy began collecting at the tip of the anti-armor laser, some twenty meters away. The cannon glowed brightly in the dark, its wielders hidden safely behind extended armor plating.

The Gento’s plasma cannon pulsed behind us.

The laser turret screamed in response.

Fletcher and I, mirror images, fell backward onto our backs, sliding over the concrete. We shot past the next machine gun emplacement, firing our guns into the rebs as they spun around to gawk at us. They danced like ragdolls right as the two energy bolts collided midair in a spectacular explosion.

All that was left was the laser cannon itself. But it wasn’t tracking to kill us. The turret was rapidly grinding to face the Gento, so vape it before the plasma cannon could cycle for another shot. Energy began to collect at its tip again.

Acker threw himself out from behind cover and shot the laser cannon right down its barrel with his rifle.

In response, the reb turret fired.

A dozen lasers shot out in all directions from within the belly of the emplacement. One operator fell to the side instantly, having been sliced in half by the probing beam. The second flailed out of his cover to avoid being eviscerated by his own mutinous weapon.

Fletcher rolled to his knees and shot the man the face.

Spinning to my feet, I surveyed the surrounding area. No more rebs.

I nodded back towards Acker, who was sprinting towards us. His shot had fractured the inner lens of the laser, causing it to refract the beam into all directions.

Just for the sake of completion, Clive shot the laser cannon from the Gento. Overkill, maybe, but at least the random beams stopped.

I stopped for a second and put my hands on my knees. “Jesus,” I said, breathing hard.

Fletcher clapped me on the back. “We’re not done yet.”

“Don’t I know it.”

I saw to strip the nearest reb of his rifle- as mine had run dry- before throwing it away in disgust. The gun was DNA IDed, I couldn’t use it. A quick glance told me all the soldier’s rifles, as well as their sidearms, were similarly coded. I frowned. Laser turrets? ID guns? Someone was funding the rebs heavily, beyond the obvious Carnage mechs. The laser turret was a Jovian Arms model that had only been put on the market months ago. ID guns had come in and gone out of fashion over the past few centuries. Someone was funding the rebel commandos, as these weapons had not been around when they went underground.

I glanced towards Famine’s ID tag. It had stopped, about six hundred meters away. I paused to finally reference her location against a map of the complex. It appeared she had taken refuge in a relatively sheltered private hangar. I checked the ownership; it was an obviously fake name.

DuPont had a lair. Hardy har.

Well, lairs are meant to be stormed.

Acker tossed me his sidearm as he passed. I racked the slide to check the brass inside the chamber, nodded, and we, all three of us, set off at a dead run.

Clive came in over the comm. “Heads up, we finally figured out what DuPont was after. It’s a goddamn hardy program nut, but we cracked it. Has Deckard’s electronic fingerprints all over it, it’s an old ONI logging software.”

“How about telling us what it logs?” I hissed. “He’s not after a nice old notetaking program.”

“Duly noted,” Clive replied dryly. “It’s defense codes, guys. To the Sol defense network. And not just entrance ciphers. Control commands. Whoever gets this could not only barge into Sol unimpeded, but take full command over every autolaser in the system. It’s the sort of stuff that only the High Admirals know.”

The revelation was a punch in the gut. Anyone in possession of the d-codes could hold humanity’s cradle hostage. It was obvious DuPont wasn’t doing this for his own benefit: he was an information broker, and was selling this to some formidable third party. It wasn’t the organized resistance, the major fleets had been scattered and destroyed with Alerton. No, it was something else, unknown. Perhaps an internal faction? Or something from the edge of the galaxy and beyond?

“The High Admirals, or an intelligence chief,” Acker noted bitingly. “It’s been twenty years, obviously he couldn’t just keep a simple line of code, for they change every day. No, he managed to bury a worm that’s been duly copying the keys into Sol for two decades.”

“Holy shit,” Fletcher breathed. “We’ve been scouring the ONI computer networks since day one- there’s no way we should have missed this.”

Unless someone had deliberately covered up the leak. Maybe the same someone who had been supplying the rebels. And even, come to think of it, the person who had got DuPont’s raiders access to our eye-view network. A job of this magnitude required an inside man.

It was up to us, then, to stop DuPont.

We turned a corner, and the entrance to the hangar into which Famine had fled sat at the far end of the long hallway. Shadows played along the doors leading off the corridor, giving the entire area an eerie feel. Even as we watched, the doors locked, save for the one at the end of the hall, which slid open silently. Clive must have worked his way into the spaceport network.

Acker frowned, and instantly dropped into the nearest portal recess, his rifle up. He motioned to us to continue forward. “Go on, I’ve got you covered. Famine’s up ahead.”

Fletcher nodded, and shouldered his rifle. We continued our sprint.

Famine’s rifle hissed silently up ahead. Almost instantly, there was an almighty crack as Acker shot her bullet out of the air. It was disconcerting, but we did not break our stride, keeping our eyes of the black opening no less than thirty feet away.

There was another crack, this time so fast I couldn’t even perceive Famine’s rifle go off. There was a clinking as the conjoined pair of slugs fell to the ground.

I dived headfirst into the hangar, rolling, pistol up.

It was a rifle, mounted on a remote tripod. Famine wasn’t anywhere near it. In fact, she stood near DuPont, at the far end of the chamber, on the edge of precipice that led into the lift shaft, one of several central tubes that pockmarked the spaceport.

DuPont was leaning against a pile of cargo crates, rummaging through an open medkit, nonchalantly tending to his shoulder wound. Famine saw me, winked, and leapt off the ledge into the abyss. Simply gone.

I had barely stomped on the rifle, smashing it, before the blast door sealed shut behind me. I heard a dull thump as Fletcher careened off the hatch. Suddenly I was very alone. Clive’s comm shouts suddenly became simple text files, he was cut off and couldn’t open the door.

There was a sleek shuttle situated between me and DuPont, its boarding ramp half down. It was a generic model favored by assassins and mercenaries, lethal practicality under the pretty exterior. Straightening up, DuPont began walking towards me, weaving through the support struts his ship rested on.

He motioned to a laptop set on a crate near where he had been sitting with the medkit. Connected to it was the ripper.

“It’s uploading right now,” DuPont said. “Looks like three percent.” He saw me adjust my aim and fire a shot at it. “Don’t worry- it’s bulletproof. You’ll certainly be able to destroy it, but I won’t let you.

“So, what’s your plan, Karras?” he asked, tapping his leg. “Because I can bet you it doesn’t include you getting your ass kicked.”

Actually, it did, but I didn’t tell him that.

I shifted my aim, leveling my MX at him and to pulling the trigger. Instantly he blinked behind me, wrapping one arm around my throat, the other over my gun hand. His fingers quickly found the button on the pistol that dropped the magazine. Even as it clattered to the floor, he twisted the gun away, casually breaking my trigger finger in the process. Pointing down, he emptied the round still in the chamber into my foot, blowing a chunk of flesh into the air.

Screaming, I dropped to one knee, but managed to lash out at DuPont’s solar plexus with my opposite elbow. He grunted and doubled over, but blinked away.

Struggling to my feet, I saw DuPont ten feet away. Tossing the disassembled pieces of the pistol the floor, he drew a pair of knives from the digital holsters mounted on each hip. I began to shuffle backwards, leaving a trail of blood with each footstep, before placing my back against the wall. Cool metal brushed my uninjured shoulder and I looked down to see a fire station; an axe encased behind a sheet of glass. Shoving my elbow through the covering, I retrieved the axe, leveling in front of me.

Blocking out the pain from my foot and hand, I remembered the times I had fought blinkers. I’d only taken on two in my lifetime, but each clash had left me on the threshold of death. I reviewed my experience. One could tell where a blinker would jump- if only nanoseconds beforehand- as the space where the blinker was about to jump into would warp. As blinkers teleported by creating their own slipstreams, this was only the natural premonitions of a stream exit. However, since the disturbances happened even before the thought of blinking traversed the mind of the blinker, one could exploit this odd causality effect and preempt the blinker.

You’d have to be damn fast though. Wall would have trouble.

And, as I wasn’t a full-on cyborg, I’d have a bit of troub-

He blinked forward, appearing at my right, slicing his knives towards me. I didn’t see it coming, and was running on pure reflex. I managed to catch the first blade on the head of my axe, but didn’t catch the second. It grazed my ribs as recoiled away from him, still keeping my back to the wall.

Instantly he was on my opposite side, but I was ready. No, I hadn’t picked up on his slipstream pattern yet, but it was an obvious tactical maneuver. Instead of trying to reverse my momentum on the spot, I threw myself into him, getting inside his reach. I realized my mistake seconds later, as he blinked out of my flying tackle and placed his boot on my back, sending me sprawling forward.

I rolled away as fast as I could, but he managed to come down from four feet off the ground with a driving punch that hit an asteroid impact. He brushed the foot-long slash wound with his fist, shattering the right half of my rib cage in the process. Gasping, I swept his feet out from under him, but he had blinked away before he hit the floor. I gritted my teeth, hating him. His ability allowed him to be sloppy in his fighting style; he could simply blink out of any permanent danger. I could use this to my advantage, I realized.

Rolling into a crouch, I swung my axe back behind my head just in time to punish him as he appeared behind me. Catching the hilt of his dagger with the crook of the head of my axe, I spun the shaft of the weapon in place, wrenching the stiletto from his grip. The blade fell and embedded itself in the ground; with a contemptuous stomp I snapped in half with one foot, while shifting my other foot to cover his right boot. Effectively holding him in place, I twisted in place to flash him and slammed the butt of the axe into his forehead, temporarily stunning him.

A vortex began to form, almost unnoticeably, over my shoulder. I had him stunned, but mangled spacetime was informing me would jump to that location soon.

I conked him again in the forehead, but he was already and halfheartedly moving his remaining knife to gut me. I easily and quickly twisted the blade from his hand and snapped it in half. I was about to deliver one last blow to his head with hopes of knocking him unconscious when he disappeared from my grip.

But I was ready.

I shot my right arm straight outward at neck level, knowing I’d catch him right in his adam’s apple. He’d be out for the count.

He blinked a foot to the left, seizing my arm, encircling them with his.

“You don’t think I don’t know that you can predict my jumps?” he hissed in my ear. “Hell, I can fake my vortexes. Any real blinker can do that. Welcome to the real world, Karras.”

Then he dislocated my shoulder, wrenching it violently out of the socket, before snapping my arm like a twig. There was an explosion of blood and I saw white bone protruding from dark red flesh.

He let me go, and I crumpled to the ground. The axe clattered out of my grip, DuPont indifferently kicked it away with his boot.

DuPont lifted me up by the chin, lifted me up to my knees and then placed a right cross on my left cheek. I spun to the floor. He lifted me again, and again felled me. And one more time. My nose and left cheekbone shattered. I nearly screamed in pain.

I spun to the floor and did not rise.

I heard DuPont’s padding footsteps make their way over to the dropped fire axe. Turning my head and nearly fainting under the flesh wave of agony, I saw him kick the weapon up into his hands with simple ease. He spun on his heel and walked back over, each measured step like the rhythmic ticking of a clock.

At that moment, I knew one simple fact: I was going to die. My heartbeat was going faster than the speed of light; my body was beaten and broken.

And with that thought came solace.

DuPont, behind me, lifted the axe high in the air, poised above my head.

I spun onto my back and shoved my heel into his left kneecap, instantly shattering it and folding his leg inward with a sickening crunch in exactly the wrong direction.

My left arm began to glow. I shook the silvery limb, shrugging back the sleeve that covered it. It was the source of my psionic powers, a gift from a run-in with a mad Deinonj named Faust a decade ago. It would only truly work when my life stood in the greatest peril. Beyond that, I was nothing.

But with the realization of my impending doom, the arm could free twist events in my favor. Perhaps a humorous manifestation of this fact, the arm allowed me manipulation of stuff like torque and momentum, twisting and indirect movement.

Reaching out to the world around me, I searched for the biggest impact I could make in the shortest amount of time.

So I flipped DuPont’s starship onto him.

It wasn’t a slow liftoff either. Like a bomb detonated under the hull, the ship arced over, flipping in midair, and landed on DuPont as I pushed away as swiftly as I could from him.

It didn’t look like he blinked out in time.

Rolling shakily to my knees, I looked around. There, behind the shuttle, was DuPont’s form. I got up and limped over to take a closer look. He had indeed blinked away, but it had been a half-second after the last second. His left leg had been crushed to something resembling jelly, the pants leg torn and red gore showing. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Bending over, I peered at his shoulder. The psi bullet had finally and totally cut off his ability, he was now as human as any man. I knew all along he was gradually losing his power, or else he would have simply blinked offworld.

Grabbing DuPont by the shoulders, I dragged him over to a set of green cargo crates, propping him up. Nearby was the guy’s medkit, which he had had open when I made my entrance into his hangar. Rooting around in it, I found what I needed. Prepping the syringe, I fumbled with it momentarily as my broken fingers before jamming the anesthesia into injection port on his leg. He tensed, then went limp. Barely conscious, his gaze became unfocused.

Grabbing my own general first aid syringe, I emptied the medicine into my own port. An immediate wave of relief swept over me.

“Almost ten years ago,” I said, managing not to slur my words. “I was captured and tortured for nearly ten months by a rogue Deinonj. I was experimented on as his own guinea pig. In the end, he managed to, well, install this arm in place of my old one as a parting gift. It almost never works, except in times of most dire need. So yeah, I guess, my plan all along was to lose.”

Reaching over, I snatched the ripper and laptop from the nearby cargo crate. The upload bar showed eighty eight percent. Grimacing, I disconnected the two devices and snapped the laptop in half. It was obvious he was using the starship’s comm suite to channel the signal, but, by the look of it, I had crushed the communication spire when I had flipped the ship.

Clive gave me a text that told me I was free and clear; that I had stopped the upload cold. I breathed a sigh of relief. He was still working on the door, though. DuPont had burned out the mechanism, Fletcher and Acker would have to circle around. Wall reported he had finally dispatched the Carnage Marine. His IFF beacon showed him several miles away. Brawls work on a different scale, I suppose, when you’re fourteen feet tall.

“In the end,” I said to DuPont, “the Director dropped two moons on him. He hasn’t surfaced since.” Which was at least partially true.

“My parents died during the war. Yours?”

He looked up, and nodded hazily.

“I grew up with the Blairs. You may have heard of them, they owned half the Locklear system before it was razed by Glask. They were good friends with my father, whenever he showed up, which was sporadic. He was a top-game politician in the ISA senate. Cared more for his work than his family, you know how it goes. The Blairs were my family, and my hero was my older brother.

“Tim was a Minuteman, see, kicking butt and taking names across the galaxy. He was a true superman, and I idolized him. He’s come home on break almost every Christmas, sweep me off my feet, sit me on his lap, and tell me some harrowing story of how he and his squad helped save some system that had been thought doomed.

“He was home when Glask made his final assault on Locklear X; he guided the family out of the city to the spaceport.”

I paused. “We were only a mile out when the dropship landed right next to us. The opening salvo killed the elder Blairs instantly, my brother took a bolt in the gut, but still managed to kill half a dozen Nahks while protecting me and the Blair girl, Casey. He still managed to pick us up and run the last mile before a squad of Tyrants found us. The cyborgs hunted us for four hours in the spaceport before they finally found us.

“The endgame was… chaotic. Tim managed to fell two Tyrants before a mortar fell near where we were hiding. He died there and then, him and Casey. Their bodies shielded me from most of the blast, but the sheer force of it still skipped me down a nearby lift shaft like a pebble across a pond. One of the last lifeboats to get off the planet picked me up, I was told, but I was unconscious the entire time.

“That’s why I joined the service, DuPont. My brother. He gave my life defending me and our race, how could I not do the same. And that’s what truly sickens me about you resistance asswipes. You’re given so much, we have peace at last; a chance for peace at last, and you turn on society and seek to bring it down. Well, the war’s over. It ended twenty years ago. The leaders of your rebellion died hours after it began. All this violence, all these deaths. Why? Why?

I laid my good fist across his nose, pulverizing it. “Why, you sick fuck?!”

The bleeding stopped as soon as it began, a sign that the coagulant had taken effect. He gazed up at me from a broken face, his eyes blank.

After a moment of silence, DuPont finally reached into his pocket and retrieved a data card. He handed to me, but held me grip tight when he passed it off to me.

“Everything you want to know is in there,” he said, staring into the floor. “Everything, I promise.”

He chuckled, but his laugh became a violent cough, hacking floor onto the front of his shirt. “They say the virus doesn’t work on somebody who diametrically opposed to whatever They force him to do. At some level, the person infected has to want to do what you’re doing to do. It starts off small, takes a couple days to work. You start seeing things, old friends, dead ones. Remember that, Atmos. For when They come for you.”

His head slumped down onto his chest. I checked his pulse. He was unconscious.

I gazed at the datachip. It was a simple model, encrypted, nothing special. I decided to have Clive take a look at it when everything settled down.

DuPont’s comments worried me. I’ve only had people start throwing around the word “They” as though it should be capitalized twice at me, and neither time was good. The first was when Wall and I uncovered the corrupt syndicate on New Cal, right before the Sacramento Massacre. The second was when we hit Faust’s cartel.

“They” is never a good word. Ever. It would imply the theoretic mole would now plural.

A couple minutes later a Gento dropped in, filling up the open end of the hangar as Acker, Fletcher, and Wall leapt out, followed by a full NUA spec ops team. The medic pursed his lips and put on a practiced grim-slash-serious look when he saw both DuPont and I, but wasted no time in giving up transfusions. We’d lost a lot of blood. I think I heard Acker ask how close we were to death. The medic only pursed his lips harder and squinted his eyes in a ‘you don’t want to know’ expression.

DuPont and I were loaded onto Gento as a second dropship fell in, disgorging a forensics teams onto the area. They had brought along a psionic healer in with them, he transferred onto our shuttle to, as he put it, “solve” the pair of us. Compared to the military medic, he was positively chatty, his hair streaked with the first twinges of grey, his eyes bright and intelligent. His nametag read ‘Drax’. Under the long, rugged hair and beard, his intense face seemed incredibly familiar.

I’ve never been healed by a psion before. Sure, we had them embedded in our squads back when I served, but I was lucky enough to never have to call on their services. I learned later that he had been sent in personally by Director Bateau. Drax was the ER chief for the largest hospital on Sol.

They made sure to temporarily neuter DuPont’s ability, digging out Acker’s antipsi bullet and placing in something more permanent. Someone mentioned that DuPont was the only capture of the day’s events, common foot soldiers had capped cyanide mouth capsules; the rest of the Horsemen had gotten away. I gritted my teeth when I heard that.

Drax finished on me ten minutes later. “You are lucky,” he said, “to be alive. I say that a lot these days,” –he offered himself a wan smile- “but you’re someone I mean it truthfully to.” He began ticking off on his fingers. “You had five broken ribs, a partially collapsed lung. Your liver was bleeding bad- that would have been fatal on its own. Not one but three of your fingers were crushed, you would have lost half your foot as well. You had a sprained ankle and two herniated disks. Your shoulder was dislocated and reinserted incorrectly, crushing several blood vessels, and the arm itself was broken openly it two places. The fact that you’re still alive is tantamount to an act of god.”

We landed fifteen minutes later at the NUA base. Drax left with DuPont’s hoverstretcher in tow, while Fletcher helped me shakily to my feet and to the debriefing room. Compared to the cluttered darkness of Karayami, the military base was stark and white, lean and efficient. Soldiers bustled past on all sides, apparently there was a major armed confrontation going on in the caverns underneath the city with the rebel army.

Debriefing sucks. On one hand, it has a perfectly legitimate purpose: to swiftly get what information you can from those who were experienced the situation firsthand. It’s intelligence coordination. It’s ubiquitous with standard military missions, from a pilot returning from a sortie to an army platoon back from a week-long mounted patrol. But during crises is when debriefing shines. Something huge goes down, and you literally need to know what’s happened. It’s perfectly reasonable, that, if a bomb goes off in the middle of the human capital, and you don’t notice the theft of the system defense codes, you want to know just what the hell happened.

That part I get. I understand it, really.

What I don’t like is true, underlying purpose of debriefing: psychological assessment. You take someone who’s just experienced a traumatic and stressful event and basically grill them to find out if they’re fit for return to active duty. Now, I’ve seen psychological casualties. It’s not pretty when your best bud loses it after seeing one two many worlds get razed. But for the love of god, keep the shrinks away from me. And the twin reasons for the debrief come to a head during a still-active crisis: on one hand, you need to get the information inside the operative’s head out ASAP. On the other hand, you simply can’t put off a psych eval. The rapid fire download clashes with the semi-structured conversation, believe me.

So they try to do both at once, in some awkward, disjointed mash-up. There’s a barrel-chested Major in front of me, reviewing the team’s assembled eyefeeds and asking a continuous stream of questiosn intended to clarify the cohesive narrative. To my left sat one of those dreaded counselors, diving into my brain structure and asking less, mostly about how I felt. Compared to the Major’s machine-gun rhythm of questions, the infrequent and sporadic inquiries of the shrink formed a semi-pleasing melody, almost like a two-man band.

On my right was the third medic I’d seen in less than an hour, this one specialized in cybertech. But it seemed he doing less checking up on my ‘netics and more upgrades. The information stream wasn’t flowing from me to him, but in the opposite direction.

“This Deinonj, Death, he has chameleonic abilities?”

“Were you good friends with Martin White? Terrence Devitt?”

“This chip will allow your healing process to basically enter hyperdrive. It’s a slow acting stimulator, like Aduro on a more gradual and permenant scale.”

“Just how did Aegir DuPont manage to tap into the team eyefeed? Does the CTI network have a security flaw?”

“Your career in the military nearly mirrors DuPont’s. Could you have been in his shoes?”

“Careful, don’t touch that- it’s an optical package. You’ll have nearly unlimited zoom and full spectrum, as opposed to the 100x max and partial spectrum you have now.”

“Why didn’t Famine didn’t stick around to help DuPont? That he didn’t matter? Was he the ‘decoy’ again? What is this virus?”

“Describe your relationship with Faust. It seems ironic that, despite an adversarial connection, his experiment provided you with the tool to finally defeat DuPont.”

“This is a military-grade nanoblood injection. We’ve finally made it so the burn lasts ten times as long, but we won’t have the software patch that’ll allow it to recharge. You’ll get maybe two to three uses, max.” I jerked away from his needle- he wasn’t going for the injection port, but the base of my neck. He held up his hands. “Don’t be afraid of a little prick, Adjutant.”

“I wouldn’t call you that,” I muttered bitingly under my breath. I had had enough. “Look, I want a straight answer. Did we manage to stop the upload of the d-codes to wherever the hell they were going?”

I was met with stony-faced silence. The song came to an abrupt end.

Throwing up my hands, I said “Look, just get me Clive Wiseman. He’ll know what the everliving fuck he’s talking about.”

As if to break the moment, a fresh-faced el-tee stuck his face into the door. “The High Council wishes to speak with Adjutant Karras.”

My expression became dumbfounded. The High Council, as in the ultimate authority in the Union ruling body? That one? The one SupCom Trego sat on?

The Major ground his jaw and agreed to let me go. They had pretty much finished their questions seconds before. The meditech took advantage of the silence to sink the syringe into the ‘netics in my neck. I jerked, and pushed him away as with withdrew the needle quickly. Getting to my feet, I followed the Lieutenant out of the room.

He led me down yet more corridors. The same state of chaos still reigned in the base, with soldiers sprinting to and fro. I managed to gleam more from passing conversations: the rebels had unleashed biological weapons, and a general evacuation order had been issued for the lower elements of the city. Grimacing, I moved on.

The LT led me past a prison block; I saw captured rebels through windows, being individually questioned interrogated by steel-faced magisters. I was surprised prisoners had been taken and processed this quickly. Odd, I thought.

Finally the LT showed me into “the General’s” amphitheatre, a cavernous room in which a good two dozen holorepresentations stood about. I noted Acker, Fletcher, and Wall had already arrived before determining who all was here.

Trego and Director Bateau stood nearest; they had left for Concordis half a day ago and were probably still in FTL. I supposed Trego and brought Bateau into the meeting, after all, the Director was obviously not on the Council. But his presence was probably required anyway- I had a feeling, once the dust settled, some would try to pin the day’s events on him. Trego would fight it, obviously though.

Beyond the pair was someone I could only compare to a chimera. He was a two-headed winged lion, with a long serpentine tail. He was Jaral, the recently elected Chairman of the High Council and, by extension, the Galactic Union. I stiffened instinctively, even though I knew he would be present. Hailing from the Frok'tar Alliance, Jaral was known to be stately and wise, a cool head(s) that led the loyalist faction during the initial stages of the civil war years ago.

Behind him was someone I did not recognize, but my cybernetics informed me to be Alton Nureno, Jaral’s chief of staff. He was a tall man of middling age, clean cut and, like most everyone represented, possessed of a commanding air. He eyed me with undisguised interest, and I vowed to look further into him before moving my gaze onward.

There were a quartet of Ark statesmen: a trio of Nahks (two female, one male) and a diminutive reptilian Terina. A pair of Scorpians conferred in a corner, physically dwarfing everyone in the room save for the Nahktars. The Frok’tar representation arrayed itself behind Jaral, easily the most diverse group in the room. A slug-bodied elephant talked silently to a floating swarm of insects, while a floating fish buzzed at a red pair of eight-legged gnomes. The ISA group, by comparison, was humorously bland and pedestrian, with only a blue-skinned Draseran to spice up the array of stony-faced politicians.

And, all at once, every single pair, quartet, and hundred-set of eyes rotated to look at me, in my shredded blood and gore-covered clothes.

Bateau was first to recover the field. “Sir,” he said, after acknowledging me with a curt nod, “I strongly recommend we put out the order immediately to evacuate Mars entirely offsystem.”

A Nahktar, one of the females- I guess- narrowed its eyes. “That seems a harsh move, Director, given the situation. It’s not as if the system is a war zone.”

Bateau nodded at the speaker. “Countess Vores. We currently do have open war in the depths of the city, where, we’ve just learned, a biological weapon has been released. If not to get the citizens out of the way, then to remove them from the path of the virus? Surely you know that, after the war, our evacuation systems are sophisticated enough to swiftly move half the population of Mars offplanet to adjacent systems within a single day, while checking every single individual for all manner of communicable viral strains. It would be child’s play to have the system quarantine out those already infected while making room on Mars for the military to move in and quash this grave threat.”

Jaral’s heads swiveled to examine Bateau. Only the left head spoke, though, its voice measured and gravely. “I understand this is not your only reason, Director?”

Trego stepped forward. “Indeed it is not, Chairman. These CTI Adjutants arrayed before you-” he swept his hand in a wide motion, noting the Meisters “-have just, to the best of our ability, cut short a rebel attack on Karayami base. During the attack, a group of mercenaries working for an unknown third party and using the rebels as back-up seized the complete set of codes to the Sol defense array. In the wrong hands, these codes could be used to completely establish control over the entirety of the Sol system.”

Moving his other head to look at me, Jaral asked- this time through the second head, which spoke in a melodic tone, “Am I correct in hoping the mercenaries were halted before they should send the codes to whomever they pleased?”

Answering for me, Trego said, “This is the issue, Chairman Jaral. Adjutant Karras- the bloody man on the right- was able to halt the upload with… eighty-eight percent, was it, Karras?”

I nodded silently.

Trego continued. “Yes, eighty-eight percent progressed. However, our techs have not yet been able to determine whether the upload was halted entirely, or it was a continuous stream and the unknown benefactor currently possesses eighty-eight percent of the Sol d-code.”

“This is the quandary, Chairman,” said Bateau. “With that much of the program, a large fleet could still do significant damage. I want to prepare for the worst case scenario and act accordingly. I realize fully this is not a question of if we are capable achieving such a feat, but whether or not we should do it.”

I pursed my lips, wondering idly how bad it would be if Sol was evacuated and nothing happened. Unknown invasion, or no unknown invasion, it’d be a catastrophe. But of course no one said that.

“Pardon my ignorance,” buzzed the Frok’tar swarm in a basso rumble. “But couldn’t one simply alter the codes?”

Trego shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Hive Opa. There’s a spider program buried somewhere in the vast ISAF Sol mainframe that simply records the changes in the code and passes it on. They’d always know what we’ve changed it to. And trust us; we have almost every AI in the system sifting through the network to find this spiderbot. They haven’t turned up a thing, so this program has been masterfully hidden.”

Jaral’s wings twitched, and he did his best imitation of a world-weary shrug. “The risks are too great. We can use the rebel uprising as an excuse to order a mandatory evacuation of Sol while we move in fleets to defend against any possible move by this unknown third party. If they wish to make their move, now is the time they would most likely make it, before we have a chance to adequately coordinate.”

I knew that, since this was a Council, Jaral didn’t make the decisions, but his opinion was held in high enough regard for a quick consensus of agreement to be reached amongst the other members.

“I leave the coordination in your hands, Commander,” Jaral said to Trego. “I shall endeavor to explain this to the public.” His tone indicated the brief meeting was over.

I couldn’t hold it in any long. I stood up.

“Wait,” I said.

Jaral turned to me, quirking a feline eyebrow. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bateau’s jaw set, his eyes harden.

“I have something to say,” I said, a bit dumbly. Before someone could obviously follow up with a sarcastic ‘then by all means, say it’, I continued.

“Throughout the course of the day, it’s been clear someone has been operating behind the scenes on our side, enabling DuPont’s posse in their mission. Someone tipped them off as to Karayami’s flaws. Someone gave them the frequency to our eyefeed. Someone’s been covering up for the rebels and outfitting them with state-of-the-art weapons. We all need to be watchful, as it’d take someone extraordinarily high up to pull of these feats. Hell, someone could have and would have been covering up the spiderbot in the d-net. DuPont practically shouted to me when I fought him that this third party has members on our own side.”

“I am not the sort of person to dismiss ideas out of hand,” said Jaral, “and we have dealt with more outlandish thoughts today. Director Bateau, I expect you to look into these claims. We can not afford a mole in these times, and the young man’s hypothesis makes a certain amount of sense.”

I quirked my head. I hadn’t expected that. Hokay. My opinion of Jaral rose significantly. Looking over at Bateau, I saw his stony demeanor hadn’t dropped. What was up?

By unspoken accord, the meeting ended, with Councilors signing off one by one. Trego and Bateau were first out, as they had the most to oversee. I turned to Wall, who still sat in pensive silence.

“That was stupid, Atmos,” he said quietly, so only I could hear, after a moment of silence. “If you believe there’s a high ranking mole, you don’t announce it to the High Council. What if one of them was the mole? Or was somehow apart of it. You don’t let the bad guys know you’re coming for them. You should have confided secretly hit the old man, and kept the knowledge loop as small as possible.”

I bit my lip. He was right.

Trego suddenly appeared, and by some technical magic he was able to rubber-band every one back into the conference chamber. I noted Jaral and the Scorpian Councilors had not yet arrived.

SupCom looked breathless. Bateau was at his side, as opposed to a separate hologram, indicating they had finally met up. The Director’s face was a nigh-unreadable mix of emotions.

“I’m recommending an initial move to defense condition one,” Trego said immediately, without pause. “As soon as possible.”

Jaral, last to arrive, turned again to face Trego. “What has happened, Commander?”

“The Scorpian defense ring just went offline. The entire northern sector of the Kingdom dropped off the face of the galaxy. Whoever this third party is, they just knocked.”
Last edited by Mobius 1 on Wed Mar 11, 2009 1:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Booted Vulture
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Booted Vulture »

Still not entirely sold on the just change the codes front but nether the less some nice action, if a rather dues ex victory for Karras. Still I understand this wouldn't really have been the case if someone had finished a certain Lordly tale. :P

As always you leave us wanting more. Its sad to think you'll be too busy writing an SS, to get any more of this done. :D
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Mobius 1
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Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Mobius 1 »

I've worked on this forever, and I'm not very proud of it.

Chapter Six: When the Man Comes Around
Whirlwind is in the Thorn Tree (D-5)

Things got pretty hectic after that. We were ushered quickly out of the conference room as the base- if such a thing was even possible- took on a whole new level of calamity. The panicked look now extended to the eyes of the colonels and generals, those who had overheard news of a mysterious presence on the edge of the galaxy. The hours blurred. Trego assembled four fleets, the ones closest to Scorpia space, as a task force to investigate what was tentatively being called an attack. Immediate comm hails sent into the sectors received no reply. The diplomatic hotline connected to King Sahad’s residence gave only static in response.

I made my way through the base, asking again and again if there was any way I could assist. Constantly turned away, I later learned that the commanders had orders to keep us uninvolved – and, after a bit of investigation, learned the orders had come from Bateau himself. It didn’t make sense, but then again, not much did.

Managing at least to find Clive, I handed off DuPont’s data packet, needing him to decrypt it so I could take a peek at what the Horseman was hinting at. Clive quickly ran off to an open computer terminal, leaving me alone again in the crowd.

I rubbed my temples. There was a dull, unceasing buzzing in my head, one that wouldn’t go away. Looking outside the windows of the base, I saw a front of angry clouds forming over the Neo York cityscape. Odd. The weather machines had cleared out the sky since the assault on Karayami.

After a couple hours, the wave of pure hunger finally bowled me over like a stack of ninepins. It was to be expected, I supposed. The fuel cells implanted in the average grunt’s ribcages didn’t carry the burden of all his cybernetics – no, it still fed off your body. This reached an insane degree with modern combat, especially so with the more enhanced Meisters. One guy told me that a Meister in full combat mode burned through a good fifteen thousand calories an hour. An hour. While the fuel cells we had could provide the charge, they had to be replenished, by feeding off our own food intake.

Basically, I got major munchies. I made a beeline for the commissary, near the bottom of the base. The room was darkly lit and entirely deserted. It didn’t take me long to load up a couple of trays worth of food from the robotic dollies and claim a table out of the empty rows.

Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned my head, half a meatball sub sticking out of my mouth.

“Am I interrupting something?” It was a female GUA Major, dark hair tucked under an old ISMC hat. Beyond a pistol strapped to her hip, she was unarmed.

I devoured the rest of the sub with a single chomp and nodded, kicking out a chair with my food. “Have a seat.”

She plopped down wearily, fishing out a flask from a tech vest and chugging a drink. Wiping her mouth, she handed it to me. I waved my hand. “Never saw much point, considering how the alcohol is filter out by your ‘netics.”

She grinned, and extended her hand. I shook it – her grip was firm, strong, and partially enhanced. “Rachel Blake, 68th squadron. I’m told you’re Atmos Karras.”

I grinned. “No shit? Blake’s daughter, in Rook Squadron?”

“We’ve come a long way since basic. You’re a Meister, I’m a Storm Commando. Of course, I didn’t think we’d meet again during these circumstances.”

I pursed my lips. “The Director sent you.”

Rachel smiled, at ease. “My dad owed him a favor from back when Alerton was around.” She thumped me on the shoulder. “Obviously it would be super-crass for me to say ‘cheer up’, but we can’t have you depressed and shit, Atmos. That’s an order.”

I snorted. She did outrank me, but only if we were using my previous military rank – “No, if the Old Man wants me fresh for whatever he thinks is coming – don’t say he isn’t, it’s patently obvious – then the bodyguard unit he assigns to me and my friends – you do have people talking to Wall and Fletcher and Acker right now, right? – would have orders to allow me free movement and action.”

She clapped her hands. “Well played. Your basically for grade school logic is simply astounding.”

I leaned back. “You haven’t changed a bit, Rachel. It’s just refreshing.” We were playing, but I laid on the sarcasm as thickly as I could.

Sobering up, she leaned forward. “No, but you have. What the hell happened to you?”

“People died.”

“Hell, if you weren’t feeling some sort of responsibility over the deaths of your comrades, they’d section eight your ass right out of here. But they’d do the same if the shame was too serious. No, beyond that. You’re trying to piece together what’s going on.”

I had to admit it; she had me dead to rights. Underneath the pain of White and Devitt’s deaths, as well the overburdening responsibility of all the lives lost when DuPont set off the bomb in the middle of the frigging city, I was trying to sort out all of the shit that was going on, between the Horsemen, the Rebs, and DuPont’s mysterious benefactors. Were the same people who set DuPont up with the virus the ones who were receiving the D-Codes and equipping the rebels? What about the other three Horsemen – were they infected with DuPont’s virus, or were they loyal enough to do it on their own free will?

I paused. The buzzing had finally ceased, but the sound hadn’t. I could barely make out the sound in my head, it sounded like chords, guitar chords. Something simply, maybe a C or a G or an F. Just strumming along.

“You have a security clearance for this, right? Obviously you’d have one if Bateau wanted you to adequately protect me.”

She flashed her IFF tag over the net, showing the mission priority and clearance, tagged directly from Bateau himself. “Good enough for you?”

I spread my hands, palms up, in a placating gesture. “No offense, Rachel, but after I’ve been through today, I wouldn’t trust my grandmother.”

“Your granny’s still alive?”

“Oh, shuddup.” I grinned.

She shrugged. “Hey, I’d be insulted if you didn’t ask.”

“Anyway, do you have any idea what the hell is going on? I’ve been trying to follow up through both the next and base command, but I’ve been locked out.”

Pursing her lips, she leaned back. “I’ve only got part of the story myself. I heard they were transferring DuPont offplanet ASAP, though.”

I sat up, alarmed. “What? You’re shitting me.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Immediate relocation to Concordis. The Director wants him at Alpha Zero for interrogation, not Mars.” She was referring to the CTI mainframe base at the Union capital. “It makes sense, though. Is something’s going to go down in Sol, do you want your number one prisoner smack in the midst of it?”

I relaxed a bit and played with a half-eaten burger before demolishing it whole. “I guess. How about the fleet?”

“Now that I can fill you in on.” She fished out a chatter and flicked in on. “Trego’s put the Fourth, Eleventh, and Hundredth Fleets under Admiral Quincy’s command – basically reforming Reaction Force Theta. They’ll rendezvous near the edge of Frok’tar space in about twenty minutes and make with all ‘due haste’. The Director wants you in the Ops Center when the fleets arrived in Scorp space.”

“Shouldn’t take more than a day to get there.”

“No, but they’re passing my the Chandra Delphi singularity.”

My eyebrows shot up. “They’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Isn’t nonphysics great?”

“Why I stuck with the Army, Rachel, why I didn’t go into the fleet.”

She stuck out her tongue. “They’ve had AIs doing that stuff for a couple centuries now. Just hope you got the memo.”

“Bah. Facts.” My tone placed them somewhere between maggots and rebs. It was old joke than ran between us. I had known Rachel for a good fifteen years – we trained all through TBS and Officer School, and were placed in Reaction Force Theta as part of the same company for five years as we did our tour of the outer rim – this was all before Alerton showed up and organized the rebels into something galaxy-shaking – after that, we went our separate ways. I signed up under Bateau and she went into Special Ops under her father. We had been more than tight friends, but had broken up when our jobs parted. Technically, our marriage was still on the books.

I shook my head and looked back up at her. “So, truly how bad is it out there?”

Rachel grimaced. She was angry as could be, though she tried hard to keep it under control. “Pretty fucking terrible. They’re not making moves on government property – they’re just trying to perpetuate as much chaos as possible. The fighting’s moved from the Underground to the residential districts, which is worst case scenario A – they’re opening using biological weapons. Thanos nanogoo, that old Ark mutation virus, the Burster disease, it’s all out there. They can’t get up quarantine fast enough – they’re doing it in orbit as they evacuate. The outer provinces, outside of Neo York were a bit better though – right up the assholes set off a dirty bomb near the Palisades. Took out the spaceport and all.” She made an exploding gesture with her hands.

I reeled. I had the basic idea it was bad, but this was fundamentally FUBAR. The Rebs had no plan, no objective, and no intended goal in sight. They were just agents of anarchy – the bugs they were throwing around were serious stuff, too. Thanos nanogoo liquefied biological material on contact; you could shut down entire districts with just one airburst. Burster was the natural extension of the nanogoo (which had been discovered on a relic in the core by ISA scientists fifty years ago), purposely engineered. It was highly airborne and contagious, a technological virus that we thought we had shut down during the war with the rebs a decade ago.

The mutation virus, well. Yeah. A whole slew of nightmares right there. At least, with the proper nano-blockers, you could be immunized against nanogoo and the Burster Bug (unfortunately, it’s damn near impossible to immunize an entire planetary population, especially one with an ever-shifting megacity), but the mutation virus was part of what garnered Agnar his rep during the opening shots of the ISA-Ark war. It was a cheap and efficient way of destabilizing a colony without actually bothering with fighting its defense forces – just pop a few million canisters in the atmosphere and show up a week later to orbitally bombard the mess – and keep it from spreading. I mean, jesus.

Mars had just short of a trillion people on it. This was the biggest disaster since Alerton, and – if my inside provider theory was correct – nearly unforeseeable. We plan for an organized enemy, one with a specific objective in mind. Galactic death-cults don’t exist for a reason – they’re too disorganized in the first place to get their hands on anything major. But this was so obviously different.

The internal guitar began to speed up, picking along to something Spanish. It had a driving underbeat.

I crushed my empty paper soda cup in my fist and absent-mindedly tossed it over my back into a trash can a dozen feet away. I wasn’t just angry now. I was fricking pissed.

Rachel reached over and squeezed my other hand with hers. Her skin was cool, but the touch was reassuring. It spoke of better times. Her expression, though, was unreadable. Was it consoling, or was there something ironic under there? I couldn’t read her it, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Should I be sad? Or what?

Wrinkles had popped up near her eyes, ringed by dark shadows, speaking of days without rest. Her arms were bandaged, some tinged red. A scar ran down the side of her neck, disappearing into the neck of her shirt. A million tiny scratches covered her upper arm, speaking of a close call – a recent one – with a fragmentation grenade. She was just as demolished as I was.

She beat me to the punch. “I remember you when you graduated officer school, the energetic young LT who had nothing in his mind except leaving a mark on the world, to change it for the better. Even when you grew out of it during Alerton you took on Fletcher as a personal investment, because you saw the raw talent he possessed. I always wondered why.”

“I realized I couldn’t truly affect the galaxy, but I still, at the time, believed that somebody else, anyone, could. I saw a younger me in Fletcher, with greater raw potential. But I mistook his ambition for an optimistic drive. The usual terrible judge of character. So I quit and went to where I knew I could make a difference on a smaller scale, with inner-city reb cells.”

“Atmos, you know history. If it teaches us anything, it’s that any one man or women can make a difference.”

“Yeah. I’m not that person.”

We talked for what seemed to be hours, even if the two Rook Squadron stationed just outside came in only forty-five minutes later to guide us up to the Ops Center. The base seemed empty and desolate now, a stark contrast to the chaos from earlier. The anarchy must have moved elsewhere, I mused. That’s the nature of mayhem - that it can never sustain itself in just one place for too long. It always moves on.

I voiced my thoughts to Rachel, and she disagreed. It wasn’t so much a disadvantage as a natural trait. Think of it as a fire. Once it’s run out of fuel, it moves on. Simple as that.

Was the base comparable to a burnt-out forest now? Was the planet just one big conflagration?

“Enough naval gazing,” said Wall, sidling up. For a guy who’s four meters tall, he’s awfully quiet. But yeah, I forgot. The guy can hear you coming from a mile away if you’re talking. “Rachel. Good to see you.”

Her smile was thin. “Wall. You’ve turned over a new leaf.”

His voice was equally hard. “Obviously. I’ve been part of the ranks of the Union for several years now.”

“Is that what they do to former rebels these days? Death or recruitment?”

I took a step back. “Rachel, what the hell? Wall’s been my partner for a good five years now. People do change, you know.”

Wall and Rachel locked gazes for a minute for before finally looking away. When we had taken down Wall – he had been one of Alerton’s personal guards – the Nahk had left a parting gift in the form of a boiling plasma burn before finally falling. There was no love lost between the two.

But it went without saying, to be honest. Rachel responded to change about as well as a cat did too a mouse who fought back. Wall, well, had no social skills (a deficiency shared by most deep combat operatives).

“Enough,” said Fletcher, sticking his head out of the door. “I still have tactical command over this unit – and this includes you, Major. Stick it under the rug until this shit blows over. Until then, get yours asses in here. They’re entering Scorp space.”

My head ached. The guitar was loud now, unbearable so, a plunging melody that echoed in the back of my mind.

Grimacing, I followed him into the CIC observation room. It was sparse, much like the overview room in a surgical theater. We could see the entirety of the base’s command center, with the six-meter wide hologram showing the Orpheus sector, which the Reaction Force had just dropped in to.

The General in charge of the base – I believed his name was Reynolds – stood conferring with several holograms. Trego and Bateau stood in full color, signaling a direct feed from Concordis. Two blue holos, however, indicated a BattleNet transmission from the commanders of RF Theta. A short, balding man with bland face – Admiral Quincy, who’s appearance belied his ferocity in combat – and a scarred Nahktar ship captain stood on the other side of the sector holo, giving reports.

“-e’re currently dispatching two smaller expeditions to cover the other systems in the sector, Commander,” reported Quincy, his voice deep and gruff. “But from what preliminary reports of the scan show, the entire Sahad system has gone dark. The defense net is intact, just completely inactive. Same goes for the inhabited planets. They’re not so inhabited anymore.”

“And what of the Union fleet that was already in the sector in the first place before we lost contact, Admiral?” asked Bateau, his eyes dark.

“We have a single Union vessel floating into range now, but it’s parked three light minutes outsystem,” said the Nahktar. My ‘netics told me his name was Sorek, the top man on RFT’s sensor net frigate. “We’re hailing, but they’re silent to our handshakes.”

“Jump in a squadron of destroyers to take a closer look,” ordered Trego. “The World Shatter is – was- part of that fleet.”

Quincy nodded to someone offscreen. The larger hologram showed the symbols of several RFT ships flash into a slipstream and to the edge of the holo.

“They have active jump drives?” I asked Fletcher.

He shrugged. “They keep dumping power into the capacitors to keep the drives spooled up. Allows for a quick getaway. Standard procedure.”

“Won’t the other systems take a hit?”

Rachel joined in. “Not enough to be noticeable.”

Fletcher nodded. “At least not after we got the reactor tech from the Ark.”

We watched silently over the next two hours as Quincy moved his fleet slowly towards Sahad. More information began to trickle in- for example, the scanners weren’t picking up a single lifeform on the planet, from a prokaryote on up to a Scorpian. There were no comm channels active, anywhere. Not even echoes. I didn’t know how that was possible – it was if something had gobbled them all up.

“Odd.” Quincy’s voice was perplexed. “We’re not getting any signals from the capital comp cent. Otherwise, we’d be able to access the strat-log of the sensor net.”

“Dear god,” Sorek intoned. “Our drones just ran the interior of the World Shatter, the entirety of it. There’s nobody on board, with no signs of a struggle. It’s as if…”

“A million people just up and vanished,” muttered Bateau to himself. “You say no signs of a struggle?”

“None,” the Nahktar captain responded fearfully. “Plasma or ballistics scorches, none. Hell, we can’t find a single bit of biomatter. Hell, the onboard rec-parks are wall-to-wall blank bulkheads.”

Bateau raised his eyebrows as a video window opened up near his head. “I wasn’t aware we were going to conduct ground excursions, Admiral.” Over the link, the dull interior of a Gento dropship could be seen, with the controller voicing over a solemn “two, one, drop”. The video gave a slight shudder as the clamps holding the ship into the bay demagnetized, allowing it to drop away from its mothership and begin an orbital burn.

“We picked up a beacon about an hour ago, Director,” replied the Admiral over the fleet link. “It’s weak, but the chance of survivors in the hellhole is worth investigating, no matter what.”

Glancing at Trego, Bateau frowned muted his comm. “The system’s in ruins, Trego. We’ve seen what we need to see. There are no bodies. We have to consider the possibility whoever did this might return- and, if they do, we’re doing the equivalent of holding catnip in front of their eyes and saying ‘hey come get me.’ We need to pull out, to consolidate, so we’re working on our terms.”

“You’re underestimating the ability of our own fleet. This is Reaction Force Theta, and they can raze systems as well. So consider, Bateau, that we will be able to hold whatever comes at us. Perhaps we’re in there to draw out whatever destroyed the Orpheus Sector, so we know what we’re dealing with. After twenty years, there’s no way a rebel fleet is still floating around with enough cohesion and power and numbers to raze this sector under our noses.” Trego gestured at vidlink as he spoke. “The Storm Commandos here are our only chance of directly finding out what happened to the Orpheus Sector.”

In the observation room, Wall buried his fist into the palm of his other hand. “My god. He’s using the fleet as bait.”

I shook my head. “I served a tour with RFT. They’re the hardest mothers I’d ever met; these guys are New Space Order personified. Besides, whatever hit this place was long gone before they hit the system.”

Wall stared up at the numerous vidlinks. The spinning hulk of the World Shatter stood bleakly empty space, while its fleet escort was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t respond.

The holo-window floating over Bateau’s head in the makeshift strat-pit below shuffled as the Storm Commando LT and his squad touched down onto the protruding landing ad in the middle of the grayscale cityscape. Stormclouds were forming quickly overhead, threatening rain. The hatch at the rear of the dropship fell silently to the ground, and the five Marines quickly secured the circular landing pad. The datafile at the bottom right of the window identified the camera as being mounted on the helmet of one Lieutenant Farley Barlix.

Barlix’s running commentary was a steady hiss emanating from the window, and Bateau dialed it up.

“-ooks like no signs of activity, though the flaps over the comp cent building are cycling open and shut.”

The controller in orbit speculated over the connection. “They’d need a human operator to do that, and the operation had to have been initiated within three hours of now, before the razing envelope.”

“Specialist Xavier just gained access to the pad blast door, we’re making ingress. Two, one, open!” The blurred view of a small door leading off the arm of the pad into the massive skyscraper rumbled as the door parted. Holding on the side of the door, Barlix conducted a scan down the dark corridor with the nose sensors of the Gento. No contacts. It appeared the city was in lockdown mode, though the security system was conspicuously deactivated.

No one was home.

Pushing forward towards the source of the beacon’s signal, the team began to pass piles of clothes, empty, just left in crumpled piles on the floor, as if those inside them had simply vanished. First one, then two, then twenty, as the team pushed further into the depths of the Sahad cyber-cave city.

Then came the ammo marks. Ricochets. Plasma and acid furrows. And the shells, hundreds of them. Black liquid, since dried, painted the walls. The team’s xenospecialist took a sample and scanned it for analysis by the fleet in orbit before the group moved on.

Trego frowned. “Admiral, send a squadron to recon the system’s asteroid field up close. Check for wreckage in the haze.”

Quincy nodded silently, listening to a comm from Sorek, before turning his sound back on and responding to Trego. “Sir, we’ve getting some sort of jamming field radiating from the rocks. This’ll be a close-in op.”

“The rocks carry some hardcore radiation back from the ISA-Scorpia War,” said Bateau. “It was still a problem when I visited the sector. Humanity stuck something to those rocks that wouldn’t let go.”

“Do it,” said Trego, monotone.

Quincy passed the orders along, before receiving another bulletin from offscreen. “Our pickets just returned from the surrounding systems. They’re all in the same shape: empty. Just empty planets and empty ships.

Then came the bodies. The Storm Commando’s feed began to show them, silently, in the background, as Trego talked with Quincy over the results of the first recon mission. The screen just sat there, not really asking for attention.

“Jesus,” whispered Acker, voice taut.

The brass fell silent as Barlix began to narrate, quietly and calmly, what he was seeing. More than a hundred bodies, stretching down a long corridor leading into the city’s Comp Cent core. Soldiers. Women. Children. Humans. Scorpian. Everything. All laying down. Serenely. Just draped over each other, as if they had all fallen asleep. All. At. Once.

There was no blood.

No signs of violence.

Just a hundred dead bodies, eyes open, staring at the commandos who could do nothing but pick their way through the layer of corpses. There were no booby traps.

The music in my head reached a horrid crescendo.

The door’s unlocked, I heard Barlix mutter into his helmet. It was the only sound beyond the cracking of bones as the armored soldiers came to a stop.

Sahad’s Comp Cent was a massive construct, stretching deep into the planet’s crust, a massive central processor with tendrils extending at random into the walls of the room it resided in. A single small monitor sat blinking on the face of the machine. All the other, larger screens had been shattered.

Contact. The camera swiveled to reveal a final corpse. It wasn’t Scorpian. It wasn’t human. It like nothing I had ever seen.

It just sat there, slumped against the far wall. A large hole had been blown in its chest, through which a massive crater could be seen in the wall behind it.

The body was easily two meters tall, white and muscular, but maintaining an air litheness, of suppleness in its build. It was humanoid, but humanoid in the way a Nahktar is humanoid – that is, two arms, two legs, but beyond that – not very humanoid at all. It’s neck was long, strapped with cords of might, black armored plates running down its spine. The same plates covered its hands and feet. Its face was sharklike, with a round, short snout and a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Most strangely of all, a black metal mask – smooth, dull, and opaque – covered its entire upper skull, concealing the creature’s eyes, nose, whatever.

No lifesigns, reported one of the commandos. It was head. Hopefully.

Barlix had his squad quickly check over the body for traps before professionally ordering them to bag the corpse. Slowly, the Lieutenant approached the Comp Cent’s monitor.

Something was wrong. I need it, but I couldn’t place the reason. Stormclouds. It had to do with the stormclouds that were over Sahad City.

Over the vidlink, Barlix spoke to the planet’s computer. “Comp Cent. What happened here?”

Then I realized what was wrong. The music in my head. It had stopped. There was just silence.

There was a moment of inactivity, then the screen stopped blinking, glowing a monotonous blue. Then characters began to scroll into view.

>>12/14/12 GALACTIC STANDARD. I UNDERSTAND.

Over one of his squadmate’s vidcams, I saw Barlix frown. He had every right to. Comp Cents weren’t AIs. They weren’t self-aware, they were just intelligent enough to perform massive administrative oversight. They couldn’t understand. It just wasn’t in their vocabulary

Barlix asked the obvious follow-up. “You understand what, Comp Cent?

>>THAT WE HAD NO CHANCE. WE TRIED TO FIGHT. HONESTLY.

A couple seconds, then-

>>THE PRINCES KEPT THE VIEW. THEY SAW IT, TRIED TO GET A MESSAGE OUT. IL SAMAK LED THE FLEET TO STALL THEM. HE NEVER CAME BACK.

>>EVER.

>>EVER.

>>HE HAS DEAD. AND SO IS SAHAD. ESTIMATE NINE HUNDRED BILLION LIVES gonegonegone. NOTE WEAPONS ARE NOT IMPEDED BY ARMOR OR SHIELDS. THEIR DEFENSES WERE TOO STRONG. WE CAN NOT GET OUT.

“You getting this, command?” whispered Barlix into his comm.

Quincy came onto the line. “The line is clear, Lieutenant, but we need you to ask it what attacked the sector. We need descriptions. Where they came from, and where they went.”

“Got it,” said Barlix, passing the questions to the Comp Cent. “Where did they go, CC?”

>>ARE YOU MAKING A JOKE? I LIKE JOKES. DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

“No…” hissed Trego. “Admiral, pull your fleets into defensive posture!”

But the Admiral’s holo came just disappeared. Cut short. Sorek’s face was terrified as he shouted orders to this bridge crew.

“The Terror Cause! Quincy’s flagship, its gone offline!”

New video windows began to pop into view, multiplying quickly. It showed the Tyranno-class vessel listing silent in the dead of space, all running lights doused. I stood their, rooted to the spot, as one the parasite cruisers, parked to close to the dreadnaught’s port side, was crumpled against the hull of the RFT flagship.

>>THEY NEVER LEFT.

>>IT WAS A PLEASURE TALKING TO YOU, LIEUTENANT BARLIX. WATCH THE SECCARIAN ON THE WAY OUT.

The screen went blank. There came a grumble as the Comp Cent finally died with the rest of the sector.

“What!” shouted Barlix.

Behind him, the body bag sat up.

I watched the sector-scale holo show another RFT ship go offline.

One of the soldiers swore viciously, training his gun on the sack and opening fire.

The body bag, designed to keep all manner of biological hazards in, also kept the bullets out. At least long enough for the bag to explode from the inside as the dead alien stood up.

“Command!” shouted someone over FLEETCOM. “Where the hell is fire coming from?!”

A clack-clack-BOOM echoed over the comm as another soldier shucked a round into the chamber of his shotgun and fired at the monster’s knees. Stumbling only slightly, the alien grabbed the Storm Commando by the neck, lifted him, and swung him at two of his comrades, knocking them all to their feet.

Barlix finally managed to bring his T2B around and was about to fire, but suddenly, viciously, the monster was right there, inches from helmet cam. Hot breath fogged the screen. We could all hear the creature’s ragged breathing mixed in his Barlix’s supercalm demeanor as the Commando drew a knife from his shoulder harness and jammed it into monster’s neck, near what should have been the jugular. Obsidian blood gushed from the wound, right before the alien, seemingly unaware of the wound, picked Barlix up by the neck.

The knife came out, then plunged down again, and again.

There was a snapping noise, and Barlix fell limply to the floor. His camera cracked, and the view from his HUD was splattered with blood.

“The asteroid field!” screamed someone else over the comm. “Fuckers are coming out of the asteroid field!”

“Shields aren’t fluxing at all – their shit passes straight through our shields!”

Seeing their commander die, his squadmates began to fall back. One of them prepped a high-powered plasma grenade as he backpedaled, firing with rifle his other hand. Bullets pinged off the alien’s helmet as he ducked behind the Comp Cent.

The Storm Commando rolled the grenade across the floor and dived for cover in the sea of corpses.

A steel beam came crashing down on the explosive the second it crossed into the chamber. The grenade fizzled and sparked, but went dead. Stepping back into view, the alien raised a comparatively tiny gun his black fist. It buzzed with blue light before discharging.

Two biosigns disappeared. They didn’t just flatline, the window actually shorted out.

Barlix’s camera showed two empty suits of armor fall to the floor.

The third Storm Commando – the specialist, Xavier – had dodged the shot. Loading a shell into his underbarrel grenade launcher, he fired at the alien’s stomach. The shot went a hair wide, and passed straight through the hole in the target’s chest, impacting and detonating against the Comp Cent. Xavier’s rifle chattered over the speakers as the Seccarian advanced, taking the barrage.

Shucking a charging level on its gun, the alien aimed another shot at Xavier, who bumrushed his foe and grabbed the wrist holding the weapon right as the shot went off. Another flash of blue dissolved a portion of the corpse pile behind the struggling pair as they crashed to the ground. Xavier immediately rolled away, emptying his clip into the alien’s stomach.

No effect. With a contemptuous swat, Xavier’s opponent knocked the rifle from the commando’s grasp, sending it skittering away. Xavier lashed out with his foot, connected with the monster’s head and sending its body crashing back down to the floor. Seeing the biomatter gun start to rise again, the specialist leapt onto his opponent’s chest, drawing his pistol and putting six slugs into the alien’s wrist before loosened a grip on the gun. Seizing the wrist, Xavier pounded it against the ground. The gun clattered to the floor.

Reaching over with its other hand, the alien grabbed Xavier by the scruff of the neck and threw him off. Xavier hit the deck hard on his back, his pistol skittering away and coming to rest near Barlix’s helmet cam.

Rolling to one side, the alien lifted his fist high – you could see it poised over Xavier’s helmet cam for a brief moment – before bringing it down like a sledgehammer on the human’s head, smashing it like a tomato.

An AI began to chatter over the line. “Losses at twenty-eight percent. Thirty-two. Forty.”

Video screens began to pop up, only fizzle out as soon as they appeared. I barely managed to catch sight of an indescribable number of undulating vessels rising out of the asteroid field, guns blazing. They looked like giant hands, all reaching up and grasping at the Reaction Force.

“Our shields aren’t protecting us! Somebody, please respond!”

“They have a interdictor field up, we can’t go to lightspeed!”

Trego’s voice, full of command, snapped over the comm. “Listen to me very carefully. You’ll have to get your AIs to attune your shields to their weapons. But right now, you need to put the planet in between you and them so as to be able to jump outsystem. Escape is your number one priority.”

The general, Reynolds, swore. “We’ve lost our line to the system. They’re letting us see what goes out, but we can’t send anything in. Bastards are rubbing it in our faces.”

“Then step up all the naval forces in the sector around Sol. Now.”

Oh, crap.

Another voice echoed over the line. “Authorize deployment of nuclear weapons. Go.”

Seven tiny suns flashed into existence, ballooned, and enveloped the enemy fleet. Helios-X nuclear/antimatter bombs.

The collective nuclear fireballs cooled to yellow and then dull red. Even with the vacuum-enhanced loads, nuclear warheads did not persist a fraction as long as aerial or ground bursts.

Their destructive clouds thinned to translucency and a glittering haze of cooling metal formed an expanding halo of metal, rock, and ice between the asteroid field and Sahad.

Inside this silver confetti, however, larger shimmering patches resolved: the energy shields of most, if not all, of the enemy fleet.

“Second barrage is go.”

Seven more fireballs appeared, then dissipated.

“Enemy casualties calculated at seven percent,” intoned one of the AIs.

“They’re opening fire again! Shields forwards, engines full reverse!” shouted one of the fleet’s rear admirals. The Reaction Force began to move backward, into the gravity well of the planet. They were hoping for a reverse slingshot so as to break up the enemy line-of-sight and get into a slipstream and safety.

Several things happened at once. Half the enemy fleet flashed into FTL and nonexistence. Half a second before they left, the storm over Sahad City exploded to reveal the battle group. The storm had been a forming slipstream rupture, growing hours in advance for a transition of this magnitude.

The Reaction Force was sandwiched.

Sapphire beams etched over the hulls of the Union ships. Whichever vessel with which the light connected instantly became a floating piece of space junk. There were no explosions within the fleet. Just one by one, the ships began to depower.

But like a juggernaut thundering through a crowd, the Union ships just barely managed to clear the crossfire. Only eight ships had made it, out of hundreds - the mighty carriers New California and Labyrinth, the Spartan-class dreadnaughts Indomitable and Far from the Sun. They were out of the beam’s line of sight, as well as that of the interdictor field. Hopefully they’d be able to acquire a slipstream and jump away.

Missiles and fighters broke away from the enemy ships. Swarms of them.

“Count four wings of enemy fighters and one hundred fifty missiles,” supplied the AI in its maddeningly calm way.

The captain of the New California buzzed in, talking to the AI. “Launch all fighters and countermeasures, Turing. We need our AA net online as of five minutes ago.”

“Launching.”

A wall of fire spawned into reality between the two fleets as counter missiles, point-defense lasers, and autocannons shot the enemy missiles out of the sky. Yet still more missiles made it.

The Avat IV, an aging supply freighter accelerated forward of the survivors of the Reaction Force, flashes rippling down its length as translocators on board the vessel beamed its crew onto the its sister ships. Remotely piloted with all shields forward, the freighter took the entirety of the remaining salvo. Its shields heated bright purple for a millisecond before rupturing. The missiles gutted the ship, which floated aimlessly until its onboard a-mat reactor’s fuel cells ruptured and detonated, dissolving the ship in a flash of blinding white light.

The fighters met seconds after the missile salvos did, trading bolts of energy. Mosquito-like contrails hazed through space as the Union pilots were slowly overwhelmed. Like leaks coming through gaps into a dam, fighters began to pierce the thin line of defense offered by the carrier’s escorts and started bombing runs on the RFT ships.

Two of the vessels exploded immediately, each hit by a hail of plasma missiles that overloaded the ships’ shields before trashing their hulls.

Chatter from the New California began to fill the airwaves.

The AI was first in – “Deconvoluting slipstream matrix, at twenty eight percent match. ETA to jump two hundred seconds.”

The same voice, simultaneous with above. A note of panic had crept into the tone. “Fire! Fire! Multiple hull breaches aft of meridian control surfaces, decks seventeen through thirty-eight!”

Then, the captain: “Jettison the last round of missiles and take all other weapon systems, decks twelve through forty, offline.”

“Doing so… done!”

“Bring the Indomitable in to protect our dead zone… request additional fighter support from the Labyrinth.”

Comm: Indomitable this is New California, request close support our stern. I repeat. New Cal, requesting close support our stern.

“This is Indomitable, bringing ship around. Enemy fighter losses at 59% - wait! Another missile barrage coming in! Count fifty contacts! Closing at 36 kilometers per second. Their trajectory will carry them through main engineering and drive section – brace for impact!”

Indomitable, take evasive action! Indomitable, this is New Cal, are you receiving me? Over.”

Hissing, the clouded with static. “I’ve lost altitude control….”

The Indomitable took the entirety of the missile barrage. Nuclear fireballs detonated along its rear spine.

Alarmed, the AI of the dreadnaught came on. “Engineering is gone, sir! Main drive is offline – I’m reading a fuel cell rupture. Fuel cell rupture, sir!”

“Sound general alarm, Titus! All hands abandon shi-”

There was a squeal, then the tag marking the Indomitable vanished as the ship was instantly vaporized.

“Shock wave incoming from rupture!” shouted the AI of the New California. “A full fuel cell containment failure – brace for impact in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…”

Klaxons could be heard. “Hull integrity compromised on all decks aft of meridian control surface! Drive control completely offline.”

“Sound general alarm, get all our men forward of the meridian, and get us into a slipstream, now!” responded the Captain.

“Entering gravity well. Dumping all available energy into capactiors. Slipstream location in thirty secon- warning. Catastrophic over-surge in drive section. Subspace drive has entered runaway state.” If the ship attempted to jump with the drive on the fritz, the ship would be pasted all over the sector.

“Doran, jettison the fuel cells!”

There came an explosion and a hiss over the line. Damage control came on, his voice gurgling. “Sir, we just took a major hit. Looks like it took down Doran.”

“They took out the construct? Dammit! Engineering, jettison the fuel cells!”

The ship’s rudimentary Comp Cent took over. “Structural integrity under 52%. Multiple hull breaches spanning several decks. Brace for slipstream transfer entry in 19… 18… 17…”

Several voice bgan to talk at once.

One of the starfighter wing commanders: “Shit! Look at the Cal, she’s bleeding fire!”

“14… 13…”

“Bombing run, taking damage. Structural integrity at 49%. Warning.” Comp Cent intoned quietly

Damage Control: “Another hit, we’ve lost our port pylon. We have to jump, we can’t take much more than this!”

“9.. 8…”

The New California began to glow blue as a slipstream matrix began to weave into existance over the vessel, the very visibility of the field belying the beating the dreadnaught had taken.

The voice of a frightened ensign came on the board. “Captain, this is security. Still no response from engineering!”

“What?!”

“There are no life-signs in engineering and I’m reading all fuel cells are still on board.”

“Stop the jum-” An explosion.

“Direct hit, we just lost the CiC! Captain?!”

“3… 2… 1… Jumping.”

It’s difficult to describe what happened to the New California. Perhaps, in simplest turns, it turned itself inside out. And exploded. And disappeared. And reappeared. All the same time. The weight on the fabric of space time was too great and the entire section of space surrounding the remainder of Reaction Force Theta imploded.

We all stood there, silent. Then, swiftly, I yanked out my comm and dialed Clive. My mind was in overdrive.

The phone rang. And rang. Jesus, pick up already.

He answered. “Agent Wiseman here.”

I jumped, fumbled with the phone, nearly dropped it. “Clive! Man, it’s Karras. I need to know this right now, the world depends on it. How’s the weather out there?”

Rachel spun to look at me. “Are you out of your fucking mind?

Clive paused. He must have been leaning out a window. “Mighty big storm is brewing up down the central districts. Thunder’s rolling in every few seconds…. Why?”

I threw my gaze wildly across the room, through the window, to lock eyes with Director Bateau. He had been listening, he had followed the same logical train I had. He saw the urgency in my eyes.

And he nodded.

I began to run, slapping the door panel and bursting out of the room before it was even open. Behind me, the cacophony picked up again. Bateau, ordering all available units towards Sol. An AI, reporting that the enemy fleet was transitioning into a slipstream.

I ran, up the ramp, through the empty base. I ran. Rook squad’s tails began to sprint after me, my friends in Bishop squad were out of the observation room seconds after I was.

I ran, hitting the door to the stairwell and smacking it off my hinges. Triggering my jet boots, I shot up through the central gap in the stairs. Floors flashed by at the speed of light, and in, seconds, I had burst out onto the roof.

The thunderhead had formed a vortex over the city, crackling with electrical energy. It hung as a grey mirror to the fiery chaos of Neo York.

Tornadoes began to spin down from the clouds, each touching down with a surrounding haze of debris. Dozens of them could be seen from the roof of the base – lightning flickering around their radii.

I hadn’t realized until just now what the storm clouds meant. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t coinciding with the chaos on Mars.

It was indicative an approaching atmospheric slipstream transition. Even counting for advanced FTL drives, something which that huge a footprint would amount to several nuclear bombs going off in orbit when it tore a rupture back into realspace.

The entire enemy fleet, thousands strong, was going to jump in right over our heads.

Whoever they were - the Seccarians, the Sahad Comp Cent had called the creature in the inner chamber – they had paid off DuPont and his gang. They had come from outside the galaxy - it was the only way we had never heard of them before – and had taken aim at Sol.

I felt hands on my shoulder, pulling me back into the building, the gang must have caught up with me. They must have figured out what was about to happen. A shriek began to fill the air, nearly popping my eardrums as the lightning began to flit around randomly, without any connection to a cloud or the ground. Just random. Chaotic.

The full extent of the situation hit me. They would have control of the Sol Defense Network. They would own the home of humanity. And there was nothing we could do about it.

The shriek reached a pitch before hitting ultrasonic. My cybernetics went offline, disappearing from my field of vision. The ground began to shake, which, combined with the winds, almost took me off my feet.

We were almost back inside when it happened. Armageddon. Someone grabbed the world and gave it one last mighty shake as I saw, over my shoulder, the entire Seccarian fleet appear in the sky, an untold number of grasping hands reaching down to envelop the planet.

The ground gave out from underneath me as we all tumbled down the stairs. The shockwave hit half a second later. I spun unto my back just in time to see a long structural beam fracture and come scything down into my field of vision.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
User avatar
Booted Vulture
Posts: 965
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 9:33 pm

Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Booted Vulture »

Excrement meet Oscillator.
The Union's getting bitch slapped. Have the scorpia been totally genocided then?
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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Ford Prefect
Posts: 957
Joined: Tue May 20, 2008 11:12 am

Re: Arc: Overheat

Post by Ford Prefect »

Booted Vulture wrote:Have the scorpia been totally genocided then?
I've conceived the People as having worlds under their control outside of Sahad, but the majority of their species was located within the bounds of that system. It would be sad if they were all dead; they're easily the most unlucky species in the Galaxy.

And to be fair to the Union, three fleets is nothing: Trego discarded them like a chess master might discard pawns. The resources under his control are far vaster than when he was the highest ranked Warmaster in the Ark. Karras calls RFT 'New Space Order personified', but no one is hardcore NSO like Trego. RFT got squashed, but they were caught by surprise by a force with superior numbers. Even the loss of two capital-class star systems is basically irrelevant to the Union.
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
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