JB CCXXX: A Familial Affair
Jamelia Belltower steps into her office, and into Amalgam-451's construct, for the last time. She breathes in air that stinks of ozone and vaporized metal and explosive residue, despite her respirator-a necessity given the thick haze of particulate from the battle which took place mere hours ago. She doesn't need augmented senses to know how inimical the aftermath of a battle involving Iterators can be to human life-spalling from depleted uranium rounds, radioactive isotopes from plasma cannon hits or exotic beam weapons, the toxic residues of high-energy synthetic explosives. And yet, it still feels too clean.
There's little blood, because the attackers were largely met by HITMarks and combat robotics, the Oversight personnel having used the time they had to flee and take what they could from -451's armory and motor pool. There's precise clusters of railgun impacts scattered across the walls, along with the gashes created by explosive shrapnel and the scorched craters of high-power directed energy weapons - the Shock Corps' telltale combination of precision targeting and indiscriminate, high-power weapons. Every corridor smells of grit and ozone. It doesn't smell anything like the odor of mud and fear and death from the aftermath of a HELMETSHRIKE operation. It doesn't smell anything like the scent of blood and gunpowder in a Mexican restaurant, when an old woman killed the old man who had taught her to become a killer. And yet, death is death no matter if it comes from a knife or a gunshot or a plasma cannon. Seeing the wreckage of the place she's called home for a year, Jamelia feels a little like she's attending her own funeral.
It's a morbid thought that refuses to leave her as she looks at what's left of her office. She's the only member of her amalgam here - it wouldn't be right to ask them to come here with her. Because she's not here on orders from higher up, and what she's preparing to do is very much personal business. She's not a corrupt Syndicate executive who thinks the two are one and the same, even though she can give a dozen reasons as to why her actions are in the best interests of the Union. But she's not going to lie to herself as to the primary reason she's looking for Elissa al-Hallaq. It's because she's searching for the last remnant of a previous life. A remnant of a prior life who could
somehow find her, sending a postcard from Paris, addressed to Illiyeen, to a safehouse Elissa shouldn't have known anything about. To have done such a feat would require patience and a lot of subtle action, whether you called it Reality Deviancy or Enlightened Science or Willworking or Magic. Jamelia doesn't know whether to be paranoid or proud.
The Technocracy has made it easy to approach this alone. The Conventions weren't about to let her keep the resources in this fiefdom, not when those resources included two princesses who were also Heroes of the Technocratic Union, a veteran commando in a ZERUEL-class prosthetic body, a high-end combat construct who had become respected and feared in equal amounts amongst the Technocracy and Traditions, and more. Everyone wanted personnel and resources like that. One by one, everyone was given offers they couldn't refuse. High level NWO placements. Ragnarok Command task forces. Even becoming the power behind the throne, whether temporal or Technocratic. She doesn't blame any of them for taking the opportunities. Not taking them would have been a waste. And even though she appreciates all of them, she doesn't need their presence. For this specific task, they'd be a distraction.
"You're not going to make a habit of trashing your offices like this, are you?" Jaron Belltower jokes, as he follows her through the corridors, deftly stepping through the holes made by the assault team's violent breach-and-clear. Unlike the Shock Corps troops still stationed here for the time being, he's wearing a suit of smart fabric, although the dust and gloom is sufficient to dirty even the self-cleaning fibers of the NWO-issue suit. He breathes in the thick, particulate-filled air without difficulty, trusting his cyberlungs and internal filters to protect him from the airborne toxins and carcinogens ubiquitous to fights involving Iterators and serious opposition.
Jamelia doesn't deign to give him an answer. "You're supposed to be taking inventory."
"I've got drones to do it," Jaron says. "And Iterators. You'd be amazed at what they've stashed in your basement without your permission, and you'd be amazed at how fast the Shock Corps and Ragnarok Command are willing to volunteer people to take inventory when you dangle late-90s high-end tech in front of them. They were probably planning to use this as a staging area for something big. Nobody'd put priority resources on monitoring 451's mat-trans."
"So we should probably be putting more monitoring on Mat-Trans assets and inventory auditing," Jamelia says. "Not all of Oversight's gone SPD." Gregor Leon and General Aleph's testimony had been particularly effective at forcing Oversight's hand, turning it from a threat lurking in the Union itself into a threat forced outside. Her construct hadn't been the only facility that had become a warzone after Izanagi. Just the one she's most familiar with. "Sorting the aftermath out is going to be a mess."
"It's already a mess and it's probably going to get worse until it gets better. We've had a few constructs lost and stripped when Oversight enacted CHRYSALIS, and several more which had either Oversight personnel vanish or had to deal with a failed Oversight coup. And now that we have to reintegrate Panopticon's former personnel back into the Conventions-everyone we have who knows hyperpsych is under a lot of stress. To say nothing about North Korea," Jaron finishes. "Hopefully we can get these crises under control and maybe stop lurching from crisis to crisis."
"And the chances of that are?" Jamelia asks, trying one of the stairwell doors, which has sagged under its own weight from the use of a thermal pulse munition. She tries to force the door a few times, but it doesn't open, and she gestures to Jaron and steps aside.
The cyborg steps up to the door and puts an inhumanly powerful kick dead center to the door, and it falls inwards to give them stairwell access. "Low. But we always live in hope, right? Hope that this is the last mission, the last dance, that after we're done with this we can just hang up our guns and retire to go fishing or write a novel or whatever we think we want to do after all this is over?"
"Nonsense," Jamelia retorts, carefully checking the door frame and the stairwell for traps. The Union strike team had avoided the stairs and elevators-too easy to trap-and even though their scanners and drones had found no traps, she's not going to just blindly trust them. "We'd die of boredom after a month in that world. For better or worse, this is who we are, and it's going to be who we are until we die of it."
"Speak for yourself," Jaron says as he draws his sidearm and pushes past Jamelia, methodically scanning for anything out of the ordinary. But there's no heat in the retort, and there's just an ever-so-slightly-long pause before he says it. "Clear. Bastion asked me to catch you here so he could ask you if you wanted a promotion."
"It wouldn't feel right to be out of the field," Jamelia responds truthfully but not honestly. "And there's a few last loose ends that need to be cleared up."
"Related to the unpleasantness of the last few years?" Jaron asks.
"Yes," Jamelia replies. It's not the sole reason she's doing this, but it is
a reason.
"Bastion trusts your judgment," Jaron finishes. "So if you need resources, he's allowed me to help you get what you need despite your clearance being in limbo right now. Expect to be working with limited equipment for the time being, though. Everyone's overtasked and we're even having to break out old tech from mothballs."
Jamelia glances meaningfully at Jaron's left wrist, and the silver watch on it. "So that's why you're wearing one of those old laser watches."
"Only partially true," the TYRANT admits. "The old Model 1970s had a better laser capacitor."
"They blow up if shot." Jamelia says. "How is this better than the modern versions?"
"They make better improvised IEDs."
"That is a useful feature," Jamelia admits. And they talk more about tech and politics and operations-just two veteran coworkers who respect each other, who both know that this might be the last time they ever see each other outside of the view of a coffin or a sniper's scope. Because both of them are Operatives, veteran Operatives, and they know that in times like these, that's too often a death sentence in slow motion.
***
Sitting in a small safehouse where she's stashed some of her equipment, Jamelia Belltower realizes just how little time she's had in the past months. She's been talking to the Void Engineers, making discreet inquiries to Professor Bastion, working with Task Force TYRANT and Harlan's psychic trainees and a dozen other tasks, and only now she has time to breathe, to take stock of events.
Just in time to do something selfish for herself, something she's never even considered for so long. When Jazmin's estranged daughter contacted her, an impressive task considering how well she's masked her presence-she had to take some time to think about what she was going to do. She still isn't sure what she wants to do, what she might say, what might happen. She's not even sure that this won't end in violence, because a part of her can't forget that everything Starling has touched has gone wrong somehow, and it would be entirely fitting with the Fallen for her to kill her own daughter. And there's always Oversight to worry about, Oversight and their spies within the Union who still might hold a grudge against her and have targeted Jazmin's daughter for reasons she can't quite understand. But that's a burden she'll have to bear if it comes to it.
Jamelia feels that she owes it to who she was to take this meeting. She doesn't need to be a clairvoyant or equipped with a tactical hypercomputer or have the experience to predict actions like clockwork to know that this is risky, and that she's putting herself in danger. But the Union's asked for so much from her, it can deal with this single act of selfishness.
She remembers Winston's last words and takes strength from them. Perhaps, in the end, that's all someone like her gets. If that's what happens in the end, she'll accept her fate. She's had a good run by any standard. A stateless young girl born to two nobodies, whose actions have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries again and again in ways both subtle and dramatic. Even if all things come to an end and are eventually forgotten, they lay foundations for the next generation. Even if she dies, her body destroyed or dumped in an unmarked grave at the end of all this, what she's done has meaning, and that meaning will remain.
She puts those thoughts out of her mind and looks at the list of equipment requests she's assembling, goes over it again and again. She might put herself in danger, and this might be the time it kills her-she knows intimately how training and expertise don't make her immortal-but she's not going to roll over and let it happen.
Vacation Packing
Jamelia isn't a very sentimental person by nature. But even so, she's kept
something with her, something that has a little bit of meaning from her long life. This something is…
[ ] A paper menu from Cafe Dar, which has inexplicably stayed open for the intervening decades after Illiyeen left its employ.
[ ] A set of recorded lectures by Blanc, in her early days, about psychological warfare.
[ ] Winston's HELMETSHRIKE Squadron Seven patch, a stylized predatory bird with a menacing crest.
[ ] The last picture of Amalgam-451, taken after Izanagi and before the start of its dissolution. Everyone in the picture is smiling, even her.
[ ] Something Illiyeen grabbed from Hollywood.
Write-In: What is it?
Jamelia's going on a vacation! Those are things you should go on when you've just accomplished something hard, like killing your mentor. It's a good chance to see the sights, reconnect with family, and get shot at by various people and monsters. What does she decide to pack for the vacation?
[X] Cemal's clockwork assassin's bracer (free choice)
[ ] The Assassin: Jamelia is packing like she might need to end up killing someone quietly, either up close or from a distance. She's bringing:
- Several sets of clothing with nanoweave armoring;
- A wearable cloaking projector;
- A Hellequin concealable multirole launcher-equipped with a smart scope, memory metal components to aid concealment, and several magazines of guided AP/explosive ammunition and airbursting directional flechettes;
- A suppressed X-8 SMG and several magazines of special ammunition;
- A monomolecular blade with self-replenishing nanotoxin coating;
- About two kilograms of high-power explosive gel and various smart fuses;
- A Progenitor miniature nanofab for toxins and combat drugs;
- The normal things you'd pack on a vacation;
[ ] The Soldier: Jamelia is packing like she might end up having to fight a war. Just like the old days in Helmetshrike. Now, most people would struggle to get this through airport security, but being a Technocrat has its advantages. She's bringing:
- NWO tactical team combat armor, capable of deflecting most small arms fire while being concealable under a heavy coat-the armor itself is equipped with an integral multispectral visor, limited optical camouflage, and an integral medical system;
- An IX-11 individual weapons system, combining a 20mm smart missile launcher and a 5mm PDW;
- A Mjolnir Mark VI heavy handgun;
- A dozen programmable 'spider' grenades capable of antimateriel and antipersonnel use;
- A vibroblade;
- Just enough tourist odds and ends to look vaguely like a tourist if she needs to.
[ ] The Woman: Jamelia is mostly packing like she's actually going on a vacation. Mostly-she realizes how many people might want to take a shot at her. This means that she's bringing:
- Casual clothes with light ballistic weave (shrapnel/pistol resistant);
- Several small holdout weapons-microexplosive jewelry with proximity triggers, explosive jacket buttons, acid bombs disguised as glass beads, and the like;
- A memory-metal knife bracelet;
- A suppressed slimline X-5S and several magazines of ammunition;
- Your typical tourist odds and ends.
