SR XXIV: A Livid Sky on Mexico City...
"We fight," Serafina says, already dashing towards the stairs back up to the surface. She's running on gut instinct here, partially. "Not enough time to get clear. We engage them in the crossfire."
"Better to die on your feet than crawling like a worm," Christos says approvingly as they emerge into the wrecked church. Snow is already building up in here, stained red with the blood of the SPD troops.
She pauses, and considers whether to say this next part. "In Moscow, a Panopticon 'rogue cell' attacked us in the prelude to the main attack," she says. "Watch the skies. I hope they won't have ARCs in this weather, but I can't be sure. And if they were working with these aliens too, they might have been called here by the thing down there."
"Ah." Christos sighs. "Yes."
Serafina gets to sending instructions to Seelicia. Father Orisino holds back, his fire burning even brighter. There is just calm on his face. The same doesn't apply for Alice, who might be trying to look calm and detached, but Serafina can see the cracks in her mask. And of course, Christos is as inscrutable as ever, even as he reboots the autonomous turrets. Somehow.
"Here," he says, approaching Alice. He passes her a small golden key on a chan. "Take this."
"What is it?" she asks quietly.
"It's a key to a sanctum. It exists in… several places. The nearest is in Pachuca. Around 90km from here. One of the tombs in the Panteón Inglés opens onto it when opened with this key." He looks her in the eye. "The Chalice will welcome you when you tell them that you slew that thing. Maybe this time you'll accept the offer of membership."
"Maybe."
"Any sign of them yet?" Serafina asks Seelicia over comms.
"Nothing yet. Maybe they're going slower. Wary of any more ambushes."
Alice stiffens. "No. They know. Get away from the windows!" she shouts. "Nerve gas incoming!"
***
Hanging back a few streets, the Roland starts to empty its missile batteries, its transport bay already unloaded. After the ambush, there was no way the commander was approaching the target in a mounted assault.
***
She's wearing a full NBC rig, and is inside the Xiaolian which is itself also sealed for chemical warfare. But Serafina realises at this point that she's underestimated her opponent, and they're very nearly as smart as she is - and better trained.
"Stand still!" she shouts at them. "Universal antitoxin coming up!"
Raising her X-410's vivisector, she preps three loads of that drug into ranged syringes and shoots her three compatriots.
"Ow!"
"Quit whining!" she snaps.
There's a whine as the autoturrets spring to life, their chattering machinegun fire picking out missiles from the air. She's pretty sure that this isn't in the design specs, but right now she doesn't care. And of course, they're not enough. Rolands have universal ammo fabs. They'll be able to keep firing. This won't be the main assault and if they know she has Xiaolians they'll know nerve gas won't kill them.
Their overwatch position covers the front of the church.
Oh. Shit.
"Seelicia! Cover your r-"
"Hostiles!"
Not fast enough.
***
Seelicia's needler chatters and she hoses down the corridor. The other Vanessas wearing identical Panopticon uniforms retaliate in kind and she darts back into cover. "Target all hostiles!" she snaps at the Xiaolians, and they begin to fire deadly accurate low-power shots which don't care about the thin plaster walls at all. She wouldn't have even known they were coming if it hadn't been for Alicia's warning, hissed from the mouth of one of the Xiaolians.
"We're pinned down by PanOp Vanessas!" she responds to Serafina. "We're flanked! We can't hold! Ord-"
She has just enough warning to roll when something smashes through the ceiling in a crouch. It's a woman - or at least it looks like one, dressed like a low-ranking Operative. She whirls and shoots Seelicia twice in the chest with high-power anti-armour rounds that go straight through her biosuit. The pain is a red hot knife in her flesh and something about those bullets is cancelling out the pain suppressants in a Vanessa. They're made to incapacitate, she dimly realises while she writhes on the ground.
An incoherent scream escapes from Beelicio's lips and he leaps for the woman holding a knife. She disarms him with an empty-handed slap and he brings his other arm around in a roundhouse punch.
The short woman leans into the blow, and shatters his fingers with her headbutt. Her hand is moving and he staggers back, his own combat knife rammed through his neck cleanly severing his vertebrae.
And then she gets shot by a Xiaolian. The low-power railgun slug still hits like an anti-material sniper rifle and she staggers backwards. The second one fires. Then the first again. They pump round after round into her.
Seelicia sees through dimming eyes that the rounds are just punching cleanly through a spongy interior. They're not destroying the construct's tissue and so the weapons which could take down HITMarks with headshots are only doing superficial damage.
But the other Vanessas have moved up and two of them have plasmathrowers and white-hot ionised gas envelop the Xiaolians. The woman leaps away from the fire through the roof and drops down from behind her Vanessas. It takes concentrated fire, but the titans fall as the heat destroys their biosuits life support and their augmented bodies give out on them.
Seelicia twitches and a subtlety different expression overcomes her face under her sealed hood. The other woman approaches her. Pulls out a field interrogation kit from her belt. She's showing a lot of flesh and that shows just how many holes were punched in her, but the skin underneath is intact.
"So annoying," she mutters and shakes her head. "We've been looking for you, V-2-1002," she continues coldly. "Now, let's find out who stole you."
"Fuck you," says Alicia and sets off her stolen immunoaggravant autocannibalism dispersant. And the explosive charges placed around the room.
***
The explosion rings out, blowing out the entire third floor of the apartment building. Serafina's gut twinges at how many civilians might have been there.
"They're dead," Alicia reports in Serafina's ear. "Watch out. They've got a high end Prog construct with them."
"They're coming in the same way you did," Christos barks. "Cover that entrance!"
"I'll hold them in the tight quarters!" Father Orisino says calmly, advancing. "They'll only pass over my dead body."
"Yes," Christos agrees.
"Go!" Orisino calls back over his shoulder over the chattering of the machine guns as they target another wave of missiles. "Get out of here!"
***
Father Orisino lunges forwards on wings of fire. He dies here, in the ruins of his church, fighting Technocrats. How he'd always thought he'd die.
He's almost glad. There are much worse places he could have died. He remembers the spaceship. The mocking grey demons. To die standing is better. To die protecting others. When he faces the Father, he can know that he died having aided in the destruction of the demon who fooled him and so many other innocents.
The faceless soldiers - so much like Rosario's outfit - don't expect him when he smashes through a wall. He runs one through, whipping his blade out vertically, and two blackened remains of a man fall apart. He cuts at the next one - they're wearing different armour, much more crude looking - and they block with a forearm, an energy shield shimmering to life.
Sparks fly everywhere, liquid flame cascading down to ignite the hallway.
He hacks and slashes, whipping his flaming sword around with angelic strength. The hostile is forced back, step by step, under the fury of his assault. They're having to defend with only one arm as they cradle some sharp-edged weapon in the other, but despite that it's far too even for his liking. They manage to get a punch through and he feels the stolen secrets of Technocratic science in the blow. It shatters a rib and he screams, but Duma keeps him going. He'd have passed out if it wasn't for the angel in him.
And then he pushes the hostile back into a t-junction corridor and realises that they were giving ground deliberately. There's the blinding brightness of a plasmathrower, washing over him.
He screams, his flesh igniting and burning. Blackened skin falls from blackened bone wrapped in light. He keeps on moving. Keeps on fighting. He runs the Vanessa through and pivots on the spot, throwing out a skeletal and and incinerating another who agonisingly tears apart into motes of light.
There's a high-pitched whine, and in a thunderclap Luiz Orisino vanishes. Along with everything else within 2.137 metres of the targeting point. Nothing of him is left. The air pops as the pressure normalises from the sudden removal of all that gas. There's a smooth crater with a mirror's edge, already filling with water from broken pipes.
His killer lowers the Dimensional Sterilisation Unit weapon she was issued. "Move!" she orders her one remaining soldier.
***
Something bursts through the door of the church, screaming in agony. It isn't very human any more. Its flesh is falling apart where it stands, turning on itself. Tumours full of snapping teeth grow tendrils and attack other parts of its body. Ms Candle's suit has already been devoured and now she's a screaming many-mouthed thing whose mind is trying to coordinate a Transhuman war machine whose smart biology left it vulnerable to whatever that rogue Vanessa managed to - impossibly - do with enlightened science.
Now the collective of the cells is broken. It's every geneline out for itself, nature red in tooth and claw. If a true Transhuman mind had been in here, it could maybe have taken back control - but Ms Clock hadn't trusted a Transhuman mind. She hadn't been ordered to have Dr Gregor blank the Transhuman within and install a new personality over the top, but she hadn't been ordered
not to and that was enough for her.
So instead she'd sent the one person she felt she could trust even fractionally. Someone whose existence didn't reveal her own. Her own personal blade.
A candle clock was a primitive way of keeping time, after all.
The roof of the church is blasted wide open, and the burning light of the sky shines through. It falls upon heaped snow stained red with blood. It looks like this place is already a warzone. The walls of the building are pock-marked with shrapnel and bullet holes, and all the windows are broken.
There's a black-clad woman whirling on her, a ridiculously underpowered WW1 revolver in hand. Ms Candle's eyes widen in recognition, and she prepares to realise one of the reasons she was sent on this mission. There's no use preserving her unstable biology and she grows claws and lunges for the traitor. She has to make up for her failure. Repay her sin.
It's only when she lunges through the shadowy figure that she realises that Elissa has inherited another one of James' talents. It's just an illusion. And
yet another damn X-410 is turning on her and this one has an automatic grenade rifle.
Her body fights her, but she leaps up, up towards the shattered ceiling and then biological vents direct her in a slamming crouch onto the X-410. She takes a grenade to the chest and it blasts her torso wide open, but she doesn't care about that. She stabs down into the armoured bulk with blade arms, again and again, until an unseen force picks her up and slams her into the wall.
Peeling herself out, she watches Elissa advance on her, shadows cascading from her hair, eyes glowing red. Elissa levels her obsolete pistol and this stupid little gun hurts so very much as it blows out one of her eyes. It isn't healing. Something is stopping it. Silver? How did she know there were shapeshifter genetics in this body!
And then there's an explosion and Ms Candle would sigh in relief if she still needed lungs. Yinzheng smashes through the wall, her armour running in full combat mode. The wing-like structures extend behind it, venting dimensional resonance. What senses are left to her detect target HANNIBAL opening up with some kind of Reality Deviant handgun against Supervisor Li.
The bullets hang in mid air before her and HANNIBAL is forced to throw himself out of the way of a space-ripping pulse from her gun which cuts a one-metre wide bore through the hole of the church behind him. She fires again and again, recklessly overstressing the capacitor of the DSU weapon uncaring of anything but killing the HVT. The HVT's pistol is punching through her shield and the wings shatter, exploding piece by piece.
One moment, he's slightly too slow and she flicks to using the area blast. His right arm is gone, missing above the elbow.
Ms Candle makes her decision. Kicking out of the wall and taking another bullet from Elissa for her pains, she throws herself at the high-priority RD with all the strength left to her. She's putting everything into this and despite her mutilation she's just fast enough to latch on and without both arms he can't hold her off. Her maw extends into needle barbs and she activates one of her Progenitor hardware functions, injecting the brain-rotting venom. The mess of enzymes, bacteria, viruses, toxins, and the highest providence of Chieron station get to work.
Only for a bull-rush from the X-410 to slam into her. Bleeding heavily from its chest, the bioroid is massive enough to tear her loose and her mouth rips asunder. She stabs at it, trying to break free, but there's more intelligence in this one and even though she's crippled its biosuit it's still moving.
And too late she realises that its eviscerator is into her and it's tearing her apart.
She initiates her self-destruct, as is right and proper. Her only regret as she dies is that she didn't confirm the kill on HANNIBAL
***
In the snow-filled world, Alice can see the flakes drifting down at a snail's crawl. A bullet traces out a path through the air, chromatic aberrations painting the cone of shocked air behind it and the last Vanessa drops dead. She's already slotting fresh bullets into her revolver before it hits. One… two… three...
Serafina is down, sprawled over the altar. The X-410 isn't moving. It got thrown halfway across the room by the self-destruct of the Progenitor construct. Serafina protrudes half-way out its opened chest cavity and she's twitching faintly. Some kind of backlash from the death of her puppet.
The faceless Panopticon killer is turning with the inexorable speed of a wrecking ball, seemingly slow but almost unstoppable. The horrifying weapon spins its blades, and Alice can track the non-Euclidean paths each part of the threshing mechanism takes. She doesn't know how the fuck something like that is stable in an Earth environment. Maybe it isn't. Maybe the fanatic in front of her only cares that they get to complete their mission. They're raising their weapon to fire it again, despite the high pitched whine coming from the mass of primium. Their armour is cracked and damaged, degrading in the snow, but it's still holding for now. The wing-things behind it are shattered stubs. The energy field flickers spasmodically.
Christos is sagged and slumped, shaking his head slowly as he tries to purge whatever the construct did to him. She can see each red droplet of blood fall from the stump of his right arm. He's not going to be fast enough. That threshing-machine weapon is spinning up again.
Will Alice be fast enough? She isn't sure. She flips her half-reloaded revolver's cylinder back into place with a twist of her arm and then she's levelling her gun and it all comes down to this one last moment.
You know the thing about Yinzheng? She's got basically every Attribute apart from Appearance at 6. And Tactics 5. And a relevant speciality. She's a professional, while Serafina is "merely" a gifted amateur. And the thing about the ambush plan was that it was a solid plan, but then you sort of whiffed the roll and the advantage from your rote wasn't enough to overcome the fact that her dicepool was larger for the mundane roll and she rolled well.
So, once again, everyone underestimated Yinzheng.
Alas.
Of course, once again, Alicia was the spoiler to her "silently take out the overwatch team, shoot you with your own railguns". So, you know, you lose some, you don't all die some.
Be Alice
"She's too fast." But is that fast enough? Due to slo-mo she has two actions. Make them count.
Alice has 1wp left and 0 PE.
[ ] Shoot the weapon
[ ] Shoot her in the hand (x0.5)
[ ] Shoot her in the head
[ ] Write-in (including use of powers rather than gunplay)
Psychic enhancements to the shot?
[ ] This gun has fired many bullets, each leaving their residue. In her hands, she can reach into the past of the weapon and pull out the echoes of once-fired rounds (Death 3, Time 3 - enchants the gun to have an unlimited stock of ectoplasmic bullets which interact with the world as Death patterns, not Matter-Forces patterns)
[ ] Bloody-hued coronas of black lightning crackle over the surface of the pistol (DSci 3, Death 3 - enchants rounds to do Agg and carry a Slay Machine enhancement against inanimate objects)
[ ] The air around her freezes over as she absorbs heat, to release as kinetic energy in the shot (Forces 3, damage + knockback adder)
[ ] No time to waste on that - just shoot again (spend the action that would have been used for casting for a second shot, choose another target or the same one twice)
[ ] Write-in
