[X] (1.5x) Kill Gretkov, then go hunt Siddharth. There can't be many living things left in Red Square, which means you'll find out if there's a range limit to his little Agent trick. And Siddharth? Well, you want to get to the point of the matter here.
-> [X] Get a Void Engineer on the line who'll tell you how to use the TransMat to jam the power transmission to Ms Langley (Jr). Once you've murderised Gretkov, possibly repeatedly, and made a
point to Siddharth how unhappy you are with him, you'll have uncontested access to the Device.
The museum is burning. The plasma beam gored it. The sprinkler systems can do nothing to fight this blaze. Jamelia flinches reflexively as a gas pipe explodes, and it's only after she flinches that she remembers that she never normally does that.
Damn Siddharth and what he's done to her.
But there's no time to think about that, because Gretkov is still stunned from the proximity-close plasma blast. She can see him now, flagged by her armour. The air sizzles from the heat. The sprinklers are producing clouds of dense firelit steam.
She can't give him a chance to recover.
Knife in hand, she flicker-jumps down, bringing her blade in a cutting motion into his knife-hand, and then the back-cut up into his face. He leaps back, wrist hanging limply from his hand and steps into a pool of molten metal. It doesn't hurt, but he slips and that's all she needs for her third strike to split him from navel to jaw.
An enhanced Victor falls down, flesh scorching in the heat.
She has a moment to think. It'll be utterly impossible to see her in thermals here.
"Rosario. Update. Cram me."
The noise over the line gives her a mild headache, but it gets her up to date on the situation. And she knows now a bit more about what Gretkov is. "We need to cut the power flow to… to the EDE," she says. She doesn't want to say 'Henriette's sister'. It probably isn't quite accurate anyway. "Get Cross and Kessler working on it from their side. I'm going to try something. Get me someone senior in the VEs
now."
There is a brief pause. "Captain Suchong here," a man says. "What is it, Director?"
"Listen to me, captain," Jamelia says without preamble. "There is a TransMat in the basement down here. When they malfunction they can shut off dimensional travel. I saw this in Argentina in the early eighties when we were making an example of a rogue. One of you was the one on the line who told us how to break it in that way. You have two minutes to find someone in your organisation who can tell me how to break this TransMat so it cuts off the flow of power to that thing in Red Square. I know the power flow DSS03 needs. That thing will need at least as much. If we get it from both sides…"
"Workable," the man says, in a taciturn manner. She hears the frown in his voice. "The RAIN seems to have pissed it off," he observes.
"I wanted it to kill it," Jamelia says. "Damn the pre-Anomaly Iterators, making hardware like this without killswitches," she adds. She might as well get her lies about how much she knows started now. She pauses. "And it'd also be pretty nice if whoever you got on the line could help me deal with the immortal body-jumping EDE which wants to kill me slowly," she adds.
"I'll see what I can do. Suchong out," he says.
Jamelia rises from her crouch, tossing her knife from hand to hand. She tries to remember how many Victors there could have been. She fails. Her mind is fogged. But he can't have many left. She hopes. If she's unlucky, Lt. Rajesh could have an entire squad down there. If so, she's probably about to die. She breaks into a sprint, fire licking at her legs.
"Rosario," she says, over comms. "Did you get that?"
"Yes," Serafina says. "I…" she shakes her head. "God, this is not what I thought would happen when I joined. You might be out of contact down there."
"Yes. Try to stop anyone starting WW3 unless it's really necessary," Jamelia says, vaulting down a flight of stairs and landing in a crouch. The door to the primium vault is close, and she's moving more carefully, looking for traps. "But better WW3 than letting them win. And remember. I read the tech notes on the DSS, and I saw that that… that thing has the same kind of field. They can neutralise each other."
Jamelia grins, a slightly manic smile which only mostly is coming from the pain.
"Don't feel you're intruding on a sisterly fight if you slam the hostile in the back with hyper-v cruise missiles when the two of them are neutralising each other."
"I understand." She can almost see the expression on Serafina's face. "Try not to die down there." The other woman pauses. "It'll upset Rose. Rosario out."
WRITE IN SHOCKWAVE CODE:
Void Engineers
[X] Tech Support
Tech Support is not
formally a sub division of the Void Engineers. However, in practice, the Void Engineers often get emergency calls from other Conventions asking for advice about things of a Dimensional Science nature. 'Help, help, there's a creepy psychic ghost girl who seems to be very unhappy we were experimenting on her and she's melting everyone's flesh; how do we not get flesh-melted?'. 'I'm being chased by EDEs who resemble various business rivals who are accusing me of somehow being responsible for their deaths. Can you do something?'. 'All our guns from the SPD just turned into demons and possessed our Bobs and now the Bobs are actually competent and evil, what the fuck?'
You know, questions like that.
As a result, Tech Support is a quasi-informal grouping of mostly ground-based Void Engineers and teams on mandatory recuperation who are on fast-line callout for the other Conventions. Sometimes they go out and hunt down zombie Samual Haight in a fancy limo. Most of the time they get called up in the middle of the night and have to try to explain to a panicking Syndicate executive that they need them to go into their kitchen and lay down lines of sodium chloride because post-human EDEs exhibit instinctual phobias to it, or have to try to explain to a bunch of Iterators how to field-modify their gear to defend against werewolf anti-tech jamming. As a result, their skills tend to wind up being selected to patch the holes in the skillsets of many members of Earthside conventions.
- Skilled with DSci, Correspondence and Prime. Comes with knowledge of Cosmology and EDEs.
- Fully conversant in Void Engineer cover stories about [REDACTED]
- Can use Jamelia and her actions as a focus for effects.
- Has various other Enlightened and non-Enlightened assistants operating in concert allowing quick-assembly of group procedures, but reliant on on-the-ground field operatives to follow their instructions.
- Status as a genki/sulky/personality-not-yet-confirmed AI named after a sword from the Matter of France is not yet confirmed.
