JB CCXXXVIII: Forgotten Machinations
Footsteps echo through the abandoned catacombs beneath Paris. Three sets moving slightly out of sync, covering up the heavy breathing of a young woman and a middle-aged man. Two dozen more, most of them synchronized with inhuman precision and intent, echoing throughout the Swiss-cheese of tunnels underneath any old city, distant and faint but closing with every second. Footsteps by inhuman, unbreathing revenants seeking only vengeance.
"They're going to… catch us… eventually." Harlan pants out loud, despite the psychic link. Undoing decades of abuse and disuse takes a lot longer than the time he's had. But he no longer has the body of a professional athlete, and even though he's in great shape for a fifty year old the pace Jamelia is forcing would make even Olympians struggle, pushing bodies beyond the edge of human limits. Even with some tactile telekinesis to augment their movement and conscious overrides of his brain stem to stave off fatigue and optimize breathing, he can barely keep up with Jamelia. Every step he makes stings. His soles are agonizingly tender and his muscles sore. He knows Jamelia's doing it because of drugs and experimental biotech and self-induced psychoconditioning, that her body isn't fully human anymore. That her mind, although not nearly as potent as his, can ignore the crass demands of flesh and bone even better than he can through sheer drive, without using biokinesis. It doesn't make him feel any better. He will not be the weak link that breaks the unit.
We can't keep this pace up forever.
We need a terrain advantage, Jamelia thinks back, glancing at him. He notices the lack of disappointment in her eyes, and is even more concerned. It's a very un-Hyena like look, evaluating professionally without making personal judgment. It's the sort of 'we're-fucked' look he's seen so often in the late Ratel's eyes, when facing impossible odds and improbable objectives. Anger rises in his throat, and he forces it down. He knows very well that he's gotten old and slow. He knows that he can blame himself, blame the Union, blame so many other people for it. The woman who Hyena is now is way down the ladder of responsibility here. He knows his mind is as sharp as ever, and that's what makes him valuable. But it still hurts to see that look. To know that Jamelia is looking at him as a potential weak link, someone who needs to be considered, to be babied.
It was never like that in HELMETSHRIKE. It was never like that in Vigilance. They all knew each other's capabilities, and all knew exactly how much they could demand from each other. The operations required nothing less. But times have changed.
Meanwhile, Jamelia looks at a map of their surroundings, overlaid with pulses from disposable microsensors and what limited Union monitoring data she could retrieve without notice. She plots a path through a veritable warren of tunnels, some man-made, others created by something other than human hands. There are so many potential ambush points, so many possible kill zones. Despite the myriad of possible routes, only a few aren't risky or outright suicidal. She slows slightly as she thinks, to a pace that would be merely grueling for trained soldiers.
"Could have done this earlier," Harlan pants, thankful they've slowed down enough that the BDU can take over more of the work. He takes a glance at Elissa, her face flushed from the strain. She looks to be in better shape than he is thanks to youth and biokinesis, but running at faster-than-Olympic-sprinter speeds for that long took a toll. Adrenaline overproduction and mitochondrial supercharging only last so long, and the harder the push the harder the inevitable crash. You can mitigate the cost via hardware but Elissa doesn't have that soft-tech in her. And Harlan knows even Jamelia's hiding her discomfort. Even though she's changed she hasn't changed that much. He can still read her, a little.
They need time to recover, even though it means the enemy will almost certainly find them. Their planned route will mean that when the enemy intercepts them, they'll be in relatively advantageous terrain. A relatively wide abandoned tram tunnel adjacent to the subways, without threats like toxic gasses and power cabling that would be mildly inconvenient to an EDE-possessed corpse but deadly to humans.
Almost like clockwork, they reach the remnants of an old Union tram station-now stripped down to little more than weathered armorcrete foundations. Even the maglev tracks have been removed, and the only thing lighting the room is the dead man in it. The EDE-corpse hybrid.
"Jazmin Blade," the dead man hisses, his voice hollow with the crackling of burned meat tearing apart. His mouth and eyes glow an unhealthy green of witch-fire. He wears a stolen body and the stolen uniform of a French paramilitary, and he holds a machine-gun loosely in one hand, almost languidly raising it in a loose firing stance Harlan recognizes immediately.
It's an action hero stance. The "I don't need sights or a stable firing stance" arrogance that you only see from untrained rabble or augmented combat cyborgs. And it's immediately clear that he's not facing the former. Harlan dives for cover immediately as the undead thing fires, his muscles tensing painfully as he catches several rounds and his BDU turns diamond-rigid and tank-tough for a heartbeat. He sees Jamelia literally vanish as she drops her handgun to slap her watch one-handed.
The machine man stalks towards Harlan deliberately as Jamelia draws her weapon from cloak, her assassin's weapon unfolding in a fluid blur of smart liquid-metals and hyper-flexible metamaterials from what looked like a professional woman's handbag into a thin rifle-shotgun hybrid. She's used
Hellequins before, is familiar enough with their transformation that she manages to keep a one-handed grip on the bag strap as it thickens and compresses into a pistol grip and has it leveled at the dead man the moment the metamorphosis finishes, her stance already having superimposed the holographically-projected aimpoint onto the walking corpse's chest.
Her cloak crashes the moment she fires, revealing her in a firing stance adjacent to an armored pillar, weapon shouldered and both eyes open. The first shot echoes through the abandoned tram station, louder than the din of the cursed machinegun fire, and impacts center-mass, piercing stolen body armor like it wasn't there and detonating immediately after with enough force to knock the man backwards several steps. Gray ash cracks and flakes away to reveal black Stygian metal, briefly glowing orange from the shot. Jamelia immediately switches targets, puts a round through the weapon he wields, shattering it in a blossom of metal and ammunition cookoffs. The pallid flesh of the revenant's hand sloughs off, revealing a black skeletal hand surrounded by a mockery of Iteration X augmentation.
"You feel the deja vu, don't you?" the nameless victim snarls, eldritch power suffusing his voice to cut past the hypersonic whip-cracks of high-velocity explosive ordinance. "This was how things ended in Chile. But this time, the story will end differently." Elissa empties a magazine into the dead man, causing more burned flesh to flake away, but it still speaks as it drives forward against the fusillade, uninterrupted by the barrage. "I have walked the cursed paths beyond the Lie and seen the truth of the neverdying, everdying gods. I have seen through the cursed lies of the Patriarch and the First Murderer-and reject their cult. I would offer you the same enlightenment-but you deserve only pain." Jamelia's eyebrow raises slightly, so slightly that Harlan only notices in the throes of combat hypersensitivity. She recognizes him. As does he. The rasp doesn't hide the accent. And they only ever did one operation in Chile against heavy-spec cyborgs.
But neither of them let it change their tactics or planning. They're professionals. Even if they've changed since those days. It was never personal for them. And neither is this. They don't have time for self-pity or meaningless apologies. Because they're HELMETSHRIKE. And HELMETSHRIKE was always made of the most dangerous sort of murderer. Murderers who killed because it was, to them, a regrettable necessity. And now murderers who have long since made peace with the mountains of skulls they've left in their wake. If An-Jin Choi thought his wraiths would demoralize the foe, cause them to have second thoughts, create that moment of fatal hesitation, his choice was a mistake. For all his stolen memories and borrowed skills, he never understood Operatives.
Because unlike him, unlike normal people, Harlan and Jamelia and Elissa all trained as Operatives. For them, empathy is a choice, not a default.
Harlan can see Elissa's aura building, pyrokinetic and psychokinetic forces hanging heavy in the air. She was powerful enough when she was young. Mature and battle-hardened, he wouldn't be surprised if she could tear tanks or HITMarks in half or shatter buildings. But the cost of doing so was never anything but drastic. How many of his old colleagues has he seen in regeneration tanks with severe brain damage? How many psychic program burnouts has he seen volunteering for HITMark IV conversion because that was the only way they could serve, after all the damage they've suffered? He's not going to let her suffer that fate.
I know how to slow him down., Harlan sends to Elissa.
Help me instead. Elissa nods, barely, but in the high-detail perception that his mental powers grant him, it's as clear as any gesture could be.
Jamelia switches her focus in agreement, backpedaling away onto the empty tracks. She fires to focus his hate, fires to slow him down, letting him stagger towards her as he leans into the storm of fire and metal. He's drawn his sidearm one-handed and empties the magazine towards her as he walks forward, but she doesn't bother taking cover against it, because she knows that none of the rounds will hit her exposed face and neck. Her certainty makes it so. The nanoweave in her clothes will stop armor-piercing ammunition from rifles, let alone hollow-point pistol bullets from a masses-built, police-issue firearm. The hits feel like punches, nothing more. Serafina's handiwork means she doesn't bruise easily, doesn't need to worry about tearing muscle or fracturing bone from the return fire. She exploits the enemy's target fixation, forces the revenant to focus on her, not on the threat.
But likewise, her onslaught does little to him. She's killed him once, but that was with heavy weaponry. Anti-cyborg weaponry. A heavy-spec cyborg like him would walk through the blast of a rocket-propelled grenade. And he is no longer a mere heavy-spec Shock Corps killer. He has been augmented with the pure undying hate giving him form. The
Hellequin is powerful, but it was designed for assassinations. Killing a world leader through the protection of an armored car, or fragging a general hiding in a command vehicle. Stolen flesh sublimates to grit and ash from the detonations, revealing more and more stygian-steel, but all she manages is to slow his approach fractionally. And he's faster than he looks. Even as she makes sure to fall back quickly, trusting her memory and inhuman agility, he keeps up with her, forcing her to kick off walls and dive away from him several times over. She's an Operative. An augmented one. She almost never makes mistakes. But she knows full well that 'almost never' is not the same as 'never,' and eventually flesh tires. All Jamelia can do is trust that Harlan's plan will work by then.
He's barely two arms-lengths away from Jamelia for a third time when he stops, foot frozen halfway in the air by impossible force. There's a ghastly straining noise-the sound of industrial machinery as interpreted by hell itself- the burned man finishes his step with steam and lightning cascading off of the soulsteel limb, his tread heavy enough to crack the concrete underneath it with an explosive crack. "Nice trick," he says contemptuously, and for a moment he's just another Iterator, all augmented swagger and very nearly dangerous enough to back it up.
Just like so many Harlan's killed, dismissing his psychic potential because they've got Primium-mesh armor and they think it makes them invincible against his mind. Just like so many Harlan's seen die, because they thought their Primium and exotic composites made them invulnerable against Reality Deviance. "You aren't strong enough to stop me. Not like this," the burned man rasps. "And you can't keep this up forever." Another step for emphasis. Even with Elissa aiding him, they can't hold back stygian-steel servomotors and corpus-woven muscle-fiber any more than they could hold back an equivalent.
Harlan grins, his bloodshot eyes making his expression positively ghoulish. "No. But I can keep it up long enough." The burned man's eyebrows have long since melted off from the explosive barrage, his face pockmarked with holes that expose Stygian-steel mockeries, but Harlan thinks he can see an expression of befuddlement for a moment before it transforms into shock. His shade might still possess the shadows of his old augmentation, engraved indelibly upon his residual self-image, giving him power and strength beyond most EDEs. But the ghostly parodies of Iterator augmentation can't replicate everything. They can't replicate Primium. Or how Primium protects from almost all psychic attack. Against a strong-willed, powerful enemy, Harlan can only manage a fraction of a second of control.
It's all he needs.
The risen uses all his might to slam through the thin concrete between this abandoned Union tram and the proper subway tunnels, and the scream of twisting metal and shattering glass echoes through the tunnel. The subway train starts slowing for a moment as emergency brakes activate, but a few moments later the sound of screeching metal and stressed brakes stops and the train starts to accelerate again, its safety functions overriden.
That won't stop him, Jamelia points out.
No. But it'll get him out of our hair for a while. Harlan points out.
We need to use this time to find a longer-term solution. Jamelia acknowledges.
We're not just going to be able to disable them for a moment and keep running. Not without blinding or neutralizing whoever's giving them information.
I'm tired of running from this, Elissa agrees. Harlan knows that part of it's cynical. If she's going to deal with her pursuers, going to stop them from chasing her to the ends of the Earth, this is probably the best opportunity by far-with allies, equipment, and preparation. But that doesn't mean she's wrong.
And even after everything, Harlan Aristide feels like he needs to be there to help.
I can sense multiple hostiles approaching our position now that I've got a read on what we're dealing with. They seem networked, Harlan comments.
I think they're moving to cut us off, then surround us. The cyberzombie was part of this delaying plan.
It makes sense. The facility would be defensible. They've stripped the Primium out of the walls, taken the reactors and computers and every other valuable system. There won't be any psi-dampeners or phasic shredders running. But the walls are still made out of armorcrete and monocrystalline metal, and even with some third party feeding the wraiths information and blueprints, they can't rule out any surprises in a Union facility or unlisted hidden exits.
You know what to do. Jamelia responds curtly.
He does. Through the pounding of his heart and the burning of his lungs, even with the oncoming headache of psychic backlash, kept in check by sheer willpower, and the aches and pains that remind him of his age, Harlan is still a combat veteran and he still instinctively understands what they need to do. Find a weak point in the encroaching net, tear its throat out. Counterattack the ambush, don't let them bog you down.
Where to?
He's Back
What was Jamelia thinking in the fight and why?
[ ] Write-In
They'll Be Back
What direction does Jamelia break out towards?
[ ] Assault the facility anyways. Even stripped facilities often have some interesting systems that can be salvaged, and they probably won't expect it.
[ ] Hijack a train. The entire point here is to get out as fast as possible.
[ ] Find a nearby hiding place-some sort of museum basement, perhaps-and set up your own counter-ambush.
[ ] Turn into the ambush and decapitate it. Elissa is pretty sure she can locate Choi in the catacombs. Take him out, and things get a lot easier.
