Update CLVI: Unstoppable
JB CLVI: Unstoppable
"Let her go." Valentin says, brandishing his electric guitar as a weapon. Subroutines in the Zeruel note that it's been modified with Reality Deviant techniques to project lightning or amplify its acoustic force, and Kessler turns the young woman towards him as a human shield. "I'm the one you want. Not her. You wanted to kill me? Here's your chance. Just let her go. And we fight like men."
What a poor choice of words, Kessler thinks. "Sure," he says to the guy who's holding the guitar in a way not-dissimilar to a baseball bat. "I'll let her go."
The NWO likes to turn enemies into weapons to use against their former allies. So does Iteration X, just far more directly. He's fast and he's very strong and the Iteration X fighting styles he's optimized for were optimized for people who don't have the limited contraction rate of human muscle fiber. Blurring into explosive motion, he tosses the pretty pretty princess head-first at the guitar-wielding man. The acceleration alone will have left her concussed from her brain hitting the interior of her skull.
John's just given him a three way choice - and that's a choice only a guy like that who sees outside causality even has the time to make. He could dodge and let her hit the wall behind him head first and cranial trauma like that will probably cave her skull in. He could fail to react in time - or, you know, just fail at dodging - and get hit by a ballistic Disney princess which is going to severely injure both of them. Or he could use his magic to save her - and leave himself entirely open to Kessler's follow-up and burn primal energy and will he'll need for this fight.
And none of the choices matter much-because they're all distractions to hide his plasma weapon. The throw's a deception, based entirely off of his superhuman balance and posture. He remembers how back in '83, some bigwig NWO theorist made all the exojocks take ballet lessons on the theory it'd improve their posture and their grasp of spatial and kinetic reasoning. And of course, more pertinently, he knows all about distracting giant cyberdragons by tossing scraps of food at them. Their vision is also heavily motion based. It's all about throwing the food at them without letting them see that your arm has moved, so you can get closer and bash their head in with a rock while they're gnawing on the scraps you tossed them. Magicians aren't too dissimilar to cyberdragons, in the end. They both think they're cleverer and deadlier than they actually are. And they both have primitive lizard brains which focus on fast movement.
Ol' John Kessler. Fun little life he's had, he thinks a trifle morosely as he moves, brain whirring in accelerated time as he pulls together memories of time-and-time again deceits and athletic poise. Maybe the fact that if he hadn't been in the Zeruel, he'd be dead... three times over by now is making him melancholic. How many other people he knows would still be alive if they had had a combat body like this? There's plenty more time for reflection, but he doesn't take it. He's a man of action, and this is his moment.
The throw sounds like the crack of a whip. The woman goes flying, and the guitarist focuses on the woman. As expected. Focuses for a fraction of a second too long, doesn't see him bring the Zeruel's plasma generation systems to bear. The guitarist drops his guitar to catch the princess, and has barely enough time to look at Kessler, fear in his eyes. Then the anti-fortification plasma cannon fires, and the only thing anyone in the room can see is blinding white. When the glow fades, the excavated room no longer looks manmade. The walls have sagged, the ceiling has melted, and no trace is left of the people who were once there, nor any trace of the mystic artifacts and other works of man.
"I guess you've suffered the fate of so many rockstars." John Kessler says ruthlessly, addressing the molten room. "Burning out." He walks out, and his motion detector notes that a large number of contacts are approaching his position, and fast. He has enough time to bring his arms up in a fighting stance as a bear, too large to be natural, smashes into him with the momentum of a speeding truck. "I'm coming back up to assist you, Naryshkin, but it'll take a few minutes." Kessler says over comms. "Bear with me for a moment."
"Busy here! Doom tank!" Henriette snaps and cut the line.
[The missiles are a refinement of the Russian 9M123,] Mari says over their mental-link. They're thinking much, much faster like this - Henriette is having to let her ADEI handle it because her meatware is having problems keeping up and so with her NWO training she's having the biological bits of her brain only think about the bits which they do better. [Joint laser-radar guidance systems. Oooh! Quite a lot of an improvement, really! That's a lot better - whoever's behind this is trained properly for such a primitive system. Transferring schematics of baseline model and projected traits of RD-modified hardware.]
Henriette's mind whirs. [I'll handle the laser, you handle the radar,] she sends quickly, flushing her weapons of their hot shells and loading parachute-equipped laser-dancers. [Unless you're not up to it,] she adds, to spur her sister on.
"Ha! I'll show you!" Mari says out loud. [It's going to be great. You'll see. Prepping radar-spoofing white noise to be sent from us, Yanga and the ECVs.]
[... you really built electronic warfare suites into the ECUs?] Henriette asks in disbelief.
[Well, duh. What if they got attacked by rogue nanobots and I had to freem them? Plus, you can always re-purpose a good E-warfare suite to boil people's brains,] Mari says happily.
Henriette doesn't have time to reply because she's too busy struggling with the vehicle's fabricator systems. "Which idiot decided on using an entirely custom interface for this thing?" She complains to nobody in particular. "Especially one that doesn't let you program custom rounds so easily? Why the hell do I need to jailbreak this thing to make non-standard countermeasures?" She settles for just firing several long bursts of smoke grenades and hoping that it'll be enough.
[this isn't going to work.] Mari says. [They're using high-power lasers that can cut through that smoke.] The AUCV rocks as several of the fuel-air explosives land close enough to detonate, flipping end over end before its thrusters stabilize it.
[Can you at least misdirect the missiles a little?] Henriette asks. [If the fabricator isn't going to let me make custom countermeasures, I'm going to stop the bombardment in a much simpler fashion.]
[...'kay.] Mari says. [Taking over for you.]
[That's my sister.] Henriette beams, and she sends the AUCV careening through the woods surrounding the Rogue Council base, towards the enemy supertank. Fuel-air explosives detonate around her, turning the forest into a hellscape, melting snow and turning ground to clay, but it's not nearly enough to stop her. The tank struggles to turn its turret towards the new threat-too little, too late. The moment the Russian armored vehicle shows up in her sights, she fires the AUCV's ordinance in an alpha strike, railgun and laser and anti-tank missiles. The weakened armor of the tank withstands the onslaught for a moment, just long enough for the crew to open the hatches and attempt to bail out-and then the anti-tank missiles, expertly guided by her neural implants, punch into the weakened side armor. Fire and shrapnel vomit out of every opening in the vehicle as her assault completely guts it, leaving nothing but a composite husk.
"All right." Henriette sends to Elsa. "What did you want again?"
Elsa snaps her fingers as she hits on a solution. "Explosives. We need explosives."
"Don't we always?" Brandon responds absentmindedly, already diving through stacked crates lying under the racks of guns. "Bullets, bullets, bullets, more bullets jeez were these guys planning to fight World War Four or something- there!"
Elsa barely gets a hand up in time to catch a brick of Semtex flown at her head, and her enhanced reflexes can barely catch the coil of detcord flying past her head. She blinks artificial eyes in surprise, but her combat instincts have her legs already in motion down the armory's entrance corridor.
The cyborg's augmented eyes scan the ceiling, looking for seams of rock and potential weak points. She's no engineer, but she knows a thing or two (or ten) about explosives and the applications thereof, and she's been in enough collapsing underground bunkers to know that every tunnel can be un-tunneled with sufficient boomsticks.
"You know, if you're going to collapse this tunnel and bury us all alive," Brandon's voice echoes down the narrow passageway, "at least do it right!"
Elsa blinks. Again. "Excuse me?"
"There's a seam of porous limestone above you; place a powerful enough charge in there, and you should be able to cause a major fissure in the nearby rock. Or better yet, place several charges across the tunnel and down the length, and if they're detonated in sequence, we can hit the resonant frequency of the limestone and make it pulverize some of the nearby granite," Brandon continues, his tone turning thoughtful. "Elsa, place that first charge directly above you in the first seam of lighter-colored rock you can find! Natalia, get me anything around here that goes bang!"
Elsa's cybereyes aren't exactly built for the task of "percussive underground geological engineering," but their LiDAR and millimeter-band sonar suites are still functioning capably enough, and they put together a picture of what the Traditionalist spy has planned. She shrugs and slams her fist into the limestone above her head, ignoring the dust she's kicked up, and quickly tapes the first block of Semtex into place. With Brandon's instructions, and more bricks of Semtex thrown down the corridor like footballs, the eight-meter corridor is soon wired with an impressive dotting of detcord-wired plastic explosive. The other prisoners wisely take cover in the cramped armory, two of the more experienced ones grabbing ear and eye protection.
"And before you ask, yes I did learn more than my fair share of geological engineering," Brandon says, as Naryshkin dashes for the relative safety of the armory. His eyes are fixed on the glow of her phone's display, and two Russian military-surplus detonators rest on the table in front of him. "You would not believe how many bunkers I had to search for back in my analyst days," he continues distractedly, as the complex shudders from aboveground explosions.
Elsa shrugs as she ducks behind cover. "I just figured that you liked the feel of rock-hard things in your hands. Or maybe you were all about that explosive finish, the one that gets gunk on everyone?"
"I'm quite cosmopolitan in my extracurricular tastes, you know. Male, female, tentacled monstrosity from the Great Beyond - what's not to like?" Brandon quips back. "Now, unless you can tell me the exact microseconds that I need to space these two detonations apart, kindly zip those very gorgeous lips of yours."
"You're a baseline meathead. How can you tell the exact time to fire them?"
"I have a cell phone. More accurately, I have your cell phone. Also, shut up."
Brandon takes one last glance at the phone, then sets it down and picks up the two detonators. He crosses himself, flipping the safeties off and staring intently down the well-wired corridor, and even Elsa's enhanced reflexes have trouble noticing the tiny delay between the two detonators firing.
Blinding light. Prickling heat. Choking dust.
But when the cloud has settled and the various survivors have gathered their wits together, they find themselves stuck in a small room behind an impassable seal of fallen rock. Elsa notes sourly that the spy has managed to avoid being covered by any of the dust from the explosion. As expected of Shadow Ministry operatives.
"Well," he wheezes. "That went about as well as can be expected. What now?"
"Now we wait and we prepare for the inevitable assault." Elsa says, warily guarding the entrance. The stones shift and the sound of impacts echo through the walls. "Set up traps, get equipped-whatever we can do. I don't think we've bought ourselves more than a minute or two." She looks at the motley crew of rescued prisoners and doesn't rate their chances particularly highly. There's a few who clearly know how to fight, and fight well, handling weapons like knives and guns with expertise. A few more clearly have some experience in it but can't be counted to do well against North Korean supersoldiers.
"But that's solid rock." one of the prisoners says, a man in his 40s currently looking at one of the worse-injured acolytes. "How can they tunnel through solid rock so quickly?"
Elsa doesn't answer. Brandon does. "By the power of their kung-fu grip. Also, juche. Trust me on this, she's right about the whole 'we have maybe two minutes before they find another entrance. So. How exactly did you plan to get us out?"
Elsa ignores him, distracted for a moment.
"Excuse me?"
"Oh." Elsa says. "Sorry. We didn't plan to get you out as much as we planned to take this place and shoot everything in it that didn't like us. We have the assets for that. I was just coordinating with the assault team. Looks like delivery is a go. Anybody here have a mathematics background? I'm going to need help with this whole 'dropping a killer robot through several meters of rock' thing."
A woman raises her hand tentatively. "I did signals analysis for the FSB. I think I can help."
"Good." Elsa says. "Let's get on with this."
Prisoner Processing:
Are you going to let the Traditions magi go?
[ ] Yes, but give them the choice of working with you. Some might be disillusioned about the Traditions.
[ ] Yes, but they know too much. Erase their immediate memories, then let them go. IBM can help.
[ ] (0.5x) No. We can recover the information we need by force.
[ ] Write-In.
Reconnect:
Choose three facts Brandon knows.
[ ] He knows of Donald's message to the Glass Walkers.
[ ] The Virtual Adepts have tried to break back into the Spy's Demise but nobody has survived that attempt. They tended to have some very interesting stories about god-machines and machine-devils before they expired. The few who got brought back-they refuse to ever touch the Web ever again.
[ ] The Void Engineers have been hugely concerned about what's going on in the Spy's Demise, and he's met one who has offered a bounty for any information.
[ ] The Golden Chalice has been seeking information on Jamelia Belltower and has offered enormous rewards for anything that leads them to her.
[ ] His superiors in the Shadow Ministry might know something, and he may be willing to arrange a meeting somewhere fancy and neutral.
[ ] The Void Engineers have made quiet feelers about two missing agents-and he thinks he's met one of them in that base.
Downtime:
What have Harlan and Wufan been doing? Choose one besides the one that has been chosen for you.
[X] Wufan has been trying and failing to probe at Harlan and see what he knows. Unfortunately he's an even better liar than Jamelia.
[ ] They kicked down the doors on a big drug deal and absconded with all the cash (+Resources)
[ ] They've been bribing and otherwise making contacts in the hacker community who can provide SIGINT (+Contacts)
[ ] They've been setting up fake IDs and other ways of working off the grid (+Cloaking)
[ ] Write-In
"Let her go." Valentin says, brandishing his electric guitar as a weapon. Subroutines in the Zeruel note that it's been modified with Reality Deviant techniques to project lightning or amplify its acoustic force, and Kessler turns the young woman towards him as a human shield. "I'm the one you want. Not her. You wanted to kill me? Here's your chance. Just let her go. And we fight like men."
What a poor choice of words, Kessler thinks. "Sure," he says to the guy who's holding the guitar in a way not-dissimilar to a baseball bat. "I'll let her go."
The NWO likes to turn enemies into weapons to use against their former allies. So does Iteration X, just far more directly. He's fast and he's very strong and the Iteration X fighting styles he's optimized for were optimized for people who don't have the limited contraction rate of human muscle fiber. Blurring into explosive motion, he tosses the pretty pretty princess head-first at the guitar-wielding man. The acceleration alone will have left her concussed from her brain hitting the interior of her skull.
John's just given him a three way choice - and that's a choice only a guy like that who sees outside causality even has the time to make. He could dodge and let her hit the wall behind him head first and cranial trauma like that will probably cave her skull in. He could fail to react in time - or, you know, just fail at dodging - and get hit by a ballistic Disney princess which is going to severely injure both of them. Or he could use his magic to save her - and leave himself entirely open to Kessler's follow-up and burn primal energy and will he'll need for this fight.
And none of the choices matter much-because they're all distractions to hide his plasma weapon. The throw's a deception, based entirely off of his superhuman balance and posture. He remembers how back in '83, some bigwig NWO theorist made all the exojocks take ballet lessons on the theory it'd improve their posture and their grasp of spatial and kinetic reasoning. And of course, more pertinently, he knows all about distracting giant cyberdragons by tossing scraps of food at them. Their vision is also heavily motion based. It's all about throwing the food at them without letting them see that your arm has moved, so you can get closer and bash their head in with a rock while they're gnawing on the scraps you tossed them. Magicians aren't too dissimilar to cyberdragons, in the end. They both think they're cleverer and deadlier than they actually are. And they both have primitive lizard brains which focus on fast movement.
Ol' John Kessler. Fun little life he's had, he thinks a trifle morosely as he moves, brain whirring in accelerated time as he pulls together memories of time-and-time again deceits and athletic poise. Maybe the fact that if he hadn't been in the Zeruel, he'd be dead... three times over by now is making him melancholic. How many other people he knows would still be alive if they had had a combat body like this? There's plenty more time for reflection, but he doesn't take it. He's a man of action, and this is his moment.
The throw sounds like the crack of a whip. The woman goes flying, and the guitarist focuses on the woman. As expected. Focuses for a fraction of a second too long, doesn't see him bring the Zeruel's plasma generation systems to bear. The guitarist drops his guitar to catch the princess, and has barely enough time to look at Kessler, fear in his eyes. Then the anti-fortification plasma cannon fires, and the only thing anyone in the room can see is blinding white. When the glow fades, the excavated room no longer looks manmade. The walls have sagged, the ceiling has melted, and no trace is left of the people who were once there, nor any trace of the mystic artifacts and other works of man.
"I guess you've suffered the fate of so many rockstars." John Kessler says ruthlessly, addressing the molten room. "Burning out." He walks out, and his motion detector notes that a large number of contacts are approaching his position, and fast. He has enough time to bring his arms up in a fighting stance as a bear, too large to be natural, smashes into him with the momentum of a speeding truck. "I'm coming back up to assist you, Naryshkin, but it'll take a few minutes." Kessler says over comms. "Bear with me for a moment."
***
"All right." Elsa says, cutting the line. "Bad news, our friend is a bit indisposed. I'm going to guess from the roaring that it involved something big and mean."
"It was probably actually a bear." Brandon says. "Trust me, I know his type. Do you know how long he's going to take to murder it? Because it'd be nice if he was here. Now." Brandon says. "About those North Korean supersoldiers. We need something to deal with them."
"It was probably actually a bear." Brandon says. "Trust me, I know his type. Do you know how long he's going to take to murder it? Because it'd be nice if he was here. Now." Brandon says. "About those North Korean supersoldiers. We need something to deal with them."
"Don't worry," Elsa says cockily. "I have this covered." She opens a secured comms link. "Langley, get BIG GUY ready for giantfall, dropping on my loc-""Busy here! Doom tank!" Henriette snaps and cut the line.
***
[The missiles are a refinement of the Russian 9M123,] Mari says over their mental-link. They're thinking much, much faster like this - Henriette is having to let her ADEI handle it because her meatware is having problems keeping up and so with her NWO training she's having the biological bits of her brain only think about the bits which they do better. [Joint laser-radar guidance systems. Oooh! Quite a lot of an improvement, really! That's a lot better - whoever's behind this is trained properly for such a primitive system. Transferring schematics of baseline model and projected traits of RD-modified hardware.]
Henriette's mind whirs. [I'll handle the laser, you handle the radar,] she sends quickly, flushing her weapons of their hot shells and loading parachute-equipped laser-dancers. [Unless you're not up to it,] she adds, to spur her sister on.
"Ha! I'll show you!" Mari says out loud. [It's going to be great. You'll see. Prepping radar-spoofing white noise to be sent from us, Yanga and the ECVs.]
[... you really built electronic warfare suites into the ECUs?] Henriette asks in disbelief.
[Well, duh. What if they got attacked by rogue nanobots and I had to freem them? Plus, you can always re-purpose a good E-warfare suite to boil people's brains,] Mari says happily.
Henriette doesn't have time to reply because she's too busy struggling with the vehicle's fabricator systems. "Which idiot decided on using an entirely custom interface for this thing?" She complains to nobody in particular. "Especially one that doesn't let you program custom rounds so easily? Why the hell do I need to jailbreak this thing to make non-standard countermeasures?" She settles for just firing several long bursts of smoke grenades and hoping that it'll be enough.
[this isn't going to work.] Mari says. [They're using high-power lasers that can cut through that smoke.] The AUCV rocks as several of the fuel-air explosives land close enough to detonate, flipping end over end before its thrusters stabilize it.
[Can you at least misdirect the missiles a little?] Henriette asks. [If the fabricator isn't going to let me make custom countermeasures, I'm going to stop the bombardment in a much simpler fashion.]
[...'kay.] Mari says. [Taking over for you.]
[That's my sister.] Henriette beams, and she sends the AUCV careening through the woods surrounding the Rogue Council base, towards the enemy supertank. Fuel-air explosives detonate around her, turning the forest into a hellscape, melting snow and turning ground to clay, but it's not nearly enough to stop her. The tank struggles to turn its turret towards the new threat-too little, too late. The moment the Russian armored vehicle shows up in her sights, she fires the AUCV's ordinance in an alpha strike, railgun and laser and anti-tank missiles. The weakened armor of the tank withstands the onslaught for a moment, just long enough for the crew to open the hatches and attempt to bail out-and then the anti-tank missiles, expertly guided by her neural implants, punch into the weakened side armor. Fire and shrapnel vomit out of every opening in the vehicle as her assault completely guts it, leaving nothing but a composite husk.
"All right." Henriette sends to Elsa. "What did you want again?"
***
Elsa stares into blank space. "You did not just hang up on me," she mutters.
Elsa snaps her fingers as she hits on a solution. "Explosives. We need explosives."
"Don't we always?" Brandon responds absentmindedly, already diving through stacked crates lying under the racks of guns. "Bullets, bullets, bullets, more bullets jeez were these guys planning to fight World War Four or something- there!"
Elsa barely gets a hand up in time to catch a brick of Semtex flown at her head, and her enhanced reflexes can barely catch the coil of detcord flying past her head. She blinks artificial eyes in surprise, but her combat instincts have her legs already in motion down the armory's entrance corridor.
The cyborg's augmented eyes scan the ceiling, looking for seams of rock and potential weak points. She's no engineer, but she knows a thing or two (or ten) about explosives and the applications thereof, and she's been in enough collapsing underground bunkers to know that every tunnel can be un-tunneled with sufficient boomsticks.
"You know, if you're going to collapse this tunnel and bury us all alive," Brandon's voice echoes down the narrow passageway, "at least do it right!"
Elsa blinks. Again. "Excuse me?"
"There's a seam of porous limestone above you; place a powerful enough charge in there, and you should be able to cause a major fissure in the nearby rock. Or better yet, place several charges across the tunnel and down the length, and if they're detonated in sequence, we can hit the resonant frequency of the limestone and make it pulverize some of the nearby granite," Brandon continues, his tone turning thoughtful. "Elsa, place that first charge directly above you in the first seam of lighter-colored rock you can find! Natalia, get me anything around here that goes bang!"
Elsa's cybereyes aren't exactly built for the task of "percussive underground geological engineering," but their LiDAR and millimeter-band sonar suites are still functioning capably enough, and they put together a picture of what the Traditionalist spy has planned. She shrugs and slams her fist into the limestone above her head, ignoring the dust she's kicked up, and quickly tapes the first block of Semtex into place. With Brandon's instructions, and more bricks of Semtex thrown down the corridor like footballs, the eight-meter corridor is soon wired with an impressive dotting of detcord-wired plastic explosive. The other prisoners wisely take cover in the cramped armory, two of the more experienced ones grabbing ear and eye protection.
"And before you ask, yes I did learn more than my fair share of geological engineering," Brandon says, as Naryshkin dashes for the relative safety of the armory. His eyes are fixed on the glow of her phone's display, and two Russian military-surplus detonators rest on the table in front of him. "You would not believe how many bunkers I had to search for back in my analyst days," he continues distractedly, as the complex shudders from aboveground explosions.
Elsa shrugs as she ducks behind cover. "I just figured that you liked the feel of rock-hard things in your hands. Or maybe you were all about that explosive finish, the one that gets gunk on everyone?"
"I'm quite cosmopolitan in my extracurricular tastes, you know. Male, female, tentacled monstrosity from the Great Beyond - what's not to like?" Brandon quips back. "Now, unless you can tell me the exact microseconds that I need to space these two detonations apart, kindly zip those very gorgeous lips of yours."
"You're a baseline meathead. How can you tell the exact time to fire them?"
"I have a cell phone. More accurately, I have your cell phone. Also, shut up."
Brandon takes one last glance at the phone, then sets it down and picks up the two detonators. He crosses himself, flipping the safeties off and staring intently down the well-wired corridor, and even Elsa's enhanced reflexes have trouble noticing the tiny delay between the two detonators firing.
Blinding light. Prickling heat. Choking dust.
But when the cloud has settled and the various survivors have gathered their wits together, they find themselves stuck in a small room behind an impassable seal of fallen rock. Elsa notes sourly that the spy has managed to avoid being covered by any of the dust from the explosion. As expected of Shadow Ministry operatives.
"Well," he wheezes. "That went about as well as can be expected. What now?"
"Now we wait and we prepare for the inevitable assault." Elsa says, warily guarding the entrance. The stones shift and the sound of impacts echo through the walls. "Set up traps, get equipped-whatever we can do. I don't think we've bought ourselves more than a minute or two." She looks at the motley crew of rescued prisoners and doesn't rate their chances particularly highly. There's a few who clearly know how to fight, and fight well, handling weapons like knives and guns with expertise. A few more clearly have some experience in it but can't be counted to do well against North Korean supersoldiers.
"But that's solid rock." one of the prisoners says, a man in his 40s currently looking at one of the worse-injured acolytes. "How can they tunnel through solid rock so quickly?"
Elsa doesn't answer. Brandon does. "By the power of their kung-fu grip. Also, juche. Trust me on this, she's right about the whole 'we have maybe two minutes before they find another entrance. So. How exactly did you plan to get us out?"
Elsa ignores him, distracted for a moment.
"Excuse me?"
"Oh." Elsa says. "Sorry. We didn't plan to get you out as much as we planned to take this place and shoot everything in it that didn't like us. We have the assets for that. I was just coordinating with the assault team. Looks like delivery is a go. Anybody here have a mathematics background? I'm going to need help with this whole 'dropping a killer robot through several meters of rock' thing."
A woman raises her hand tentatively. "I did signals analysis for the FSB. I think I can help."
"Good." Elsa says. "Let's get on with this."
***
Yi Kuang-Min and Yi Nam-Il have trained years for operations outside of their mother country. They know their mission is critical-to find evidence that the Technocracy has lied to the west and that the nuclear bomb that devastated Moscow was some sort of false flag by the Technocracy itself. They know that the embarassment would allow the Traditions to regain ground. Possibly even win the Ascension War as the Technocracy's modernity and logic are proven to be shams. They expected this attack to happen, which was why their base was so fortified, why the sounds of battle are occurring even now.
They sought to recapture some of their prisoners-perhaps even a Technocrat, to interrogate for more information on the nuclear strike and on Moscow. Something that could be a knife in the heart of the Technocracy's body of lies. But with the entrance sealed-doing so will be too risky. Take too long. They, unlike their brothers and sisters, have fought the Technocracy before in border skirmishes and bloody covert ops missions in Seoul. They know what the Technocracy can bring to bear. They know that their allies are now dead. The tank is gone, and with it their hopes of withstanding this onslaught. Svetlana and Valentin are dead, having underestimated the strength of the Technocratic war machine. They can die here, or they can complete their mission.
The choice is obvious. "We fall back." Kuang-Min says harshly in Korean. "We will find other allies. We will bide our time. And we know these dogs now. They will not be able to escape our vengeance. We must complete our mission."
His brother agrees. "We kill them later. Let us leave."
When the HITMark crashes through the ceiling a few moments later, it finds nothing. The soldiers are gone. Somewhere else in Russia. It sends its mission report to the commanders and dutifully proceeds to start carving through the plug of rubble standing between the former prisoners and the base.
They sought to recapture some of their prisoners-perhaps even a Technocrat, to interrogate for more information on the nuclear strike and on Moscow. Something that could be a knife in the heart of the Technocracy's body of lies. But with the entrance sealed-doing so will be too risky. Take too long. They, unlike their brothers and sisters, have fought the Technocracy before in border skirmishes and bloody covert ops missions in Seoul. They know what the Technocracy can bring to bear. They know that their allies are now dead. The tank is gone, and with it their hopes of withstanding this onslaught. Svetlana and Valentin are dead, having underestimated the strength of the Technocratic war machine. They can die here, or they can complete their mission.
The choice is obvious. "We fall back." Kuang-Min says harshly in Korean. "We will find other allies. We will bide our time. And we know these dogs now. They will not be able to escape our vengeance. We must complete our mission."
His brother agrees. "We kill them later. Let us leave."
When the HITMark crashes through the ceiling a few moments later, it finds nothing. The soldiers are gone. Somewhere else in Russia. It sends its mission report to the commanders and dutifully proceeds to start carving through the plug of rubble standing between the former prisoners and the base.
***
The Technocrats have put all the recovered acolytes and consors up into an expensive hotel for the time being, while they bring in experts to debrief them. The five-star hotel suite is a much nicer prison than the dirty stone cell, Brandon has to admit. Yet it's still a prison of a sort, even if the Technocrats were adamant that he was just a 'temporary guest' until their superior could talk to him. Until then-he'd just have to stay there. Even if they didn't say anything about guards, he knows they exist and they're watching them. Probably some jerks in active camouflage suits camping on the rooftops, watching his every move. So until they make a mistake or they tell him what they want-he'll be staying in the suite, ordering room service, and generally running up their bills by demanding the most expensive foods and liquors, which the hotel dutifully provides. It's a very petty sort of passive-aggressive revenge, especially since he knows that the Technocracy has enough money to not care-but it makes him feel slightly better and that's what counts. He doesn't know what they want-even though he knows that they're being eminently polite about it all.
It also tells him that they think he's important enough that demanding ten thousand dollar bottles of cognac isn't even slightly straining their hospitality, which means that he's either important or the Syndicate's taken an interest in him. Probably the former, given how the assets they sent looked to be entirely Iteration X, and high-end ItX at that. He got a good glimpse of the battlefield before they shoved him into a truck. Scattered combat robots everywhere, a slight shimmer of a combat vehicle with active camo-and there was that heavy HITMark that they deployed, and John fucking Kessler. Nothing NWO, nothing Progenitor, just the kind of heavy metal Ascension War veterans talked about in their war stories. Generally the ones where they talked about other people who were no longer alive, because Iteration X tended to want to guarantee its kills.
He's almost relieved when they come for him. And then he sees the petite, pretty woman who has come to visit and he realizes just how foolish that feeling was. "Jamelia Belltower." Brandon says. "And what exactly do I owe the pleasure of your visit to? I thought you were still administrating your construct in Los Angeles?"
"I've taken some time off." Jamelia says. She doesn't want to tell him about her duplicate. That would be... dangerous information.
"I'd offer you some," Brandon says, gesturing to a half-empty bottle of liquor, "but I'm aware you don't drink."
"I want to know exactly why you're here." Jamelia says bluntly, taking a seat. "And why you've been following me for the past year."
"Because you're important." Brandon responds. "And I'd like to know how. You show up in Moscow, and suddenly the city gets nuked and giant death robots drop out of the sky. You show up in London, or we think you do, and MI5, the NSA, and the CIA all go crazy and think you're some sort of arch-terrorist. Fast forward a few months, your construct is attacked by vampires and a few hours later, something takes down a number of Traditions and Rogue Council information sharing sites. Something downs the Spy's Demise at the same time. A Technocratic black ops team associated with the NWO's current leader disappears off of every radar after it spends a month running into Rogue Council and Traditions areas chasing some wild goose. All of this relates to you somehow, I'm sure of it."
Jamelia nods. "And do you have any evidence of that besides mere happenstance?"
"Maybe. Let me go and let them go and I'll tell you." Brandon says. "You're not here for some random wet-behind-the-ears students who think the Technocracy is a fairy-tale guys like me make up to scare them."
Jamelia doesn't seem to react, but Brandon knows that she's thinking through it.
It also tells him that they think he's important enough that demanding ten thousand dollar bottles of cognac isn't even slightly straining their hospitality, which means that he's either important or the Syndicate's taken an interest in him. Probably the former, given how the assets they sent looked to be entirely Iteration X, and high-end ItX at that. He got a good glimpse of the battlefield before they shoved him into a truck. Scattered combat robots everywhere, a slight shimmer of a combat vehicle with active camo-and there was that heavy HITMark that they deployed, and John fucking Kessler. Nothing NWO, nothing Progenitor, just the kind of heavy metal Ascension War veterans talked about in their war stories. Generally the ones where they talked about other people who were no longer alive, because Iteration X tended to want to guarantee its kills.
He's almost relieved when they come for him. And then he sees the petite, pretty woman who has come to visit and he realizes just how foolish that feeling was. "Jamelia Belltower." Brandon says. "And what exactly do I owe the pleasure of your visit to? I thought you were still administrating your construct in Los Angeles?"
"I've taken some time off." Jamelia says. She doesn't want to tell him about her duplicate. That would be... dangerous information.
"I'd offer you some," Brandon says, gesturing to a half-empty bottle of liquor, "but I'm aware you don't drink."
"I want to know exactly why you're here." Jamelia says bluntly, taking a seat. "And why you've been following me for the past year."
"Because you're important." Brandon responds. "And I'd like to know how. You show up in Moscow, and suddenly the city gets nuked and giant death robots drop out of the sky. You show up in London, or we think you do, and MI5, the NSA, and the CIA all go crazy and think you're some sort of arch-terrorist. Fast forward a few months, your construct is attacked by vampires and a few hours later, something takes down a number of Traditions and Rogue Council information sharing sites. Something downs the Spy's Demise at the same time. A Technocratic black ops team associated with the NWO's current leader disappears off of every radar after it spends a month running into Rogue Council and Traditions areas chasing some wild goose. All of this relates to you somehow, I'm sure of it."
Jamelia nods. "And do you have any evidence of that besides mere happenstance?"
"Maybe. Let me go and let them go and I'll tell you." Brandon says. "You're not here for some random wet-behind-the-ears students who think the Technocracy is a fairy-tale guys like me make up to scare them."
Jamelia doesn't seem to react, but Brandon knows that she's thinking through it.
So you've finished raiding a Rogue Council base, accomplishing your mission and notably causing them to fail theirs. Too bad the two biggest badasses have snuck off and are planning their REVENGEANCE against you. The HITMark magic roll was actually to cut their retreat off-if that had succeeded it'd have pinned them long enough for Kessler to finish the fight and murder the shit out of them. @Nuts!'s write-in basically guaranteed the safety of the prisoners barring the possibility of Kessler badly flubbing, so there was that. Since there are those write-ins about the confrontation, I think I may use some of those. Meanwhile, I have some questions for you!Prisoner Processing:
Are you going to let the Traditions magi go?
[ ] Yes, but give them the choice of working with you. Some might be disillusioned about the Traditions.
[ ] Yes, but they know too much. Erase their immediate memories, then let them go. IBM can help.
[ ] (0.5x) No. We can recover the information we need by force.
[ ] Write-In.
Reconnect:
Choose three facts Brandon knows.
[ ] He knows of Donald's message to the Glass Walkers.
[ ] The Virtual Adepts have tried to break back into the Spy's Demise but nobody has survived that attempt. They tended to have some very interesting stories about god-machines and machine-devils before they expired. The few who got brought back-they refuse to ever touch the Web ever again.
[ ] The Void Engineers have been hugely concerned about what's going on in the Spy's Demise, and he's met one who has offered a bounty for any information.
[ ] The Golden Chalice has been seeking information on Jamelia Belltower and has offered enormous rewards for anything that leads them to her.
[ ] His superiors in the Shadow Ministry might know something, and he may be willing to arrange a meeting somewhere fancy and neutral.
[ ] The Void Engineers have made quiet feelers about two missing agents-and he thinks he's met one of them in that base.
Downtime:
What have Harlan and Wufan been doing? Choose one besides the one that has been chosen for you.
[X] Wufan has been trying and failing to probe at Harlan and see what he knows. Unfortunately he's an even better liar than Jamelia.
[ ] They kicked down the doors on a big drug deal and absconded with all the cash (+Resources)
[ ] They've been bribing and otherwise making contacts in the hacker community who can provide SIGINT (+Contacts)
[ ] They've been setting up fake IDs and other ways of working off the grid (+Cloaking)
[ ] Write-In
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