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[X] Search around the town for any clues as to what happened here

The town seems so peaceful. It's not silent. You can hear bird song, the sound of night flying insects, smell flowers, and hear the slight hum of drone systems. The only thing that seems absent is people.

Something feels off though. It's not just the fact there's no one here. You know it at a pre-conscious level. If you were good at something like the Lemnosi battle meditation maybe you'd be able to figure it out immediately but you're sure something isn't right. Everything looks normal, both to your own senses and sensors, and to the drone that Reizay has launched to cover the town.

But Alex is right. You don't like this place.

"Did you sweep this place?" You ask Miri.

"No, we stayed out of it." She looks around, carbine up and catapult at full deployment. "Too spooky."

"What's the play?" Mirareki asks, moving up to join you.

"Well, you're the hazardous area expert, any ideas?"

Mirareki looks around. "We take it slow. Teams of no less than four and everyone stays in sight of one another at all times. Lidar on visible and very low power. Here." She pulls a bundle of tubes from her webbing and hands you one. Inside you can see a set of ceramic disks. "Toss these ahead of you as you go. It's primitive but it works."

You divide up into teams, making sure each group has some of Luyu in it for firepower. Your own team is two Luyus, Alietta and you. The Eternalist is silent and still but you can see she has her backpack microphone extended.

"You have something?" You ask her.

"I'm not certain." She looks around. "I think there's something wrong with the bird song."

You move out through the town, checking each building with swarms, with T-wave, by looking through the windows and then entering. There's nothing odd about them. They're all simply buildings. The same kind of thing you're sure you've seen in a lot of places.

"Blade-Six, this is Blade-One." Mirareki says. "We've found something odd."

"Accessing your feed."

You pull up Mirareki's helmet feed and for a moment aren't sure what you're seeing. Looking at her map coordinates you realise she's lead her team off the main street and down into the alleys behind. They've broken, seemingly at random, into a house. The inside of the building is wrong. It's like a stage set or a doll house, rooms far too small for human habitation, honey combed together to hold up a facade.

"They look normal to T-wave, but if you go in or send in a swarm, this is what the interiors are like. They're all fake."

"The birds are fake too." Alietta says suddenly.

"The birds?"

"Look." She brings up a sonic graph, and its Juketta for a moment. "These sounds have the wrong entropic structure for a real set of independent speakers. It's not birds. It's a simulation of the sound of birds."

"Don't like this. Don't like this." Luyu mutters, her weapons and combat drones scanning around the empty streets.

"Why would someone set it up like this?" Banara asks. "What's the point?"

"Pretty good lure for an angler fish." Miri mutters.

"Okay, but we landed in the centre of it." Mirareki says. "If this is a lure, then what's the mouth?"

<<We have incoming from Neph side,>> Shendra calls in suddenly. <<It's under countermeasures, already inside what we thought was the exclusion zone.>>

"We need to move," you say. "The Nephilim sent something after us."

"We still don't know where the trap is," says Miri.

"That's still speculation. For all we know it's ornamental," says Banara. "All these machines are mad."

"Cut the chatter." You order. "Make some distance on foot and then hide. Somewhere with good cover outside the buildings if you can but inside if you have to. Signal silence."

The team moves quickly and silently. The task has papered over the tension but the situation is too ambiguous to rid you of it entirely. You and your team resort to hiding in a greenhouse, amid fake plants arranged to seem plausible from outside. Your countermeasures sink you into the backdrop of frauds.

The birdsong and insects ring in the night. Nothing moves. Your breaths are long and slow, filtered through your mask to almost eliminate even the residual air disturbance. After a long set of moments you see the Nephilim appear; a shimmer in the sky, then a shear, then a block, a blunt cuboid hanging there just as things like that shouldn't, above the centre of town where your lander set down. You don't know why it's dropped its countermeasures. You reach out a thought to Alex but hear nothing back, and you realise she hasn't spoken to you in some time.

"What's it doing?" whispers Banara, next to you.

Its drives come alive. In reverse. As fast as it arrived it starts to leave and then it can't. It's pinned in the air on nothing. All around you the buildings shrug in an unfolding ripple and susurrus and then long thin limbs with joints irregular extrude from the structure of the settlement and lean in toward the interloper. The greenhouse blooms into a mess of ribbons that reach into the sky and leave you and Banara and the others rolling silently in the false garden, desperate to move, but not daring to as the town uncoils on the Nephilim and impales it. A hundred needles from every angle. The trap pries it apart and drops the corpse to the ground and quiet as it bloomed the town returns to its residential sleep.

"We," you make yourself say, and then broadcast to the others, "need to get out of here."

You reconvene in the woods outside. Real woods, so far as you can tell. You mount your bikes, riding hard between the trees.

"No way they didn't see us," says Luyu.

"It's like when we scouted before," mutters Miri. "They ignored us. The trap was only ever for the Nephilim. They don't care about us at all."

"Bullshit," snaps Luyu. You and Miri look at her and the speaking body is the one the cybernetic, "They shot my arm off."

"We just walked in and out of a bear trap pretty as you please!"

"They weren't shooting at a Nephilim behind me."

"Guys." You're not feeling much better but you need to keep this from escalating beyond tension. "Let's keep moving."

You begin to pick your way up the hillside, a long slope of rocks covered in a thick layer of thin trees. Alex is silent. You can barely even detect her processes turning over. You could really do with her input right now. Ever since you started exploring the town she's been barely a whisper, hidden as deep as she's ever been.

Oh, of course. You know why. The mountainside feels very cold and very steep and full of blades at the edge of perception. You're standing on a precipice and a wrong move will bring all these people who trusted you down with you. You've put everyone in terrible danger.

Luyu starts on the private channel. <<What about your->>

You snap your weapon up. "Contact left!" And everyone follows, including Luyu. But there's nothing there. "Sorry," you say. "False alarm. I'm also on edge."

But Luyu's taken the hint. You see understanding in her face. The Emim here are only attacking Nephilim. But Nephilim are posthuman systems. Just like you. If they realise you're carrying Alex in your head, everyone is dead.

But that doesn't resolve Luyu's objection. The Emim shot her arm off.

"What was different inside the prison?" asks Mirareki.

"Maybe they were panicking?" says Reizay.

"That doesn't seem right. Or it's too flimsy. This is their operational epicentre, they're not going to slack off security."

"Well besides us it was just the prisoners…"

"Possibly they mistook us for Nephilim servitors because it was a Nephilim facility? Or the prisoners… the prisoners were host to Emim infectious material. But they didn't prioritise targeting prisoners, they picked out combatants. They could see all of us. In the presence of the infected prisoners… I have an idea."

"Shoot."

"They're some kind of deviated Nephilim. The Nephilim have a mental block. They can't leave the region around the observatory. They can barely even think about it, you saw the freaks they made when they had to get around the problem. Those Elioud."

"So the Emim are the same?" You think you see where she's going with this.

"They have a different block. They can't perceive or think about us. The prisoners were a way around that, they made us perceptible to them… but I don't know how they did that if they couldn't perceive the prisoners in the first place."

"The Nephilim did it," says Luyu. "They can see us, so they know the Emim can't, and this way they can turn their enemies against one another. The prisoners… oh, fuck. That's why they let us get away so easily! When the wider Emim network gets wind of the prisoners we rescued, they'll open a second front!"

"We'd better warn them." Mirareki says.

"If we transmit out, we could blow this whole thing." Miri looks up. "They were in network isolation. They'll be kept there."

"You want to bet everyone's lives on that?" Mirareki glares at her

"You want to bet our lives?" The twin special op says, just as fiercely.

[ ] "We'll transmit a warning as soon as we're well clear of the town."
[ ] "No, we've got to stay radio silence and trust the Writer and her cohorts know what they're doing."

"Either way, we have a job to do. But let's pick up the pace. Because if the Emim start seeing humans that means they'll start seeing us."

"The Observatory is just up ahead." Miri points. You see it coming up above the slope. The Observatory sits up ahead, a vast silver tower standing against the sky. Posthuman material. Around it, various sub buildings, power generators and the like stand silent sentinel.

You move over the crest, careful not to skyline yourself, and drop down into the rocks beyond. Nothing moves in the area around the Observatory. No, that's wrong. There's something in the trees, stepping placidly forward. A precise configuration of limbs and geometries around a bare and perfect sphere that flows like liquid to reveal new formations and conjunctures. Mesmerising perfection. It makes its way through the forest and the hills pausing and moving at instants, revealing symmetries and asymmetries in jagged succession.

It stops and there's the cry of machine noise.

"Is that an Emim?" asks Luyu.

"Or a Nephilim?" asks Reizay.

"No," says Mirareki. "Or, I hope not. I checked the signal and environmental salt against the database. Whatever it is, it has White Stone Black's private key. The posthuman that governed the last attempt to turn this place on."

"That's a posthuman?" Reizay whispers.

"It's something under the direct control of at least a significant chunk of one. Or with control of the same before it could kill its privileges." Mirareki says.

The thing starts moving once more, across the mountainside, in your direction.

"White Stone Black has little record of hostility to humans," Mirareki says. "It let us work with it on the activation attempt. But it's supposed to be dead."

"Can we sneak past it?" you ask.

"If it can see us, I really doubt it. For all we know it's seen us already. But maybe it can't."

"Can we kill it?" you ask.

"If it's a direct control posthuman unit it'll make the nephilim look like a drone screen. But with an ambush maybe we can overwhelm it. Maybe."

Then there's a third option.

What do you do?
[ ] Try to sneak past it
[ ] Try to kill it
[ ] Try to talk to it