87 – Status Reports
The Headmaster stood, hands folded behind his back, in a lonely blue circle as the rest of the Ruling Council faced him upon their elevated seats within the shadowed chamber. They did him the courtesy of wearing the smallest and most nondescript of psi-screens rather than the more fearful open designs which would display their distrust of a psychic potentially reading their minds, which was nice of them. But in the end, he knew they were politicians. Better politicians in character than the Dominion or 'the miners' as the third major power in the Korprulu Sector were often dismissively called, but politicians all the same. More idealistic, certainly, but then he was a Shadowguard. He knew just what was needed and what had been done to ensure that such a bright and shiny idealistic society could even
exist at all rather than be a dream of philosophers. He made sure to stare straight ahead, as he knew that they would find his unblinking stare uncomfortable despite their relationship, just as he knew that he would wait for some undisclosed amount of time for them to peruse the files that had been delivered to them. As if they had not already read through them twice before this clandestine meeting was called in the first place.
"She tore a
battlecruiser down, and then crumpled it half to pieces," one of them scoffed, slapping the data slate on the table. "And wasn't even winded?!"
Almost immediately afterward another of the Council sighed and began to rub at their temples with the tips of their fingers.
"You've repeated yourself, and that phrase, about half a dozen times now Phillipe, despite how you shuffle the words about," the woman almost growled.
"A battlecruiser!" the man nearly shouted again.
"
Moving on from that," the Headmaster coughed, "The results of our testing are conclusive – she was made as a weapon."
"Well," a balding man grunted, fist held beneath his chin, "It's not like that isn't entirely unexpected considering what she's shown us. What else do you have?"
The Headmaster furrowed his brow before continuing to speak.
"We've extensively gone over her sheer physical power, it's the finer details that she struggled with…initially. Frankly speaking she's quite clearly a psychic prodigy, and beyond that an extremely competent student."
And wasn't that the truth, he acknowledged silently. She took to the reading materials with a will, and basic scholarly introductions to the many fields that a Shadowguard would require access to had been devoured almost eagerly. Scratch that, definitively eagerly. A staggering lack of fundamental knowledge about modern technology and history but that was easily rectified enough. An orphan pulled off the streets of Umoja might be the same, save for the fact that she knew even less than that. They had no real idea where Yuriko Thirteen had come from, and despite their best efforts they could not quite seem to figure out even a hint of that place.
"Her…mental defenses," he noted idly how some of the Council shifted at the words, one of them even having the open gall to have a hand tug worryingly against their psi-screen before they realized he was looking, "Were quite frankly atrocious and -," he held up a hand to forestall the immediate series of outbursts from the men and women facing him, "-
and fine members of the Council if you will let me speak?"
There was a series of muttered exchanges that he didn't bother himself with listening to for a good minute before they turned to him once more.
"Despite our attempts to scan her mind, to discover her origins, or any other truly pertinent information, we have been unsuccessful. The sheer trauma-," he paused as some of the Council began to outright shout.
"You've had months with this girl, how can-,"
"I thought the Shadowguard were supposed to be the premier-,"
"Ladies and gentlemen!" the Headmaster called out, dragging their attention back down to where he still stood. "If I could continue my report? I know for a fact you've got plenty of more notes, and we can move on to questions later…
after I'm done?"
For just a flicker of a second, his eyes glowed with psionic light, before it disappeared within a single blink of an eye. Silence was his answer, and he took that to be good enough.
"We've further moved on to studying her…patron, who if I'm not mistaken is currently responsible for the salivating of our entire R&D efforts regarding the protoss. In point of fact, the technology he has been providing to us still resonates strongly with psionic experimentation
without relying wholly upon the 'Khala' of the protoss we've encountered so far," he gestured for a moment and a holographic screen appeared to display the strange yet definitively alien technologies given over to the Protectorate. "
Where he is getting them is still not fully trackable for us, though we suspect it is beyond the current reaches of space held by any faction of humanity."
Another twitch of his fingers and three large sigils appeared upon the screen instead.
"We have had, despite our best efforts, little success in infiltrating the three groups that appeared soon after our contract with 'Mann' – if that is even his real name."
It would be not precisely right to say that the Umojan Protectorate was the premier stealth and infiltration-capable nation in the Koprulu Sector. In some ways, others were better, but that number was getting smaller and smaller with every year. Which was why it was somewhat frustrating for him to admit failure.
"Have we even confirmed that Mann is in control of these people, or that he employs them?" one of the Councilmen tilted their head as they gazed at the symbols.
"The Virginian Revenge, Scions of Anarchy, and 'Kurtz' Kids' have each individually been seen with Mann upon their flagships at some time or another, though whether or not he is giving them orders or something else is…currently not known," he had to raise his hands with the palms out in order to forestall the next interruption even as he knew it was coming, "
Yet we can tell that they are making use of the accounts seconded to them. Black market exchanges of stolen goods, from foodstuffs to weapons to technology, is ongoing with multiple customers in Deadman's Port."
There was little to be actually seen in the chamber, but the Headmaster was still capable of seeing if not fully feeling the tightening of lips and crinkling of skin around narrowed eyes. They were frustrated, and likely disappointed with how well the Shadowguard had been performing lately concerning Mann and his charge. It was one thing to have trillions of credits worth of technology thrown at them for naught but one woman's attendance to the Shadowguard academy. It was entirely another for her to outstrip the strongest human psychics ever found on record save for – perhaps – one or two incidents elsewhere in the sector. The pride of Umoja had suddenly become a factor in the ongoing discussions, to be so forcibly humbled by the apparent power and resources of one and the sheer psychic might of another.
"I've heard of that," Councilwoman Wotan hummed, "I think they're calling those exchanges 'Dominion Bazaars', from the whole…," she waved her hand vaguely in a circle, "Massive amounts of contraband and stolen weaponry."
"Yes, it is proving to be even more lucrative than we thought it would for Mann, given our initial projections," the Headmaster nodded slightly.
"I've heard that MannCo itself is hiring itself out as a police force," another member of the council said before terminating in a cough, "Or PMC. Or both."
Another twitch of the fingers, and the screen flickered to a wild series of graphs, charts, and names flickering past in a long moving list.
"Indeed. While Mann is running…or organizing…or at the least
interacting with the previous three groups, MannCo itself is shaping up to be on the face a fully legitimate company."
"From nowhere," one of the council noted, the sarcastic drawl in their voice unmistakable.
"From nowhere, yes. On that note, as near as we can tell, he is
not in fact from the UED, but we haven't fully confirmed the veracity of that theory," the Headmaster swiped his finger along the screen, bringing the automatic scrolling to a halt. "In any case, MannCo is proving itself an able security force across the Sector, and they've proven to be more than capable of tearing apart anyone who comes up against them."
The images that appeared on the screen were evidence enough of
that.
"Here, they were put on contract guarding a remote mining post held by one of the minor Guilds from the Combine.
Here," the picture changed, "They're hunting down pirates with frankly overwhelming amounts of force," the picture changed again, "And here, with seemingly no regard for their own lives, they tore each other apart as two
different Guilds in the Combine hired separate divisions to fight each other."
"MannCo is willing to fight
itself?" he heard one voice incredulously say.
"MannCo is willing to
kill itself," he replied, the images showing the utter devastation in space between multiple wraiths and battlecruisers in orbit around a moon which even now was still being contested. "Apparently Mann has the, if you'll forgive the inevitable wordplay, manpower to simply throw away at itself."
"And yet people are still hiring them against themselves?" Councilman Phillipe scoffed.
"In limited cases, yes. There are nearly mountains of paperwork to be signed out as they purchase either 'Ruby' or 'Sapphire' divisions," the Headmaster lifted first one hand and then the next with the two designators.
Images shifted to reveal the open colored sigils on the two separate sets of marines which charged at each other upon a battlefield on some forsaken rock or another. There were literally too many to count when it came to the Koprulu Sector, so he did not bother doing more than putting the recorded name of said rock on the screen without comment. In but a moment, dozens were dead on the battlefield, their blood seeping into the stone, while yet more dropships arrived to dump off marines and medics.
"Extremely rich minerals on this particular rock, hence why two Combine families are trying to get at it. MannCo is perfectly willing to throw its soldiers into the grinder again, and again, and again, either delivering bombs into enemy camps or whatever else needs doing."
"And there's no concern that they are working together or something? That they might be colluding to extend their contracts?"
In response, the Headmaster moved to the next image, which showed a clearly high ranking member of a Ruby MannCo force having his head violently torn from his shoulders by the clenched hands of one Sapphire marine.
"Maybe at the start but the sheer violence MannCo is willing to extend its guns to, depending on who has been hired and who the target is, has put that theory to an uneasy rest."
Things slowly shuddered to a halt after that. They asked questions that he had already answered either verbally or that had been provided to the documents they'd been given. He answered them regardless. The Council hemmed and hawed, but the fact of the matter was that they simply had not yet been able to crack much of the enigma of Yuriko Thirteen or Mann at all. It was frustrating, to be sure, but simultaneously intriguing for him. How long had it been since he had retired from active service to become the Headmaster of the Shadowguard Academy? Since he'd had a real challenge much at all? Not in the form of some rampaging horde of zerg or overly righteous protoss, but something more…intellectual.
Eventually the meeting ended, and he more than happily left the city on a stealthed transport back to the Academy. Despite all their advances and the stringent training his kind went through as a group, it was unavoidable that the more crowded areas of humanity were an uncomfortable buzzing in the back of the mind of any sufficiently strong enough psychic. Two more of the senior Shadowguard on Umoja flanked him as he sat, their minds as alert as ever, though he could feel curiosity tingling through both as they more 'felt' than so much as saw the files he flipped through on the way back.
"Sir…," one, the male of the duo, finally spoke up.
"Speak freely Adrian," the Headmaster jerked his chin at the man, "No need for codenames or titles here."
The Shadowguard rubbed the back of his head uneasily.
"Is she really as powerful as they say?"
The Headmaster lowered the files in his hands, and turned to fully face his graduated pupil.
"Yuriko Thirteen is the most powerful
consistent psychic I've ever seen. Small instances of specific breakthrough outweigh her, but not by that much. She can crumple battlecruisers, battleships at sea, and lift up weights that would blow brains out of the skull of any psychic that tried," he pointed to all three of them one at a time, "All of us included. She's nearly an equal to the Queen of Blades, or to wherever November Terra ended up, and that's just at the moment. Her powers are growing the more she learns, which is true for anyone, but her?"
"I heard that uh," Adrian cleared his throat for a moment, "I heard that she hasn't even topped out yet."
"Exactly," the Headmaster nodded, "She hasn't. The sheer amount of fine control and power it requires to simply levitate literally everywhere you go is immense, to keep yourself level even more so. But as near as we can tell, all her training up until this point was outright violence, nothing mental or fine, without damn near
any of the techniques that we teach. But the more we add to her repertoire, the more powerful she gets."
"I have a question sir," the other Shadowguard finally spoke up from where they sat opposite him in the shuttle.
"Why haven't we killed her?" he finished before his student could. "Because, I don't think we would survive the reprisal."
"So we're just…," the Shadowguard clenched her fists, "We're just…
willingly giving training and techniques to this unknown woman, for this unknown man? What if she turns on us, what if it's all a ploy to learn our secrets and tear us apart!"
"Alana, have you
seen the kind of firepower Mann's got? He could probably burn Umoja down in a day if he wanted to," Adrian replied, before the Headmaster could, "He's got us over a barrel. A weird friendly barrel, but a barrel all the same."
"And we're just supposed to be okay with that?" Alana crossed her arms, "Just be okay with this girl getting stronger, improving her skills and abilities, because he's giving us all this protoss junk and helping out against the Dominion?"
"I mean…I'm not
okay with it," Adrian, "But I accept it."
"And that's the way of things," the Headmaster interjected, looking from one to the other, "We do this because we are ordered to. Whether we like it or not is beside the matter. In the beginning, yes, I'm quite sure that they assumed that Yuriko was Mann's daughter or something, a wealthy man who wanted to ensure his offspring had the best possible psychic education money could buy. By the time we determined the real truth of the matter, it was rather too late to step back."
"Bullshit," Alana growled, somewhat in time with the shuttle bouncing in the airstreams as it escaped the city limits. "We could have told him off at any time."
"Yeah, because the great philosophers of the Council are
definitely going to give up on the man who has given them such ludicrous amounts of protoss tech," Adrian snorted. "Divergent from what we knew or no, it's going to allow us to
leapfrog the Dominion given enough time at outright exponential levels."
"I know, I know," the Headmaster hummed, "It doesn't precisely sit right with me either, but that's just the situation that we're in."
"Still a ways out from the Academy, Headmaster," the pilot's voice crackled over the comm, "We can go faster if you want, though."
"Do it. I want to get back to the Academy as fast as possible."
===================================
A small flickering in the lights was the only sign that the latest hearing devices had been set on loop. By now Yuriko was reasonably sure that the Umojans had figured out that something was amiss but it wasn't as if they could stop it even if they wanted. Which she was also reasonably sure they did. Unfortunately, such things were doomed the moment they had allowed Mann to put some of his marines on their planet and in the Shadowguard Academy. Shrugging the thought of such intrigues away she instead elected to float back onto her bed and bundle up with her blanket to let the aches and pains of the days training disappear.
"And…done," Nobu grunted as he placed the disk on the ground.
"Greetings, lass," Mann chortled as his image projected upwards from it, his crafted barrel chest openly on display.
"No shirt today, Mann?" she tilted her head even as she asked the question. It wasn't as if he actually needed it after all.
"Nah, trying out the whole 'big captains coat' thing without a shirt. Seems to work to intimidate people when I show up on planets that they need near-on hazard gear to be to negotiate contracts."
Yuriko scoffed at the ridiculous man, but there was a small smile hidden in it at the same time.
"And where did
you get experience doing that sort of thing?"
"Well right now of course," he smiled widely before hunching slightly as the smile shrank slightly. "I uh, probably got swindled pretty good early on. But considering the fact that I'm doing it over and over again, you've gotta get experience somehow right?"
"I…
suppose," she shrugged. "Is it easier for your more official stuff, or to be a pirate?"
"Piratey stuff," Mann answered immediately. "That's
way easier. I give you this, you give me that, if you betray me I'll make you walk the plank-,"
"Airlock-,"
"-
same thing," he stressed, "and in turn they'll shoot me or something."
"Not like that would work on you though," she pointed out, carefully stretching out on the bed while continuing to look at him.
"Hasn't stopped them from trying. I've been blown up like, ten times by now. And only most of those by the pirates and thieves and whatevers."
Yuriko paused at that, and for a moment decided to just contemplate that the sentence she had just heard had, in fact, not made her freak out at all. Was that a good thing or a bad thing that she simply accepted that Mann could be utterly torn to shreds but so long as he could reassemble a body he would be…well, not precisely himself again but mostly the same? Then she decided that she'd been dealing with his ridiculousness for years now and since it wasn't likely to change that she'd just move past it. It wasn't like there was anything else to do about such a thing but have a panic attack or something and just wasn't her.
"If anything, I'd suspect that it would help your reputation."
"Oh, it has," Mann's smile then had nothing friendly about it whatsoever. "Anyway, on my end, I've pushed 'Amon's Chosen' back to their one remaining world, all of the rest of their tech is either being stored away or being shoved down Umoja's throat."
"That's good," she found herself saying…and believing, if she was honest with herself. Part of her had wondered if that was a sign of sociopathy that she was enjoying the knowledge of a near-extermination of an entire sub-race…but then she thought about it some more. The rest of her had discarded the previous part. "But what about the Arkships you were telling me about?"
"Ah, them. Yeah, I went and looked them up, as well as the Xel'Naga ship with the other artifact piece."
"Ooh," she turned on her side to face him again, "So now you have those rip-field generators?"
"Yeah," he nodded happily, "They're…kind of weird, and you have to line your own forces around them with either shielding or, well, I dunno yet, the weird materials the Xel'Naga use for their own stuff, but other than that, they're pretty neat. The ship itself is cool too, if a little too open to the air for me."
"If you had your way everything you made would be a giant cube of guns," she snorted.
"And that's a bad thing?"
"Not necessarily," she drawled, "Just not, you know, the most…aesthetically…good," she finished lamely.
"Uh huh," Mann rolled his eyes at the old argument. "
Anyway, I've tagged the rest of the artifact locations with troops, so even if Amon or one of his cronies decides to go after them early, then I can drop a few metric fuck-tons of firepower on them."
Yuriko chuckled before flicking her finger at the light switch, causing the rest of the room to dim.
"Only a few?"
"It could be more than a few," he admitted. "Anyway, how was school today?"
"It went well. I'm getting better," she smiled, even if it was now in relative darkness save for the dim illumination of the holographic projection. "Not, you know, stronger necessarily, but…it feels good to be like this again."
"They
really put the military in you, huh?" Mann's tone was joking, but even then…
"I suppose they did," she murmured. "Is it so wrong to appreciate the discipline? The…"
"Comradery, and the…yeah, I get it."
"I can't just hate
everything about my existence," Yuriko sighed, though she wondered about that as she stared at the ceiling.
"It's not a pleasant feeling, no," was Mann's almost inaudible reply.
"But," Yuriko blinked slowly as she summoned visible psychic energies into a small ball above her which flickered and crackled, "I don't know how long I'll be here. How much longer, I mean."
"I told you, you can take as long as you want, remember?"
The orb began to slowly spin in place.
"I remember, but…,"
"Yuriko."
She let the orb disappear and looked at him again.
Mann had, despite being a holographic projection, leaned back against the door to her quarters. His face, when not keeping up the boisterous pirate exterior, had drooped back into the same tired expression of, well, Guy, from before. It didn't matter that he had entirely different facial features now, in this moment, he looked like Guy to her. But then he smiled, and shrugged, his hands in his pockets.
"We have all the time in the world, Yuriko. Don't worry about it. You could, hell, you could go to a university or whatever here, get a few doctorates, and all that."
"I know. I just…feel like I'm the one who is being frivolous. Coming here. Making you do what you had to in order to get me here."
Mann shrugged again.
"It's no trouble. Believe me, I've had more than enough of trying to do 'higher purpose' stuff to last me a lot of lifetimes and over two galaxies."
The darkness in his voice gave her pause, as it always did when they skirted this topic, but this time she forged ahead just slightly.
"But…you're still…doing good here, right?"
"Well…," Mann shifted uneasily, "I suppose. The Dominion in and of itself isn't…
bad, it's just run by a maniac, who employs maniacs. Amon is
blatantly evil, what with the whole wiping life out entirely thing…I mean…,"
"You don't have to save everyone at once, you know," she offered up, though she swore she saw another mixture of emotions she couldn't immediately identify cross across his face.
"Slow and steady…cause that's never gone badly for me. Yeah, yeah, I guess. But enough about me, seriously, how was your day?"
She knew he was redirecting, but…well.
Like he said.
They had time.
"Well, they brought in a few new psychics who were born on some of the worlds within the Protectorate, not Umoja itself, and I swear…,"
She pretended to not notice how relieved he was as they spoke of smaller things.
