The packet of data and ID hashes called a Soul scratched it's head-representation. It ran internal diagnostics. Vast sectors of it were null-black, unresponsive. Only the most basic of apps remained. A timekeeper function showing crazy, constantly shifting values. A map filled with junk data. The Solid Snake idle app. Memory archives.
+YOU ARE THE SOUL OF EMCEE, CRIMINAL WANTED BY EMPIRE LAW, AS WELL AS MEGA-OLIGARCH LIGHT-BENDING GUY.
It checks its backup-archives and ID-checksums and affirms. Pseudo-sensory capabilities are granted, and the reawakened soul surveys the surroundings. Visual virtuality drivers come online and rendered the world around it. There was no depth, shade, or detail. Just sheer white. The voice of god spoke from above. Or more accurately, a voice of something far beyond a god.
The voice spoke with the subdivided and delegated authority of the Emperor. Even with but a fraction of the Emperor's all-encompassing authority, the equivalent of an apathetic twitch of a cosmic giant, those permissions and authorizations hit the disembodied soul like a hammer blow.
+PER THE AUTHORITY OF EMPEROR/MAGISTRACY AND THE EMPEROR'S LAW, YOU ARE ENTITLED TO A FACT FINDING MISSION BEFORE JUDGEMENT IS RENDERED. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORFEIT THIS INQUISITION AND CHOOSE TRIAL-BY-COMBAT WITH YOUR PROSECUTOR. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT AND ALLOW FOR A DEEP DATA PROBE IN LIEU OF INTERROGATION. DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR RIGHTS AS LISTED?
"Sure. Let's get this over with."
+AS PER STANDARD PROCEDURE PLEASE BEGIN.
We took a farcast to Paradizio 4, orbiting around the solar home of Light-Bending Guy. It was the furthest planet away from Paradizio Prime, and was a criminal hotspot that Light-Bending Guy sponsored because it got its kicks off of having an entire criminal freeport on its payroll. Also, every High Net Worth Individual should have close access to deniable ops, as every. Single. Faulty. Self-help program said.
From there, we paid the bribes necessary to bring our stuff from the home office. What we were doing wasn't illegal, but it did bend protocol. See, Light-Bending Guy should have been notified by the Prosecution that a fact finding mission was supposed to take place, spearheaded by Lambent LLC. And, to the Prosecution's defense they were going to tell it. Just, you know.
When we found what we needed already, before Light-Bending Guy could purge everything.
We cleared security, no problems. Our guy that was supposed to smuggle us to Paradizio Prime needed a little convincing to pilot his modded shuttle for us, but we fixed them out quick. It was a three hour transit to Prime's orbit, where the highest spires of Light-Bending Guy's planet touched the deep black of space. Did a little research on Light-Bending Guy's personal kicks. The planet housed Light-Bending Guy's personal dev staff, leisure quarters for people who interested it, fortresses for its toys, shit like that. Absolute goldmine. Which was why Paradizio's forted up like the Ninth Endwar. Defense sats, some exotics- there was a shimmering patch that we passed which was probably some sort of self-directed nanodrone swarm - but largely invariant tech. The sort of firepower you'd expect in a low/mid-level corporate security setup, like antimatter bombs and coilguns, rather than the weapons or defenses which directly twisted matter and space and fundamental forces that got thrown around in serious hostile takeovers or when FORCE/COMBINED found some folks who needed stomping for the temerity of existing outside the Empire. We waved to the beamers searching nearspace as we passed.
"Here?" Little bastard was bold. I was holding my ironcaster to his cranium and he wasn't going to come back from that - not with the offensive programs I had gotten past his soul's firewalls - but you couldn't find a stutter. He got us through the outer defense packet of rover drones and cruisers, snuck us through the EYE//SEE buoys, and parked us right over our LZ. I made a note. This guy deserved five stars, even with the convincing.
"Ayuh," I grunted. Us three were void-hardened, equipped with stealth-commando aux gear. Multispectral chameleoflage, high-res passive sensors, and an encrypted, sheathed QEC comm for the teamspeak tac-mind, and an inertial maneuver guidance pack. Nothing that would stand up to serious weapons, but we were expecting basic corpsec, not serious hardware. +Check. Sound off. Emcee speaking.
THE TEAM (select two):
[]- +Siedr here.: Siedr's a piy champ. Not the face, but the guys that play the objective. Guy's chassis is some sort of exotic matter ghost with multiple atomic weights they could phase through. They were the cold-champ of the Electrostatic Cup, over in the Jaw Sector, but the team manager wanted them to move hotside and blow up the enemy team with nonlethal nukes, Siedr quit 'cos that that wasn't his style. That's the thing. Ask him to hang around staking out the oppo for months on end, not a peep. Steal the most embarrassing data out from under the owner's noses? He's your guy. Pick up a beamer that's more of a laser pointer? Fuck you, fuck off, he's quitting. It's absolutely bizarre, but since the other half of our job is hush hush ops, I keep him around.
[]- +Hokvod here.: This guy was ten guys in one. A xeno-origin swarmform intelligence, mated to a custom drone-printer and a talent for invariant alchemy. They got anything you need, from combat drones, EWAR spoofers and direct overriders. Their primary body (kinda) is this hunchbacked carrier, like one of those underwater invariants on Tascula, that can print drones up to five cubic meters in volume in minutes, less if they're smaller. That thing's great for running distractions, sneaking viruses into closed systems, and snaking bugs into hard targets. And also, 30 kilos of fissile material might be useless but it never hurt an op. Still, I don't like how they defend their drones. Uses a cracked version of a default firewall, which makes the primarily invariant drone constructs easy hacking targets, and the fact that they just claim that it's an ablative defense model doesn't convince me one bit.
[]- +Noor here.: Best thing to have on your side when things go down is a kickass ex-FORCE breacher. Noor liked her job so much that she brought her commando gear with her when she went private. That gear is a fullspec shell with mirrorfields, wraithskin - everything you'd want if you make a regular career out of charging through still-rising mushroom clouds and getting half your body wrecked by disruptors and inertials. She's even brought her trusty customized Kalashnikov to the fight - so if a problem can be solved by violence - annihilated by fusion shells, incinerated by beamers, vaporized by a disruptor, or sawed apart with a shearblade, she can solve it. The only problem is that she was a breacher. That shell of hers has stealth systems designed around confusing target locks for milliseconds, not avoiding sensor sweeps for hours.
[]- +Kanly here.: Our hacker. I rescued them after their hacker collective got splashed by a corpo kill-team. They were about to do some pro-gamer shit: upload some sort of psychosis virus to a corpo squad before I got to him, I never got the full details. Kanly did good work. I've never seen a lockbreaker as good as them. Their Soul's stuffed full of EWAR daemons and keys that it glows, even in realspace, like an anemone, with materialized apps waving receptor-fronds as they move. Doors? Memories? Security? Zoop, zoop, zoop. Never there, always gone. With their custom RIG 'Finnegan,' Kanly's got the hardware and the software to queue up malware in enemy tangos and obstructions. Got a real attitude problem, though. Doesn't play the objective, goes overboard, and tests out crazy experimental shit when I just want a door opened.
+As you all know, we are contracted to find incriminating information relevant to the Prosecution's case. We are to make a low-profile insertion into the primary target, listed in the dossier. We are given to believe from Prosecution's info that this is the primary server hub for Light-Bending Guy's auxiliary memory cores, as well as containing multiple objects of art. We are to prioritize information with keywords: private, slave, serf, uncontacted, invariant, and leisure. Resistance is high, Primary Target will be hardened. Weapons are low profile until we need to effect a rapid exit, with this.
I hold out a glowing dense-blue data card. It doesn't exist in the real, but for us it might as well be solid.
+Our aleph protocol will be hacking Primary Target's personal farcaster. Our bet protocol will be to escape into the private cruiser bays and escape. Our gimel-
+How many of those protocols do you have?
+I got 'em all the way down to taw. Any objections? Now's the time.
Amusement/familiarity/annoyance emoticons pulsed through the net. What can I say? I'm a jokester. The other two stood up and suited up, checking their shit. I ran an introspective bio-hack. All systems, green and good to go.
JOB STATUS:
[]- Desperate: Operating costs are high for people like us. Pay's higher too, and if I bungle this, I shutter Lambent Beat and go back to polishing my resume. So I'm razor sharp, a bit jittery. Empire's credo is that desperation is good for you, spurs you higher. I hope it's true. Otherwise I'm a mite bit fucked.
[]- Run of the Mill: It's whatever. Our accounting's good, finances got good margins for error. It might make the team complacent, but what the hell, worrying too much takes it out on you. I don't need doubts running through my crew now. They're pros, so I expect the same pro work I get out of them.
[]- Charity Work: Fuck, guy, my heart's soft. After all that shitwork of fucking over motherfuckers, for motherfuckers, all you want is one good thing. This is my budgeted one good thing. Prosecution's no oligarch, I checked 'em. They're an invariant concern charity, and you always, always give money to charities on the street.
Equipment check. Suit's sealed up. Fuel for the maneuver pack's topped off. My antique ironcaster, shaped like a hammer designed to kill the world, reports full integration with my field-breach penaids and its magazine of semi-guided kinetic-kill vehicles is fully slaved to my personal ECCM programs. And my favorite...
ASSET SELECTION:
[]- Stealthed CQC/MOBILITY Killform 'Badek': The Badek is a Zanj Co. manufactured shell for moderate-intensity corporate conflicts, and displays their signature edged grace in it's dual mode quadruped/biped movement. Composed of obsidian black self-healing smart-matter surrounding multiple redundant low-power darkfields and inertial generators, Badek's lightweight construction allows to to strike first, strike hard, and strike often, assisted with an integrated high-cycle shutterwarp that allows the chassis to rapidly reposition itself in combat. Its information warfare capabilities are focused on offense rather than defense, with multiple integrated pathogen-labs that can evolve precision-targeted malware and viral strains in real-time with a wide variety of detrimental effects. Spread vectors include an integrated ironcaster, the disruption-field coated claws and deployable accessory longknife, and conventional network protocols. You have furthermore attached multiple single-use explosive drones to it, with payloads ranging from hard shutdown EMP, anti-matter detonation, omniphagic greywash, and microsingularity. Slaved to Badek's tactical computer, these are capable of self sustained, self directed flight.
[]- Brutal Brawl Body 'Berimbau': The Berimbau is a very simple, and brutally elegant repurposing of drone secondary drive nodes into a personal conflict resolution system. A cheap inertial field generator and a zero-time hypercomputer to control it, mated to, two primary arms and a tertiary manipulator limb. The lightweight armor layers and motorized skeleton largely exist to give it shape and provide something to attach the antimatter-generator/reactor and battery-organs to power the drive and its governors. The inertial field is its primary defense and an offensive solution as well - it can be intensified to create a pseudo-shearblade effect around the skin, cutting through matter with a spatial distortion, and field repulsion allows the chassis to skate across the battlefield in all three dimensions. In addition, it carries two internal weapon mounts. As of now, Emcee may deploy a short range scatter-beam weapon that is laced with broad-spectrum viruses, and a simple pop up molecular disruptor.
[]- 1st Generation Infowarfare Commando Shell 'Beleth': Sometimes, old solutions can get the job done too. Dating back to FORCE/COMBINED's forces in the First Expansion Epoch, a very long time ago, the Beleth was a top of the line multirole combat chassis when built, with its compatibility with all known personal battle armor handheld and hardpoint mounts, EM-absorbent stealth plating, hypercontractile shape-memory sinews, and the earliest personal-scale comprehensive Architecture-mediated infowarfare suite on a commando chassis which, at the time, took up a good 40% of the body volume. The Beleth's infowarfare suite might be far outdated by current FORCE standards, but it outstrips its closest competitor in the mostly invariant price range and escalation level, while possessing milspec inert matter-hacking, no-contact malware via remote EM/quantum generation, and real time basilisk hacks. Beleth has been further updated by (also ancient) bodyhacker communities: the micro-ARC fusion reactor is now a modern Architecture tap, with composite armor impregnated atom-thick monopole scalemail and implant several stealth and defensive field generators, while revisions to its self-repair nanohives provide it comparable operational capacity to "modern" low-end commando chassis.
"Void us." Pilot's all too happy to agree. The rear section of the shuttle unfolds like a cocoon and we fall towards the atmosphere. Conditions were sheer clear. Albedo was accounted for, and we put all our systems on sleep mode. The drop packs are smart enough to know to keep us decelerating through the fall, make sure there's no reentry heat that might give us away. We touched down at the LZ at 0600 and booted up our systems under the sun's rosy glow. We had 2 hours to complete the task.
Noor set her Kalashnikov to the tachyonic-antimatter beam and cut through the sheet of field impregnated metal blocking the access shaft. Radiation and matter scattered into the atmosphere, an oil-slick aurora. "Hope that doesn't trip off any alarms," Noor grunted, plunging one hand into the white hot outline and ripping the cut section away, exposing the highest floor. We landed, two quiet thumps and one loud clump, on the highest floor of the spire, a latticed bulb of a-steel set to allow the visible EM spectrum to pass through and illuminate the half done interiors. Very ritzy, from the still undefined interior-dec objects.
"Shouldn't be." Kanly was unfocused, but even then they had enough clock cycles to hold a conversation. "Not big enough. Could just be explained as an accident, or emissions. Okay. Sensors slaved on me. Noor, your ports aren't open? There." A laser right beam of data punched between them.
"Happy huntin'," she said to Kanly and me as we coded vanderwall surface topography into our palms and soles. Microscale flexible irregularities rose on our shells, and we left Noor to set up a temp command center on the uppermost floors. Noor's signature is too high. Her stealth profile is best measured in combat relevant timeframes of milliseconds, to throw off target locks instead of sustained stealth. Better to keep her in standby until things went FUBAR and we needed someone FORCE-relevant expertise.
I kept the model of the spire in my immediate memory. First kilo was leisure, mixed with light business admin. Beepee's good. We crawled on the walls and the ceilings, out of the direct LOS of the few who were still here. The Badek's darkfield slid a few pings away from me, and Kanly, well, they were running an IFF hack. They couldn't recognize them.
It was a good environment for that kind of movement. These floors were constructed in a retro futuristic style, where the cutting edge meant a lot of open spaces and high ceilings. Big, almost FORCE styled brutalist cubes rippled in and out.
Even after all these years, nobody builds sleeves with 360 degree vision unless they really need it. That's how Kanly and I scuttled across walls, under gantries, and over the heads of the adjuncts and the CEOs.
+Hey, Kanly?
Noor on the line.
+What?
+Remember how you said that the radiation burst wouldn't be a problem? Remember?
Kanly swore. Inside, but I knew them well enough. +Oh, fuck you. It's a problem now.
+Yeah. Housekeeping coming up to take a look. Unless you want them to be a free floating molecular cloud, stop them before they get to me.
+You heard her, boss. Coords?
+Look down.
We did. An octet of repo sleeves were marching under us, talking to each other in the ultrasound range.
_Of course they'd do this shit when we're on break.
_Yeah. Fucking microwave burst. Who'dya think set it off? I bet it's Chzy's kid. Hate that little gene squirt.
_Eh, let's just hurry up. I need to get back to the superchat.
Kanly and I shared a look, and we began executing the protocol. I engaged my shutterwarp. Kanly pinged their ports with a sedative virus. _Hey, I think I'm bricking-
Shunk.
First one down. I forced my knife into the spinal SOUL-shunt, discorperating them permanently. They're running on slower cognitive cycles than me. I can see them react, milliseconds too slow. I blipped out of reality then back into reality, looped my arms around my second target's neck and broke it. The spinal cord was exposed and I jammed a finger into it, viruses and malware coursing from my pathogen labs into their critical systems. Another two were foaming up, from solid matter into an aerated, bubbling mess. Another was killed by my integrated ironcaster. Two shots and then their defensive fields were gone and the viruses were worming to their brains. A third was sniped by Kanly's personal gundrone.
This took about three point eight seconds. Four were dead. Two were rebooting from backup drives. The last one was the boss, who had to be ex-sec, from the way they moved, the sharp, angular actions of a Panzerkust skill-soft backed up by… I pinged their internals. Yeah, that was a stripped down commando shell hidden under the repair sleeve.
It was suspicious, but not that much. There had to be so many discovery agencies crashing the places they worked at and murking them that they said, enough is enough, I'm splurging my paycheck on something that can defend me against these psychotics. Which, fair.
They struck a stance, limbs at the median line, facing me. I didn't have the time. Would've liked to give them a what-for, but we were on the clock. I pulsed a command at Kanly and they broadcasted a full spectrum hack, from visual- all around them the air changed color. A basilisk hack- to audio- it was a terrible noise like the sound of a matter being torn to bits in a singularity's event horizon- to pings. The firewall ignored most, let some through, and I shutterwarped behind them.
They were too slow. Their arms were lagging, slower than their intent. They said something, but I ignored it. I grabbed their leading wrist and threw them to the ground, and my knife plunged into their left dorsal dataplug. Perfect G-Judo throw, calibrated to Vitruvian biomechanics. Malware disgorged from the blade and the sleeve turned an odd shade of green as bits of their peripheral mass began to flake off in big sheets.
I looked around. Six corpses in rapid decomposition. No stealth team worth the name would not have a necrophagic on hand. Two still booting up. I injected an amnesiac into their system. Behind me, Kanly raised a hand. Their other was deep inside the chest cavity of the leader, angry red-violent streams of data flowing down their arms into the carcass. +We have a problem.
I was running sensor sweeps in the immediate area. Our ironcasters were emissions-masked, but it was never enough. Scanners and cams had us fingered. +Yeah, I know. We're picked up already.
+That's not the problem. The problem is the pig has a silenced alarm. I didn't pick it up.
+Oh.
Shit.
+I'm slowing the ping, but there's only so much I can do. I've sent a bunch of conflicting instrs. Hope that'll slow the loop, but our raid time is shorter now.
Noor popped back up on Codex. +Just putting this out there, but we'd cut down a lot of time if we just cut our way to the center.
It made some sense. We were tooled up fairly heavy, so a punch through is within possibility. But this is a mega-oligarch here. They always had something nasty in their hordes. The number in our bank account flashed in my brain. Too low. I didn't want to wagie. But would it matter if I ended up in Light Bending Guy's personal torturebox? +Okay. We're going...
[]- LOUD: Regroup with Noor and storm the internal farcasting network into the most heavily shielded data-sector.
[]- QUIET: Do not break protocol. Continue to the service highway, find an administrative nerve center, and query the server.
[]- GHOST: Find a security hub and task Kanly to erase Emcee's tracks as they pass through the spire alone.
We were deep in the guts of the Spire, hacking through the front door with picks and programs. The door to the vault we've got a bead on is one tough sob. Along the way we hit a security node and scooped up some passwords, and we used them to come up with a couple of likely matches for the key for the vault. Except the hash triggered another alarm, so I had to run around the entire three-click physical network representation blowing up nodes, with Noor running a skillsoft on my processors, so I didn't screw up the demolitions. So now Kanly's given up and busted out some matter hack. Converted what bits of the giant vault door, taller than some hab-blocks, that was left undefended after they had a go at the firewall into strange matter, eating up and turning everything else into more unprogrammed strange matter, which was promptly backspaced out of existence by Kanly, again.
I'm so close. We have ten solid hits on our search strings in this vault, out of a total of fifteen. +Done. Standby for blast clearance.
We did so. Noor puppeted my limbs and placed three microsingularity grenades along the tunnel Kanly's hack bored through. Nonlethal radiation, atoms and subatomics decaying into crazy frequencies of energy, sunk into the darkfields in my arm.
Boom. The great door, a monolith of field impregnated invariant matter, reinforced with chronolocked blast panels, with white-secworm programs, crawling through the matrix, was warped apart, crushed, and otherwise spindled into a bundle of circular hoops radiating waste heat on the ground. Three microsingularities created a tunnel, barely large enough for Kanly and me to wiggle through.
"We made it. Guess you don't have to write us recommendations, huh?"
+Keep to the secured channels. But you're right. We're on a clock. Noor, get down here. Kanly, let's move.
+Ten four. Noor's line cut out, but her blip's moving downward, tracing our path. She'll be fine.
There was this giant Vitruvian, golden skin, perfect symmetry, hung upside down on a cross. Old, old thing. +Huh. Never thought Light-Bending Guy would get into Evangelist chic, Kanly commented.
+It's obviously Rosicrucian. Hurry up, will you?
I could tell that Kanly thought I was full of spam. We still moved on, searching through the well catalogued madman's art gallery. The artful detritus of the Empire came to Light-Bending Guy. That was its thing. Not as rich, or as arcane as MR. BIG. Not as entrenched with the movers and shakers as the Zanj Board. Among the greats, a bottom feeding leech. But in the logic of the market, leeches and cockroaches lived on while the sharks and tigers ate each other whole.
Anyway, there's a lot to be tempted to flich. One of the side pieces, let's take this vitrified brain in an iso block. The Architecture around it bled, another language overwriting the Empire's code. Probably worth a couple of stellar objects. A historical ironcaster, without even an internal munitions printer, probably older than some black holes, and not in the sense that there's some that were born minutes ago in some foundry somewhere, in the sense that it's older than naturally made ones.
We went deeper. The vault changed, the roof closer to us, the walls closer. Trellises of preserved invariant commando shells, leftovers from a FORCE/EXPEDITIONARY expedition passed us by. We walked over engraved stock transactions of companies long dead, carved on ivory tiles. Hands of people who crossed Light-Bending Guy, all stacked up so so neatly, waved at us.
There was no singlular theme, except memory. Eons and eons of Light-Bending Guy's memory, made real and spoiled out from its neurons. Victory after victory, atrocity after atrocity, odds and ends that it must have thought was important. I was walking through a magnificent monster's memory lane.
+Must be good to be rich, I broadcasted after a while. +Anyone got anything?
+Found a couple likelies, but they're all legit. Top and top. I'm not seeing anything that might hit… no, I just did.
Kanly's right. They stood at the foot of… something. It looked like a globe, just a simple brass one. It's encryption was too, too strong for me to unravel. +What's this?
Kanly tapped the plaque. For my own edification. My own kingdom. +Looks like something commemorative. Hey, maybe Light-Bending Guy killed off an invariant civ. You've seen the Expiditonary trophies. Guy probably likes that stuff.
That's it? That's all? Just this strange enigma. The Prosecution was expecting something ironclad. No, hoping for. Except they were only satisfied when their hopes were up and good. What is this? Nothing at all. I took it anyway. I would have stored it away in my inventory, but it was too dense for my decoders to break down, so I just stashed it on my shell. +Fine. Noor? We're done here. Get to the- Noor?
+I'm not reaching her either. What's going on?
+Check if we tripped anything, I ordered, turning around and bringing all my weapon systems to bear. Power usage surged, background processes shut down. The air, all of a sudden, felt hot like I was near a generator. Like I was-
Movement ping!
I whirled around, ironcaster and blade at the ready. Only Kanly, who pulsed shock at me. Nothing moved, and I didn't find anything, even running nine full strength sensor sweeps. +Do you think something's here with us? Local RAM's being used.
+Yeah, boss. That's me. I'm trying to punch through the local jamming. Local sec's discovered us.
That made sense. Spam up local memory with junk programs, make us devote resources to freeing up some space, and move officers into the vault. I hoped Noor's with the program. We might not have enough strength. +Okay. Move.
We retraced our steps. Nothing changed. That really got to me. And that damned ping kept coming close. Flickering in and out of my perception. I told Kanly and they set a daemon to overwatch, except that dumb thing couldn't detect anything at all.
Kanly and me made it to the welcoming chamber anyway. I thought I was just jumping at ghosts. Except.
+Where's the Vitruvian? Kanly asked, half curious, half terrified. Something old and monstrous and light and deadly as killing light landed behind us.
.01% OF LIGHT-BENDING GUY'S ANCILLARY BRAIN
NET WORTH 13,974,682,367 COMPUTATIONAL HOURS
KEBEROI OF THE MASTER'S VAULT
I was an idiot. I should have checked the Vitruvian. I saw it and dismissed it, placed it right next to the invariant soldiers with only slightly modded musculature. Of course Light-Bending Guy would leave a booby trap. Too high on success, too hasty. My bad.
The thing, Light-Bending Guy's guardian, was wrapped in a cloak of distortion. Waste emissions from it's own internal processes baked off the golden sheen, leaving only veins. +Kill it! I barked at Kanly, who queued up some attack program. Didn't help. The Vitruvian ate up all the local data to run anything. That must have been the heat I felt in the air. It was the source of the jamming.
It moved before I did. I flew back, into the vault door. It caved in my chest, and ripped off my arm. Self repair routines went to un-concaving my chest cavity and sealed off the fluid healing veins splattering white lymph all over, as the darkfields came back online. It just cut right through them. And now it did the same with Kanly, who's shell was not rated for the fist of some fragment of a god of capitalism and fuck-you-money to rearrange their internals with blunt force.
+Noor! Noor?
Nothing! The jamming's still thick as a star's core. Fine, then. It was me.
[]- ABANDON: Kanly can buy you nine seconds. Use it well, and come back for them later, or maybe never.
[]- MURDER: Eliminate the guardian while it's distracted. This is probably the last time it will be somewhat distracted.
[]- HOSTAGE: Force the guardian to choose between finishing off Kanly or watching Emcee blow up the rest of the vault.
Bodily integrity restored, minus a limb. Smart matter's healed up, the field generators at 87% capacity, some fritzing on the ends. At least it was just an unmodded Badek. Enemy consists of one Vitruvian, modded into some killbeast of pain. I'm reading pseudo-invarient hyperdense self healing armor, high-bandwidth Architecture tap that's burning up the local Architecture, and I couldn't even guess what kind of weapons it was packing. Maybe it's skull could unfold into a GUT ripper. Maybe it's blood was a programmable nanoswarm.
I had one hope. Either the Vitruvian had more sadist logic in its programming, in which case Kanly's dead, or it could play the objective and protect the vault. Then, Kanly lives. I stood up and rushed towards the insides of the vault, knife flying towards one of the display cases, containing a set of incisors from three extinct genelines.
One moment, the Vitruvian was doing the knuckle flamenco with Kanly, the next it transposed itself between the case and my knife. Velocity bled from the knife as it drew closer. Inertial drain! I overclocked the musculature of my remaining arm, overdrew energy from my reactors until the heatsinks burst into protesting whines.
And then it grabbed me by the head and threw me against the floor and stamped on me. Two viral vectors, but no virus contamination.
+Get moving, Kanly.
+Understood.
Why? Why didn't it have any infowar? Sure, it was a defense that was probably only rarely tripped, but why didn't it have one of the most basic of combat defenses? Kanly dove out the door. Good. I stood up, testing out my new center of gravity with a couple of test swings. It raised its fists, slowly, sadistically, rubbing its knuckles in an avaistic basilisk hack, a threat display.
One part of my mind separated from the rest, becoming an impartial observer. A beta level clone with access to a small percentage of my computational resources and read access to my thought streams. The Vitruvian, it said, is an antique. It is not the hypereffecient kill-shells of the Empire, it has too many dead end features of undirected evolution. Therefore-.
I ignored myself. Talky shit.
It moved first. Blue Cherenkov radiation shone off of its shear-fields, atoms being ripped to shreds in it's passing. It was slower than me. Inefficient biomechanics, but for every joule lost to heat dissipation, it made up for with GUT rippers on the ends of it's knuckles.
I ducked under the first haymaker trailed by a slash of hot rads, spat a virus infected ironcast munition at its chest and blipped away. The munition round shattered to bits against the shearfield, millimeters above it's skin after it penetrated the inertial drain. The armored skin fizzled and foamed where the fragments hit. No pen. It's almost invincible.
-Its a matter of tradeoffs. No matter how good it's machinists were. You can assume that their kill-logic is top notch, programs are lightweight. Power will be an issue. The Vitruvian form is unsuited to heat dissipation.
I could cook it from the inside.
Yes. Or, my fork continues as the Vitruvian swings it's fists in fast motion, you could get Noor to attack it. Her Kalashikov is FORCE issue. You could force the issue.
Either way I need her, I thought, leaping over a chain reaction of atoms being torn apart into radioactive energy. It was swinging its fists around. Every time it touched something it decohered into nuclear blasts. This was a good thing. It was gunking up it's own sensors, while my darkfields ate up the low-yield atomic bursts.
+Emcee?
+You're standing. Are you capable?
+Yes.
+That's all I need. Get Noor on the line, I ordered as I shutterwarped past the door
+Emcee, this is Noor. I'm in 34.112.4135. Local security's furious. What's the situation?
+We have obtained our needed intelligence. We are being pursued by a high threat sentinel. Data squirt your way. I beamed over the relevant timeslices and ran down the hall, Kanly on my back. Their shell was not up to task. White lymph was dripping out of bruises and abrasions that were not healing fast enough. I'll have to talk to them later.
"They're there. All units converge-" Triple tap. The sec that rounded the corner fell to the ground, and behind me the Vitruvian punched it's way out of the vault in a nuclear conflagration.
+Noor, get to my location. Kanly, can you walk?
They were fixing themselves up. Sealed up all critical organs, now they threaded a daemon-command through local reality and made their shell move the way they wanted to. Affirmation pulsed through the net. +Good. Then get to the farcaster. I pushed them away, stowed the globe on their shell and faced the Vitruvian.
You are down one arm, my fork pointed out. What's your plan?
Win.
My one arm holstered my ironcaster. The longknife sprang back into my palm. The Vitruvian kept on running. It ignored me, my first pass skittering harmlessly off of its defenses, chasing after Kanly.
Looks like whatever it is is important, I thought.
Unless it's programmed to retrieve everything that leaves the vault.
Fair.
I grabbed onto it's ankles, it dragged me along. My darkfields clashed with its shearfield as it stormed after Kanly, who bleeped distress all over the comms. I'm working on it, but they wouldn't trust me. If I had the clock cycles to be annoyed, I would be.
It punched through walls. Kanly hacked local defense systems and tagged the Vitruvian as an enemy, bathing it in plasma-fire, stitching beamer pulses after it. No luck. It soaked up the fire and keeps on running.
I finally got a good foothold. Diamondoid claws dig rents in the floor as Kanly slams the last door, the door to the internal farcaster shut. Three feet of monopole-matter and a glimmering firewall of who-knows what. It comes to a halt, the matter under my feet screeching in protest.
Finally it deigned to look at me. I regretted this course of action three seconds later, when it pasted me against the wall, dragged me all across the walls like I was a paint tool. It was beginning to disassemble me like an infant's stimulation game, fucking build-a-bot. Ripping away the armor panels, playing with the tertiary fiberoptics. It-
Rat-a-tat-tat, one wall tears under the weight of a Kalashikov's shatter. A swarm of ironcaster munitions, each attached to an inertial anchor, ended their orbits in the Vitruvian's body. It was swathed in an aurora as Noor moved in, haemolymph and ashes splattered all over her chassis as she blazed away. Multispectrum beamers joined the barrage, and by this point I could not see the Vitruvian.
+Missing an arm, Noor noted.
+Give me your's. She laughed, a sensible chuckle. +Kanly, how's the farcaster? Open the door.
+I just incapped the crew. The override's taking a while, and the field of exits are… narrower than we expected. All of it puts us in this system. Pick one and I'll start configuring it.
[]- HOOK: You're back on Paradizio 4, where you can take the farcaster back to safe space, or hijack a transtellar voidcruiser. Except Light-Bending Guy probably has a bounty out on you, and every shitpunk with combat chassis will want to test you.
[]- JAW: Paradizio 2 is a second tier planetoid, where the vast majority of Light-Bending Guy's employees work, rest, and live. It's linked to the farcaster network and even has a voidcruiser bay, except that Paradizio 2 has Light-Bending Guy's surveillance network all over it.
[]- NAIL: You are in a Solarium LLC (Personal Corperation of Light Bending Guy) deep space exploration voidcruiser. Complement nine commando-marines, three civilian crew.
We exited the warp right in the guts of a voidcruiser crawling away from the Paradizio system, which I felt was the best place to be. The farcaster linked its terminus point right into the space warping engines of the voidcruiser Fargone Days. Lucky for us, Noor still has relevant qualifications for breaching ops in her CV, which I always felt was a bit overkill for searcher ops but always comes in clutch in situations like these.
Even before the sensor fuzz cleared up, Noor activated her shell's hazardous enviro routines and blindfired eight variable-pen ironcaster munitions at the most anomalous patch of fuzz. When it did, we came to an engineer lying in pieces with the remnants of their IDE lying in representational pieces orbiting him, and klaxons blaring on all spectrums.
We were still pros. Kanly stopped to scrape up the last bits of sec-data on the engi while Noor and I stacked up on the door. She breached it with a wide-beamer burst and we were coming up the ventral access shaft running from the HQ to engineering, protected by eight dissipator shields, in case of critical overload. Standard procedure, my beta-fork noted, was that in case of boarding, severing charges should be detonated and the crew quarters separated from overrun sectors. Except, voidcruisers are dear to any corporation that operates them, so Solarium LLC is chancing a countercharge.
A three-team of commando shells comes down the access shaft. They're bringing out all the stops against us, but they obviously let standards drop. The firewalls are easy for Kanly to punch through, their formations easy to punch through. Noor dumps kiloerg after kiloerg of high energy waves down the shaft, while I take potshots at the marines with my ironcaster. They cut all their combat sim budget on crap, and now they're paying the price.
We're halfway up the shaft, air hot and overstuffed with Kanly's RAM-eaters, depriving the defensive systems of computational resources. The pop-up daemonforms deployed flash-fab beamers that lasted for all of one millisecond before they experienced critical system failure, spilling their information out into realspace in crazy auroras of light. Noor advances, her FORCE-spec shell hardened for real deployments, where new suns are kindled constantly. A little bit of fuzz isn't anything to her. The six remaining try to flank, but Noor's Kalashnikov can chew through this voidcruiser's outer hull. The internals are nothing. Four of them go down in the first volley, sigs going from active to surrender. The last two ninja out of this sector, mostly intact.
Me? I took it easy.
We killed our way up the shaft, into the HQ. Foam specs, degenerated matter, and stranger stuff coiled around us. I made a note to get Noor a bonus- she's been meaning to go to Jungle one of these days, and this op justifies the vacation cycles.
They gave. +surrender! Surrender! the ship's LT pings us. +who's boarding?
+Lambent Beat LLC. I sent a cease fire command at Noor, who's already cooling off her Kalashnikov. +Sorry, fellas. Hope insurance covers that.
The voidcruiser's defenses spool down. "You guys?" the LT opens the blast doors, where I can see what's probably the XO fixing a hole in their skull. Not at all related, the LT has an ironcaster in their hand. "You hit Paradizio, ya? Good heist, though you fumbled it." The LT has a conversational tone, like they're discussing a piy game. I like them. Their shell is a pinnance, a bulbous, weak thing built to interface with the 'cruiser. And they still took a gun to their XO's expensive toy. "I'll send an invoice to your office, if it's still there."
Huh? "What do you mean by that?" The LT gestured to the nethook on the 'cruiser's console. It was showing a newsfeed, Paradizio Local. Noor and Kanly peered over my shoulder. Singular, heh.
START LAMBENT BEAT LLC IN VIOLATION OF PARADIZIO SECURITY POLICY
"Expected that," Kanly nodded.
BEGIN PROSECUTION OF LAMBENT BEAT LLC FOR VIOLATION OF EMPIRE SUB-STATE CONFLICT REGULATIONS 1.c.I- 1.cIII 1.c.I relevant entities will agree to the time, place, and nature of the conflict.
1.c.II any violation would allow for either an escalation of conflict or a case brought before EMPIRE/MAGISTRACY.
1.c.III finally the offended party may escalate two steps and no further.
"We can fight that in court, I think. Charity can handle costs." Noor. "Bet their lawyers can make Light-Bending Guy look like a sore loser." And no one likes a sore loser in the Empire. Especially because we operated under a completely different set of regs- the corporate conflict suite. Yeah, we bent those a little, but that's just normal. Advantage pushing. No magistrate would agree with Light-Bending Guy, I hope.
PUNITIVE RAID LAUNCHED AGAINST LAMBENT BEAT LLC.
"Aaand there it is," I muttered. There was a timeslice hyperlinked to the last announcement, I opened it and it was about as bad as I expected. Office in ruins, there goes our stock. At least our data's in the cloud under a premium account with a reputable company. "Noor, round up the crew and keep them under lock. Kanly, you get to what needs fixing and get us the fuck out of Paradizio."
They nodded and began their tasks. I opened a channel to the Charity- Empire Concern for Invariant Persons- and waited for them to respond.
>//. SITU FUBAR HAVE CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE?
Three milliseconds. Decent response.
>//. SEMI-CONCLUSIVE. PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION OF POSSIBLE NON REGISTERED INVARIANT OWNERSHIP.
I waited for their response. All I could think was that maybe this could be the end of the op.
>//. GOOD TO DECENT. WILL CUT ALL CONTACT & DISAVOW KNOWLEDGE OF YOU.
Motherfucker on motherfucker.
>//. WILL STILL PAY IF YOU BRING CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE. DOUBLE-TREBLE. SORRY WE CAN'T HELP. GLHF.
"So since we're not invariants, we can go space ourselves, huh?" I shake my head. Double or treble won't cut it. When we're free of this, I thought, we're going to shake them down for an OOM more. Plus operating costs. +Noor. Kanly.
+Here.
+Here.
I sent over the log and waited for the cursing to stop. +Alright. Let's discuss our next move. We're not illegalized, but we're the second best thing- trapped in legal limbo until a fact finder figures out what the hell is going on with our situation.
+How much credit do we have? Kanly. +You know it's not enough.
+Our first move anyway should be immediate security. Debate everything else later, when we're in deep space. Good work getting us on a DSV.
+You burned half of it.
+And you'll fix the rest. Noor shrugged over IP. I was operating the voidcruiser console from a tactile interface, opening up the navi-gears. We're a bit out of the heliopause, limping away in our drive bubble. Burned up ansibles, overloaded the sensor systems. We're running blind, and Light-Bending Guy had enough net worth to outfit the system with a couple of heavy duty interceptor-voidcruisers. And, of course, we have nine marines, two of which are in full capability and the rest fixing themselves up from redundancy. In other words, possible hostiles.
OFFICE RENOVATION Select two.
[]- Restore Engines: You're gone. You might leak so much EM people halfway across the sector can see, but that's their problem.
[]- Restore ELINT: The drive bubble's crap, but that doesn't matter if you're just background radiation.
[]- Secure the Crew: As long as they're clear for infil-ware, you can use them to crew the ship. And nine commandos never hurt anybody.
[]- Eject the Crew: You don't need them. They can hail for help, and you can't risk the security breach.
NEXT MOVE Select one.
[]- Homeward Bound: Return to your home system and salvage what you can.
[]- Into the Black: Disappear into deep space and begin investigating available evidence.
[]- The Chop Shop: Contact criminal elements and get a price for Fargone Days and your disappearance.
