“Well, that’s an augury of violence if I’ve ever seen one. An entire block flooded with thoughtstuff. They’re massing alright. Looks like we’re going to have that fight after all.”
“Or shit’s fuckier than we know. You think the Ori–”
“Yep. Absolutely. If there’s an open jar, the half-strands from the Incubi probably got one of their invisible fingers dipping inside. Well, they might even be the jar in the first place, running a dive on themselves. Like in Kososo.”
“You think your uncle pretending his gates are down will get Greatling to pull something stupid?”
“Enlightening, Reva. Glad to see our little cadre’s being headed by an intellectual.”
“Yep. Know what I think? I think this Mirrorhead doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Well, come up with whatever mad-cap strategy you want, but bunching your fighting-meat up in one place all of a sudden isn’t exactly subtle. And frankly, there’s not enough of them. Of course, if the Ori have their hands on him someway somehow, they might be feeding him false intel to start a fight in Nu-Scarrowbur as a distraction. Like in Kososo.”
“Now we just keep watching. We got the time. We got the Longeyes’ support. And we got four-on-one if it comes down to a ‘Clad on ‘Clad. Far as I can tell, we basically got called in to do a milk run.”
“...Reva, why the fuck did you have to use those words?”
-Conversation between Reva Javvers and “Tigertail,” Bloodthanes of Stormtree
Avo’s mind slowed to a halt as he overlaid Draus’ perception upon his own.
From on high she gazed down at Nu-Scarrowbur, the roof of her newly stolen aerovec was practically scraping the ceiling of Layer Two. Physically masked by the phantoms simulating midnight, her cog-cap remained low as she used the confusion of her environment as attention-ablative plating.
Clever. There’s a trick to keep in mind.
Trickling veins of traffic rounded the countless shield-shaped structures of the district below her. Every two blocks or so, an Exorcist’s Specter hovered, a satellite between intersections, each establishing a new watchtower for surveillance.
Missing were the patrolling golem knots of the Scalpers or any trace of their associated members operating in the street. At a glance, this seemed an obvious reaction to the presence of the Exorcists, but clearer omens stood in former Syndicate-owned blocks now mostly vacant of thoughstuff and loci signatures.
If the district was a portrait of climbing colors when regarded in the Nether, several major spires were now devoid of luster, bland in a sea of growing voluminosity thanks to the encroach of Tier-security.
+I’ll try to get a closer look,+ Draus said. The heft of tension was as if a solid block inside her. She welcomed its weight, reveling in a task fit for her purpose. She yearned to see if she could evade the notice of the Exorcists entirely, leaving her Incog unstrained. +How’s the shit on your end?+
He checked Essus’ signature. The former father wasn’t moving, surrounded by two flanking accretions. +Going to get Essus. Block is ours again. No sign of any more Incubi. Yet.+
Pulling the Crucible mem-data secured from subverted loci, two other memory profiles appeared. A hype-feed advertising a double act who fought with minds in sync and wielded wisping drones lined with threads of monowire. Two upcoming razorgirls–twins named Tsuni and Prani Mandrahupta–were set to “perform” with him.
All details indicated they were recent contract acquisitions made by Conflux–their backstory vaguely similar to Essus’ own, being twin daughters surviving the ascent up a Scalper Crucible while their father didn’t.
Unlike Essus, what memories the systems offered presented them as savage husks hollowed by drugs and vicarity addiction. Chrome as they were on the outside, inside was already rot and rust. Death for them was a question of when, and not if.
Somehow, Avo doubted the father enjoyed being around them, despite being billed as the “family bound by trauma” act the Syndicate was selling. That was fine. Avo had just the thing to resolve this mistake. +Going to get the father out of the mess now. Stay synced.+
+Alright. I’ll see what I can figure out from this. Ain’t no way Conflux is makin’ it to the stormtree. Exorcists are godsdamned everywhere. It won’t take nothin’ for a Paladin to come a’ thunderin’ if they get reports about some kind of rogue ‘Clad tearing up these here Warrens.+
He considered the implications and pulled over some mem-data from Mirrorhead. +You think he’s plannin’ on burning through his own as a distraction?+
+Most likely possibility. They make the noise. He gets through with his golems and does his suicide run. A balls-out assault might-could cause enough chaos, and all he needs is one drone with some kind of reflection to make it through the portal. Then he’s up and ready to do somethin’ real dumb. Alright. I’m gonna inch in closer. Cast me if somethin’ happens.+
Her session went dormant.
A yowl sounded from Chambers and a most disquieting sensation of squealing rat-spiders emerging from a hive of wounds bled across their joined thoughts. Ignoring the former enforcer’s complaints, Avo placed a waypoint just behind where Essus was located, and the Blockcrawler drilled on, melting through alternating layers of plasteel and plascrete as its legs clanged and trudged through wrinkles of melted slag.
Another option to solving the Conflux problem, Avo realized, would be to alert the Paladins and the Exorcists through a loud enough disturbance. Mirrorhead, however, was certain to escape–or die by the ends of another. That would be a most unpalatable resolution to something they spent so much effort on.
More and more, it seemed his best choice might be to distract or trap Mirrorhead somehow and then null all of Conflux to simplify the slaughter. The greatest risk remained the Syndicate boss himself: Avo had the mem-data for his adversary’s Frame and Ontologics–he would review with Kae once he was finished with his present tasks.
A voice sounded inside him. The Woundshaper was roused by his thoughts. “You delay matters you are wary of facing. Why not just kill him and be done?”
“Flavor,” Avo said. “Want to sample Mirrorhead’s thoughts. Want to understand him beneath the armor of his divinity. His taste that way will be more… sublime.”
The old fragment of fallen divinity hummed a single note of dry regard and said no more.
They were at level four hundred and ninety if the DeepNav was accurate. A sprawl of sealed tunnels lined his vision as he noted where the paths led, deeper beneath the crust of the earth itself, sinking into the dark of the Penumbra, where former factories and bygone industries languished untended but for Syndicates, smugglers, FATELESS, and the things touched by the Low Masters.
The place where Essus was to perform wasn’t nearly so deep–his current area was a block lobby similar to what they arrived upon after their own Crucible, ascending to the gutters from the tunnels of the Penumbra stretching up from the level of the Maw
Segmented into a maze of winding rooms and with all exits sealed, the survivors were free to run and hide however they pleased. Ultimately, it wouldn’t matter. Conflux never intended on them getting out, and the layout of this “small event” was a testament to that.
Twenty winding and cramped paths were made so via crudely fabricated walls planted in the middle of the lobby. The only true way to escape was vertical, and even then, there were seven drones with gauss repeaters on turret duty.
These were certain to be snuff recollections. Nothing more.
Or at least they were before Avo’s arrival.
The Blockcrawler slipped through a molten wound between energy junctions and found itself crawling around the interior of a sealed silo. Along rust-coated blast doors did its magnetized steps sing, and down in the black, Avo could see the collapsed remains of an immense cargo platform lodged sideways against the interior walls, warping the pillar it was based around.
They were forty feet from Essus now. From him and the other thirty Conflux personnel loitering about. One was hissing wounded thoughtstuff into the Nether. They laid in the corner, and from the damage, Avo marked them to be the Necro in charge.
Another victim of his mem-cons. Probably the reason why they were delayed as well.
A shuddering noise choked out from Chambers as he started bouncing in place. Looking through glitching details offered by the Blockcrawler’s locus, fifty-six signatures flashed as a simulated model of the rooms beyond was woven in shape by a swirl of phantoms. “Alright, voice–agh, fuck. We’re here… now, where’s the godsdamned Woundhound? I need it–ohhh–I need it bad. It feels… like it's about to unlatch.”
Avo ignored Chambers for now. The Woundhound came later. Right then, his only goal was to make contact with Essus. After that, if the man was still himself, then he was due a stake in Mirrorhead’s execution.
Maybe there was a measure of solace in delusion. The man deserved to pass with pleasant thoughts of his boy, not rusting away as an instrument of slaughter to a will not his own.
Mustering his Heaven and slowing time, Avo deactivated his Incog and cast out his Whisper. It was a pain being unable to use his other phantasmics when hidden, but perhaps once he started binding ghosts to shards of loci created from his blood, he could afford to operate with a new sense of flexibility.
For now, there was little worry: the Necro was down and the rest were distracted. Snaking through matter, Avo brought the mem-key he made from the Incubi to bear as he injected himself straight into Essus’ thoughtstuff.
This time, he didn’t bother concealing himself.
+Essus. You still there?+
Sinking deep into a sea of mem-data, the sequences wavered momentarily. Confusion was the first taste to greet Avo. Confusion and surprise. Then, the mind came alight, the surge of perception flowing through every sequence. Disbelief and refusal broke against the ironclad presence of hope. Like watching a cloud thicken in slow motion, Avo witnessed Essus’ thoughtstuff compose a response.
Peeking out from the father’s perception, he found himself looking through enhanced eyes. Old Ascender Hawkeye Mark Is. Traces of mem-data were missing from the chrome’s functions as if someone did a sloppy job manually deleting some root memories integrating the implant. It looked like a jailbreak performed without a Ghostjack. Messy and dangerous. Essus was a few integers away from getting his perception shredded.
Amateurs. These things weren’t meant to be done without a Ghostjack, and even if they wanted to go makeshift, they needed the requisite memories to achieve stable extraction. The fact their raw eradication worked was more a testament to luck than skill.
+I… have… been… waiting… for… you.+
Essus’ response came slow throughout Avo’s review. A substantial number of implants weren’t even at proper synchronicity. Cross-corporate augments always took substantial tuning to work together. Though the technicians did what they could mechanically, the fact remained that Essus’ body hated itself. Highflame-backed Ascender optics were struggling to communicate with a Stormtree-aligned Grendel exoskeleton while most of his supporting implants were street-grafter garbage. Avo wasn’t a grafter himself, but a quick pull from Conflux memories described the father as being a “spite job” by Mirrorhead and a “shit-fuck cyborg held together by hatred, patch jobs, and other questionable fluids.”
Avo felt himself frown in the real. Few people got what they deserved in New Vultun, but again, fate harbored a special hatred for the father.
Flicking a glance at the thirty-four Confluxers, Avo regarded the two razorgirls with fleeting interest. Their thoughtstuff was more porous than a joy fiend’s. Hitting them with Lucille’s Agony would be like popping a bubble considering the content of the trauma. The others were barely protected even with their wards. A low note of pain escaped from the Necro leaning in the corner.
He let time regain its pace to better facilitate a conversation. +Yeah. Came back. Made promise. Mirrorhead’s time to die. Conflux’s time to burn.+
+Stable. And sane,+ A trickle of broken amusement spilled overfrom Essus. +I didn’t not think myself capable but… I always hoped you would return. They claimed you were dead, but I…+ He smiled then. +I lied to myself then. But the lie was… was a lie in itself...+ He chuckled. Through his perception, a nearby tech shot him a weird look.
“Uh, Lingerer? You alright there, consang?”
Essus froze. He turned to face the man. “Yes. Better, in fact. Artad’s blessings.”
The tech’s flickering blue eyes swiveled as they shot a worried look at one of their cohorts. Working to fix the night’s murder-filled entertainment, they were spread wide, some assembling wires, other prodding at drones. They weren’t ready for what was to come.
+The locus,+ Essus said. +Where the… the watchers were supposed to come through. It broke with the uh… the mind-thief fell ill.+
+Yes. Necro’s hurt. Going to finish him in a moment.+
Parts of Essus’ thoughts wavered like a tattered flag, but by testament of will, the man was still sane, still capable of composing his own thoughts. Wounded though he was, shattered but holding was yet the right descriptor.
+I have… done terrible things,+ Essus said. Shame followed. Emotions were breaking inside the man like a dam. There was no time for this. +I refused to kill at first but they… they put memories of other children dying inside of me until I…+
+Essus. Can’t make that right. But Mirrorhead’s not watching now. Bomb in your head won’t go oft. And the Necro is down. You understand?+
Slowly, he felt Essus offer him a nod. +Yes… yes…+
His fist lashed out, the blow a surprise to himself and Avo both. The tech he just spoke to barely managed to widen his eyes before death came. Titanium greeted flesh and the bones that comprised the Confluxer’s jaw emerged as a burst of darts through the back of his skull.
A cry of alarm rose–and droned as Avo accelerated his reflexes.
Around him, a few personnel and the two razorgirls imbued with the enhancements of neurachem or other reaction booster moved as if inches, twitching barest increments before his gaze. The rest might as well have been frozen solid.
The first targets were the twins. They were chained in mind and action, moving in tandem as they ejected the threaded monowire drones out from their spines. The drones didn’t even fully detach from their bodies before they broke.
Synaptic lightning forked through the Nether, striking the closer of the two. Ghosts imbued with all the pain in Lucille’s Regret splashed against wardings and wardings shattered. A mental scream sounded for but a beat before it was subsumed by the banshee howl of channeled traumas.
As he blew out the first razorgirl’s mind like a candle, he watched as his traumas overflowed across the link so fast the second mind in the conduit burst immediately after the first, wards popping like a lightbulb after her sister was extinguished.
A glitter of thoughtstuff speckled his Metamind. Only shadows of memory remained of them.
Shadows, and a fortuitous secondhand realization that one of them had a Woundhound injector on them.
Leaving the techs for Essus to slaughter, Avo slipped his Whisper out from the father’s mind and cast torrents of mind-nulling ghosts at the already crippled Necro and the drones. Then, he scanned the minds of the survivors. Two Auto-Seance sessions were unsequenced from inside their minds. A thoughtcast toward a nearby locus containing a Nether lobby for the block was nulled mid-travel.
In effect, he was tearing the sound out of out of the Confluxers as they screamed, neutering any chance they had of survival.
Much like they planned for the twenty people trapped within slatted sheets under the pretense of playing a game of death and survival.
When no more possibility of escape remained, Avo slacked his haemokinetic mass and slipped back into Essus’ mind.
The following brutality could be encapsulated in a single word: Catharsis.
Bodies broke and smeared against walls. Limbs came free of sockets and splattered further against skulls. Nonoptimal cyborg that he was, Essus was rage unchained and grafted toward the sole purpose of dispensing crude, vulgar violence.
Vulgar violence the techs were helpless to halt with their crumbling morale and absent martial prowess. Without enforcer protection and the overwatch of their drones, the resulting moments belonged to a nature documentary. Read complete version only at novel•fire.net
Avo remembered the No-Dragons promoting a patch release of one of their nu-hornet variants made to eat away the near-endless swarm of locusts spilling out from a rupture near the Silk Spiral. Cradled in the mind of the hornet, he experienced a wholesale culling as the bioform tore through the cloud of locusts, its crystalline form and virulent exoskeleton cutting the pests from the skies via blade and plague both.
What Essus performed wasn’t nearly as impressive in terms of magnitude, but the experience of the vicarity was the same.
Pulped and twisted remains pooled across the ground like soup.
Standing upon a pond of gore, Essus looked at the shadowy outline of his own body within the crimson pond, basked by wings of neon bleeding into the faintness of apparitions. The boy and Avo himself hovered over his sides, looking upon the butchery with approval.
Essus did not throw up. With all the parts taken from him, the act was no longer possible.
He did, however, squeak. A soft whimper escaped from him as he faced the shadow of himself. “Artad… why? Why.”
+He’s not here Essus,+ Avo said. He could have left it at that. He didn’t. +It’s just me.+
Sobering at the words, a series of palms slapping metal pulled Essus’ attention. The survivors were pounding at the inside of their enclosure. They wanted to escape. To be freed.
“I… I need to free them,” Essus said. A soft sob choked free from his throat. “I don’t need to kill… I can save someone. Finally. Finally…”
Avo understood. He grunted. +Yes. But grab the Woundhound injector off the dead razorgirl. Need it.+
And even through the thickness of the sealed blast doors closing off the space behind them, out from the titanium hive of a Blockcrawler, the agonized screams of a certain degenerate traveled deep and true.
Something had indeed become unlatched.
+Chambers’ testicles are giving birth to aratnids. Will need replacement.+