She was close, now – close enough to push on through the smoke and heat with only the Vision to guide her. She snapped down a filter mask and a pair of thermalscope shades anyhow – there was no way she’d let her precious new flesh be ‘vaped first time out of the tank. Devine would never shut up about it, for one thing – and then there was the cash she’d bet on herself to last at least three missions.
Behind her CeeAn heard a great groaning, shattering noise, and felt the building convulse as a section of girder fell three floors down to smash her battlewagon to scrap. More work for Nguyen, then – if she managed to get out of here alive.
Her insurance on that front came in the form of two bulky silver autoinjectors, stuffed with a savage dose of ‘dreno. This shit had been the cream of the crop from their last little raid – rarefied juice which the Submagus Alchemists swore came from highborn glands.
Careful now – she knew from her Vision that she was getting close to the edge of a vast chasm. If there was any doubt in her mind it was dispelled when a claw-tipped tentacle erupted through the floor like a runaway subway train, smashing its way out through a sagging wall.
Wherever shit like that was happening, Abdulafia 330 was bound to be close by.
Sure enough, as she slid the last few feet on her belly, there he was. CeeAn poked her head out over the pit, looking down a sheer and smooth wall of metal to where her fellow Ashishi perched on the handle of his favorite stiletto. Just too far down for a desperate leap and not a handhold in sight.
“Up here, boy!” she yelled, her voice amplified by speakers in her filter mask. “This makes us two for two, ‘Afia – if I save your ass one more time I’ll officially own it!”
He looked up – she was annoyed to see that he wasn’t in the least bit surprised – and pointed down into the maw of the machine below him, a flaming orifice filled with saws and grinders. He was shouting something, but she couldn’t make it out.
Oh well – CeeAn hefted one of the two autoinjectors and clipped it to her shoulder pauldron, feeling the soft pad of the needle-head nestle up against her jugular. She dangled the other over the abyss until she was sure that ‘Afia had seen it, then let it go.
The ‘dreno slammed into her a second later, a roaring blast of euphoria which bent the world around her brain like hot steel.
Oh, this was good stuff!
Raw power raved and crackled through her factory-fresh body, a feeling indescribable to all but those who've had to live as patterned light.
Her bioelectric field flared like a nuclear blast, whipping up the smoke into a towering figure, an exact replica of CeeAn twenty feet tall, surrounded by a corona of purple light. It was hard to ride this one out, hard to keep control of the rush and focus it just right...
Then a blast of white fire came up out of the pit, a solar flare which blew the roof off the crumbling Valley View in a neat circle. Flickering tongues of black lightning wreathed the searing beam, and CeeAn could see chunks of cybernetic tentacles and claws rising in the heart of the pyroclasm, ablated away to ashes by its furious power.
In the Vision she saw the Kraken writhing in pain and fury, lashing out with its remaining razortipped arms blind.
The Mall gave a terrible lunge like a foundering supertanker, and the floor dipped, the angles of the place suddenly made all wrong...
Then she saw it – a shadow in the core of the flare, a humanoid form cut out in black from the savage white light. A snarl of dreadlocks stood out from its head like the snakes of the Medusa, and as the terrible radiance faded Cee could make out the features of Abdulafia 330, hovering in midair with his eyes rolled back to blazing whites.
The Vision sliced through her like razorwires then, showing her the insane truth. His field was unfurled all around them, burning up his body like candle wax. He was holding the Valley View together with raw power, and he couldn’t possibly last long.
CEEAN – THE NODE! VERLAINE HAS FALLEN TO A SEQUESTRATOR – A THING WE HAVE NEVER FACED BEFORE. YOU MUST REACH THE NODE, AND WHEN YOU DO...
I’LL TRY TO OPERATE.
The voice came in from everywhere, a choir of harmonics torn from the tortured steel of the building itself. Questioning him now was not an option if only because any distraction could bring tons of masonry down on them both.
“Show me.” she said, reaching out one hand to the black cutout shape in its blaze of white light.
And the Vision scribbled across the air in front of her, a jagged trace leading her on through the mall, immune to the smoke now, immune to the fire. The same force which gave ‘Afia the power to hold together an entire sector of Elysium wrapped her in a hard shell of patterned energy, a suit of impenetrable armor which let her leap from floor to floor like a ninja, thirty feet with each step.
There, up ahead, the node. And within, a churning nest of gelid black snakes, wrapped up around the shattered mind of Magus Verlaine. They were just in time.
The rogue Cyben! Direktor Ascher could hardly contain his delight as he watched the Celebrants at the gates being torn to pieces by that exquisite death-dealing engine. In another time and place Octavio would have given any sum of money to have Tsien in his pit-fight leagues – but here and now he was glad to have him running rampant in the beltway’s quiet streets.
A better diversion couldn’t be imagined – it would certainly take Kronos some time to assemble another Celebrant squad on this night of nights. Unless the Grandmaster of the Grief Division took this failure personally... as he sincerely hoped would be the case.
The green LCD clock still flashed its triumphant row of zeros in the bottom of the Direktor’s sensorium dome, floating over the top of a thousand scenes of carnage.
He caught little traces, here and there of other games afoot in the Last City tonight. Those who profited from the chaos he had brewed up would no doubt thank him - if they ever found out about his patronage.
The forces of the RT were creeping in at the seams, the Pit Ferals were restless, sending strike teams of savages up the spillway to plunder what they could before the Ashishim or the Vatican beat them back. And other, less partisan elements were getting their cut at the same time.
Octavio was reaching out to a little group of them now, calling in a very old debt by remote control.
One of his ubiquitous flycams skimmed through the hot and oily air down in the bowels of the city, in one of the deep-buried manufactoria owned by Consolidated Industries. His legions of A.I. spies had drilled their way into the camera networks of a thousand such places over the years – strategic points where any amount of things could go spectacularly wrong. This one was a weapons development plant, and tonight’s trouble took the form of four desperate and dangerous outlaws – the Emerald City
Gang. The little party Lieutenant Tsien had thrown at the beltway gates had bought him enough time to tie up a loose end, and these were just the people to take care of it for him.
The flycam followed a path of destruction which Big Leon had carved through the factory modules, a trail of ragged holes through walls of metal and plasticrete. Here and there headless bodies clad in the black uniform of Consolidated security bore mute testament to the accuracy of the Tin Man’s guns, and shredded scraps of flesh and armor chunks evidenced the rage of the one they called the Scarecrow.
Oh yes, these folks were just Mr Ascher’s type – professionals. His flycam caught up with them in the main vault of the manufactorium, a spherical steel womb flashing strobe-light red as alarms split the air.
Leon was wrestling with the three-foot-thick door of the facility’s secure store, his hairy arms bulging with impossible musculature. About the top-heavy giant’s neck a collar blazed with searing voltage, goading him on to fury. It seemed that the door was going to rip from its bolts any second now...
The other three looked on, unfazed by the carnage they stood amongst. It appeared that an unfortunate Consolidated fire team had made their last stand here, before the great lockway – and that they’d lost
in a spectacular fashion. The Scarecrow – an old acquaintance of Direktor Ascher’s – was carefully cleaning off his knife-fingered gauntlets with a scrap of white silk, resplendent in a three-piece tweed suit spattered liberally with gore. Tin Man looked almost as if he’d run down in a half-crouch, the muzzles of his twin rifles splayed to cover the whole room. Only a fool would believe it, though – Ascher’s flycam could see the shimmering field which surrounded the battered and scarred old robot, the electronic senses which scanned the whole manufactorium for the merest trace of movement. Without countermeasures so advanced that they were all but science fiction the Flycam would never have gotten this far.
Finally – ah, sweet regret! Lady Alvarez looked just as good today as she had back in Ascher’s heyday, a sylph in red leather, twisting the controls of Leon’s collar with a sadistic grin. That one – well, Leynna Mendelev-Singh was fiery, but Ruby Alvarez was pure incandescence. Young Octavio’s one proposition to her had nearly cost him certain tender parts of his anatomy. The fact of her cataclysmic fall from grace made her seem even more attractive to the jaded old Direktor – when all of this was through, perhaps ...
But for now, it was strictly business.
The Scarecrow rubbed his knife-bladed hands together with glee as Leon gave a final bellow and heave, ripping the door from its moorings in a shower of fractured plasticrete. Shrouded amid the clouds of dust which billowed up around it, Ascher’s flycam alighted on the tip of a dead guard’s finger, it’s abdomen splitting into four
hovering segments. Each one hissed out from the carapace of the little machine, forming a frame in midair in which flickering green light bloomed and congealed...
A perfect replica of the Direktor stepped through that ethereal doorway, a hologram dressed to the nines in pressed white cotton, his silver-tipped cane clicking on the bloodied tiles.
As the Emerald City Gang looked expectantly through the dust into the containment vault he tucked his cane under one arm and began to applaud.
At once the Tin Man came back to life, his flashing green eyes casting out laser-targeting beams to pin the segments of the flycam through Ascher’s incorporeal form. The Direktor looked down with disgust at the four slim traceries of light marring his suit. He tipped the brim of his panama hat and raised one eyebrow.
“And hello to you too, my cybernetic friend. Just hold off for a second, would you? I’ve got to talk to the kid who buys your batteries.”
The Tin Man had no face, as such – just a crude skeletal grimace painted across the front of his scuffed head-dome. Nevertheless, the look he shot Ascher was pure murder.
“And what do you want down here, Direktor?” asked the Scarecrow in his clipped English accent – studiously copied from old twodeeos, no doubt. “This little raid is being funded by our Celestial friends, and last time I checked, they were no allies of yours. They don’t let their citizens watch...entertainments of the type you provide.”
His eyes flashed rage from behind the plastic mask he wore.
Ascher smirked, glad to see that his old friend hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Some people would hold it against you if you turned them into a pitfighter, but Aitken Straw apparently wasn’t one of them.
“I’m here to see Miss Alvarez, actually.” he said “The fact that I find you going about what I assume is your legitimate business here is hardly my concern.” He gestured with his cane at the human wreckage all around them, the shattered vault door, the hole in the reinforced wall.
“Who’s the funny little man?” asked Big Leon, his face split in an idiot grin now that the power to his shock collar had been switched off. “I can see through him I can, he’s funny, yes he is.”
Lady Alvarez silenced the malformed giant with one slim finger across his lips, slipping the controls to his collar into her pocket as she stalked through the rubble and blood toward Mr Ascher.
“Who says we have anything to talk about?” she asked, her thin face twisted into a scowl. “All I’ve ever had from you and your damned network is bad publicity and worse photographs.”
Direktor Ascher smiled, twirling his cane between his fingers like a stage magician.
“Oh, I think you’ll find you owe me one, miss. You see, I once had a talented young editor on my staff - who for one reason or another had to be gotten out of the way.”
Off in the corner of his vision he saw the Scarecrow’s hands clench, his razor-sharp claws slicing into his palms. Ahh – so that was why he’d stayed quiet about old times. He’d never told Ruby how he came to be the thing he was ...
Well, he was about to have a talk-show moment.
“The little snot thought that he should get a better cut from the pitfights I was shamelessly rigging – and perhaps he was right. Anyhow, he tried to blackmail me - and that, as you know, is a recipe for swift obliteration.”
Lady Alvarez nodded, cool – that kind of reasoning was right out of her lexicon. The Scarecrow, however, looked like he wanted to rip Octavio’s face off and spit on it. “Anyhow, I thought of a much better fix. I had him worked over by my biotects – amateurs compared to Lancaster’s boys, but skilled in their own special ways. By the time they were finished he was a pit-fight dog you could bet your life savings on. Then I had them wire him up with a cerebro-blocker – a little black box that turned off his higher functions. The damn thing could only eat, shit and kill after they soldered him up.”
Oh, he was glad he’d come here as a holo – not that he had any choice, but nonetheless – if he’d been standing here in the flesh the Scarecrow would have already reduced him to bloody ribbons.
“You see, nobody would believe a thing like that. Godawfully ugly, mindless – he was better than dead. And then you had your little run-in with the Direktoriat, and I thought to myself – why not give you a hand?”
This was just a step too far, and the Scarecrow stalked forward, his butcher-knife fingers crooked at Ascher’s incorporeal throat.
“And I suppose you’re going to tell her that this was your mercy, Octavio?” he spat, ripping the plastic mask from his face with an obscene sucking sound. Beneath the shell of plastic he was a skinless horror, stitched up with wires, his eyes welded under domes of diamondglass. “All you did was put the switch in my head and deliver me to her.
After that, I was just doing it to survive...”
Ruby stared at him, aghast, her hands going to the twin railpistols at her belt. “You were his puppet all along? All these years, Straw?”
The Scarecrow’s ravaged face was twisted with rage and shame and self-loathing.
“No! He’s got no control over me! This was just his way of getting rid of me!”
The Direktor wished he could have been filming this intimate little moment, but other concerns were far more pressing. He stepped between Ruby and Aitken Straw before they could fall on each other in fury.
“My dear Miss Alvarez, it was all about your legend. After people saw you kill Lord Delroy and Lady Erdminster in glorious threedeeo their appetites were whetted for more! You killed them outside the Game, and your whole clan into the bargain! It was beautiful footage, and I just had to have the exclusive...”
“So you sent me a little helper marked with tracers...” she hissed, pointing one of her bulky pistols right through Ascher’s chest at the Scarecrow. “Do you realize how many times we’ve almost been killed because of your bloody coverage?”
“The key word there is ‘almost’, Ruby.” said Octavio, still smiling. “And now – do you have any idea what the common man thinks of the Emerald City Gang? Are you familiar with the pre-apocalyptic legend of Robin Hood? They think you oppose the Council of Hierarchs because they’re cruel and corrupt!”
Well, that elicited a laugh from all of them – even a blast of static from the Tin Man. “Crueler than us? More corrupt? Please, Direktor. If you think that we owe you a favor based on a story that flimsy, you must be as mad as they say you are.”
The Scarecrow jumped on it, sliding his mas
k back on as he pointed at Octavio with one scarred silver claw.
“That’s right! He lies! I’ve never betrayed us – never! All the times we’ve been scanned and rigged and chopped by our clients – they never found a single tracer.”
Now Direktor Ascher’s grin widened to shark-like proportions, as he used one thumb to hinge open the top of his cane.
“There was no need, mister Straw.” he said, rubbing his thumb around the little flashing red button there revealed. “You’re carrying something much worse – something I can trace with a little bit of stolen clonehunter gear. You see, my biotects didn’t just fit you out as a killer. They spliced you with a little extra twist as well.”
Now all eyes were on the Scarecrow, as if the gang expected something vast and alien and toothy to erupt from his heaving chest.
“Munitorium Necrovirus 392 – I’m sure you’re familiar with its uses, Tin Man.” The scarred old mekan nodded once, with a squeak of corroded bearings. “A sample from the apocalyptic wars, woven into each and every organ of our friend the Scarecrow. Believe me, if I hit this switch you won’t be able to run fast enough.
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