by G Aliaksei C
The First Technomancer
Vazanklav: Book 1
By: G. Aliaksei C.
Copyright ©️ 2019 by G. Aliaksei C.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. Don’t steal my work, mkay?
All characters and events depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Any similarity to actual events is there for a reason.
First words:
July 27th, 2018
Beta release:
August 23rd, 2019
Thank you to Eruwenn, Redarcs, Hema and Mikey for proof-reading and editing this soup of words.
Thank you to Mikey for shading my unprofessional, low quality art.
Published:
November 12th, 2019
Second Edition (Less Bugs™):
January 1st, 2020
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Part Zero: A Dark, Angry Prologue
0 : Cut Out
1 : The War That Never Ended
Part One: Brave New Megastructures
0 : A Bad Case of Death
1 : To Do Unto Others
2 : Casual World
3 : Brawling Industry
4 : Strength Before
Part Two: A Fortress of Theoretical Solitude
0 : Weakness After
1 : Foundation
2 : White Specter
3 : Of Knowledge
4 : Nineteen Knights and the Queen of Death
5 : Steel Fruit from a Tree of Fire
Part Three: Deductibles of Fame
0 : Bad Neighborhood
1 : Life on the Waste Ring
2 : A Function of Relative Security
3 : The Costs
4 : Mark Five
5 : Supplier’s Politics
Part Four: A War of Greed
0 : Beyond Vazanklav
1 : Hell Knocking
2 : Cause Preparing for Effect
3 : The Short War
4 : Uncontested
Lists and Tables
Part Zero: A Dark, Angry Prologue
“…There, in the very depth of hell, beneath the night of fire and ash, Humanity struggled, lived and died. And in their endless battle they became what no other race could imagine in their worst nightmares…”
0 : Cut Out
Earth, 2112
In the end, nothing really mattered.
All of Human history, every man and woman who was ever born and died, every social and technological achievement Humanity reached - it didn’t matter. Not to any reasonable degree.
Every tear, every laugh, every good and bad deed, none of it had any particular consequence. No single life affected history enough to change it, for good or bad. The collective purpose of Humanity, of millennia of growth and development, it all came down to a single effective result - the growth of the Human population.
Only one among billions could have made the next step. But statistics is a cruel master, and, with tens of billions living on Earth, the appearance of such a monster was just a matter of time.
It was inevitable that, among the billions of living, at least one would wield both the motivation and strength to push the world over the threshold that would mark the start of the new age - and the annihilation of the old.
At first, some called it World War Three. That term was not incorrect, but it failed to accurately compare the scales of the three conflicts.
Instead, this next stage of Human existence became known as The War.
First, The War took away Human decency. With it went the weak and the stupid, purged by the harshness of the new world, often at the hands of their own kind. Then, it took away everything that limited Humanity. Laziness and fear became words from history books, legends that any could read but none could understand. Such was the price of our survival.
In return, The War gave Humanity terrible strength. Technology bloomed like never before. The race as a whole became more capable than it had ever been. Our fighters grew stronger; Our minds worked faster; Our focus became finer.
The War had taken away the casual nature of life itself, but it left behind the soul of Humanity, the theatrical, dramatic, lively core that had taken us through history just as well as our intellect and ingenuity had.
And, even in the hellish reality of The War, our unnecessary, impractical melodramatics were still a driving force behind our actions, just as much as the need for survival. It was a weakness, but also a mystical motivator that drove us further than need ever had.
For me, this weakness manifested as a need for awesome, a rarity few respected. My inventions were always grand, their effects drastic, their scale daunting. And the degree of effort I put into presenting my work served well to amplify its natural grandeur. In that harsh world the only way I could impress anyone the ‘awesome’ of my work was by investing into it, preparing for it, and masterfully presenting the product when the time came to introduce it into the world.
Following this philosophy, I had invested in a huge lever switch.
There is solid logic there, I promise.
The switch served me well as I wired it into one project after another and worked to give an impression of significance during presentations before the higher ranks of management. The investment paid off again now, if only with me as audience, as I slammed the handle down. The grip had mass to it, smoothly swinging on the oiled hinge, clicking into place at the end of its wide rotation.
The handle’s motion was like a conductor’s signal. An orchestra of electric background noise echoed through the hangar as the equipment all around came alive. The fluorescent bulb over the table dimmed as the machine at the core of the lab hummed awake, its importance resonating throughout the surrounding sensors. Energy flowed down the liquid conductor, through the translucent pipe, and into the dome at the center of the hanger. The connector between the pipes and the machine began to glow as tiny fractions of transferred energy radiated away. Frozen gas erupted out of automated dispensers, spraying the connectors and covering the floor in a fine layer of frost.
There was an excellent reason why I, a Senior Engineer and first-class specialist, had my hangar built on the lowest floors of the Hive, as far underground as the construction teams bothered to dig. For that same reason I conducted the final testing of all my work alone, while the support staff evacuated. That reason was my first major project while under Corporate employment, a job that got me branded by the Weapons Research and Development branch as “a brother from another department”, and left a major, irreparable crater in a nearby mountain ridge.
My current project had already made attempts to match the destructive potential of a small napalm bomb, so this time the switch-pulling was happening from behind a plate of armored glass. Still I flexed my mind, strengthening the natural electromagnetic forcefield around my body.
Unlike last time the air did not explode with power. The effect of that fireball would have had merit at a firework show, but at least it had been an obvious failure, unlike this angry silence. The lack of visual effects left me frozen, wondering if the arcane machine was saving up for a killing blow against its creator. Yet, as the seconds dragged on, the dome sat unexploded, collecting power in the vast capacitor arrays next to it. A good sign, supposedly.
I snatched a modified either-scanner off a nearby workbench, extended the antenna, and glanced at the readouts. Nothing. The hangar space was clear of energy on the frequency the system was designed to operate within. I was saf
e from the potential of death by radiation or fireball, for the moment.
I reached for the Gem sitting in its cloth pillow on the same metal table. The dull-red centimeter-wide sphere rolled into my hand and I hurriedly plugged it into the sensor, anxious not to drop the precious jewel.
The Gem lit up. The audio element I ripped out of a Geiger counter started up, clicking to match my anxious heartbeat. A red glow illuminated my hands. One point two zero-zero-three watts of power registered pouring out of the receiver Gem - a Gem that wasn’t connected in any way to the humming transmission system block sitting in the middle of the dark hangar. Across empty space, without any wire or medium, the dome was feeding power to the Gem. Without even a small fireball.
I lifted the eighty-kilogram blast shield with one strained hand, keeping it between myself and the dome as I stepped closer. Reaching out I snatched open a panel, inserting a chip into the port and watching the value grow to match the reading on the Gem sensor - one point two zero-zero-three watts. The energy from the dome poured into the Gem through the shielding effects of the blast shield, through my powerful defensive EM field, through the hull of the dome itself, without any detected losses and without filling the area in between with energy.
Without any attempts to incinerate me and the lab.
Wireless, lossless energy transfer that didn’t saturate the area around the transmitter with power!
Making sure the system was stable and the hangar control computer was on standby I got up, straightened my shoulders, and marched out of the dark workshop leaving the familiar humming sounds behind. The sensor swung around on my belt among other tools.
The hatch to my lab was a veritable airlock with three thick, armored doors. They opened in series as I passed, letting me through without delay, recognizing my authority.
The two soldiers on the other side of the hatch turned to face me as I rushed past the last hatch. Their armored faceplates cleared.
“Sir?”
“Secure the floor, guard this room. And get a defense kit down here.”
“Medium or heavy kit, sir?”
I stopped and stared at the officer. “I don’t know soldier, can you fit the anti-tank artillery that comes with the heavy kit through the elevator?”
The man considered. “Possibly, sir.”
Of course he can. I raised a hand, correcting the question. “Alright, but do you think the enemy can fit a tank down here for you to actually shoot with that artillery?”
“Understood sir. Medium kit.”
I headed for the nearest elevator, charging though lively underground hallways, past countless other hangars similar to mine. Across the hall was a hatch leading to once such hangar, the entrance flanked by two metal spheres. The spheres were locked in a staring contest with the soldiers, but now barrel ports extending through their layered armor to track me. The combat robots, or combots for short, guarded the antimatter plants and labs. If they could nervously bark at every passerby, they would.
Down the hall were the laser labs. Their very existence made the walk stressful, as the engineers there kept upping their power ration requests every week. After each such upping a construction team would come down, patch another hole in the Durasteel-stone walls, and repaint the outer wall of my hangar where the strike would inevitably land. The only thing that kept my domain safe was the overengineered construction of my hangar, an identical copy of the antimatter labs, with solid Durasteel walls that effortlessly shrugged off the scaling laser strikes. This deeply displeased the engineers, who gathered around the scorch mark on my wall, taking measurements and readings, completely ignoring my well-earned anger and threats.
“You should understand,” they would say. “You leveled a mountain!”
They found it funny. I found it incredibly uncomfortable to live on the receiving end of a shooting range.
A dozen soldiers ran past me, heading towards my hangar. Each one was clad in a compact, light suit of airtight armor that gleamed black with the familiar look of Ballistic Durasteel. Two of them carried a massive, tripod-mounted cannon. The reinforcements saluted me as they dispersed across the hall, surrounding the entrance to my labs. A few stood still, pressing themselves into the walls, and slowly vanished as their armor changed color to match their surroundings. Two set up their autocannon in the middle of the hall, aiming it back down the passage. The detachment would ensure the absolute security of my lab while I was absent.
One of twenty smaller elevators was already waiting for me. I stepped in and the doors began to close, but a pair of mechanics from the Gravitonics branch crammed into the elevator with me in the last moment, holding onto the ends of a gray metal rod. The rod tried to lift them off the ground, making it seem like the two were performing impossible pullups. They greeted me as the doors closed, but I rudely ignored them, mentally hooking into the local network.
A certain sense of calm overtook me as I used my implants finished their collective task - to duplicating, saving, and uploading the project data across several dozen secure Corporate servers. This was protocol, to document and back up a positive result before doing anything else. The electronic mesh tangled throughout my brain absorbed all the latest project data, pouring it into the building’s network. The success of the project would not be hidden in my head, and a freak accident would not end its life like it would mine. The whole of the Corporation would have this technology now, no matter what happened to me.
The value of this new technology seemed just as endless as its application. A weapon did not require a power source if all it needed was a receiver. Powered armor wouldn’t need massive batteries and reactors if they could receive their power remotely. Tanks and aircraft could be miniaturized if their internals included a conduit to power rather than the entire power source. No device would ever need batteries again if it could rely on a distant, limitless source.
I thought about all this as the elevator accelerated up. We passed the shipyard levels, and my internal Geiger counter let out a threatening tirade. I wished I could step out then, to look upon another project where I had left my mark. Here, on the ground levels of the Hive, the first Corporate spacecraft of war were being built.
For years I worked to bring the first warship together. There was no technology that allowed for such craft at the beginning of my service. Now we had antimatter, gravity control, and weapons we couldn’t have dreamed of wielding only years ago.
I was not in charge of the project. That was Jeb Klaim, chief engineer of the Corporation. But millions of personnel were cycled through the project, and none but a select few thousand were deemed worthy of permanently working on it. I was one of them. The War dragged on, but we still worked, building the first weapons of their kind while our brothers and sisters fought to give us more time. Many key breakthroughs were made when a dying, wounded soldier crawled to us from the front, giving up in their last breath to arm us with stolen technology.
Now the first ship was finally being built under the Hive, a ship that could break out of the great blockade created by countless satellites and ground-based weapons, rise above the lower orbits, and with mighty weapons rain down death, untouchable and uncontested.
The elevator cube took me up to the ground floor of the Hive, the gigantic fortress-bunker, the impenetrable citadel I called home. There I had to change elevators, pushing through crowds of scientists, engineers and officers, taking a second lift to the top of the pyramid. Outside the walls of Durasteel and concrete, I knew, raged storms of radioactive snow and hail, hammering away from the darkness of the eternal night. The Hive had no windows - they would be the weakest and most useless feature of the structure, showing only the storming, deadly darkness outside, illuminated by an occasional explosion.
Unlike most Corporate, I had hobbies, and for me the saddest part of this hellish weather was my inability to comfortably paint it. Long ago, before the world turned to night, I would climb to the outer surface of the Hive, set up a canvas and paint the Siber
ian wilderness from the glorious vintage point. But painting wasn’t fun in a suit of powered armor, where a gust of wind could freeze you or burn you to ash.
Remembering those days takes away my very will. It was a bleak, dreadful existence. Any minute could be our death. Any second we could go into combat. Anyone I met in the halls could be an enemy spy. And if I wanted to survive, if I wanted my brothers and sisters in arms to survive, I had to stay vigilant every moment of my life, had to keep working and creating, never giving into the endless stress and fear.
Several hundred floors later the cube released its upward kinetic energy back into the transportation system, coming to an instant stop without any stress or sensible deceleration. The armored doors and clamps slid into the walls of the shaft, locking the cube in place. I suppressed the usual discomfort of gravity lifts - that unreasonable sensation that the cubicle would stop but I would keep going up at a hundred kilometers an hour like a terrified meat missile.
I marched across the halls, passing hatch after hatch, waving the identification implant in my hand at every guard and security turret that tried to pause my charge towards the main chamber. Pushing apart the two gate-like doors leading to the throne room, I broke in. My armored boots sent pings across the vast chamber as they hit the metal floor, filling the dark room with sound.
On the other side, upon a gleaming black throne of Durasteel, sat Director Fall. The glowing aura, combined with a uniform that would not look out of place on an emperor, gave the man a god-like presence. To his sides, two dozen soldiers in heavy power armor materialized out of thin air, aiming their massive rifles at me. The disruptor rifles had no barrel holes, instead ending in a flat plate. A pull of the trigger could scrap a tank from kilometers away, so the weapon made a certain statement when wielded indoors.
The fact that I made it this far without serious challenge spoke of my status with the Director. Most others wouldn’t even be able to order the lift to go this high up.