Chapter Text
The woman using the alias Kate Markson considered her options.
Her current mission was simple observation: she was to report on Arquebus’s efforts and her estimate of their progress and delivery timetable, nothing more. She wasn’t sure whether Arquebus’s efforts were satisfactory, or if HQ had decided that the problems facing them wouldn’t be resolved by a single agent and her slow, albeit steady, supply of stealth drones, but she she had not received any further orders or mission adjustments since.
On the one hand, it freed her from worrying about her own performance. On the other, it meant she no longer had even the illusion of control over when she’d finally get to leave. Occasionally, when she grew particularly frustrated with her current assignment, she wondered if she'd been sent to Rubicon because HQ trusted her to complete a mission with minimal support and less oversight, or because no one wanted to deal with her. If it was the latter, the feeling was mutual, and had been for most of her life. If they’d sent her anywhere even marginally less terrible, she’d consider it a welcome break from the mewling masses who clung to their “humanity” like toddlers to their mothers’ skirts.
Her current mission was simple observation, but HQ’s goals, which were her goals, remained the same as ever: ensure a corporation began exporting Coral back to Sol. She could choose to take steps independent of formal orders if she judged it beneficial to those goals; the ability to improvise was a valuable one in a field agent, provided said agent understood both her orders and those greater goals. She was confident she understood both.
In the end, the question was whether it was wise to expend effort and assets now, or wait for HQ to hand down her next mission. She assumed there would be a ‘next mission’ because her experience of the last nine years told her there would always be a ‘next mission’. Signal intercepts suggested Arquebus was already organizing another shipment of supplies from the Ice Fields to Belius, so they were liable to end up going down the worst-case ‘full commitment, no result’ route without her interference. The RLF needed to be curtailed.
Killing C4-621 would be the single greatest blow to the RLF’s current effective strength, but it would be a heavy expenditure. No amount of drones could kill the target in its AC, so she’d need to find a way to catch it between missions: not impossible, but expensive, especially if it continued to return deep into RLF territory to rest. The primitives’ lack of technology was, ironically, a pain for her to deal with. Her drones’ Monitor Display Deception could make a mockery of most modern sensor technologies, but it wouldn’t stop a savage with an optic from spotting tracks in the snow and raising an alarm. If she used the drones, she stood to lose dozens mapping out the path through their patrols. Infiltrating personally was tempting, but unacceptably risky: she was not here in her role as an active mission asset and had no one to provide the remote support she would normally rely on.
The other pilots were valuable targets, but they were guerrillas: difficult to track down unless they were on the offensive. Like C4-621, killing one of the RLF’s Fingers would be a heavy commitment of force, but unlike C4-621, it wouldn’t necessarily be an ‘expenditure’. If she caught the pilot moving their AC between bases on the perimeter of their territory, one of the heavy melee drones could probably kill them with the element of surprise and assistance from other units. The catch would be that it would take either luck or saturation to have a group of drones in position to make the intercept on short notice.
She checked her assets: she had only six of the expensive (in both fabricator run-time and raw resources) melee units in all of Belius, which meant at most six groups with a half-decent chance of killing a skilled pilot in ambush. If she wanted to trust less in luck for the battle—which had the trade-off of trusting in luck more for the interception—she’d need to reduce that to three or even two groups.
She was reluctant to deploy in TRANSCRIBER herself. She could use an AC well enough—her skill assessments were comfortably in high C-rank—but she’d never drilled the skill beyond what she felt was sufficient to let her steal one if it were ever the best way to make an exit, nor had she ever wanted to. TRANSCRIBER was also, by virtue of being a unique, overt unit that needed to travel ‘to’ and ‘from’ any deployment, at much greater risk of being tracked. It hadn’t been equipped with MDD under the flawed assumption that it would be used when she needed force instead of stealth rather than in addition to it—but then again, that assumption wouldn’t have been flawed if she’d only had to complete her original mission…
No. She was thinking about this all wrong. The RLF were guerrillas; their primary defense against her and Arquebus both was their ability to hide throughout Belius, moving under cover of storm or underground, and that was a problem her drones could handle. They could search the areas Arquebus couldn’t, their stealth more than sufficient to prevent the kinds of ambushes the corporations had learned to fear and their unmanned nature rendering them expendable in the event the RLF caught one. Given the vigilance necessary to catch one of the drones in action, all killing one would do is send up a red flag indicating the RLF had something to hide nearby.
For once, the blighted climate would work to her advantage: it was simply too cold on Rubicon—and too devoid of readily available fuels like wood—to have any kind of human habitation without electrical power. (Coral generators ran electric heaters, as it was both inefficient and horribly unsafe to ‘burn’ it in the literal sense.) The drones’ passive sensors should have no trouble sniffing out the telltale EM disturbances of active electrical currents even through walls or embankments. The last step would be to determine which were civilian targets and which were the Front—or not bother and let Arquebus either do that work themselves or just purge the lot.
She went through every drone on Belius not already engaged in a critical task and set them to scout through factories and cities, abandoned megastructures and subterranean transport networks, assembling a crude grid through the least patrolled areas and giving the units orders to report any EM or thermal signatures they found as they came across them. That done, she minimized her neural-interface workspace and returned to the sight of her base so she could stand up and walk two meters over to the barely-cushioned metal slab that served as her bed. No combination of stimulants and CSF conditioning had yet managed to reduce her need for sleep to below about fifteen percent of her daily cycle, and her next required down-time was almost here. Postponing it would imperil her work performance, which was unacceptable.
She missed her old work, the personal touch of being out in the field herself. Instead, she was doing the work that she’d once happily left to the analysts and handlers guiding her steps, her usual role taken on by cat’s-paws and autonomous weapons. Killing people through drones wasn’t the same. Killing people with TRANSCRIBER wasn’t the same. She hadn’t gotten her blades wet in… damn, it had been four years already. The last time had been that Doser group whose name she couldn’t be bothered to remember, the one she’d used to wipe out a civilian settlement to draw the RLF’s attention away from Arquebus’s attempts to renovate one of Furlong’s old factories. The project had been an early step in the recently-arrived Expeditionary Group’s efforts to set down roots outside the ‘Corporate Holdings’ surrounding BAWS’ headquarters, and she’d been eager to get them settled in and their survey corps to work.
That eagerness had caused a problem. She’d been hasty, too used to the perfect anonymity and information control granted by the now-shut backdoor into Asset Zero, and simply hired the Doser group for the job through an alias. The drug-addled degenerates had done it, then turned around and tried to blackmail her alias! They’d guessed she was Arquebus herself, some CorpInt goon planting false flags: wrong, hopelessly wrong, but dangerously so. Not only would the accusation put the RLF back on the warpath she’d been trying to distract them from in the first place, it would have sent Arquebus Intelligence sniffing around for the perpetrator of what would look an awful lot like someone else’s false flag operation against them.
She could have sent Asset One. She probably could have left the entire operation to her drones. She shouldn’t have ignored standard operating procedures and taken the field herself without support, but she had. She’d agreed to a meeting to ‘negotiate’, feigned surprise and badly-concealed nerves when her counterpart hadn’t come as alone as he’d promised, and allowed the group to ‘capture’ her and bring her back to their hideout for ransom. She’d then taken pleasure in killing every living thing in the Grid subsection. Her augments were, in theory, enough for her to kill a soldier in high-spec power armor if she got in close before he could react; the fact that she cost a couple orders of magnitude more than that power armor was the price HQ paid for subtlety. Two dozen gangsters wearing up-armored personal protective equipment weren’t anywhere near that threatening, but the lack of danger gave her the chance to appreciate the slaughter. She’d walked out of the base dripping in blood like she’d gone swimming in it.
She’d never had the chance to cut loose like that before, and had been a little disappointed it hadn’t been the experience she’d thought it would be. (She would, if pressed, admit that the error that had set things in motion might have been deliberate, on some level, just to give her the excuse to try it.) It certainly didn’t make up for the fact that she’d spent most of the next four years locked inside a hole she’d dug into the frozen dirt, not so much ‘killing people’ as ‘marking people for death’ by her drones and sometimes Asset One. Having to take the field in TRANSCRIBER wasn’t any better. It was, in every way, a downgrade over personal work, and all it did these days was draw attention to how much she missed the latter.
The only pleasures left in her life at this point were her fantasies about the upgrades she would demand when her assignment was over, were it ever over. Nine years as the Military Intelligence presence on this ice-ball should have earned her enough company credit for anything she could think to name… or more! By the time she got off Rubicon, Coral would be back on the market with all its dazzling possibilities. Things the synthetic substitutes could never hope to do: memory and reasoning implants, intelligence augments, the dawn of full-blown cognitive enhancements that could finally fulfill the tantalizing, unrealized promise of the C1 program. Damn the shortsighted fools at RRI who’d decided they’d invented a weapon and not the keys to the gates that marked the limits of squalid humanity!
The possibilities were endless. Superhuman intelligence! Mind-to-mind networking! And even, perhaps, the keys to overcome the stubborn limits of life-extension technology? It was almost too good to be true. She might look like the same woman of twenty-four Earth years she had for the last forty, having cast aside her last scraps of organic skin around that long ago, but she was rapidly approaching the threshold at which no life-extension treatment could hold the creeping deterioration of her years at bay in the few organic components she wasn’t yet rid of. Coral wouldn’t fix that issue, but it might—might—offer an alternative.
She had spent altogether too long sifting through RLF propaganda broadcasts in the first year or two she’d spent here, unwilling to dismiss any potential source of intelligence out of hand. The broadcasts were frustratingly, and unsurprisingly, useless: the RLF reported their missions hours or days or even weeks after their conclusion, and the rest of the time the lines were filled with vacuous prayer readings, music, and the occasional sermon by their drug-addled guru.
But something in all the noise had caught her attention: the RLF spoke of an afterlife in the Coral they worshiped. A balm dreamed up by primitive minds, and yet… not entirely without possibility. Not as they thought of it, surely, but with the right tools, the right pieces, who was to say that a fully functioning set of transhuman cognition implants couldn’t continue to work even as the gray matter they augmented failed? Continuity of consciousness beyond the limits of human flesh and into the undying realm of copper and silicon! Ascension to true immortality—digital apotheosis at last–!
A grand shudder ran through her body at the thought; she relished every inhuman click and pop as it went, every unnatural bend of her limbs, every centimeter of chrome and polymer revealed. Was this how the sad primitives of Federated Space felt as they guzzled down neural-net generated pornography and cheap narcotics to stave off the horrors of their all-too-human lives? She imagined it must be.
Nothing else could compare.