Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

THEN

‘Handler Walter’ let out a relieved sigh as the damned Institute prototype war machine finally fell silent.

“…is it over, 621?” he asked.

It was a rhetorical question. He didn’t receive a reply, and he did not expect one. His faithful hound didn’t utter a single unnecessary word in his presence even when she wasn’t exhausted by the sort of ‘marathon of combat’ she’d just endured. Walter remained silent as well, letting her catch her breath before moving on to the final step in his years-long mission.

621 and her armored core stood at the heart of the convergence. The center of all remaining Coral in the galaxy. The fuel that had sparked the greatest expansion of humanity’s territory since the invention of superluminal travel; the drug that had enabled crimes against humanity unrivaled since Titan’s Hammer. A man who had been more a father to Walter than his own had done his best to wipe it out; now, at last, he was on the cusp of finishing the old man’s work.

He let 621 rest.

He let himself imagine a future for humanity free of Coral’s influence.

He let his guard down.

The whistle of a supersonic artillery shell. The thunk of it slamming into the mud next to his hound’s feet.

“No! 621, move!”

Walter didn’t get a chance to see if his warning was of any use, if his hound managed to fling their ten-meter tall war machine to safety or went down to the blast. The sound of the detonating EM-pulse shell through his headset was nothing next to the cacophony of another craft making contact with the disguised hull of his hidden satellite. He barely had time to set off the failsafe that would fry his computer system before three men in PCA boarding gear burst into what passed for his office, gun-mounted lights blinding him as they screamed orders—

NOW

Harsh light stung his eyes no matter where he looked. The too-white paint—on the walls, floor, door, ceiling, even the table he’d been chained to—reflected the actinic glare of the bare florescent bulb like a deliberate assault on the senses. It probably was deliberate, at that. Interrogation rooms were not supposed to be comfortable for the interrogated.

The trip between his ruined command post and his current ‘accommodations’ had been long, but too smooth for atmospheric entry, so Walter knew he was in one of the detention centers honeycombed throughout the largely-automated Closure System. There was also the dead giveaway that the gravity was too light, maybe point-seven Earth compared to Rubicon’s point-nine-three; no Coriolis effect in his inner ear when he turned his head, so it was a-grav, not a rotational pseudo-force. That, and the decor, was about all he could learn about the station he was on from inside the room.

There was no way to mark time beside the steady thrum of the station’s environmental control, but based on his needs, he’d wager he’d been here for a little over a local day, if that. He’d slept a few hours, and been watered twice and fed once, as well as afforded a single trip to the lavatory (under a comically heavy guard for a one-armed man deprived of his prosthetic and cane: three men in full Planetary Closure Administration riot gear belted over Arquebus security uniforms, guns in hand) so his captors weren’t going to simply leave him starve to death.

Having read the reports on Arquebus’s internment camps, Walter suspected starving to death would have been the easy way out for him.

Finally, or perhaps all too soon, the door opened to admit a tall, wiry man in a Vesper-blue flight suit and jacket, shadowed by another faceless Arquebus security officer draped in Administration spoils. The pilot’s pale hair lay slicked back to reveal a sharp widow’s peak over a knife-straight nose and high cheekbones, his strong jaw shaved clean. Not a single seam or scar betrayed his augmentations, speaking to the quality of medical care his position afforded him.

The security officer made to follow him into the room, but the Vesper took one look at Walter—lingering on his empty left sleeve—then waved him off and waited for the door to shut before helping himself to the chair across from his captive, his hands flat on the table.

When the man didn’t speak for nearly a minute, Walter finally broke the silence. “Snail, I presume.” The man’s jacket lacked a number or emblem, but there was only one person Walter expected to come all the way to orbit just to gloat.

The Vesper scowled, his whole face displaying his displeasure. “Unfortunately not,” he said, and indeed, that was not the voice Walter had heard while wheedling his way into what passed for V.II’s good graces. “He died to your hound under the Watchpoint. I am V.I Freud.”

That was good news for Walter if it were true; it suggested 621 was still alive and active. Alas, he was not so optimistic as to take Freud’s word on the matter until he could judge what the man might gain by lying.

That Freud was here at all, either by necessity or as a ploy on Snail’s behalf, was interesting. Walter had done his research on everyone worth knowing on the poor, smoldering rock that was Rubicon III, and the relative lack of information on Freud told a story all its own. The man had removed himself as much as possible from the daily workings of the Vesper machine and sortied only on the hardest missions Arquebus faced, often with minimal support at his own request.

In anyone else, it would be the mark of a glory hound, but neither Freud’s public appearances nor the private records Walter had access to indicated he had any interest in the luxuries or privileges his position afforded him. Most of the other Vespers’ personnel files read like dossiers of blackmail material; Freud’s merely listed a steady log of anti-aging treatments—perfectly normal for the few who could afford them—and a preference for tea over coffee, not that anything but substitutes was available out in the fringes of human space even to an elite like one of Arquebus’s Vespers.

“And without your lieutenant, you’ve found yourself forced to take on all the work you’d gotten used to delegating,” Walter commented with a pleasantness that was entirely feigned. He kept his eyes fixed on Freud’s even as he noted the man’s hands tense at the bottom of his peripheral vision.

Walter had concluded that Freud had little interest in anything to do with the rest of the Vespers, or anything else beside himself and his armored core. If that were the case, it was natural to assume the sudden return to leadership would irk the man, and either Freud was a good actor or his probing shot had hit the mark. Unfortunately, that was only the case if Snail was, in fact, dead; perhaps he disliked having play out a part in one of Snail’s gambits, or he was simply displeased to be called out on his distaste for his nominal role. Walter couldn’t say for sure yet, but he filed the detail away all the same.

“It’s my job,” Freud said, his voice not hiding his annoyance. “I would worry more about your position than mine, ‘Handler’ Walter.”

“And what is my position, exactly?” Walter replied. “What do you need from me before you ship me off to one of the ‘resorts’ you run planetside?”

“You mean Snail’s pet projects?” Freud sneered. “I think we both know they’re little more than an exercise in cruelty, ‘research’ and ‘reeducation’ be damned. I respect you enough to know they wouldn’t intimidate you, so I hope you’ll give me the respect of doing the smart thing rather than the spiteful one.”

“Cooperating, you mean.”

“It’s your best choice,” Freud said, leaning forward to sell the deal. “We have your computers—your failsafe wasn’t as thorough as you would have liked—and we have you here, up in orbit.”

Walter had known his panic button wouldn’t get everything, or maybe even ‘most of it’ after how quickly they’d pulled its plug; the harder one made it to lose data on accident, the longer it took to destroy it on purpose and the more opportunity an attacker would have to halt the process. Still, the fact that Walter was still alive told him it had hidden something Arquebus—or perhaps Freud in particular—wanted to know.

“All right,” he said. “What does cooperating look like, exactly?”

“Your hound,” Freud replied at once. “Is it loyal to you, Walter, or just to the kill-switch we found in your computer system?”

A memory came to Walter, unbidden, of an old joke Carla had once told him about two pirates who sought to settle a dispute with a drinking game involving poison hidden in one of two cups of wine. He couldn’t recall the details, but he remembered the punchline well enough: both cups were poisoned because the one who’d picked the contest was immune. The outcome had been determined the moment the rules were set.

Arquebus wanted 621 on a leash. If his hound was loyal to Walter the man, keeping him alive was a complication, a potential weak point. If the hound only respected the collar, he was superfluous, unnecessary. Pick a cup and drink, Walter. You die either way.

But Arquebus had a problem: until they knew how to break 621 to their leash, they risked the dog biting back—and the fact Walter was dealing with Freud and not the late Snail showed just how hard his hound could bite. Staying silent wouldn’t save him, of course. Answers or no, Arquebus would throw him out the airlock eventually… or into one of their dubious ‘reeducation’ camps, if Freud was lying about Snail’s death after all.

Walter hadn’t concerned himself terribly with surviving the mission to begin with. It would have been nice if it happened, if he could have followed through on his promise to his hound personally, but it was never a requirement.

He said nothing. Smiled, the expression not reaching his eyes. Enjoyed watching Freud’s mood darken and his arms tense with the wish he had something in his hands to throw across the table at Walter’s smug face.

V.I was an interesting figure; if the records Walter had obtained were legitimate, Freud wasn’t even augmented. Walter had doubted it at the time, but looking at him now, Freud’s eyes betrayed the kind of single-minded obsession one would need to choose such a thing and make it work. It reminded Walter of himself in his youth, too many years ago on the moons of Jupiter, determined to prove that expertly piloting an AC didn’t demand several pounds of hardware shoved crudely into one’s skull. All he’d proven was an exception to the rule.

But what an exception he had been. Walter been famous for it, in his day: one of the best pilots of his time and in many’s minds the best unaugmented pilot in history. The ubiquity of augmentation surgery meant there had been fewer and fewer contenders since. Thirty years ago, people had found it laughably quaint that a pilot who could afford augmentation would refuse it. How much worse had the jeers gotten since, as the procedures grew more effective and less risky? How much harder did an unaugmented man have to fight to be respected as a pilot in the modern age? How much pride did Freud hold close to his chest that he would decline even the unparalleled safety and reliability of 10th generation augments?

Enough, perhaps, to seize the opportunity to pit his skills against the legendary Blackguard, the greatest unaugmented pilot to ever live? To change the rules of the contest, to risk losing for the chance to actually win?

Probably not—especially if Walter was the one to suggest it—but dragging things out favored Walter regardless. Carla would learn of his fate soon enough, and 621 was either dead or standing at the finish line mere days away from escaping her own personal hell for good.

One way or another, it was out of his hands.

Chapter Text

Excerpt from the publication A Time Travel’s Guide to Sol, a satirical work published in 204 UE under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Oakes’ with the purported purpose of introducing an ‘information age’ (c 2000 CE / 100 BUE) time traveler to the modern day.

The following text appears in Chapter 3: “Tourism”:

Given the difficulty inherent in planning trips with travel times measured in months amid the ever-shifting variance of colonial scrip, corporations began issuing executives and management-level employees likely to engage in interstellar travel some or all of their wages in “Company Assured Money”, abbreviated COAM or C (to match the MSD symbol M) and often colloquially (and erroneously) referred to as “credits”.

While “Company” and “Money” should be self-explanatory, the word “Assured” refers to a single unit of COAM conveying the assurance, or guarantee, of an amount of value redeemable for one local Mars State Dollar upon arrival at Mariner Station, or its equivalent anywhere else. As the practice (and the scale of human industry) spread, companies and even rich private individuals found it convenient to perform transactions directly in COAM rather than MSD, as they no longer needed to heed the instantaneous availability of circulating Martian Dollars to conduct business. As a result, your last few hundred years of dividends were likely accumulated as COAM rather than paid out in MSD without your input, saving you the trouble of converting your wealth to the intermediary unit.

While it is common in the vernacular to claim one ‘has’ or ‘is paid’ some amount of ‘credits’, COAM is not itself a currency. It is thus more accurate to describe oneself as ‘due’ or ‘credited’ a value of MSD ‘in’ COAM.

TECHNICALLY INCORRECT: “I have 100 000 credits in my account.”
TECHNICALLY CORRECT: “I am due a value of M100 000 in COAM from my account.”

TECHNICALLY INCORRECT: “I earn 60 000 credits a year.”
TECHNICALLY CORRECT: “I am credited a value of M60 000 in COAM each year.”

Unlike many things in this guide, people do, in fact, find this odd.

[Sidebar:
Be aware!
Using the latter, TECHNICALLY CORRECT forms is the surest way to out oneself as a time traveler or prescriptivist grammarian. Should this occur, admit to time traveling immediately; it will be less trouble for you.
End sidebar]

THEN

“Raven…”

The Handler had not instructed her to ignore the auditory hallucination she’d recently developed, so she thought, Yes?

“One of your implants is… different.”

All of her implants were differ—oh. The kill-switch. She knew it wasn’t like the rest because her Handler had been displeased when he’d found it. Not at her, thankfully, but she shuddered at the memory all the same. She then immediately regretted shuddering because everything hurt.

“Yes. That one.”

Even several months after her surgery, C4-621 was still getting used to speaking only with great difficulty and more than a little shame at her disability. A possibly-hallucinated woman plucking ideas straight from her mind was an even harsher adjustment, and it hadn’t been even a day since she’d appeared.

The reason she’d appeared was almost certainly the same reason 621 was currently lying in the only hospital bed in their base’s makeshift infirmary feeling perfectly terrible. She’d been caught in a Coral Surge—something akin to an uncontrolled burn-off of the most valuable fuel in existence, a blaze energetic enough to warp and melt armor meant to absorb shots from a plasma cannon. 621 had snapped out of the bizarre trance her sudden injuries had left her in to find a gentle, encouraging voice doing its best to get her through the next five minutes of combat.

Normally, 621 would not have needed the help. Normally, she was not suffering from severe burns and acute Coral poisoning.

“I can disable it, if you would like,” Ayre continued.

621 gave it a second’s thought. Her Handler had told her Ayre was a hallucination, but 621, privately, did not believe that. Her Handler had not ordered her to believe him, so that was allowed. She was glad he had not because she was unsure how she would follow such an order, and she could not bear to think of what might happen if she failed to.

Irrelevant, 621 concluded. Her Handler was better than most, she believed. Brusque as he may be, he gave her limited autonomy in her missions, insisted she rest properly after injury, and even provided treatment for non-mission-critical medical issues like her post-augmentation aphasia. She had no inclination to betray what kindness she received from him in any way that might give him cause to use the kill-switch, not when the care he afforded her was so much better than many would give a slave in his place.

She had nowhere else to go, anyway.

“Then, if it’s the same to you,” Ayre said, “I would rather disable it, to be safe.”

If you think it would be best.

621 liked her Handler well enough, but the kindness Ayre gave her was a softer sort. If her implants hadn’t crippled her skill with language, she might have labeled it ‘compassion’—but her inability to name it didn’t mean she didn’t recognize it for what it was.

Walter might have her loyalty, but Ayre had quickly earned her trust. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if the two ever came into conflict.

THEN

“Confirmed,” Ayre announced. “V.II Snail eliminated… and we’re all better for it.”

621 went limp in her crash harness; with her direct control relinquished, the Attitude Control System took over and straightened REASON from where it crouched over her enemy’s wreckage. A shoulder tackle had pushed OPEN FAITH’s already-overloaded ACS past the breaking point and REASON had dragged it down like a street fighter, her knees and fists hammering the enemy into scrap until the state of OPEN FAITH’s pilot capsule left no doubt about the fate of its owner. Only now, with her blood cooling and her adrenaline fading, did 621 realize just how tired she was.

Fuck, was she tired.

Rusty. Flatwell. Maeterlinck. Wu Huahai. CEL. Fight after fight after fight without end. The resupply Walter had arranged in the city above had refilled her weapons but not her spirit, and the last in that list had been a class of its own—and then that smug bastard Snail crippled the left side of her AC with an EMP before she knew he was there, rendering both her laser cannon and the relatively simple stake-driver melee unit inoperable without even hitting her. If her panicked boost had come a heartbeat slower, he would’ve disabled her whole core; as it was, without Ayre’s near-magic technological prowess restoring partial functionality to the paralyzed left arm and leg, she probably would have died anyway.

The mission up to that point had taxed 621; killing the second-ranked Vesper and his entourage with only half an AC left her exhausted. It was something of a pity weariness was the only thing she could feel right now. She’d fantasized about punching Snail’s OPEN FAITH to pieces with REASON’s bare fists before, and now desperation and fatigue had robbed the moment of its due catharsis.

It took several minutes, over which her breathing steadied and her core cooled down enough for her sweat to turn unpleasantly chill on her skin, before she realized something had been missing for some time.

Walter? 621 thought.

“There’s no signal,” Ayre replied. “Your COM is operating normally, and I’m not detecting any jamming or ECM. He’s just… silent.”

621’s partner—a native Coral intelligence, something she was pretty sure everyone else would consider pure fiction—had taken the liberty of meshing herself deep into both 621’s implants and her AC’s systems, the better to run comms and mission control. 621 didn’t doubt Ayre’s words; she would know.

“Fuff,” 621 said. “Fuh. Ffff. Fuff! FFFFFFFFFFFUCK!”

Ayre did not respond verbally—or whatever passed for ‘verbally’ across the Contact they’d made—but 621 could feel her agreement. The two remained silent for some time while the Coral-doped mud of Institute City’s swamp turned dry and flaky on REASON’s hull.

621 only realized she’d dozed off when a familiar voice jolted her out of her slumber.

“You alive down there, tourist?”

621 rolled her shoulders and neck, sore from an all-too-short nap in the pilot’s seat. She took a deep breath. Concentrated. Carefully pronounced: “Affirmative.”

“Small mercies!” ‘Cinder’ Carla muttered, as much to herself as 621. “Right, here’s the deal. Walter had a dead man’s switch rigged to contact me if he went silent for too long, which I now know about because it just went off. Guess he knew there was always the risk he wouldn’t be around to finish what he started.”

621 hung her head, her fears confirmed.

“He left a message for you,” Carla continued. “I’d offer you privacy… buuut I already listened to it before contacting you. Just another bad habit of mine. Here.”

Sure enough, Walter’s voice—prerecorded but no less welcome—came down the com channel. “621, a friend of mine’s sent a request… no. This one’s from me.”

621 perked up once more. Walter had promised to give her a reason to exist; she still didn’t know what he’d meant by that, but there was a reason her AC had the name it had, and it wasn’t out of pettiness or spite. Her AC was her REASON to exist, the only one she had left, and Walter had made it a far better life than he’d needed to considering he legally owned her. There were very few things 621 wouldn’t do to fulfill her Handler’s last wishes.

The message continued, and her determination turned to horror as numbers and charts filled the video feed and the purpose of their enterprise emerged from the shroud of secrecy.

“The Coral must be burned, 621.”

No.

“This isn’t an order—it’s a legacy.”

No!

“Let the last cinders burn.”

No no no no no no no!

He wanted—

He wanted her to—

She was barely aware of Carla picking up the call once more. “Walter and I had a front-row seat to the horrors of the Rubicon Research Institute more than fifty years ago. We made a promise to ensure those crimes could never–”

Strangling a sob, 621 punched the END COMM button hard enough to sting her hand through her flight suit’s gloves, then palmed the release on her crash harness, curled into a ball, and wept.

NOW

A phantom stalked the cleft leading to Institute City, a terror in worn and muck-splattered red paint. Scout probes, MTs, LCs—whatever Arquebus poked into the hole, it found bitten off at the wrist. Such was the severity of the problem that a fuming V.I was currently in orbit in search of a solution, ignorant of how the situation on the ground would change in his absence.

“Raven,” Ayre’s said once more, insistent. “You can’t keep going like this. You need to rest.”

621—if that name still meant anything to her—knew that already. She’d been awake 30 of the last 32 hours. REASON had returned to the resupply pod twice before its cargo ran out; after that, she’d scavenged from the wrecks, starting with INFECTION and LI LONG and then turning to whatever Arquebus sent down the hole. Cryptographic lockouts usually prevented ACs from salvaging weapons in the field, but ‘usual’ AC pilots didn’t have a Coral life-form riding copilot in their network. With her help, connecting the power systems and synchronizing the new equipment with the FCS was the harder step!

But she couldn’t rest. Not now, maybe not ever. The Coral was gathering behind and beneath her, its guardian slain by her hand. Without her—

“Raven,” Ayre’s voice cut into her thoughts, her normally calm voice filled with concern. “You’ve already taken your emergency dose of C-stabilizers. If you insist on staying down here, you’ll die.”

Can’t. Have to protect. My fault.

“You can’t protect anything if you’re dead!”

The shock at hearing her ever-calm companion yell was what finally cut through the dissociative haze 621 had wrapped around herself like a blanket.

621 fired off another scan pulse and, after confirming they were alone, took her hands off the controls to hide her face.

I don’t know what to do, she thought to Ayre. What am I supposed to do? What few decisions she’d been offered since waking from surgery had been clean, sharply delineated things: missions, AC components, optional objectives. Memories of life before augmentation followed much the same lines: work shifts, clothing styles, food brands. Multiple choice, strictly regimented.

“Whatever you choose, I’ll support you,” Ayre said, “but you’ll need to be alive to see it through.”

This? Being asked to decide? To choose? To plan, to plot, to follow a line of her own devising, not set down by another’s hand—it stole the bottom out of her stomach like a long drop.

It felt like falling.

The Coral—your family—

“Walter can’t reach them down here without you, and Arquebus aren’t going to burn the Coral,” Ayre reassured her. “They want it for themselves, and that will take time we can use to prepare.”

But I promised to take you to your family.

“And you did, Raven. You did. But now we need to look after you.”

I don’t want to leave you.

“You don’t have to. I’ll go with you, Raven.”

621 glanced up from her hands in surprise as though Ayre had a physical presence to look at. You will?

“I will. Of course I will, Raven. Now let’s find you some help.”

Help. Right.

How?

“Carla has been trying to hail us–”

No! 621 thought at once. Not Carla. She’d known all along what Walter meant to do. Supported it, promised it. 621 wasn’t ready to face her, not yet, maybe not ever.

Ayre paused, thinking over the alternatives.

“I don’t know of any Rubicon Liberation Front bases in the area,” she said, “but Flatwell must have been operating from somewhere nearby.”

Would they even help us?

“They might want a favor in exchange, but we’ve done enough work for them that I think they would shelter us if we asked.”

621 reluctantly nodded her assent. Flatwell… they’d tried to kill each other not long ago for reasons 621 hadn’t understood at the time. Had he known what Walter was planning? Maybe. She’d happily forgive him if that were the case.

Forgiving Rusty was a harder prospect. His words had hurt her in a way she hadn’t realized she could still hurt. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It was a job. It wasn’t supposed to be personal.

But then, that wasn’t the only time she’d broken that rule. Hammering down G4 and G5 at Gallia just to prove their smack-talk a load of hot air. Lashing out at NIGHTFALL’s pilot as their operator boasted of their freedom. The roaring in her ears as she beat the life out of Snail.

Hints of someone else shining through the gaps in her metal. Someone younger, more heated, unsuited to being a weapon. A weakness she didn’t need.

Especially now that she’d been reminded how much it could hurt.

Focus, she told herself. Ayre was right: she was on a time limit. Rusty, Flatwell… whether or not she could forgive either of them mattered far less than if they would forgive her, and even that only mattered if she could find them before her organs started shutting down from the Coral in her blood her implants demanded for their function.

Ayre. Options for the RLF? Please.

“We still have the RLF IFF tags from the Gallia Dam operation,” Ayre suggested. “They’ll be out of date, but that should only make it more obvious who we are.”

That could work. 621 didn’t know what had happened to Rusty, but given their obvious connection, she assumed he would have helped Flatwell back to the surface. (She hoped Flatwell had survived. She had tried not to deal a killing blow to either of them.) From there, Flatwell and his people should be headed east, towards the coast across the sea from Belius, the most densely populated area on Rubicon and the heartland of the Liberation Front. The biggest question was how fast they were moving.

Of course, that assumed 621 could make it to the surface in the first place. It’s going to be a long trip up the shaft, she thought.

“I know. You should rest before we go.”

621 frowned.

“You need it,” Ayre insisted.

Two hours, 621 bargained. And you’ll wake me if Arquebus sends anything else down here.

“You need more than two hours sleep.”

Two hours.

“Two hours, then,” Ayre agreed. “But only starting once you’re actually…”

But her partner was already asleep.

Chapter Text

THEN

BEEP BEEP BEEP.

V.I Freud silenced his alarm and rolled out of his bunk before his brain fully registered he was awake. He slipped off his smallclothes and took the same regulation 3-minute shower he had as an entry-level muscle tracer pilot. The flight suit he donned afterwards was a great deal nicer than the one he’d first used all those years ago, but the compressed Asabiyyah Nutri-Plus brand ration bar he chewed as he headed to LOCKSMITH’s bay and the beaten tin mug full of tap water he washed it down with were the same as the grunts in the barracks across the base had.

(Freud had never bothered to learn that his opposite in the recent conflict, G1 Michigan, had done much the same—but while Michigan had done so in full view of his troops as a show of camaraderie, Freud did so in private because he simply couldn’t be arsed to change his habits or requisition anything nicer for his meals. The bars were healthier than what his peers ate anyway.)

When Freud arrived on the garage catwalk just past the hangar blast doors, nearly level with LOCKSMITH’s head, the clock on the wall read twelve minutes past the hour. He was pleased. He’d been efficient this morning.

An aide approached him with a tablet, and he exchanged his empty cup for it and thanked the woman without looking away from his machine. He swept a dozen status reports from various branches of Arquebus’s CorpSec into an archival folder, knowing they’d have been forwarded to Snail automatically, before one tugged his lips into something approaching a smile. Arquebus’s Advanced Development Division had a working AC-compatible prototype of the tower-pattern pulse-shields the PCA Heavy Cavalry units used. Production was still a month or more out, but with the specs largely set, he’d be able to start training with it in the simulators.

He was in the middle of reviewing the spec sheet—and considering drafting some recommendations to the engineers involved: the weight of the prototype had to come down if they expected any kind of market for it, even at the cost of shield stability—when the clock on the corner of the screen ticked over to 15 past and a call came in.

“O’Keeffe?” Freud asked as the man’s icon popped up onscreen, unable to resist a bit of needling for his long-serving teammate. “Early day for you, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” V.III O’Keeffe spat with uncharacteristic scorn, the audiograph spiking as he banged about his office. “I’ve been putting out fires since naught-30 this morning; had half a mind to wake you, too. V.II’s dead, we’ve got a renegade merc loose in Priority Zone 2 killing everything in sight, and you have an orbital shuttle inbound in five to take you up to the Closure System to debrief a PoW. Get moving.”

“Debrief a…” Freud sputtered. “Why is this my job? Wait, what do you mean Snail’s dead? How?”

“Because I’m already doing your job,” O’Keeffe snapped. “I’ve been at it for hours and there isn’t enough time for me to pass the buck back before you have to leave. You’ll have time to review the reports in flight, but you can either launch in the next twenty minutes or spend two extra hours waiting for transfer orbits to take you to the right satellite. Your call.”

For all that Freud was nominally the superior officer here, he knew an order when he heard one. “I’m on my way to the launch hangar,” he said. “Send me everything.”

NOW

Freud was nursing a stress headache as he slumped into his chair and put a call through to Arquebus’s western base. The office he’d commandeered aboard the satellite managed to compare unfavorably to the interrogation room he’d left minutes earlier. It was a small, dark, cramped room overstuffed with filing cabinets full of poorly labeled data cards documenting the hundreds of ‘persons of interest’ who’d passed through the installation since its inception. Even the chair behind the too-small desk was crap, the sort of awkward ‘ergonomic’ piece of shit one picked out of a catalogue for its impressive price rather than any degree of common sense. Freud had gone out of his way to replace it with a chair taken from one of the unused interrogation rooms, it was that bad.

After a few seconds that felt much longer to his fraying patience, the line connected with a click, and the monitor in front of him resolved into the Vesper’s No. 3 with his feet up on the desk of an office much like Freud’s own, albeit with a desk chair designed by a human being. O’Keeffe looked like Freud felt right now: old in the way few AC pilots got between the hazards of their work and the perks of the job, with heavy bags under his eyes and a pyramid of empty mugs stacked up on the right side of the desk, the tablet he’d been working with now lying in his lap. The video feed was too compressed for Freud to see the silvery spiderweb of scars across O’Keeffe’s temples from his original augments—2nd generation, barely past the point ‘butchery’ turned to ‘surgery’—but Freud had seen them in person enough times that his mind added the detail.

“Freud,” O’Keeffe greeted him with the audible weariness of the overworked, not that Freud had sympathy to spare after how brusque the man had been that morning. “Hope the ride up wasn’t too rough.”

“Talk to me, O’Keeffe,” Freud grumbled. “What’s the situation down there?”

The man huffed. “We pushed hard on the western front and left Belius a mess, and it’s coming back to bite us. Swinburne—”

Freud couldn’t care less what Swinburne had fucked up before his death. “I meant the situation in Priority Zone 2.”

O’Keeffe grumbled and swung his feet off the desk, knocking the mugs to the ground in the process. “It’s what it was when you left,” he said as he corrected his posture into something resembling professional. “Anything we send past the security grid dies. I’d suggest you sort things out yourself if we had enough Vespers to keep thing running without you, but we don’t have the luxury. To make things worse, we’ve had scattered contacts up and down the shaft, including no less than three reported sightings of our problem mercenary–”

“They’ve left the City?” Freud interrupted.

“I wouldn’t count on it. Our security forces are running afoul of automated defenses and jumping at shadows. We have people reporting sighting Raven, Michigan, Rusty… I’d bet someone’s claiming to have run into Nine-ball down there as we speak. The cross-training on PCA equipment is still a work in progress, and moral is low. I’m cycling troops in and out to isolate the complainers, but…” O’Keeffe trailed off into a helpless shrug.

So we know exactly as much as we did when I left, Freud thought. Fucking nothing.

He massaged his temples with one hand as he rummaged through the mess on the desk for the tablet containing the most pressing concerns Snail had left in his wake. “Okay. What’s Balam’s status?”

“Holed up in the spaceport east of the ravine. They’re pulling out of Rubicon completely, and—”

“—and with our limited supply of captured PCA units, it wouldn’t be worth the materiel losses we’d suffer forcing a last stand,” Freud interrupted. “I read the report. No change in their deployment?”

“None.”

“Good. The Dosers?”

“Same. RLF too. We can’t hide losing three Vespers in one day for long, but—no, best assume it’s already leaked and they’re preparing to take advantage.”

Freud grunted and looked at the next few items on the list. Most of it spoke for itself, but one entry stood out. “What’s this about ‘unknown drones’?”

O’Keeffe winced.

“That,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows heavily on the desk, “could be a problem.”

When Freud didn’t interject again, O’Keeffe continued, “We’ve had around a dozen separate incidents involving unidentified autonomous units using high-end MDD—mostly in Belius, but at least one confirmed in the outskirts around Watchpoint Alpha. The few we’ve destroyed haven’t left enough behind to identify the exact technologies involved, and the stealth systems make analysis of live targets predictably frustrating, but from what we’ve seen in action, it’s good. Too good.”

“More Institute relics?” Freud guessed.

The other man shook his head. “Institute tech was good for its time, but it’s still fifty years old; the only reason it’s still relevant is because they had Coral. These drones, whatever they are, they’re new. Fifteen to twenty years ahead of PCA units that only just hit the field, and if the ghosts I’ve found in the PCA’s logs are what I think they are, they’ve been striking at the PCA as recently as three months ago.”

O’Keeffe stopped and leaned back as he waited for his superior to come to the same conclusion he had.

“SOLMIL,” Freud said, feeling another headache coming on. “Has to be. They’re the only ones with better gear than the PCA—the damn cav units ADD is prying apart are SOLMIL’s latest hand-me-downs. But why are they attacking their own agency?”

“Why is anyone doing anything on this shithole planet?” O’Keeffe asked.

“Coral,” Freud groaned. “But that doesn’t explain their behavior. You can’t run a resource extraction op with a handful of deniable black-ops assets, and if SOLFED wants Coral, they already own the PCA!”

“SOLFED owns the PCA,” O’Keeffe said. “SOLMIL wants the Coral.”

“Over the heads of the plutocrats?” Freud scoffed. “Why now? What’s so urgent that it has military brass running ops against a fellow government agency?”

He could tell by the expression on O’Keeffe’s face that the man did not expect him to like the answer.

“Internal SOLINT memos suggest Tau Ceti will make a bid for independence within the next 18 months,” he announced.

Freud politely declined to ask how the fuck O’Keeffe had gotten his hands on an internal Sol Military Intelligence memo. “They’re sure?”

“Sure enough that SOLMIL is sniffing around for every advantage they can get. We’ve had corporate wars on and off since before we crossed light-speed, but always under SOLFED’s rules. There hasn’t been an outright war between colonies since the Feds crushed Titan two hundred years ago, if you can even call that a ‘war’. If they’re worried enough to run an op like this…”

Then it’s sure to be a right fucking shitshow no matter who wins in the end, Freud finished to himself. He was rapidly getting another headache. “How bad is this for us?”

“Too early to say. If Tau bides their time and we get Coral extraction running in a reasonable time-frame, we’ll have the most lucrative government contract of our lifetimes. If Tau accelerates their timetable or… ‘certain interests’ continue to interfere in our operations, SOLMIL will come in and take the whole planet off our hands at gunpoint.”

“Rendering every dime we’ve spent on this campaign wasted.” Freud pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers as the enormity of the clusterfuck he’d found himself in became apparent. “They were interfering with the PCA because they wanted them muscled out by anyone with the means and profit motive to suck the planet dry of Coral, and now they’re watching us like hawks to make sure we’re moving to a schedule they don’t have the grace to give us.”

“So it would seem,” O’Keeffe agreed.

Fuck!

“All right,” Freud said, then paused as he once again noticed the bags under his lieutenant’s eyes. The rest could wait. “Get some sleep, O’Keeffe. I’ll pick up the slack from here.”

O’Keeffe raised an eyebrow. “Not coming back down?”

“Not yet.” Freud didn’t feel like explaining that he didn’t need LOCKSMITH tempting him to fob off even more work off on his already overworked lieutenant. Eight Vespers’ worth of administrative duties between the two of them and O’Keeffe was already taking a 70-30 split; more than that would push anyone with any sense to mutiny. “If we can get a handle on our rogue mercenary, we could solve a lot of problems at the same time.”

“If,” O’Keeffe repeated darkly. “Good luck. I’m going to take that nap you offered.”

Freud nodded sharply and closed the channel, after which he set aside professionalism and dropped his head against the desk with a heavy thump.

What he wouldn’t give for even one extra officer worth their fucking stripes. O’Keeffe was almost finished patching the holes the recent spate of combat—and a frustrating number of assassinations by terrorist agents—had opened in the command structure of the general security forces but had yet to address the vacuum at the top of the chain. Good officers were hard to find, and when corp doctrine insisted those officers also be AC pilots of at least moderate skill, the field narrowed even further.

Fucking Arquebus. Fucking Snail. Losing the hotheaded-but-capable Rusty in a failed bid to eliminate their faithful headache, then leaving always-reliable Maeterlinck out to dry to keep the pawn in play after it proved more capable than anticipated… if Freud blamed the prick for his own death, that was fully half the Vesper casualties in this operation laid at the man’s feet. Hell, he’d been the one to recruit Hawkins, Pater, and Swinburne, so Freud might as well blame Snail for their fatally inadequate performances as well, the fucker.

Through the pain of his compounding stress headaches, something about that thought stood out to Freud as important.

Snail had seen to the death of V.IV and V.VI with a callousness that crossed into deliberate malice, removing fully half the remaining Vespers who predated Freud handing the responsibility for recruitment and promotion over to his second. Snail had also previously promoted one of ‘his own’ over the latter despite her seniority and unblemished record, and that was far from the only questionable decision he’d made when it came to the ranks. For fuck’s sake, nothing Freud had seen since taking back his responsibilities as V.I indicated Swinburne was competent as an AC pilot or an officer, much less worthy of a Vesper’s number that made him both, and the less said of the mess 7th Squad and the Belius garrison as a whole had become on his watch, the better.

Suspicions piqued, Freud grabbed the tablet and took a closer look at the fate of the three newest—and now late—Vespers. The oaf Swinburne had died to a single (presumed) RLF insurgent infiltrating his area of operations; old news, an undignified end to a pilot undeserving of his position.

Freud skipped forward a month.

Just over a week ago, V.V and V.VIII detoured from their designated patrol on Snail’s orders, or so they’d thought; Raven and their employer-of-the-day, one of the RLF’s few augmented pilots, had assassinated the pair instead. The logged message looked authentic enough, but it had come through local channels rather than the secure Arquebus network, which was half the reason the fake had been possible at all. Why would Hawkins trust orders sent over a channel without the normal security verifications?

Because this wasn’t the first time he’d received them that way.

Arquebus COMNET logged everything, but concealing a back-channel message like this was as easy as deleting it from the AC’s COM before maintenance. Snail could have been sending messages like this daily and unless someone died with the message still in memory—thanks, Hawkins, you dumb fuck—no one would be the wiser.

There were supposed to be people watching for these things, of course, but another frantic search through the records confirmed Freud’s newest worry: O’Keeffe’s analysis of the assassination glossed over the issue entirely, stating only that the two were ‘diverted from their assigned route by enemy SIGWAR’. The man was the Vespers’ damned Intelligence Officer! Catching this shit was his whole fucking job!

While Freud was at it, how long had O’Keeffe known about SOLMIL’s drones? He’d alluded to them showing up in the PCA’s logs—where was that in his reports? How long had he spent chasing down an internal SOLINT memo on Tau fucking Ceti only to mention it to fucking nobody? Because Freud had the reports right in front of him, and he could see plain as day that none of that had made it back to the suits on Mars.

Freud broke into a cold sweat. He’d done SIGINT training, knew the patterns to look for in the data, how to use what was said and what wasn’t like two color channels in the same image. Snail had stacked the roster with no less than half its number loyal to him, including the man himself—if O’Keeffe was collaborating, which seemed damned likely, they had the majority. Even more tellingly, O’Keeffe had been deliberately omitting information from his reports to corporate for who knew how long—including information that SOLINT was keeping well under wraps, and which could be priceless to anyone with a stake in the arms market.

With a pit in his stomach, Freud turned to O’Keeffe’s reports on the captured PCA assets, both those submitted to him—to Snail, in practice, by dint of his abdication of command—and those to Arquebus’s executive suite. The latter were underreported by roughly forty percent, much of the difference in materiel quietly shuffled into off-the-books warehouses for transport off-world. Financial assets conveniently misplaced, shuffled through subsidiary corporations before dropping off the network into black-money banks in the Inner Colonies…

The tablet clattered to the table from numbed fingers as Freud faced the fact he’d been hoping to disprove for several minutes: Snail had been plotting a fucking coup.

Against who? SOLFED? Ridiculous. SOLMIL were the watchmen, the enforcers of fair play in intercorporate warfare, the single largest concentration of military power anywhere in human space. Snail knew as well as anyone that the so-called ‘cutting edge’ PCA gear was their cast-offs; the barest hint of a threat to the Fed, and SOLMIL would eat him alive. But against Arquebus? In the chaos following the outbreak of civil war, with SOLMIL mustering out of the system to Earth’s oldest extrasolar colony and the Praetorian Guard scrambling to fill in the gaps, untested and unprepared for enemies with equipment parity?

It was stupid. Ludicrous. But it might have worked.

As for the odd men out on this little plot, the muzzle on Rusty’s emblem was ill-fitting. The man might not show his ambition the way his peers did, but no one worked as hard as he did without it; he’d like as not join the weaker side just for a larger cut of the spoils. Maeterlinck was a wildcard; she looked up to Snail like he walked on water, but it was anyone’s guess whether a gambit like this would impress her or break the pedestal she’d put him on. Freud would’ve wagered the latter, and her death suggested Snail agreed. And in his own case… if he were brutally honest with himself, Freud had to wonder if he would have even noticed, or if he’d have been tinkering with LOCKSMITH one day when Snail walked into his hangar to inform him of the regime change.

Freud wasn’t sure what rankled more: Snail’s complete indifference towards the threat he posed to the man’s plans, or the fact it was fucking justified. Every piece of incriminating evidence he had found had passed through his desk over the last few months, unnoticed largely because he never bothered to check his mail. Snail certainly hadn’t been worried about him; with all three of his hand-picked Vespers dead, he’d thought nothing of arranging two more quick deaths, knowing full well that Freud would delegate replacing the lot with no questions asked.

And what about O’Keeffe, to whom Freud had already given the task of filling in holes in the squads’ command structures and drawing up new Vespers? Was he an opportunist, or did he have the ambition to follow through on the plot himself? And what the fuck was Freud supposed to do about either possibility? Fire the only person with the necessary experience to pick up his slack on a theatre-wide level? Spend the rest of the conflict looking over his shoulder for a dagger in the back? The detention satellite suddenly felt like the only safe place in the solar system.

To think he’d woken up thinking today was going to be a good day.

Chapter Text

Excerpt from the publication A Time Travel’s Guide to Sol, a satirical work published in 204 UE under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Oakes’ with the purported purpose of introducing an ‘information age’ (c 2000 CE / 100 BUE) time traveler to the modern day.

The following text appears in Chapter 3: “Tourism”:

One of the first edicts of the Federated Worlds of Sol was to restart the calendar year by setting the new Year 1 UE (Unification Era) to the founding of the Mars State Authority, which unified the 9 until-then independent Martian colonies. The same edict also set the official date and time standard on all bodies in the system to use Mars Standard years (MSy) over the old Earth equivalent years (Eey). In the turmoil following the Reunification, this standard was not enforced, and today only formal government records use MSy. Even on Mars, everyone except the FWS itself counts years from 1 UE using Eey; as such, the duration of the First Earth-Mars War is now recorded as 6-8 UE and the Reunification War as 29-34 UE.

[Insert:
While we’re at it—
More precise dates on the interplanetary calendar are also tracked by the Earth day, either by Earth’s own seasonal calendar with its 12 months of irregular length, or simply by the number of Earth days since the new year with the unit ‘e’ appended; date systems based on local days use ‘d’ instead. For example, 16/08/204 or 231e/204 both mark the date this work was published. When handwritten, it is common to place the stroke through the e or d rather than following it.
End insert]

In common conversation, the word ‘year’ by itself may refer to ‘calendar’ (Earth) years, ‘Standard’ (Mars) years, or ‘local’ years depending on context. The terms ‘decade’, ‘century’, and ‘millennium’ always refer to calendar years even in contexts where the word ‘year’ without a qualifier would mean something else.

Because the FWS sets the legal age for voting, narcotics use, and compulsory service drafts based on MSy, human age is universally measured in MSy. It is the only reason a vast majority of the population will ever use MSy for anything. Someone born on Earth on New Years Day, 180 UE became legally permitted to vote and buy alcohol at age 10 in mid September 198 UE. No one finds this odd.

As integer MSy measurements are only about half as precise as integer Eey measurements, many people informally track age to the half- or even quarter-year. The latter usually stops after early childhood, as quarter-years are used mostly for developmental milestones, but many parents continue to celebrate their children’s half-birthdays into adolescence or even up until the children come of legal age. If you overhear a conversation like the following…

[Image:
A cartoon of a smiling woman walking down a street with a whining adolescent boy, each with a speech bubble coming from their mouths. The woman’s speech bubble reads, “Are you excited for your eighth-and-a-half, sweetie?” The boy’s reads, “Moooom! I’m almost grown up! Half-birthdays are kid things!”
End Image.]

…this is why.

Moving on to smaller units, the word ‘day’ almost always refers to the local synodic rotation period unless it varies substantially enough from Earth days that it is inconvenient or unpleasant to arrange life according to the local sunlight cycle, in which case a 24-hour day is used and the solar cycle largely ignored. If you are instead speaking of interstellar calendar days, the qualifier ‘Earth’ is prepended.

The units of time called the ‘week’ and ‘month’, like the ‘day’, vary from world to world. Typically, they are the integer number of local days closest to the absolute length of 7 and 30 Earth days, respectively, unless the world’s day cycle is already fairly close to an Earth day, in which case they are 7 and 30 local days even if another integer number would be closer. Local months are generally numbered rather than named; local years may have a non-integer number of months or a number of days at the end of the year which are not part of a month.

For all three units, there is no consistent cutoff for when a world uses one definition or the other. Whether any given planet or moon uses Earth-standard or local synodic days is entirely up to custom. (The colony of Terra Rasa is fairly infamous for its 33-hour shift/sleep cycle.) For worlds that use local days, whether they use the former definitions of a ‘week’ and ‘month’ or the latter is equally arbitrary. What ends up being “customary” boils down to an impulsive decision made by overworked and sleep-deprived first-wave colonists. No one finds this odd.

If there is any benefit to these customs, it is that an estimate of “about one month’s travel” between two particular inhabited systems holds true regardless of which one you are on.

[Sidebar:
Modern Math!
For quick conversion between MSy and Eey, the factor 1.9 is often sufficiently precise. One additional digit of precision (1.88 = 47/25) gives results with error <0.05% (true value 686.98/365.26 ≈ 1.8807972…). Converting from Eey to MSy simply inverts the fractions (10/19 or 25/47 depending on the required precision).
End sidebar]

THEN

Flatwell tapped his fingers on his desk as he poked at his terminal with his other hand. His 6th-generation implants were capable of interfacing with the base computers if he wanted, and they were good enough for viewing documents or video, but their ability to accept text input was… well, suffice it to say it left something to be desired. As a result, he’d never formed the habit of using them for the half of a personal computer’s job they were good at, either.

The corporations’ so-called Coral War against the PCA had gone smoothly—too smoothly for the Rubicon Liberation Front’s liking. Arquebus had proved both competent and lucky at every turn, or maybe all the accumulated karma from thirty years of active genocide had caught up to the PCA all at once and dragged them down to hell posthaste. Balam hadn’t come out much better, but their fate was solidly of their own making; they’d traded Arquebus the easier battles in exchange for the worse prizes and still acted surprised that they came out behind.

In the end, Arquebus had emerged from the Coral War more intact than either Balam or the RLF would like, their boot on the face of Rubicon no less firmly planted than the PCA’s had been. The only improvement to be found was that they were merely ‘indifferent’ to the survival and wellbeing of the Rubiconians rather than actively seeking to annihilate them, and that would last only as long as it took to establish a corp-indoctrinated population with which to displace them. If the Liberation Front didn’t find a way to curb Arquebus’s success hard and fast, the whole War might leave them even worse off than they’d been at its beginning.

Belius, at least, was a mess for both sides; the corporations’ focus on the PCA had given the local RLF units a sorely-needed break to repair and reorganize—and left a few important personnel vulnerable to Flatwell’s favorite contractor—but that wasn’t going to last more than a week unless the Front managed to serve the Vespers a curve-ball soon. Meanwhile, across the sea on the Ice Fields, Arquebus had more or less free reign. The RLF had established outposts throughout the area in their arguably successful bid to push the PCA off-world, for what little good ‘driving them into orbit’ had done, but nothing like the bases they maintained in Belius.

It was all about logistics, in the end: the Ice Field outposts were satellites hanging on the end of thin and fragile supply lines. There hadn’t been a population center capable of supporting even a single ‘base’ anywhere on the continent since the Fires had spilled out from Institute City. Belius had been sheltered by distance and the western-most Grid; the area that was now ‘the Ice Fields’ had had no such protection and been stripped to scorched bedrock. As such, everything from food to munitions to manpower had to be flown across the sea from Belius—and then the manpower needed to be flown back on a regular schedule lest a long stint in the wilderness drive morale down to nothing.

The outposts were enough to orchestrate hit-and-run attacks targeting the defenders’ morale and the occasional raid on a convoy whenever CorpSec tried to cut costs on their escorts, but every RLF gun currently in the theatre wouldn’t be enough to bloody Arquebus’s nose when they had their whole elite AC force on-site.

“I’ll go,” Flatwell decided.

It was the answer to a question he’d been asked more than five minutes ago by a man still waiting patiently for his answer.

“Personally?” Dolmayan asked, the old man occupying a picture-in-picture on the terminal in front of him. “Respectfully, Brother Flatwell, the Front can ill afford to lose your leadership.”

“I have people I trust to hold the fort in my absence,” Flatwell replied, choosing to pretend his old friend was worried about the day-to-day rather than fearing for his safety. Besides, the statement was true in the more dire case as well. “You’re the only other pilot who I’d trust to tangle with a Vesper, and the Front needs you here more than it needs me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Dolmayan said, “but I’ll trust you to look after yourself.”

“You’re going to assassinate a Vesper?” Arshile asked. Flatwell’s adjunct was standing by the side of his desk as he often did during important-but-not-secret meetings, ready to step in to answer any question Flatwell might have. “It’s the kind of damage we need to deal them, sure, but…”

“It’s risky,” Flatwell allowed. “But I have a plan. I’m not going to fight fair, and I don’t plan to cost Arquebus just one Vesper…”

He smiled, the expression not reaching his eyes.

“If all goes well, by the time I get back, they’ll be down four.”

NOW

It was a hot late-summer day on the Ice Fields—which was to say that the temperature was approaching freezing from the wrong direction, but close enough so for Flatwell to pop the seals on the piloting compartment for a breath of fresh air. The cloud cover was thin enough for sunlight to shine through and tint the normally gray sky Coral-red from horizon to horizon, providing a vivid contrast to the snow-covered mountains to the north and east.

Scorched and battered it might be, but Rubicon was still a beautiful place. Flatwell could only wish he had the chance to see landscapes like this as they’d been before the Fires had plunged the world into an endless winter: a clear blue sky above forests of the hardy, straight-trunked trees that had once flourished across both continents.

That world now only existed in the stories passed down from his parents’ generation, but the desolation had a majesty of its own. Even the shattered husks of the Grid were beautiful in their own way, though they had nothing on the open expanse before him.

“You done yet?” his traveling companion complained. “We’ve got another hundred klicks to go before we find your shuttle, and I’d like to still have all my fingers when we get there.”

Flatwell grinned behind the collar of his heavy winter jacket as he turned and looked down the hatch at his ride home, boots clanging against the deck, or ‘collar’, of STEEL HAZE’s core. “Twenty years ago you’d be begging your parents to let you out to play in weather colder than this.”

“And my ma wouldn’t let me because it was too damn cold,” the former ‘V.IV’ Rusty shot back from the flight seat below, shivering in a flight-suit and jacket newer and warmer than his passenger’s. Flatwell grinned wider at the hint of his godson’s provincial burr shining through the accent he’d worked so hard to adopt, then wiped the smirk off his face before the younger man could look his way. His good mood would only make his fellow pilot’s worse.

Flatwell’s plan had been what he would comfortably call a partial success. Raven had accepted his job offer, and the two of them had made short work of the Vesper pair he’d manage to lure away from the safety of their forces. The next stage of Flatwell’s plan could be summed up as ‘patience’; the moment he got word from Elcano that they’d closed the deal with Furlong, he’d have Rusty stab Snail in the back—literally, if it was convenient; ACs weren’t the only way to kill someone—and the two of them would steal away back to Belius while Arquebus’s command structure burned down behind them.

Then Snail had decided to kill Rusty first—Rusty himself wasn’t sure if Snail had suspicions about his loyalty or was just team-killing out of frustration—by setting him up to fall to Raven, and Flatwell had arrived with the good news too late to break up the fight but plenty early enough to take a disabling hit himself. He was riding home in the damaged STEEL HAZE because his own faithful TSUBASA was nothing but a pile of scrap a dozen kilometers deep into Watchpoint Alpha. It was a steep loss, but it was, ultimately, only materiel.

“Give me a minute,” Flatwell said, turning back to the scenery. “I’ve been underground too damn long.” Rusty should know as well as anyone that Liberation Front members tended towards one of two extremes: those who wanted nothing more than to stay safely burrowed out of sight of the PCA’s patrols, and those who cherished every second they spent above ground—and AC pilots were among the latter almost without fail. Dolmayan might well be the only active pilot who preferred the warrens to the surface.

It wasn’t ten seconds before Rusty spoke again. “Flatwell–”

“A minute, I said!” Flatwell snapped, unwilling to let the sight of an open sky go unappreciated.

“It better be a fast minute, then!” Rusty fired back, and this time he was looking up at Flatwell, eyes wide with the urgency that supplanted panic in the well-trained, “because there’s someone else out here!”

That lit a fire under Flatwell’s ass, and he pulled his flight helmet back on and dropped down the hatch to his undignified but necessary position on Rusty’s lap with all haste. “What? Where?” They were more than two hundred kilometers outside the Arquebus perimeter and nearly that far from the nearest concealed RLF base, as close to the middle of nowhere as anyone was likely to come. Of all the bad luck…

“About thirty kilometers west-south-west, heading due east,” Rusty replied, fingers flicking over the controls to batten down the core by touch as he focused on the long-range radar through his implants. “I’m not going to lie, Uncle. I don’t like our odds if it comes to a fight.”

Flatwell had to agree; the ACS was halfway to limit just keeping the lopsided STEEL HAZE upright despite its missing left arm, to say nothing of how hard it had to work to keep the thing steady at any kind of speed without the arm-mounted thrusters. The fact that combat maneuvers would smear his unsecured self over the screens covering the cockpit was also a problem. “Think they’ve seen us yet?”

“We can pray they won’t, or we can turn STEEL HAZE on and run, but we’re going to have to choose fast.” The previously-expressed rear of the core locked forward with a heavy mechanical thunk, closing the gap allowing entry and exit to the pilot’s compartment. Rusty’s left hand hovered over the switch to bring the AC fully online while his right pointed to the sensor data on one of the lower screens. “You recognize those IFF codes, old man? They register as RLF to HAZE, but you didn’t mention anyone else this far east.”

“It fits our patterns, but they’re out of date,” Flatwell said, frowning at the display. “Wait. Are those…?” He trailed off, querying his implant’s memory in the hope of confirming a hunch.

“What?” Rusty asked.

“I can’t be sure without TSUBASA’s COM, but those might’ve been current when Raven took our bid at Gallia.”

Rusty cupped his helmeted face in his hands, slapping Flatwell in the side of his flight helmet in the process. “Great.”

“And if that’s the case,” Flatwell continued, choosing to ignore the interjection, “there’s only one reason he’d be using them now. Open a channel.”

Rusty grumbled as he worked the COM through his neural interface, but his only protest was a surly, “You’re going to do the talking.”

Twenty kilometers away, the radar blip came to a stop, and Flatwell prayed he hadn’t just made a terrible mistake. “Raven?” he called. “Is that you?”

Ten long, stressful seconds passed before he got a response. “Flatwell. You’re okay.”

Flatwell frowned to himself, not expecting to hear a woman’s voice on the line—but Rusty didn’t seem surprised, so it was his own fault for assuming. He tried to decide whether she sounded happy or disappointed that he’d made it out of the depths and couldn’t.

“Good to see you too, buddy,” Flatwell said, deciding to act as though it was the former. “That IFF tag you’re running—from the Gallia Dam operation, correct?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t say anything else.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Flatwell asked, ignoring Rusty’s glower.

“Need help,” she replied after another delay. “Medicine.”

The two men exchanged a curious glance.

“Are you injured?” Flatwell asked.

“No.” Another pause. “Augments.”

“You need C-stabilizers?”

“Yes.”

Rusty pulled up a text prompt in front of Flatwell’s face and entered she doesn't talk much, which was not very helpful. Well, if he wasn’t going to say anything, he had no right to complain about what Flatwell was about to do.

“We have a long range atmospheric shuttle hidden closer to the coast,” Flatwell told her. “It can fit two ACs.” TSUBASA and STEEL HAZE, in the original plan; STEEL HAZE and REASON, now. “Once we get back to Belius, we’ll be able to provide medical care.” And negotiate payment, Flatwell didn’t need to add; mercenaries like Raven would be more suspicious of him if he didn’t come asking for quid-pro-quo sooner rather than later.

Neither Rusty or Flatwell himself carried C-stabilizers in the field, but the RLF had enough to trade. Even corps without third- or fourth-generation augments in their ranks kept a supply on hand to treat acute Coral exposure, and some of those drugs inevitably found their way into Liberation Front hands through embezzlement or raiding.

The response was immediate and text-only. > Acknowledged. > En route.

Rusty muted their outgoing comms, then whined, “Do I get a say in this?”

“If you wanted a say in it, you should have said something,” Flatwell said. “Would you rather I let her die?” Too late, he remembered that Rusty had done his best to kill the mercenary only the previous day and pulled him into the mess while he was at it. “Never mind.”

The two sat in silence as their new companion continued to approach.

“Do you think I made a mistake?” Flatwell asked.

“I don’t know,” Rusty said.

“You don’t like her.”

“It’s not that I don’t ‘like’ her. It’s…” Rusty paused, weighing his words. “It’s the jobs she takes. If she were just in it for the money, she’d at least be predictable, but she’ll blast apart one Liberation Front position for a quick buck, then turn around and defend another for half the pay the job’s worth. She’s worked for everyone on the planet except the PCA, and I’m not fully sure she hasn’t done that, too. I have no idea what she’s fighting for, because it’s not money and it isn’t a cause, and I don’t think she does, either.”

“You don’t trust her,” Flatwell said.

“I shouldn’t,” Rusty replied. “But I want to. And that only makes her more dangerous.”

“Not like you to be swayed by a pretty face.”

“I haven’t even seen her–!” Rusty cut himself off with a strangled squawk. “You’re an ass, Uncle!”

“At my age, you take the laughs you can get,” Flatwell drawled. “Here she comes.” The two men turned their attention to the screens as REASON closed the last kilometer between them and set down onto the ice beside the battered and half-disarmed STEEL HAZE.

“Damn,” Rusty muttered. “She almost looks worse than we do.”

Flatwell had to agree. The previously red REASON had barely a flake of paint left on its fire-blackened hull, and the bare armor was so warped that if he hadn’t seen it the day before, he’d be hard-pressed to identify the mix of Firmeza and Kasuar components that let it match STEEL HAZE’s impressive speed. Its left leg moved sluggishly as it walked over to stand alongside them, and its left arm hung limp, showing that the damage wasn’t limited to the outer plating. Whatever fight it had picked had gone on so long it had purged its entire weapon loadout to either ammo attrition or battle damage; the undersized SMG in its right hand was an MT model rather than one of the larger AC variants.

Rusty unmuted their comms and spoke of his own volition. “Hey, buddy, I’m going to release the locks on my left weapon bay. You’ll be able to remove the Ransetsu. It’s rigged for left-handed use, but it’ll work better than that MT unit.”

> Understood.

A mental command put the weapon bay into maintenance mode, and a moment later, REASON pulled the unusable-to-Rusty heavy assault rifle from STEEL HAZE’s back. Rusty had his AC kick a bit of snow over the discarded MT weapon, for all the good that would do to fool any trackers to come.

“Do you have the key to unlock the weapon’s authority?” Flatwell asked once their outgoing comms were muted again. The security keys usually stayed in the hanger, only the hashes loaded on the AC itself.

“She was using one of Arquebus’s MT weapons,” Rusty pointed out. “Either she has a way around the lockout or we’ve given her a better club.”

“MT weapons aren’t anywhere near as well-secured,” Flatwell pointed out, “especially BAWS’.”

“Could you hack one in the field?”

“Well, no…” Flatwell fell silent as REASON ejected the Ransetsu’s magazine and triggered the rifle’s autoloader with the ease with which it was designed to function. “A way around the lockout, then. I’d pay a lot of money to know how she did that.”

“You and everyone else in the RLF, I’m sure.”

“Spoiled brat.”

The two fell silent again as Raven’s voice came over the comm once more. “Rusty… thank you.”

Rusty’s face lit up at those two simple words, at least until he saw that Flatwell had noticed. “Right, we should… we should get moving,” he mumbled, forgetting to unmute the comm. Raven followed regardless.

“Not swayed by a pretty face, hmm?” Flatwell teased.

“Shut up.”

He rolled his eyes and did as asked. The two ACs skimmed over the ice, well below either of their listed top speeds thanks to STEEL HAZE’s missing arm and whatever damage REASON had suffered.

“That was the first and last thing she’d said to me before today,” Rusty said unprompted. “Out loud, anyway.”

“Thank you?” Flatwell asked, unsure he’d understood correctly.

“After the operation at the PCA Spaceport, yeah. Wait a minute, hold on…”

STEEL HAZE stopped.

REASON stopped.

STEEL HAZE took a step.

REASON took a step.

STEEL HAZE lifted one foot.

REASON lifted one foot.

STEEL HAZE set its foot down.

REASON set its foot down.

“What?” Flatwell asked when Rusty started snickering.

“Her AC,” Rusty said, still laughing. “She put the damn thing in auto-follow.”

Chapter Text

Excerpt from an intelligence dossier provided to Federated Worlds of Sol Military Intelligence (FWSMI) Agent ████████ (mission alias ████ ███████), 252 UE

HISTORY

ALLMIND® was the brainchild and pet project of Elcano Chief Human Resources Manager Riley Gallagher, who envisioned a world in which vast swathes of the workforce—among them bureaucrats, engineers, and security directors—could be replaced by a single system. The project was, in no uncertain terms, a failure. Elcano's Corporate Security Force refused to so much as turn their prototype on, much less run it through the desired tests. The engineering function produced designs that were at best 'odd' and often outright nonfunctional. Lastly, the managerial system was expensive enough to run and made frequent enough mistakes that it was unlikely to ever become competitive against the low cost of human labor. Despite these setbacks and more, the project would run for nearly 30 years, ending only alongside CHRM Gallagher's life during the Coral Burn Event.

After the PCA took custody of Closure Site 1 in 208, it dispatched survey teams to acquire all surviving electronic data in the sunken Institute City, which was also the site of the primary ALLMIND® development project and server cluster. Believing the system could be adapted to their use, PCA engineers forked the project, moving the managerial branch to the distributed server infrastructure in the Belius Grid and repackaging it as the ALLMIND® Mercenary Support System. The MSS poses as the same neutral party previously associated with the ALLMIND® brand to the scattered mercenary and security forces who survived the Fires while serving as an intelligence gathering tool for the PCA via root-level backdoor access and automated monitoring.

As part of the subterfuge, ALLMIND® continues to release part designs at irregular intervals, the most 'successful' example being the MIND armored core frame released in 249—partially due to the components' ease of use making them attractive for training purposes, but mostly due to a lack of obvious flaws and the low price ALLMIND® demands for 3rd-party manufacturing licenses. It is likely PCA engineers either corrected the issues typical of ALLMIND® designs prior to the frame's release or designed the frame themselves from the start; confirmation or refutation of this theory is desirable intelligence.

At the same time the PCA set up the ALLMIND® MSS, another engineering team raised the primary ALLMIND® server cluster out of the sunken city into the new cave systems above and reinvented the engineering and security projects as the PCA's Primary System Intelligence, known among PCA personnel as the 'Enforcement System' and often shorted further to 'the System'. The twin projects drastically reduced the necessary manpower to enforce the PCA's directive, especially on the surface, as the PSI allowed the entire command staff and most of the engineers to remain in orbit and operate it remotely. Over the next two decades, the PCA would gradually recall the local command staff to the Home Office on Mars, leaving more than 90% of their decision making to the PSI.

Addendum supplied by SOLINT Agent ████████ to FWSMI, 256 UE:

During their attack on Station 31, the anarchist-aligned mercenary unit 'Branch' successfully accessed the command systems responsible for the ALLMIND® Mercenary Support System and prevented all further access to its backdoors and monitoring systems, locking the PCA out of their own honey-pot. Branch's simultaneous attempt to breach the Primary System Intelligence met with failure, but losing root access to the MSS will impair the PCA's ability to maintain control over the surface.

THEN

V.V O’Keeffe frowned as he reviewed the dossier he’d put together on the Vesper’s newest ‘number’: Elliot Reston, call sign ‘Rusty’—one he’d given up most of his signing bonus to keep rather than accept a rename, but kids that age made stupider decisions every day. Earth native, clearly from one of the agrarian communes scattered throughout the uncivilized areas. Putting down five names in the ‘parents’ field of the personal history attestation he submitted for a mercenary license was a dead giveaway.

Wilderness settlements like those didn’t share their records with the local governments if they kept them at all, so Rusty’s paperwork trail may as well have started the day he’d earned that license. A faint accent consistent with his history, a bit of country bumpkin to his mannerisms, attested 8th gen augments (though the doctor who’d conducted his physical noted the boy may have been scammed; his metal wasn’t quite right for 8th). Earnest, eager to please, and a bit of a hedonist judging by how much of his new paycheck went to bars, strip clubs, and fine dining establishments. All in all, it was classic ‘country boy in the big city’ behavior.

And yet… O’Keeffe had learned to trust his instincts. He’d been headhunted in no small part because of them, and right now, having just walked out of his first meeting with the man, they were telling him something wasn’t quite right. Whether it was the kind of ‘not quite right’ he reported to his superiors or not… well, that remained to be seen.

Reviews of Rusty’s performance from his brief stint in 2nd Squad ran the gamut from ‘positive’ to ‘glowing’. He was efficient, charismatic, easy-going, serious, funny, adaptable, observant, independent, obedient, motivated… a real asset to any team, by all accounts. His simulator scores were consistently in the top 70th percentile among the elite ‘lower’ Vespers squads, and he’d jumped up in the rankings soon after V.III Webster had been killed in action. (O’Keeffe could understand that: no point giving it your all until it mattered.) Psych evaluations reported a sense of detachment from his surroundings and peers, likely caused by culture shock, but nothing of great concern.

It was all so perfectly, precisely harmless. A commanding presence that never challenged authority or spoke out of turn except to ease the mood. Uncultured in his mannerisms but well-versed in classical literature. Even his vices were aggressively inoffensive, just enough to provide texture to his character without calling his reliability into question. No fights, no insubordination, no problems with gambling or drugs (even alcohol), no issues with corporate culture or the chain of command, no run-ins with the law. He even paid off his credit account in full every month.

For a young kid from the places modern civilization had left behind, it was an impressive display of maturity and assimilation. Almost… too impressive.

“What’s eating you, O’Keeffe?”

O’Keeffe smoothed his face back to neutral as he looked up at V.I Freud, who must have seen him scowling as he passed by his open office door. “Just the normal security work on our newest member,” he answered, which was mostly true. “You notice anything odd about him?”

“He fights like he’s used to a BAWS AC,” Freud said without hesitation, “but he’s adapting well to Arquebus doctrine.”

It was such a quintessentially ‘Freud’ observation that O’Keeffe couldn’t help but laugh. “Not what I meant, but interesting nonetheless.”

“What did you mean?” Freud asked.

“Nothing,” O’Keeffe lied. “Just looking for threads to pull. You know how Intelligence work is.”

“Well… keep it up,” Freud said, and went back to whatever he did with the time he wasn’t obligated to spend doing V.I things.

Used to a BAWS AC, huh? O’Keeffe thought. They’d been one of the most common models on the market until about, oh, twenty years before Rusty was born. BAWS MTs and weapons were uncommon but pervasive throughout Federated Space, but the company had more or less stopped producing ACs after the Fires. BAWS had no longer had the resources to run development on AC components, and technology marched on too quickly for their quickly-outdated designs to find a market.

A BAWS AC wasn’t something Rusty should’ve encountered in his career as a freelancer, but at the same time, there would be no reason for one of O’Keeffe’s counterparts at Mitsubishi or Furlong to train a spy using one, either. Even if they expected some savant to ID their training set-up from the kid’s piloting, it would’ve been less suspicious to use their own currently available products! Which meant that the most likely explanation was that Rusty came from somewhere it was easier to get old BAWS components than current competing ones, and the only planet BAWS parts were still common was Rubicon, where the company had been founded sixty-odd years ago and somehow remained despite everything that had happened since.

Which just so happened to be the same planet that had once held the secrets of Coral.

Interesting.

Arquebus paid O’Keeffe well to keep their ranks free of spies and infiltrators, but not nearly well enough for him to be good at it. He’d joined the Vespers to live out his life in what little comfort there was to find in the hellscape humanity had made of their universe, and the fuckers at the top could sit and spin for their role in the whole circus. If Rusty was a plant of some kind, he was one of the better trained ones, and by far the most audacious. Most of the spies O’Keeffe caught were rummaging around in accounting or sales research, not the damn Vespers! It was enough to make him like the man on that merit alone.

Besides, the first party that came to mind once he dismissed the other conglomerates as likely perpetrators was SOLINT, and no one paid enough for O’Keeffe to play games anywhere near a Federation black-op. Would a SOLINT operative allow himself to draw suspicion like this, minor as it was? Almost certainly not. Was O’Keeffe eager to risk being wrong about that? Absolutely fucking not.

He closed the files and flagged V.VIII Rusty as passing review for full security access. Rusty was an enigma, but an entertaining one; whatever he was here to do, O’Keeffe would be happy to watch from the sidelines.

When everything is burning down around you, you might as well sit back and toast some marshmallows.

NOW

BEEP BEEP BEEP.

O’Keeffe hadn’t expected to wake to his alarm; he’d set it for a greedy eight hours, sure Freud would call him back into service in half that time. He liked Freud well enough as a coworker, but the man was a terrible fit for the responsibilities of V.I. V.II had suited him brilliantly, allowing his knowledge of Core Theory and small-unit tactics to shine in the field, but Arquebus had just had to promote him past his ability. Corporate doctrine said the Vespers were ranked by some arcane function of their piloting skills, seniority in the organization, and marketability, not their aptitude for the damn job, so V.I he was! Idiots. And C-suite wondered why O’Keeffe half-assed his job—well, no, they didn’t wonder about that because he didn’t let on he was half-assing his job, but the point stood.

Freud was to blame too, a little. He could have sandbagged, let someone else take the top spot, but O’Keeffe could admit that if he had the chops to dismantle 8th and 9th generation pilots with no augments of his own, he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity, either. It wouldn’t have changed much anyway. The problem they faced right now wasn’t that Freud was in charge of the Vespers, it was that ‘the Vespers’ now meant ‘one battle junkie and an old slacker’, and since Arquebus HQ had opted to keep 2nd Squad and the best pilots of 3rd, 4th, and 5th back in Sol as a reserve force, he didn’t have access to the dozen best candidates for promotion.

Like everything else currently frustrating O’Keeffe, it was something that had made sense at the time: men of that caliber would be wasted in the bargain-bin locally-sourced MTs Arquebus had had to rely on since arriving on Rubicon. It didn’t change the fact that they were sorely missed now. He’d already sent home a request for their reassignment, but it would be weeks before they arrived, maybe as much as a month, and that was a month too long to leave those positions empty.

The alarm was still beeping. O’Keeffe shut it off and shuffled off to the showers.

Thirty minutes later, a clean, fed, caffeinated, and mostly awake O’Keeffe made it to the disaster area that recent times had made of his desk. First things first: the empty cups went back to the mess. The pens went back into their holder. The papers—all coarse locally-recycled stock, obviously—returned to their organizers. The tablets—which he used in lieu of learning the workflow for his new augments’ personal computer functions—lined up on their charging pads.

The desk was now clean. Time to see what Freud had been doing in his absence.

O’Keeffe was pleasantly surprised by what he saw. Freud had finally started taking his job seriously, reviewing and issuing orders for the surface deployment around Priority Zone 1, managing the supply train between there and Belius, and had even vetoed two of O’Keeffe’s Vesper candidates and put forward one of his own. Freud had also begun moving some of Snail’s embezzled PCA equipment out of storage and back into circulation, earmarking a large quantity of it for the Belius garrison in the care of O’Keeffe’s own 3rd Squad, so it looked like the coup was off. O’Keeffe had been expecting Freud to bring it up since he’d first given him the news of Snail’s death, but Freud had never been one for memos or meetings, so maybe O’Keeffe had expected too much.

It was too bad. O’Keeffe would’ve enjoyed imagining the looks on the C-suite’s surgically perfected faces when men in PCA gear kicked their shit in, but he didn’t have enough ambition or given fucks to see it through on his own. It seemed Freud was the same, content to let Snail take his shot but not caring enough to do so himself. Why would he? The man cared a hundred times more about the battlefield than the boardroom.

Not like we don’t have enough problems already, anyway. Freud had done his share of the work, wonder of wonders—and formally bumped O’Keeffe up to V.II, not that really changed anything—but that still left four Vespers’ worth of problems in each of their laps and nowhere near enough hours in the day to solve them all.

That brought O’Keeffe’s mind back to the Vesper candidates. Both vetoes had landed on the women from his own 3rd Squad, which annoyed him a little, but he understood the logic. His rear-echelon work meant he sortied less than half as often as any other Vesper and his squad’s combat hours reflected that.

In that light, Freud’s nomination for rebuilding the Vespers was both inspired and more than a little cheeky: he’d ignored the lower Vespers squads, then ignored the whole rest of the Arquebus combat force, all in favor of a logistics officer with not a second of simulator time in her record. O’Keeffe could well imagine the thoughts in Freud’s head as he’d stricken down the 3rd Squad members and filled in her name instead: If you don’t care about combat hours, O’Keeffe, just get a logistics officer and be done with it!

It wasn’t even a bad idea. O’Keeffe would readily admit that her skills were a near perfect match for half the paperwork he had facing him, but with her complete lack of combat experience or leadership training, it would be a hard sell to corporate. A brevet rank, perhaps? Something to consider.

He flagged the posting ‘provisional’ and prepared to send it back to Freud with a suggestion to either get her in a simulator posthaste or outright falsify the record, then remembered that Freud might well still be in orbit, in which case he might as well do it himself. Sure enough, he’d last logged into ARQCOMNET from the same Detention Satellite he’d called from to relieve O’Keeffe the previous night, and the shuttle was still docked to it.

O’Keeffe frowned. Freud stepping up to do his share of the work was good—desperately needed, even—but staying up in orbit without his AC was unlike him.

He can take care of himself, O’Keeffe decided. He had too much damn work to do to babysit his commanding officer. He opened up a message terminal to send Rusty a joke about Freud getting ‘high’ in orbit but working more instead of less—

Rusty was dead.

O’Keeffe closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Eight hours wasn’t enough. Twelve hours wouldn’t have been enough. He needed a vacation, a bottle of 60-proof liquor, and some actual fucking friends. Rusty was as close as he’d gotten in years, the security of you don’t know I know what I don’t know letting him unwind a little around the man, and now he was dead.

Then another message arrived for his urgent review, and V.II got back to work.

Chapter Text

THEN

Flatwell ran his fingers back and forth across his old, worn Belius dollar coin in his pocket as he watched the techs finish locking down REASON into an AC bay in one of the RLF’s better-hidden bases in south-Central Belius. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up in his youth, not long after his mother had given it to him as a keepsake; once the most common form of currency on Rubicon, now nothing but a relic of a world long lost. When he’d first stepped into a leadership role in the Liberation Front, both the coin’s faces were still clearly identifiable; now, his cold-numbed fingers could barely discern that it had ever had a relief at all.

Raven wasn’t doing Flatwell’s nerves or the old coin any favors. REASON had shut down the moment it had locked into the shuttle’s interior bay for the three hour flight to Belius, and neither it nor its pilot had stirred since. His men had needed to transfer it from the shuttle to the AC hangar with a crane, like salvage.

Flatwell didn’t know if Raven was even alive in there, but there was little in the way of aid he could have offered with just Rusty, the shuttle pilot, and himself, and a lot of ways they could have made things worse. He’d pushed his worries aside and left it alone, the same way he always did for things out of his control. As for Rusty, Flatwell had already sent his godson to wait in his office.

The lad was another thing weighing heavily on his mind as late. There would be a reckoning in the next life for what he had made of his sworn brother and sister’s son.

“Umbilicals are green,” Bletcher announced, the burly tech keeping one eye on his men and the other on the readout in front of him. “Signal’s good. AC’s accepted our handshake.”

That was one hurdle passed. If REASON hadn’t accepted the connection, with its pilot out of commission, the backup plan was to break out the cutting torches.

“Open her up,” Flatwell ordered.

“Opening her up!” Bletcher echoed, jabbing the heavy switch on the gantry’s control board. “Huh. That’s weird.”

The cause for comment was obvious. Flatwell’s own TSUBASA used the same Firmeza-pattern core as REASON, so Flatwell and his techs knew how the piloting compartment was supposed to open. REASON was doing… not that.

A standard Firmeza core would slide the heavy armor of the pectoral wedge forward to expose a top access hatch under the plating afore of the head mount: in essence, more or less the same process as STEEL HAZE’s Nachtreiher core, just the fore armor and structure moving forward rather than the rear armor and structure moving backward. Instead, REASON’s wedge was splitting along the mid-line seam like the jaws of some giant reptile, the lower half swinging down to expose the piloting capsule from the front. It was a manufacturer-supported modification, but an uncommon one, as its only function was to marginally increase the ease of boarding in exchange for weakening the commonly accepted ‘most important bulkhead’ of the capsule’s armored pressure hull—the one facing the enemy—by putting a damned door in it.

Bletcher had started moving the gantry the moment the non-standard configuration became apparent, but it still felt to Flatwell that it took far too long for him to maneuver it around the tip of the wedge and down to the actual access point. Two of his techs lowered the ramp affixed to the gantry, then scrambled out of the way of the medics hurrying to unseal the capsule itself. Flatwell didn’t get a look at the pilot he’d gambled on helping until the medics had her strapped down to the gurney and on her way past him to the infirmary. She passed Flatwell feet-first, colloquially if not literally, so the first thing he noticed was that both her legs ended above the knee.

His first thought was an incongruous one, given the seriousness of the situation: How does she work the pedals? But of course, to augmented pilots, the pedals were nothing more than a vestigial remnant of the muscle tracer designs armored cores descended from; Flatwell didn’t use them either except by reflex. The medics had left her helmet on and were moving slowly, opting to make the journey smoother rather than quicker, so whatever was wrong with her, it wasn’t urgent. That was good.

He gave one more look to the woman’s AC, now looming quiescent overhead, and then turned and headed towards his office. Rusty would be waiting for him.

It galled Flatwell that the RLF would see his godson as a traitor, first to his own people—because he had been born on Rubicon, though that wasn’t well known—and then to the corporation that had employed him for nearly a decade. He’d done what he could to spread the truth through rumor: that Rusty was a mole, a loyalist on the inside. It hadn’t taken. Much of the base seemed to assume Rusty had, at best, suffered an attack of conscience at some point over Arquebus’s occupation of his homeland.

Soon, Flatwell promised himself. The first pieces of Elcano’s new prototype, carefully disassembled and disguised, were already on their way from Tau Ceti. He needed Rusty’s reputation ‘rehabilitated’ by the time the techs got the new unit assembled because Rusty was the only pilot the RLF had who was capable of using it to its full potential. Even with the revelation of his true allegiance, signing over their trump card to a spy would be a hard sell, but he’d make it work. Somehow.

Besides, Flatwell thought, I made a promise.

His godson would have his welcome home.

NOW

Forty minutes and one humiliating and well-deserved tongue-lashing from Flatwell later, Rusty found himself unleashed on RLF Remote Outpost Epsilon in more ways than one. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do, not unless Flatwell rustled up the punishment duty he’d threatened, so there was nothing stopping him from going wherever he wanted.

As soon as he figured out where that was.

Out of the corner of his eye, he recognized one of the men coming down the hallway towards him as the medical assistant he’d passed on his way out of the hangar, and that made up his mind for him. “Excuse me, brother,” Rusty said as he stepped in front of the man—the kid, really, young enough he’d have still been learning his letters when Rusty shipped out all those years ago. “You were there when they opened up Raven’s AC, right?”

The young man scowled as he gave Rusty’s Arquebus flight-suit and jacket the stink-eye, but grudgingly answered, “The Butcher? Yeah, I was there. What’s it to you?”

“Is she all right? How badly was she hurt?”

The kid scoffed. “She wasn’t hurt, just half-asleep. Kept making rude gestures every time we hit a bump.”

Rusty couldn’t help the relieved giggle that escaped his mouth. “Well then. That’s… good. She still in the infirmary?”

“Yeah. Margot gave her one of the private rooms. A2.”

“Thanks.”

He moved aside to head down to the infirmary when the kid called out, “Hey. Asshole.”

Rusty glanced back to find that he was indeed the one being addressed. “Yeah?”

“My brother was in the Juggernaut when it went down.” The kid didn’t wait for a response before he turned and continued on the way he’d been going, leaving Rusty poleaxed in the middle of the corridor. The few brothers and sisters of the Front nearby carefully avoiding looking at him as they went about their business.

Everything for the cause, Rusty repeated to himself. Everything for the cause. No price too great; no life too small. Only freedom can light our way. Forged in ash, we stand as one. The old slogans worked about as well on his spirits as they had on the PCA.

The infirmary could wait. He needed to get these cursed colors off as soon as possible.

It was a very different Rusty who arrived at infirmary thirty minutes later, or so he told himself: one freshly showered and dressed in the heavy work clothes common to non-combat and off-duty personnel, RLF patches proudly displayed. It felt more false than the Arquebus colors he’d worn for the better part of a decade. He’d betrayed Arquebus a thousand times over, a thousand secrets as deadly as any knife, but he had not a drop of their blood on his hands. The blood he’d spilled from his countrymen could fill a river.

He’d been so eager when the man he’d known from childhood as Uncle Flatwell had proposed the mission. The PCA’s latest purge hadn’t left enough of his village to indicate there had ever been a settlement there at all; his Uncle—not by blood, perhaps, but by the bonds between his parents and their friend—had been the one to dig him out of the rubble. He’d been lost, angry at the world, at his parents for leaving him, at himself for surviving and his Uncle for saving him. He’d been empty. Adrift. Hollow.

He’d clung to the offer of vengeance like a drowning man to driftwood. The mission had given him purpose, something to rebuild his life around. It had been so easy to replace that traumatized, broken shell of a boy with something else, someone else. The perfect Vesper. The perfect spy. Calling Elliot ‘Rusty’ Reston a facade implied there was something else beneath it, and Rusty knew he had blended in as well as he had because there was nothing of his old self left to hide.

The monster that young RLF volunteer had seen in the hall was the same one that Rusty still saw in the mirror, RLF colors or no. He’d been a fool to expect anything else.

Rusty didn’t bother to disturb the nurse on duty, not wishing for a repeat of his last encounter, and instead headed straight to room A2 behind the rows of cots ready for mass casualties. Luckily for his nerves, the question of whether to knock or not was moot. The door was already open, so Rusty could simply peer inside.

The woman lying in the bed had to be Raven. She was staring at the wall to her right, her hand tapping out an unheard pattern on the hospital linens, unaware of her visitor.

“Mind if I come in?” he asked.

Her fingers stopped their tapping for a moment before she nodded, eyes not leaving the wall. Rusty took that as permission enough to duck inside and pull the visitor’s chair over to the far corner of the room to give her her due space, or as much as one could get in a two-and-a-half-meters-square room. And that was how he got his first good look at the most famous mercenary on Rubicon.

The first word that came to mind was ‘delicate’, which was perhaps not the most shocking thing in the world. AC pilots as a rule tended towards the leaner side, their training focused on endurance over strength. The exceptions, whether from fat or muscle, were so despite their profession, not because of it. A second look proved the impression more situation (hospital room) than substance (actual appearance). They’d rolled her flight suit’s outer and inner layers down to the waist, revealing a simple black athletic bra and leaving well-muscled arms bare beneath the blanket she’d pulled across her shoulders like a shawl.

As for her features, she was unhealthily pale—again, not uncommon among pilots who didn’t go out of their way to avoid it—with a narrow, hawkish face and black hair clipped short above her ears. Her face bore a few major scars and innumerable minor ones, the most noticeable being a line that ran all the way up one cheek, around her eye, across her forehead, and back down the other side in the exact shape Rusty knew a mass-market BAWS flight helmet pressed into the skin. At some point in her sorties—around the time the Vespers had shipped out west, if he had to guess—her own helmet had gotten so hot it had left a brand on her face.

Her most striking features were her eyes; when she finally turned to see who’d come to visit, her irises were a vivid, sparkling Coral red. Despite popular media’s portrayal to the contrary, the ‘Coral eyes’ phenomenon in augmented humans was confined to the retina, leaving them looking more like victims of poor flash photography than the brilliant false contacts actors wore in the holos. As far as Rusty knew, the dose it’d take to bring Coral all the way to the outer eye was the sort that earned you a short stay in palliative care—but Flatwell hadn’t mentioned anything about her dying, so ‘as far as he knew’ must not be far enough.

“Rusty?” Raven guessed.

“Raven,” Rusty replied, then paused when her face twitched at the name. “Or should I stick to ‘buddy’?” Rusty knew from O’Keeffe that Raven was a stolen license, but he didn’t have anything else to call her but her serial number, and that felt downright rude. Besides, it was tradition that pilots used their license call signs—or other, more personal nicknames—almost exclusively: a holdover from the earliest generations of augmented pilots, when memory loss and drastic personality changes were the norm rather than the exception.

She glanced down at her lap like she was ashamed of herself. “Raven is…”

She hesitated, thoughts and expressions shifting across her face in inscrutable patterns.

“Scary.”

Rusty had long suspected she was the only person on Rubicon who wasn’t at least a little scared of the name ‘Raven’. Hearing that it spooked her, too, threw him for a loop.

“But I am,” Raven said. “Or… I am trying to be.”

Trying to live up to your own reputation, huh. Rusty thought. He had a pretty good guess what that must feel like.

Rusty suddenly realized that he had no reason to be here. No, not ‘no reason’—she was the only person more out of place in the heart of the RLF than he was, after all—but no excuse. Nothing to justify his decision to visit to her or anyone who might come to check on her, only the gnawing realization that he might never be as at home among his people as he had been among the enemy.

Perhaps that was why he found himself so drawn to Raven the last few months. She was one of the enemy, like he was, but not. Not a corporate pig like the Vespers, not a mercenary warlord like so many so-called ‘freelancers’. Something… unknown.

Rusty could not admit, even to himself, how badly he had wished to peel back the veil and find that she too wanted Rubicon free. He did not know his own mind well enough to understand that much of the anger he’d felt in the depths had sprung from this imagined betrayal, nor that the rest was confusion and panicked rationalization. He knew how to kill his enemies; it was why the Vespers employed him. He knew how to kill his allies, his friends, his family; it was why the Vespers did not know about the spy in their midst. But Raven was neither friend nor foe—in-between, undefined—and for the first time in a decade Rusty had found himself facing someone he was not prepared to kill. He had reacted… badly.

“I see the doctors took care of you,” Rusty said at last, with a look towards the bottle of pills on the table beside her bed.

“Yes,” Raven agreed. She spoke slowly, as though she had to make sure of each word before she continued. Her second language, perhaps? “They gave me an injection because I was late for my dose. I’ll be back on pills tomorrow.”

“But you’re all right, otherwise?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t offer anything else, but then, he hadn’t really expected her to.

“You don’t talk much, do you, buddy?” Rusty couldn’t help but observe.

“No,” Raven agreed. “It is… hard… after the surgery. Aphasia. Gets worse when I’m tired. Or upset.”

“Oh.” He was—he was making an ass of himself, wasn’t he. “Sorry, I—I’ll leave you–”

“No!” she blurted, her usually flat voice tinged with something like alarm. “No. Please.” She swallowed. “Stay. If… if you want.”

Rusty nodded and leaned back in his seat. “Sure. No problem.”

“I… enjoy talking. Even if it is hard.”

Rusty forced a grin. “Yeah?”

“I think I used to talk a lot,” Raven said. “Before.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“Most people don’t wait for me. I’m too slow.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” Rusty said.

Raven dropped her eyes to her lap. “Sorry.”

“What for?”

“Your AC. STEEL HAZE.”

“Not your fault, buddy,” Rusty said. “I should have trusted…”—my gut—“…Flatwell.”

Raven only curled up tighter. “His too.”

“Don’t worry about Flatwell. He took me to task for that already.”

“You don’t have. Many ACs here. Do you?”

“You mean the RLF?” Rusty asked. “No, we don’t, and we can’t use STEEL HAZE without giving away that I survived. But that’s not your problem…” He hesitated, then took the plunge and added, “…unless you want it to be.”

Raven didn’t reply, which he should have expected. He’d gotten ahead of himself. Rubicon wasn’t her home, its people not her people.

Rusty had wondered if Flatwell hadn’t meant to make her an asset, the way he’d promised help so freely. If he had, Rusty could only hope he hadn’t fucked it up by moving too fast.

“I don’t know,” Raven whispered.

Rusty raised an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“I don’t know. What I want.” She turned her head to face him, then, staring into his gray eyes with her Coral-reds. “That’s what you meant. In the depths. My purpose.”

“I…” Rusty cringed in on himself, running one hand through his hair like it’d help him think. His prayers to vanish into the bulkhead behind him went unanswered.

“I don’t know why I said half of that, to be honest,” he admitted. “I thought everything was going well, and then I went down into the caves on another routine mission, and I saw you. My buddy. And I knew right then and there that the only way one of us was getting out of there with our mission intact was with the other dead at their feet, and… I don’t know. It shouldn’t have been different, but it was. I didn’t want to fight you, but it was the only way I could finish my mission at Arquebus.” Rusty let out a bitter laugh. “And then you showed me I never had a chance anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” Raven said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Still sorry,” she insisted, staring down at the blankets covering her. “You were right. Rubicon needed you. Not me.” Raven shivered and clutched her blanket-cloak close to her body as she murmured, “Your mission. This. The R-L-F. More important. Than mine. Should have lost.”

It was Rusty’s turn to stare, bewildered by her response. He’d meant what he said to Flatwell: as far as he’d been concerned, from the moment he met them, Raven was their AC. He hadn’t known she was a woman until they’d massacred the PCA together, and hadn’t had any reason to think of her like one in the time since, but now the room felt far too small, his heart was in his throat, and his stomach was doing flips.

There was something terribly fucked up in his brain if he interpreted ‘I would fail a mission for you’ as some grand romantic confession, and yet—

“It’s… it’s all right,” he stuttered. “I did what I needed to. The important things, anyway. We can… we can make it work.” Stupid. That might have been the best opportunity he’d get to pitch the RLF to her, even if only to ‘make up’ for her earlier victory, but his mind was lagging five klicks behind his mouth and the distance wasn’t closing.

Flatwell was onto something after all. I need to get out of here. But she’d asked him to stay, so he did.

Raven, Rusty quickly learned, liked to talk. A lot. He had to bite his tongue several times to prevent himself from talking over her—he hadn’t missed how she felt about that—and in exchange he learned more about her than he’d known there was to know. It was like every word she hadn’t been able to speak since her augmentation had been bottled up waiting for release. Whenever she exhausted a topic, she’d only go quiet for only a second or two before launching into another one without prompting.

Her meandering choice of topics kind of reminded him of that stupid middle-manager-targeted ice-breaker game O’Keeffe had hazed Maeterlinck with, where you had to draw a new topic from a deck whenever you paused for too long. That man had a weird sense of humor.

It also, blissfully, freed Rusty from saying more than one word in a hundred. He didn’t have to worry about trying to break down the corporate persona, or rebuilding a mask of the boy he used to be, when he was little more than the recipient of Raven’s slow, sometimes halting, but always passionate speech.

Raven had some vague memories of her pre-augmentation life (‘like a dream I never forget’, she explained it), but they were sparse enough, or dissociated from enough, that she felt no attachment to them. That life had left its scars on her all the same, both mental and physical. She remembered that she’d seriously injured her knee at her job, leaving her with chronic pain and a severe limp. She wondered if the doctor who’d bought her had decided no legs were better than a bad one.

Hers was a story Rusty had heard a thousand times during his short stay on corporate Earth. The boss blamed you for the accident to avoid putting a doctor’s bill on their payroll sheets, then fired you when the lack of treatment impacted your performance. Why fix what they broke when replacing you was cheaper? Meanwhile, debts mounted and opportunities dried up, until eventually, you fell so far through the cracks no one ever heard of you again.

What did Raven care about, if she had nothing left from her past? Armored cores. Anything and everything AC-related, she could go on about at length, from the physics of their weapons, to the design trade-offs of different manufacturer’s armor composites, to the various quirks and glitches you saw when running one corporation’s Fire Control software on another’s hardware. With nothing left to hold on to, she’d thrown herself into her new career as a ‘weapon’ with a dedication that bordered on obsession—a desperation to please, to be useful, that just about broke Rusty’s heart in half.

He learned which weapons were her favorites and which she used out of expedience. Her favorite tactics and hidden tricks, the optimizations she’d made to her neural interlink firmware to get the most out of her AC. Some of things she explained, he recognized from her fieldwork, like the tricks that had cost STEEL HAZE its arm; it turned out she’d disabled a half-dozen software features most people considered ‘critical’ in order to do things the engineers considered so unsafe as to be universally undesirable. How she managed to keep her core upright with the ACS on barely half the time was anyone’s guess.

She talked, and he listened, dozens of facts sorted and categorized—strengths and weaknesses, avenues for exploitation, mental vulnerabilities to prey on should they come into conflict again. Part of Rusty was glad he could still think of her as a threat well enough to run the kind of analysis that Uncle Cadza had drilled into him. Another part hated everything about it.

Raven never once mentioned what she and her handler had been looking for in the depths. Rusty wasn’t sure she knew.

Chapter Text

“Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or the FWS why Trade Common isn’t spoken on Titan.”

— Joke told by stand-up comedian Manasa Mallaya during a set, 131 UE. Individual flagged for further monitoring.

THEN

One day more than forty years after the Fires brought the Coral Revolution to its disastrous end, an attractive young woman wearing her black hair in a chin-length bob atop a tight-filling business suit pressed to knife-edge precision walked into the eighth most expensive restaurant on the Elysium Planitia’s premier boulevard. She brushed past the maitre d’ in her slip-on 15cm heels with confidence that froze him in his tracks and headed directly up the stairs to the private rooms on the second floor, where she entered room 5 without knocking and sat down at the table across from a handsome young man in similarly sharp attire, smoothing the skirt that ended just above her bare knees with military precision.

Anywhere else, even on Mars, the two would have attracted looks. In the heights of the wealthiest district in human space, they blended flawlessly into the multitudes of the rich and famous spending their exploitation-gained wealth on the best luxuries and amenities they could afford. Those dining at the seventh most expensive restaurant would have looked down their noses at the pair before forgetting them entirely; those dining in the ninth would do their best to pretend any with more means than they did not exist.

Neither the man nor the woman spoke a word for the entirety of their meal except to the waiter. The food was of the highest quality, and the presentation, extravagant. The appetizers cost more than their waiter made in a year. None of that was as valuable for them as the privacy the restaurant afforded its clientele. Only once the table was cleared and the check signed did the man speak, knowing the waiter would not bother them again until both had left the room.

“Agent,” he began, then paused to raise the briefcase at his feet onto the table and retrieve a paper folder. “Your assignment is to infiltrate the cordon around Rubicon III and determine whether the destruction of Coral there is as complete as the PCA reports.” He set the folder down on the table and slid it across to the woman on the other side. “Due to their information blackout, we have no intelligence on the situation on the ground, and as we are not coordinating with the PCA in this matter, you will be operating with limited access to off-site support.”

Another folder joined the first.

“This folder contains the details of your mission.”

He placed a third folder on the table.

“Asset Zero is a backdoor to the mercenary support network currently operating on the planet. The PCA has their own keys, so you will need to maintain a low profile.”

Another folder, this one slightly thicker.

“Asset One is one of our best deniable assets, an AC pilot with valid mercenary credentials and a history that shouldn’t draw more than the usual amount of attention. He is considered highly reliable, but it will be up to you to manage his personality.”

Yet another folder, thicker still.

“Asset Two is another mercenary contact, unaffiliated with us but useful as a catspaw. They’re your signal flare; if you find Coral, they are how you get the word out.”

Another folder, not quite as thick as the last.

“Asset Three is a self-running minifab configured to churn out our most advanced stealth drones at a steady pace. As you will be operating independently with no on-site intelligence support, you will need them. We have also arranged for you to acquire a recycling unit from a local organization that will keep the fab running on whatever you feed into it. Rocks, scrap metal, the corpses of your enemies…” The man allowed himself a small smile at his joke, the only hint of humanity he had given since his guest had walked in. “I’m serious about the corpses, especially if they’re still in their MTs at the time.”

He sat back and allowed the woman to flip through the folders, awaiting questions. The woman was too professional to offer any, though that did not mean she was not paying attention to both his words and the meanings between them. She had not missed the use of the term ‘signal flare’ to refer to Asset Two. Covert agents did not communicate with signal flares. Asset Two was not a means to send word back to her masters, it was a means to ‘get the word out’ in a way that wouldn’t be traced back to them.

She had also not missed that there was no mention of what she was do to if she did not find Coral. Likely, the cost of extracting her through the PCA cordon in such an event eclipsed even her own value to her organization. It was not the first time she had not been offered extraction from an assignment, and yet she was back here on Mars regardless, ready to do it again. She enjoyed her work and the benefits it afforded her.

Satisfied, she swept the folders into her handbag, stood up, and descended the rear stairwell to leave through the small door at the back of the restaurant for the professionals and celebrities who wished to keep their rendezvous under the table. A common cab took her two miles down the strip to the eighth most expensive hotel in the area; she paid the driver in cash. Once inside, she took the elevator up one floor, then walked to the stairs and descended into the second parking sublevel. She paid no mind to the cameras watching the stairs; if the man on duty was not one of theirs, it was her handler’s fault, not her own.

Once in the second sublevel, she walked around to the area reserved for deliveries and climbed into the back of a van in the heraldry of a produce company. The heraldry was a facade only; inside, two rows of seats faced each other across a gap wide enough for a single slim person to traverse comfortably. Asset One was already seated on the right-hand bench, just as ugly as the image in his dossier. He was an early survivor of the Human Enhancement Project, product number C1-249, and it had not been kind to him. Two ugly metal optics jutted from his eye sockets, and thick scars from repeated follow-up surgeries crisscrossed his face, neck, and bare scalp. High-profile body armor capable of protecting against a ricochet from a 105mm muscle tracer round made his already large form take up even more space.

She kept the disgust off her face as he turned his head to bring the primitive red-tinted cyberoptics to bear on her, the lenses visibly telescoping to bring her image into focus. Humanity’s first crude attempt to free themselves from the limits imposed by their messily-evolved neurology had produced precious few successes and countless scarred, hideous failures. 249 had likely had his corneas burnt out by Coral binding to the wrong neurons.

He did not speak, and neither did she as she took the seat across from him and belted herself in. The vehicle rumbled to life and began the six-hour drive to the misleadingly named Pathfinder City, founded nearly opposite the probe’s historical landing site. It was one of Mars’ most popular tourist destinations for off-worlders because it held the base of the planet’s largest civilian-use space elevator hanging below Mariner Station, and so her departure from the planet would go unnoticed. Asset One would stick out no matter where he went, but his value evidently eclipsed that issue.

She spent the ride reviewing the dossiers and intelligence briefs. The Rubicon system had only one other settled body, Rubicon VI-II, the second and largest moon of the largest gas giant in the system. Once a bustling hub offering a rest stop between Rubicon III and the superluminal boundary at the edge of the system, it was now little more than a hive of gambling dens where smugglers, thieves, and pirates could fence suspect goods without oversight. The PCA was the only authority in the system, and anything that didn’t approach Rubicon III, they didn’t deign to notice.

Rubicon III itself had been a black box ever since PCA Directive 2d had banned all ‘unauthorized’ travel and communication to and from the planet, so the folder on the system contained better information about VI-II than her actual target. All she had was some historical data from before the Fires, the findings of the university teams sent to study the fallout forty years ago, the PCA’s own suspect reports to the Executive Council, and even less reliable anecdotes from the few people who had been granted passage through the cordon for one reason or another. Asset Zero would give her a better idea of the situation once she managed to worm her way into the system, but she’d be flying blind until then.

She moved on to the mission details. She was to enter the Closure area posing as a corporate representative of Hyland Mechanics, a longstanding Intelligence Service front, en route to a meeting with BAWS, the only interplanetary corporation legally operating on Rubicon. As far as the PCA were concerned, she was here to demonstrate a sample of their new factory-line robotics in hope of making a sale; this detail provided cover for the 5800 kg minifab in her luggage. Asset One would pose as her bodyguard, he and his armored core hired above-board through a public mercenary listing service. She was being provided an AC as well, presented to the import authorities as his spare; they would not inspect either.

There was no meeting with BAWS; the moment she was through PCA security, everything about her scheduled visit would disappear from their logs. Such was the limit of Military Intelligence’s influence in the PCA: one insertion, one deletion. She was responsible for disappearing herself once she reached the surface, ‘liberating’ the miniature refinery from where it awaited sale to a nonexistent buyer, and setting up both the minifab and its feeder in a secure location of her choosing and preparation. Her objectives—her only true ‘orders’ among pages and pages of intelligence and recommendations and hypotheticals—were to search for Coral and light Asset Two’s ‘signal flare’ if she found it.

As for what little direct assistance she had been provided: Asset Zero’s automated monitoring systems were currently under the observations of other, only-slightly-more sophisticated automated monitoring systems. So long as she covered her tracks with even a modicum of care, she would have free reign to push and pull the tides of mercenary conflict as she saw fit. Asset One would enter normal mercenary service through Asset Zero to maintain his own cover identity, which was functionally his real identity, giving her a nigh-untraceable method of directing his actions at a remove. Asset Two was irrelevant until and unless she found Coral and a potentially destabilizing influence even then, as anyone willing to shoot at a Federated Administration would be. Asset Three’s folder contained data-sheets, not a dossier—the fab was a very expensive tool, but it was ultimately still a tool. Communication with her anonymous off-site support team was available only every three to four days for a period of about ninety minutes while a stealth satellite in a high-eccentricity orbit passed over Belius.

She had done more with less.

“What generation?” C1-249 asked suddenly.

Green eyes colder than ice flicked upward to the man across from her. She still did not speak, communicating her distaste and question both in one precisely-raised eyebrow.

“Anyone without augs would have taken those shoes off the moment she was out of sight,” 249 observed with a smug grin, like he was clever for noticing it. “You know my generation. What’s yours?”

“Twelve,” she deadpanned.

He cackled. “This is what I love about you spooks! Always so grim-faced I can never tell when you’re joking.” His smile grew mean, and he leered as best he could through the metal in his face, letting the whir of the lenses exaggerate the effect. “How many of those curves are still soft, little lady?”

She was beginning to see what her handler had meant by needing to ‘manage’ 249’s personality. He wasn’t interested in her, not sexually. This was a power play: him the large, hulking male, 191cm; her the small, delicate female, 175cm in her heels. He was poking her like a child would an insect: just to see how she’d react.

She decided to make their positions clear. She kicked her right leg forward, flipping her shoe off to strike him in the sensitive skin around his ocular implants. The moment he began to flinch back, before the shoe had even struck him, her still-raised leg launched a straight kick at his unprotected torso. There was enough space between the benches that legs as short as hers shouldn’t reach his chest, but that didn’t matter. Her lower leg pistoned out, flawless synthetic flesh splitting apart to reveal the shining chrome and matte-black carbon-fiber-polymer mechanisms responsible for driving the ball of her bare foot thirty-odd extra centimeters forward to take 249 straight in the gut.

The metal holding the bench in place beneath her groaned, even as reinforced as it was; the van rocked slightly despite the heavy armor hidden under the facade of civilian industry. 249 got it much worse. The impact mesh of his body armor strained and tore and the trauma plate behind it shattered into five pieces. She wrinkled her nose at the scent of bile rushing up his throat as he folded around her foot, the force of the blow carefully calculated such that what remained after defeating the armor would cause severe distress without lasting injury to the only personnel asset she had. Killing him world have taken less force, in fact, but she kept her blades sheathed and made her point through power alone.

She kept her foot in his gut just long enough to be sure he registered the nature of the hit—his reflex augments were nearly fifty years older than hers—then retracted her lower leg to its proper length and snapped the limb to her right to catch the shoe on its way down. She deftly caught the lip at its front between her first and second toes, then further rotated her leg far past the limits of a human body to pass the shoe back into her hand.

249 was still recovering some time after she’d put everything back into its proper place.

“That explains the lack of leggings,” he wheezed once he’d fought the nausea down, one hand clutched to his stomach and the other over his left implant like he’d been poked in the eye, which he may as well have been. “I think I like you, scary lady. What am I supposed to call you, anyway?”

She flipped open the dossier on her cover identity to check the name against her memory. It matched.

“Markson,” she said. “You will call me Kate Markson.”

Chapter Text

THEN

C4-621 had been at this for two days. Her handler had given her only a single task since she’d passed the check-in to the ALLMIND® Mercenary Support System, a clean-up near her original unintended landed site even an AI pilot could have performed. The silence hurt. He’d promised her a reason to exist, a reason to keep waking up every morning in a world intent on ripping everything away from her piece by bloody piece. A world that had sent her tumbling down, down, down, breaking her body on each new landing only for her to shift and fall once more, until she’d come to rest on the last stop before oblivion.

Had she really done so poorly in her first two sorties? Had her performance in the Grid not been enough to erase the mess she’d made of her infiltration? If she had been better, faster, more careful, could she have avoided alerting the PCA? Should she have performed better against their heavy patrol VTOL? Did he regret buying her?

C4-621 had been at this for four days. The laws of physics were cruel masters across the board, but they grew crueler still the more one scaled up. “The larger they are, the harder they fall” was not merely the quip of a victorious underdog, it was a fact of reality itself. It was a cold, hard fact that an armored core ten meters tall and massing around a hundred tons simply could not take a spill safely. At best, the machine was liable to suffer serious damage to components never meant to bear its weight; at worst, the pilot would be injured or outright killed.

Once it became apparent that the human balance reflexes didn’t scale up to machines massing more than about half a ton, no matter how sophisticated the controls, muscle tracer engineers invented the Attitude Control System, or ACS, a computer system responsible for managing the hundred tiny motions required to keep a biped (and later units with different mobility components) upright and stable under its own power. Under normal conditions, it was just another layer in the control system, a guiding force that made sure a machine’s weight stayed over its feet. In extreme conditions, it had the authority to fully override the pilot’s controls to restore balance before they managed to tip the entire machine over. The sudden loss of control would leave a pilot defenseless in the middle of combat, true, but more than a hundred years of military engineering proved that that was better than the alternative ninety nine times out of a hundred.

C4-621 had been at this for a week. She’d sortied once more into the contaminated city whose name she did not know, a task she believed she’d performed adequately. Three times in the desperate, sloppy fight against the PCA heavy air patrol, her LOADER 4 had locked up as the ACS fought to keep it steady. It had been awful. The simulator simply cut the neurofeedback whenever the ACS took control and shook the capsule a little. It hadn’t prepared her for the lurch in her stomach as the system suddenly brought every actuator to max in attempt to wrench the machine back upright. It hadn’t prepared her for the horrifying helplessness as her AC froze in the line of fire, letting the VTOL’s machine guns rip chunks out if its armor. It hadn’t prepared her for the feeling of violation as the machine’s instincts overrode her control over limbs that her neural interface made feel half her own.

The ACS system was, ultimately, just a piece of software, and like any piece of software could be paused or outright terminated. The physical ACS OVERRIDE switch in her piloting capsule lay under a plastic cover bearing the stencil DO NOT USE. The one in the simulator did not—likely because unlike the one in the live cockpit, it couldn’t kill her.

C4-621 had been at this for ten days. She’d now sortied three additional times since she’d started her obsessive training, all three targeting specific high-value assets. Two of them set her against the local guerrilla forces calling themselves the Rubicon Liberation Front. The third, another intercorporate job, had been her first taste of AC versus AC combat. She had expected more from a machine that Arquebus saw as a serious threat to their operations, but neither it nor its pilot had been enough to challenge her.

She’d continued normal simulator training, as well, not so dead-set on chasing ACS overrides that she would allow herself to fall behind in other areas, but compared to training without ACS the normal combat programs felt flat and uninteresting, closer to a game than a real challenge.

Her handler did not speak of her performance except to congratulate her for each successful sortie. It seemed she was performing to his expectations. She was glad. Augmentation had been her final, desperate resort; if he threw her away, she would have nothing left to catch her as she fell.

C4-621 had been at this for three weeks. It wasn’t impossible for a human to keep a muscle tracer or armored core upright on their own. It simply wasn’t practical. Why would a pilot spend hundreds of hours training to do a task software could already do only to end up worse at it anyway? It was foolish. She knew it was foolish. Her handler, full of praise after her most recent performances, had then reprimanded her for spending so much time in the simulator. He’d encouraged her to pursue other things, like the speech therapy program he’d acquired for her.

She understood. He needed her fresh if a new mission came in, and the aphasia, while it didn’t affect her piloting, was an obstacle in communicating with his support team. She heeded him, and allotted ninety minutes each day for speech therapy and ensured her sleep and meal schedules satisfied the doctor monitoring her condition.

And then she had returned to the simulator.

She had to be better. Better than she was now. Better than the Redguns. Better than the Vespers. Better than anyone else.

She had to be good enough that Walter could never bear to throw her away.

NOW

In a way, 621 wasn’t sad to see Rusty go, called away by the same nurse who’d given her the pill bottle earlier. Ayre had kept her talking for more than an hour, and her throat had been scratched raw from the unusual burst of activity.

“Raven,” Ayre asked gently, “I’m sorry I didn’t ask before, but is it normal for talking to injure humans?”

It isn’t an ‘injury’, 621 thought sadly. It’s a muscle I haven’t trained, that’s all. It will pass.

She felt a shift in Ayre’s presence, the sort she’d come to interpret as awkward fidgeting.

“Did you mean what you told Rusty?” Ayre asked. “About trying to be ‘Raven’?”

621 had to think about the question. It had been a deflection at the time, a way to avoid further questions about herself. She remembered a name from before, but it was attached to nothing but disappointment, poverty, and the constant, inescapable pain of a bad knee. Tainted and useless. Like h—

No! She wasn’t useless. She had a purpose, her REASON to exist. A new life. A new name.

‘Raven’. A name that stood for something: ‘the freedom to choose what one fights for’.

621 had never had to make a choice before, not one more important than between two paths to the same end, even in her scattered memories from Before. The idea of being ‘free’, truly free, was nothing anything in her lives had prepared her for.

But Ayre believed in her. Wanted it for her. It was one of the few desires Ayre had ever expressed of her. If she could not allow herself to want something for herself, she could at least want it for Ayre.

I did, Raven decided. It is who I am now. Who I need to be. I need… to be able to choose.

There was a reason, she now understood, why the word ‘fall’ was so meaningfully intensified by the word ‘free’.

“I’m glad to hear that, Raven.”

I still don’t know what to do, she thought sadly. How much freedom did she have here, exactly? The RLF would want something for their aid.

It was a calming thought. Perhaps Flatwell or his lieutenant could give her missions, like… like Walter once had. But then, wouldn’t that be running from the name she’d only just claimed?

I need options, Ayre, Raven thought. I’ll still choose, like you want me to. I just need somewhere to start.

“The first thing to decide is whether you want to work with the Rubicon Liberation Front going forward.”

Where else would we go? Fleeing to the RLF had been an act of desperation—not because Raven held any ill will towards them but because she knew full well how they would feel about her. If she’d had other options, they would have been safer bets than throwing herself on the mercy of a population she’d taken part in massacring.

“We could return to freelance work,” Ayre said. “You made enough money during the war that you could live off it for years.”

What about my debt? Raven asked.

“Rubicon isn’t exactly a well-traveled system, and you’re operating under a stolen license. It’s unlikely anyone would come looking for you as long as you sortied on a D- or E-rank mission once or twice a month to keep your license in good standing with the Mercenary Support System.” Ayre paused, then added, “Or I could simply alter its records if you would rather not sortie at all.”

And go back to being useless? Raven would much rather face death on a regular basis.

“Raven…” Ayre murmured, her affection and comfort doing their best to wash away Raven’s old fear of abandonment.

I know, Ayre, Raven thought. You won’t leave me. I believe you. I just… I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, if I wasn’t fighting.

“Is there anything you’d like to fight ‘for’?”

Like what?

“Snail taunted you with Walter’s capture,” Ayre said. “Do you want to try and rescue him, if he’s still alive?”

That was a horrible, horrible question. She did, and yet…

Should I? Raven asked hesitantly. He wanted to… to kill your family.

Ayre didn’t respond for a few seconds.

“You trust him,” she said. “You are fond of him, even. It would be a risk, but if you think he’ll listen to you, I will support your decision.”

How do we even know if he’s alive?

“Carla might know. Her connection to Walter is deeper than either of us realized.”

But she wants the same things he does, Raven thought. She’s not going to listen to me.

“She might.”

No one listens.

“Rusty did.”

Raven had to stifle a laugh, lest anything listening think her insane. He listened because he wanted into my pants.

There was a long pause.

“…but… he would not fit?” Ayre asked slowly. “Your pants are tailored for your legs.” She politely did not mention that those pants, like Raven’s legs, ended above the knee.

Oh for crying out loud. Raven dredged up all the cultural context necessary—maybe a little too much, at that—and pushed the lot as clearly as she could across their Contact. It took some time, even at the speed of thought. Here. See?

There was a long, long pause.

“And this is… physically necessary for your species to reproduce?” Ayre asked, sounding both embarrassed and faintly horrified.

There are some ways to automate parts of the process but, broadly speaking, yes.

“Do people prefer those methods, then?” She sounded almost hopeful.

Oh heavens, no! Raven replied, delighting in the unprecedented opportunity to tease her partner. People go out of their way to make sure they won’t produce children just so they can do it more!

“I see,” Ayre lied quite blatantly. “Perhaps you should avoid him in the future.”

You were the one who told me I needed more than one friend.

“I may have misjudged him.”

Are you… oh holy hell, you are! You’re jealous!

“I am not jealous,” Ayre insisted. “You gave me a great deal of information about you and your species I was not aware I was missing. I am still… adjusting, that is all.”

So you wouldn’t mind if we found a closet somewhere?

“A… oh. I see. I… do not know if I would want to be present for such an experience,” Ayre admitted.

Raven’s heart skipped a beat. I… you…

“I’m sorry,” Ayre said before Raven could form a proper thought. “I would not leave you, Raven, I promise. And I am not asking you to… not engage in the activities natural to your species. I am simply offering to give you your privacy if you wish to do so.”

I’m sorry too, Raven thought. I was teasing you. I’m not… it would be a mistake to involve myself in that way. I just thought it was funny to see you so flustered.

“Then… you are not interested in him…?”

It’s not that I’m not interested, Raven did her best to explain. It’s that I shouldn’t be. It would be a terrible idea to get that close to someone I might have to fight tomorrow. Or even someone I wouldn’t have to fight. It would be a… distraction.

“A distraction?” Ayre repeated.

It’s… it probably sounds really strange to someone without a body, but humans like to be touched. A lot. It’s… I don’t know how to describe it. Important? It’s important. It’s pleasurable. But it creates… bonds. Emotional attachments.

“I don’t understand.”

Don’t worry, I’m just not explaining it well. It’s like… Not having any better ideas, Raven raised her arms and trailed her right fingers down her left arm in a pale demonstration. It’s different when it’s someone else doing the touching, she added. I don’t know how else to describe it.

“Different like… this?” Ayre asked, and Raven once more felt the sense of fingertips trailing down her arm. And oh, it was different. Fucking hell.

This was dangerous.

“Raven, are you all right? Your heart-rate just spiked.”

“F-fine,” Raven stuttered, so off-kilter she defaulted to speaking aloud. “I’m f-fine. Ask me. Before you do that. A-again.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Ayre asked, obviously concerned. “I thought I could provide the stimulus you specified. I felt the pleasure response you described… I don’t understand what went wrong.”

Nothing! Raven thought. Nothing went wrong, it was… it was extremely pleasurable in a way that—that I don’t think you intended.

“I don’t understand.”

That was… Her cheeks was surely shining brighter than her eyes. That kind of contact could be—my body interpreted it as… as an invitation or solicitation of… further contact. Much further contact.

The response was an awkward. “Oh.”

Would it be alright if we never, ever spoke of this again?

Ayre sighed. “If that’s your decision, Raven, but if touch is as important as you say it is, I would encourage you to seek it out regardless. And I must ask: why, if it is so important, have you not experienced any such contact during all the time I have known you?”

It’s not like I had many chances.

“It seems like a critical oversight in the care your Handler provided you.”

It’s not—it’s not like that. Raven struggled to explain. I’m a weapon, Ayre. I’m not supposed to need things like… like touch.

“By that logic, would your need for touch not prove that you are not just a weapon?”

I can’t, Ayre! she insisted. I can’t… I can’t ask it of anyone. A good weapon doesn’t need to be touched. It doesn’t like to talk! C4-621 added in a panic, memories of Rusty’s recent visit flooding back. If I’m not a good weapon, they’ll throw me away. I can’t let them throw me away again, Ayre, she begged, blinking tears out of her eyes. Please.

It took a minute, but the comforting feeling of her partner cuddling against her thoughts slowly pushed the fear and panic away.

“It’s okay, Raven,” Ayre said. “No one will throw you away for being human. I won’t allow it.”

Raven—Raven, she reminded herself, she was Raven now—had no idea what Ayre could do to follow through on that promise, but the conviction in her partner’s words made her believe it all the same. Thank you.

“And if you can’t ask it of anyone else… I would be willing to touch you again, if you wish.”

At that, Raven couldn’t help but huff. You don’t know what you’re offering, Ayre.

“Your memories made it clear that it’s something typically shared between dedicated intimate partners.” Ayre’s mentally-expressed mood turned mischievous as she continued, “You and I are bound together by our Contact in a way some humans might equate to marriage, aren’t we, Raven?”

Ayre! Raven yelled in her head, flustered beyond belief. She had brought this teasing on herself, to be sure, but still! Aaaaaaaa…

“It is only an offer, but please, do not hesitate to ask it of me,” Ayre said. “Also, Flatwell just walked in. I believe he wants a word.”

Damn it, Ayre!

Chapter Text

THEN

“What is this place, Uncle?” Ziyi asked as they descended deep into the ancient tunnel.

There were only two of them making the pilgrimage. Uncle Dunham led the way, an LED-cluster lantern hanging from his right hand, his left tracing its fingers over the rough-hewn wall. Ziyi trailed along two meters or so behind him, hands wrapped tight around her midsection for warmth and reassurance. Both wore heavy winter clothes taken from the RLF’s stores, even this far underground, as well as a double layer of cloth over their noses and mouths and goggles over their eyes. The later weren’t to protect them from the chill, but rather from whatever awaited them below.

The scale of the place boggled Ziyi’s mind. She’d grown up in the shadow of the Grids, but the Grids were like the clouds overhead: so distant and vast they weren’t really part of ‘the world’ in the first place. The cavern, though—that was here, all around her, and it was terrifying. A hole forty meters in diameter sloping down at a twelve-degree angle, dug not for the stone it displaced but simply to arrive somewhere with space for the machinery the old colonists had wished to bring with them. Uncle Dunham’s lantern was so bright it would hurt her eyes without the goggles, but even it struggled to reach the opposite side of the massive borehole.

“Uncle?” Ziyi asked again, her nerves beginning to fail her.

“Shh,” Uncle Dunham said. “I’ll explain soon.”

Ziyi had celebrated her fourth-and-a-half birthday about three weeks ago. Uncle Flatwell had given her one of the good rations—and an extra sweet!—and promised to teach her how to drive a snow-buggy. Uncle Dunham had taken her up on his knee and offered to tell her any story she wanted to hear.

“I want to hear about you, Uncle Dunham!” she’d declared, and Uncle Dunham had laughed and told her he couldn’t tell her that story, only show her. She’d thought he didn’t want to talk about it and given up, but this morning, Uncle Dunham had come by unexpectedly and asked Uncle Flatwell if he could take her down to ‘the Old Places’. And now here they were.

Ziyi had already decided she did not like the Old Places. She wondered how Uncle Dunham felt, that he would rather brave this place than speak of it.

They were nearly a kilometer into the tunnel when Uncle Dunham stopped, then turned left and stepped through the wall. Ziyi squeaked in surprise, then realized her mistake and hurried into the narrow cleft after him. They crept ten meters through a crevice too narrow for the large man to navigate without turning sideways to sidle along, which brought them to somewhere in the middle of a cramped square stairwell. Perforated metal steps led up and down far beyond the range of the lantern, interrupted by a landing at every corner, and a tight cage of metal bars running up and down the center of the shaft shaft anchored the steps in place and blocked off the gap at the center.

They went down, down, down, a dozen landings or more, before Uncle Dunham stopped again, this time on a landing in front of a heavy metal gate. He transferred the lantern to his left hand and removed a metal shim from his coat, which he used to work the latch from the wrong side. Uncle Dunham continued through the open gate, and Ziyi obediently followed him into another massive tunnel.

The air on the other side of the gate was different, somehow. To the left lay massive, rusted metal bulkhead; to the right, the carved rock floor continued on for only twenty or so meters before sloping down much faster beyond a once-sharp edge. From the look of its walls, that path was not so steep it could not be walked, but it was steep enough that Ziyi was not sure she could recover if she began to tumble. Thankfully, Uncle Dunham did not take them towards the beginning of the slope. He stopped to shut the gate behind them, then motioned Ziyi to remain still and turned off the lantern.

Ziyi did not like that at all! The world around her had vanished, leaving her blind and alone in the vast darkness of the mine tunnel. “Uncle?” she called. “Uncle? Uncle!”

“Don’t worry Ziyi,” Uncle Dunham murmured, appearing at her side like a ghost to take one of her hands in his own. “I’m here. It’s just us.”

“I’m scared, Uncle,” Ziyi admitted.

“Most people would be,” Uncle Dunham said. “You’re being very brave.”

“I don’t want to be brave. I want to go home.”

“Soon, Ziyi,” Uncle Dunham patted her shoulder. “Very soon. But first… what do you see?”

Ziyi was about to respond that she couldn’t see anything because he turned off the lantern, but she could see Uncle Dunham—not well, but enough to know he was there even without his hand on her shoulder. She turned back to the cavern and gasped.

“Sparks!” she exclaimed.

They’d been washed out by the glow of the lantern, but there were tiny, twinkling red lights floating about the cavern—some no more than pinpricks, some large enough to appear more like wisps of fluff. All seemed to drift and dance on invisible currents. It was a magical sight. The myriad twinkling specks were like nothing Ziyi had ever seen.

“What are they?” Ziyi asked once her awe had faded enough for speech.

Uncle Dunham chuckled and made a halfhearted grab for the nearest mote, which succeeded only in disturbing its flight into a more chaotic pattern. “This is Coral, Ziyi,” he said.

Ziyi gasped. She turned back to the Coral and bowed the way the Auntie who often doted on Ziyi—a kindly woman named Mei who shared Ziyi’s facial features, an unusual trait among their family—always did to the other Uncles and Father Dolmayan. “I am very sorry,” she told the Coral. “I did not recognize you. Please forgive me.” The tunnel that had terrified her moments earlier was now hallowed ground, a sacred space she was privileged to be admitted to.

Uncle Dunham broke into a hearty laugh that sent the lights tumbling and dancing all throughout the cavern.

“Here, Ziyi,” he had after he recovered. “Watch.” He let out as much of his breath as he could. Ziyi could barely make out Uncle Dunham, silhouetted against the faint specks of Coral, raising his hands to his face and lowering the cloth mask. He drew in a large breath of air, held it for a moment, then sighed it all out again.

“Your turn, Ziyi,” he said once the mask was back in place.

“You said it was important to keep the mask on,” Ziyi said, frowning at the deception implied by the contradiction.

“I did,” Uncle Dunham replied. “One breath is safe. Breathe in, then replace your mask quickly and carefully.”

Ziyi hesitated.

“It’s all right if you don’t want to,” Uncle Dunham told her.

That convinced her. Ziyi blew her lungs near to empty, pulled the cloth away from her face, and filled them to bursting with the unfiltered air of the tunnel. The strangeness was stronger without the mask, oh so much stronger, a red-light scent catching at the back of her throat and quivering under her fingernails.

Mindful of her instructions, she made sure her mask was well in place again, then turned to give Uncle Dunham a questioning look. The whole world spun with her.

“Easy now,” Uncle Dunham said, laughing as he caught her drunken stumble. “You don’t do anything by half measures, do you, Ziyi?”

“You said it was safe,” she murmured into his coat. Her head was spinning. Her skull felt hollow and gauze-stuffed all at once.

“Safe, yes, it was safe,” Uncle Dunham reassured her. “Made you dizzy, though, didn’t it?”

“Mhm,” she whined.

“I figured you’d just take a quick sniff,” Uncle Dunham continued, still clearly amused. “You went all out! Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. I’d have stopped you if it was dangerous. Bet you’re already feeling better, yeah?”

Ziyi pulled her face out of Uncle Dunham’s coat to check. She was feeling better, though she still felt a little wobbly. “What was that?”

“Coral,” Uncle Dunham said.

“I thought the lights were the Coral,” Ziyi complained.

“Oh, they are,” Uncle Dunham said. “Coral is tiny, Ziyi. Far too small to see. The motes you see in the dark—those are made of thousands, maybe millions, of tiny Coral all grouped together into something large and bright enough to see.”

“Like Adams and Molly-cules,” Ziyi said, eager to show off her knowledge. “But why did it make me dizzy?”

“Coral is poisonous, remember?”

“Only if it gets in…” Ziyi trailed off, then cried out, “Oh! We breathed it! That’s what the masks are for!”

“Very good, Ziyi!” Uncle Dunham said. “What you just experienced is what we used to call miner’s daze. It doesn’t take a lot for Coral to clump up like those lights, but if there’s just the wrong amount of Coral drifting around and the air is real still, it will stay too spread out to see. Then some poor soul breathes it in and their head gets all funny. Usually only happens in deep mines, since any breeze will make it start clumping up, so: miner’s daze.

“That’s why people started dosing, you see: they thought, ‘If a little bit makes me dizzy, what happens when I breathe in a lot?’ Turns out some people really like the feeling, even if it rots their brains straight through all the while.”

Ziyi looked up at Uncle Dunham with a look of betrayal. “But…! You said it was safe!”

Uncle Dunham laughed and ruffled her hair. “Relax, Ziyi. That wasn’t even a tiny, tiny portion of what a Doser would take. I worked in a mine just like this for ten years. Got the daze dozens of times thanks to sh-h-h-abby equipment. Didn’t hurt me a lick as much as just one hit would a Doser. The doctors got real good at checking for it.”

“But why?” Ziyi asked. “I mean, why take me down here? Why have me get dizzy?”

Uncle Dunham paused, then sat down with his legs crossed in front of him and bid Ziyi sit on his lap. She did so without hesitation.

“Because you said you wanted to hear a story about me, Ziyi,” he said. “These tunnels are my story, mine and ten thousand others’. I once worked the machines that dug tunnels just like these—spent more than half my life underground before everything went wrong, and I wasn’t yet a lad of ten when the world burned down.

“Coral, the daze, these mines…” Uncle Dunham sighed wistfully. “It’s all the history of Rubicon. Our history, my own more than most. It was supposed to be the greatest discovery of the last four hundred years. The Coral Revolution, they called it. A cheap, clean energy source more portable than any before it. It powered shuttles, starships, factories, even whole colonies. A new age of humanity. And then…”

“The Fires,” Ziyi whispered with dread awe.

“The Fires,” Uncle Dunham agreed. “The world burned, and then it began to freeze. People were lost and alone, separated by distances they were too afraid to cross, not knowing who else was out there. They might have died never knowing if there were others out there like them, if not for…”

“Father Dolmayan,” Ziyi said. She knew this story well.

“If not for Father Dolmayan,” Uncle Dunham confirmed. “He came down from the paradise he had found in the Grid and began to travel from town to town. He told people of their neighbors, of people just like them. Some had too many clothes and too little food, and others had too much food and too few clothes. Neither could solve their problems alone, but with Dolmayan and his Messengers to bring them together…”

“They had enough food and enough clothes!” Ziyi cheered, then paused and gave her Uncle—or at least his silhouette—a disaspproving look. “I know these stories already, Uncle.”

“I suppose you do, at that,” Uncle Dunham admitted, “but you said you wanted a story about me, and I’m telling it—the story of how I met Dolmayan, and why I chose to become a Messenger myself, back before we were the RLF. I was a miner, like I said. Tunnels like this were my trade. I’d work the machine to bore a hole into a mountain just like the one we arrived through, then another worker would lay rail tracks, and another would drive a train full of more digging equipment down the tracks, and the process would start all over again. We’d already tapped most of the Wells close enough to the surface to reach with a single vertical shaft, you see. Heck, sometimes we were just feeling around in the dark hoping to get lucky!

“Of course, that was before the Fires. Afterwards, there wasn’t enough Coral left to mine. The corporations left, and they didn’t care to take those of us that survived us with them. Oh, Mars offered to move us off-world… if we didn’t take so much as box of our things with us, and Rubiconian money wasn’t worth a cent anywhere else. They wouldn’t even promise us jobs wherever we ended up.”

He sighed. “We could stay here and suffer the ash, or let them ship us off to Coral-knows-where with only the clothes on our backs. Two choices so bad it’s hard to say which was worse… but of course that was months later, after the PCA showed up and told everyone to leave.

“My friends and I were lucky. We were deep enough in the mine that the heat didn’t get us, but not so deep that the tunnels collapsed on us from the blast. Once the Fires ended, we climbed out and headed down to the city to search through the ruins, found whatever we could. We had enough, at first. There were years’ worth of food and clothing with no one to claim it. So many people had died… you can’t imagine it, Ziyi. One day, a city had more people than you’ve ever met in your life packed into a space smaller than the tunnel we walked through just to get to the stairs. The next, they were as empty as the wilderness. The Fires…”

Uncle Dunham paused to suck on his teeth for a moment before he continued softly, “There’s a reason they call people like me ‘Cinders’, Ziyi. It changed us, all of us. It couldn’t not.”

Ziyi shivered for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold and hugged Uncle Dunham as best she could, her arms still not long enough to circle his broad chest.

NOW

This is the Butcher of Bona Dea? Ziyi thought, watching the woman from the neighboring gantry as she watched the techs repaint her AC in turn. She can’t be much older than I am.

“Not what any of us expected, I think,” Roku said from his place at her back, once again demonstrating an uncanny ability to guess her thoughts.

“Monsters ought to look the part,” Ziyi grumbled. “The world would be better if you could pick them out of the crowd.”

“She did help extract both you and Dolmayan-sama from Balam’s prison.”

Ziyi scoffed. “Because we offered her more money than they would.”

“Perhaps.”

The freelance murderer might be the current target of Ziyi’s bad mood, but she wasn’t the cause. Being in the same base as two other Fingers at the same time made her teeth itch. Herself, Dunham, Flatwell… three out of five of the Liberation Front’s elite AC pilots under one nuke-able roof. Four out of six if you ignored the paper-thin fiction that Rokumonsen wasn’t part of their cause. The damned fool was hovering over her shoulder right now like a self-appointed babysitter in an odd costume.

Only slightly less irksome than the security concerns was the pigfucker pushing the Butcher’s wheelchair, the Arquebus mole or whoever he was. She wouldn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, and he probably weighed half again as much as she did. Seeing him stop to joke with Flatwell like they were old friends, like all the people he’d killed meant nothing to them, made her skin crawl. She didn’t care how much information he’d slipped their way; the bastard had no right to wear RLF colors after how many of theirs he’d killed.

Then again, maybe treating everyone like they were his friend was just how he tried to ingratiate himself to people. He’d cut and run from Arquebus because he’d failed to kill the Butcher, and now here he was joking with the very same pilot while he guided her wheelchair. Ziyi couldn’t make heads or tails of the slimy prick and, to be honest, didn’t care to.

She let her hand reach into her pocket where she kept Messam’s crudely stamped metal dog tags. They’d had a reliable source, some poor drudge worker in Balam’s grand mess of a logistics train—and then one day that source wasn’t reliable anymore. Maybe he’d been turned, or maybe Balam had decided to feed the mole; the result was the same. Most of the squad had escaped, thank the Coral, but one of Balam’s tetrapods had crippled her MT in the opening salvo, and she and her second had been captured.

Knowing it wasn’t her fault didn’t make his death any easier to bear. Could she have saved him if she’d discarded stealth and sortied in YUE YU rather than an unmarked muscle tracer? She’d never know. The only fragmentary silver lining to whole debacle was that by sheer chance, Balam tossed the two of them into the secure wing of the same complex where Father Dolmayan himself had ended up, leading the Liberation Front to him in turn. The Father of the RLF had been visiting old friends among BAWS’ civilian workforce when a bunch of jackbooted Balam thugs on a power trip rounded up the lot for ‘illegal assembly’ on a whim. Fucking pigs, the lot of them.

(Ziyi had never encountered the word ‘pig’ or its derivatives as anything but a slur towards corporate security forces and sometimes the PCA. She had never bothered to ask if it had any other meaning.)

Fuck Balam. Fuck Arquebus, too, and their damned ‘mole’ with them. Different org, different op, same old shit. Why trust a man who betrayed people once not to do it again? Maybe she could convince Roku to stab him with that stupid sword he carried everywhere—No. This is Flatwell we’re talking about; just because he knows how to play nice with someone doesn’t mean he trusts them. He has a plan.

It better be absolutely genius, or we’ll be slaughtered like rats.

“Let’s go, Roku,” she murmured, already considering how best to distract her overeager minder. If Flatwell was using this as his current base of operations, Arshile should be around here somewhere. He could take everything else off her mind until the RLF needed her.

Chapter Text

THEN

Walter frowned as he paged through the latest reports from the ground support team. His hound was doing better than she had any right to after the ‘treatment’ she’d received from the meat merchant Walter found himself forced to rely on. “Don’t expect much from this one,” the bastard had said, and the medical chart made the reason clear. That damned butcher! Using implants as old as hers were was closer to murder than medicine. That 621 had come out alive was better than could be expected under the circumstances.

Her physical health was good. Her Coral blood level was stable in the desired range, and she showed no side effects from the C-stabilizers her body needed to handle the substance in her system. She was, by her own report, not in pain. Carefully recalibrating her implant firmware had addressed both her insomnia and the mood swings she’d suffered from. She did not show any signs of psychosis or schizophrenia, nor symptoms of personality or dissociative disorders. Her aphasia had improved from the garbled vocalizations she’d come to him with to whole words over less than a month, and would get better still with further treatment.

That did not mean his hound was doing ‘well’. She had to be ordered to complain about even severe issues with her accommodations. She had no issue with the doctor manhandling her but shied away from any kind of friendly contact. She refused to express her own opinions to anyone she considered an authority over her. She spent between twelve and fourteen hours each day practicing in the simulator, half of it on what appeared to be a masochistic desire to experience repeatedly falling to her death.

Walter was a practiced hand at dealing with C-series augmentees. He considered it something of a duty, given his father’s leading role in the technology’s creation. The skill wasn’t helping him with 621 as much as he’d like. Few of the aforementioned issues were ‘unusual’ for a more highly disabled C-series patient, but as far as he could tell, 621 wasn’t ‘highly disabled’. She had opinions, preferences, an awareness of her needs, and a sense of self; she was just doing her best not to for reasons he wasn’t equipped to deal with. Walter suspected her remaining problems were more due to trauma from whatever life had led her to the surgical table than they were the surgery itself, and his expertise solely addressed the latter.

He’d had a psychologist on staff, but the man had thrown a fit after the disastrous operation against the PCA laser artillery array. “Why are you even paying me?” the shrink had screamed across the video link. “What do you need a fucking therapist for if you’re just going to keep throwing them away?”

Walter had not thrown his hounds away. Not those three, nor the ones before them. He had promised them a reason to exist, a life after the mission, and he had meant every word. Each and every one he hoped would be the last—the one to finally see the mission through and reap their reward—but the road was long, and it only took a single misstep to end a journey for good. That entire operation had been just such a misstep on his own part: a misjudgment of the PCA’s commitment to the position and the assets they would have defending it: a bloody CATAPHRACT. The heavy war machine wasn’t invulnerable—617 had proved that much—but after 619 fell on the approach to a direct hit from the primary laser array, it had been enough.

Walter couldn’t say that. Telling the shrink that would have meant admitting to himself how much Walter had wanted each hound to live. How every sacrifice repeated the callous indifferent to human suffering of his father’s work. How much he wanted to finally see his promises through. Reversing the mutilation his hounds suffered wouldn’t erase the crimes of the past, but it might finally let him feel like he made some small recompense. His next priority would be to put a hit on the bastard who supplied him with hounds in the first place, which would arguably do more longterm good than any single act of charity for a victim.

Walter couldn’t say any of it. The uncaring mask he wore had become his armor. So he’s mumbled something about ‘maintaining optimum performance’ and the man had screamed obscenities at him and quit on the spot.

A shame. He’d been a good doctor. Maybe too good. He couldn’t handle seeing his patients go off to die. That 617 survived long enough to die on the operating table rather than the battlefield had likely made it worse.

Nothing to be done about it now. Walter could deal with 621’s trauma after the mission; he’d already committed to restoring her body. That assumed she survived the mission, obviously, but he had every intention of seeing that she did.

He’d had the same intentions for the hounds before her. Maybe she’d be the one to make it happen. Maybe in a week or a month or a day, he’d be off to the meat market for 622.

Walter had told 621 the same thing he’d always told his hounds: find Rubicon’s Coral, and they’d make enough money for her to buy back her life. It was a half-truth. They were here to find the Coral, and 621 would see all the money she needed when they did, but Walter wasn’t here to get rich selling the stuff. The reason he was here in the Rubicon system, hidden away in a satellite disguised as debris kilometers above the PCA’s cordon, was to make sure nobody got their hands on the horrid substance ever again.

The meat merchant was only a symptom of mankind’s willingness and ability to mutilate their fellows for personal gain. Walter couldn’t do anything about the willingness. He had a way to eliminate the ability, at least for this one specific case.

Walter had come to Rubicon to rid the universe of the last source of the poison that made his hounds they were. Without Coral, there would be no more C-series. The augments still in circulation were more than fifty years old; within another decade or two, there wouldn’t be any left that were ‘fresh’ enough for implantation. Patient prognosis got worse with every reuse, and with no way to turn back the clock or make new hardware, the technology would die out for good. Synthetic alternatives were common, even popular, but they could only duplicate the few specific, well-understood functions they were made for, and were significantly gentler on the body. There would be no repeats of the monstrous final years of the ‘Coral Revolution’.

The mistakes of the past—the evil his father had done—would remain in the past for good.

Institute City Relic 0822-215D: Handwritten Journal

A handwritten journal bearing the monograph "AW", recovered from a residential building in Institute City. Many pages are damaged by water or fire. Most of the surviving contents focus on daily life, but select relevant passages [EXCERPTs 00..22] suggest it belonged to a researcher at the RRI, identity unknown.

EXCERPT 10

[The following text appears at the top of its own page in an unsteady scribble]

Lights flicking. Patient hallucinating but mostly lucid. Tablet screen showing errors. Patient requests water room tap opens Distance ~3 meters Duration Got cup myself Patient still playing w/ lights Immobile no physical switch Patient now operating bed controls physical switches out of reach Speaking to myself + hallucination Repeating word Lasam? Lesam? Resam? Tablet no longer glitching experimenting patient can read tablet BLIND not facing now addressing other files Patient ceased speaking lights off patient requesting water tap does not operate until I am in place lights will not turn on patient has lowered bed to sleeping position no longer responding lights have turned back on

[On the same page, in a steadier hand]

204d/201

I am sitting in a bathroom stall. My hands are still shaking. I have seen something nothing in all my years as a scholar or scientist have prepared to me to explain. I don’t even know what to call it. Technopathy? Rubbish. Every word for it is steeped in connotations of fiction, mysticism, or outright fraud.

I had been making the rounds to observe the subjects. 6 survivors in room 4 were unconscious. Patient 44 one of the worst-off medically. Penetration of coral into her nervous system more than 30% higher than previously recorded maximum, likely due to improper surgical procedure. Optic nerve near-destroyed by coral encroachment. CBLs dangerous but not lethal in short term. Due to systemic health issues following surgery we judged coral antidotes would trigger organ failure regardless and switched to palliative care.

I had just exited the room when the lights behind me turned off, then on, then dimmed. I returned to the room. 44 was murmuring. Lights continued to adjust. Consulted my tablet to remotely adjust lights and found the screen glitching and unreadable. I set it on the bedside table and began taking notes in ink.

44 requested water and the tap turned on. Tap is operated by proxpad and approx. 3 meters away from 44’s bed. I grabbed the cup and held it under the water until it was full. Could not shut off water myself. Tap shut off only after I returned to bedside. Squirted water into 44s mouth with the cup straw. Lights began adjusting themselves again. I set the cup aside and began scribbling notes as fast as I could. 44 asked to sit up and 

The patient beds are hospital models designed to raise and lower the head of the bed to support patients upright for eating and comfort. Motors are operated by foot pedal or a wired remote for patient use (not connected to any beds in room 4). Foot pedal was on the opposite side of the bed from me. Bed began moving on its own. 44 complained bed was now too high and it lowered. I helped 44 drink again. Tried to engage patient in conversation. 44 recognized my voice but continued to converse with one or more hallucinations. Kept repeating a word I couldn’t make out. I tried again to work tablet but the software was slow and unresponsive. 44 asked why I was closing my apps. Surgery left 44 mostly blind. I opened a text app and asked 44 to read from it. 44 complied. The screen was facing me the whole time. I closed the application and 44 was able to identify other apps and files on the device by name and even read from one without me opening it. 44 requested more water. The lights were off and the tablet could not turn them on so I had to do it in the dark. I held the cup under the tap to see if tap operated itself again and it did. After another drink 44 complained of tiredness and the bed lowered. The lights returned to previous level. My tablet rebooted itself and began functioning normally again. 44 would not respond to further questions.

I should go check in with security. I do not know how much of the event the camera in the room would have caught but the effects on the lights should be obvious.

204d Cont 205d  Continued

Can’t sleep. It has been twelve hours and I am still trying to make sense of what I saw. I am thankful I had taken to carrying this journal with me to work. I am not a superstitious sort but having it in my pocket was calming. Now it feels like a weight even from across the room.

No electronic records of the event at all. 8 minutes missing from security camera. Bedside monitor logs are blank. Even the water meter shows no usage. I spilled some water on my journal during the event! One smudged journal entry and my handwritten notes are all the physical evidence I have of the most groundbreaking discovery since the invention of the scientific method.

44 expired while I was in the bathroom trying to come to grips with the event. That is the only word I have for it. ‘The event.’ If the autopsy doesn’t show anything our scans didn’t the body is a dead end.

Still thinking about 44s mumbling. Annoyed I couldn’t understand that word. Thought it might be another language but due to speaking difficulty/slurring I could not narrow down a phonetic language search to anything useful. Could be gibberish but it was consistent enough I feel like it had meaning. Neurological issue? Aphasia or apraxia, perhaps.

Just noticed the pun in ‘dead end’. Not funny.

[the following note was written with a different pen and underlined twice]

If it happened once it can happen again.

NOW

Walter jerked awake as the door to his cell-slash-interrogation room opened. Freud was back, somehow looking even worse than Walter felt; the latter had gotten maybe three hours of the worst sleep in life, but the former looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. It had been a day or so at most since they’d last spoken.

Walter began counting in his head.

“Long day?” he asked, mildly.

“Save it,” Freud snapped. “I have a list of problems longer than orbit, and I assure you, you do not want to climb that list.”

“I’m not sure why I’m on your list at all. You’re the best unaugmented pilot of your time.” A dig disguised as praise, a reminder than so long as people remembered Blackguard, Freud’s own achievements would always have that qualifier. “Are things going so well on the surface that this is the best use Arquebus has for you?”

Interrogation was exactly the sort of job Freud should designate to the Vespers’ Intelligence Officer and his lieutenants, and the fact that he hadn’t meant something. Walter just wasn’t sure what.

“Would you rather I sent you along to the Factory?” Freud countered. “Never met anyone eager to make the trip, but there’s a first for everything.”

Empty threat, Walter thought. Snail would’ve thrown me in without a warning, and you’re too pragmatic to torture someone out of spite. Snail must be dead after all; neither he nor Freud would have the patience to drag a gambit out this long. But there was definitely something going on between Freud and O’Keeffe, or Walter would be dealing with the latter. Freud was many things, but a practiced interrogator he was not.

“Raven must really be a thorn in your side, if you’re still up here,” Walter said.

“Raven is a valuable asset we would rather not see go to waste,” Freud replied coldly.

Liar, Walter thought.

“I can’t say I blame you,” he said aloud, baiting a hook. “She has an impressive record. Six dead Vespers is quite the feather in one’s cap.”

Freud’s eyes narrowed. “Six,” he repeated. “Is that so.”

Walter frowned as though he’d only just realized a mistake. “Ah. You never did track down the assassin who got V.VII, did you?”

“Rokumonsen,” Freud said. “An independent who specializes in hitting single, high-value targets.”

“Swinburne was ‘high value’?”

The jab got an actual laugh out of Freud before his frustration and general hostility could stifle it. “Apparently not! That fool was incompetent enough that ‘being able to kill him’ didn’t narrow down the…”

He cut himself off, realizing a little late that he was supposed to be the one asking the questions.

“So,” Freud said. “You’re claiming your hound beat Rokumonsen to the punch.”

Walter shrugged. “The RLF’s money is as good as anyone’s.”

“Then I’m sure you will both find Arquebus a most satisfactory employer.”

“How silly of me,” Walter said. “I thought this was an interrogation, when it’s been a job interview the whole time.”

“If a paycheck was all it took to loosen your lips, I’d have a contract drawn up already,” Freud growled. “You’re not here for money, Walter. Funny thing I learned digging into the PCA’s sealed records: you damn near grew up in Institute City. Your father put his name—and by extension yours, Aston Walters—on more than a few of his most dangerous projects.”

Walter kept his face blank, though he knew that was a tell all its own. He’d taken for granted that he and Carla had covered the tracks of their pasts, failing to consider that the PCA would have dug up whichever Institute databanks survived the Fires. It was an unwelcome surprise—and worse, one they should have prepared for.

It was darkly amusing that Freud assumed Walter’s father was who the weapons were named after, though. The surviving records must not have distinguished between the two Doctors Walters.

“You know what I think, Walter?” Freud pressed on. “I think you left something there, fifty years ago, and you want it back. And I want to know what.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Walter replied.

Freud forced a smile. “The fact that Institute City is intact at all is enough to convince me to be… flexible in my assumptions.”

“No,” Walter said. “What I mean to say is that you would not believe me because I have no reason to be truthful. I could name half a dozen projects I saw in my days in the Institute and you’d have no way to tell which one was the real prize.”

Another negotiator might have responded to that probe by asking what would make it worth Walter’s while; Freud opted to spread his hands in surrender and draw things out a little longer. “True—and as that lack of trust goes both ways, you have no reason to expect me to hold to any promise I may make to secure your cooperation.”

“Sitting in a black-site chained to a table tends to set certain expectations.”

“Like one’s imminent execution.”

Walter raised an eyebrow, surprised Freud hadn’t even bothered with a euphemism. “I’m not getting any younger.” Another subtle hint, another seed planted. I’m right here, Freud. If you want to prove you’re better than me, let’s do it.

“And yet here you are, alive and… mostly unharmed.” Freud paused, then leaned forward to murmur, “I’ll be blunt, Walter. Killing your hound would solve one problem. Turning them—and you, make no mistake—would solve many, many more. You have no expectation of surviving this, that much is clear, so you’ll want assurances. I’ll give you your hound. Put them to work for us, and they’ll have the gun to the Vespers’ heads that guarantees our end of the deal.”

Freud wanted him to ask. Walter was willing to play along. “And what exactly is ‘your end of the deal’?”

“You want something from the City. This is the last chance you’ll have to get it.” Freud smiled as he leaned back in his chair like a king lounging on a throne. “Or spend the rest of your life in this room. Your call.”

Walter stared at Freud until the latter’s grin began to crack.

“You should’ve sent O’Keeffe,” Walter told him. “He’d have tried to bribe me with a decent meal.”

“You–!”

“You’re offering me what I want from the City?” he pressed on. “Maybe what I want is to not have to share with the likes of Arquebus. What then, Freud? Are you still going to give me what I want? I bet that would go over well with the executives.”

Freud lunged across the table and punched him in the face. Walter toppled off the chair, the shackle on his arm arresting his fall with a painful jolt.

“You ungrateful bastard!” Freud screamed. “My faith in your common sense is the only reason you aren’t already chained to one of Snail’s bloody machines!” The man took two deep breaths, strangled another scream in his throat, and stormed out the door, slamming it shut behind him. The CorpSec goon he passed on the way out reopened it to check on the prisoner, then walked in to drag Walter roughly back into his chair.

That had taken only three and a half minutes, as near Walter could judge. Compared to everything he’d read about the man, the Freud he was dealing with wasn’t just stressed, he was teetering on the edge of a breakdown.

What bothered Walter most was that Freud had given few signs as to why; the only clear hint besides the fact that Freud was here at all was that the Arquebus executive suite was the worst of several sore spots. If it were just 621 troubling him, Freud would have—should have—delegated things down the chain and enjoyed the challenge of hunting her himself. She may have reaped the Vesper’s roster, but neither the PCA nor Balam had compromised the bulk of Arquebus’s command structure, so what the hell was going on down there? Why was Freud keeping O’Keeffe away from Walter, and what had him on edge around Arquebus’s C-suite?

And what was that about hiring Walter, of all the things to offer? Freud had been right when he’d said Walter wouldn’t trust his promises, only to go beyond ‘unlikely’ into outright ‘unreasonable’. It made for a terrible lie, so there was no reason for Freud to float the possibility unless he meant it… but at the same time, that line of thinking was exactly what would make it an effective misdirection if he didn’t. But then, if Walter accepted, Freud had promised to let him handle 621 himself, which would put Freud right back where he started if he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain…

One thing was for certain: if Freud was willing to allow Walter’s hand to touch his hound’s leash again, something somewhere had gone very, very wrong.

Chapter Text

THEN

“It was hard living, after the Fires,” Uncle Dunham continued, down in the glimmering darkness of the old Coral mine shaft. “All the survival lessons we’ve taught you, we had to learn ourselves by getting them wrong. People got sick from ash, from spoiled food and bad water, from the cold, from hunger, from Coral seeping into the ground. We weren’t one of the places that had too much food. We didn’t have too much of anything, as far as we knew. Turns out we had too many people. There were places with too few, but we never would have known that without Dolmayan.

“We were starving when Dolmayan found us. He gave us food not in trade but just because he didn’t want people to suffer. There wasn’t enough, but it was more than we had.

“He told us there was a farm thirty kilometers away that needed more workers. It was honest work, hard but no harder than mining. We were suspicious. A strange man showed up from out of the ashen fog and wanted to take us a couple dozen kilometers down the road? It sounded like a trick! But I said to them, I said, ‘If it’s a trick, it’ll be no worse than what we had yesterday.’ Some of my friends, they saw the wisdom in it. But we were in no shape to walk ten kilometers. So Dolmayan took his ASTŁIK—you know ASTŁIK?”

“The robot!” Ziyi cried, throwing her arms up to emphasize its size.

“The robot,” Uncle Dunham agreed. “Dolmayan took ASTŁIK and unhooked an old trailer bed, pulled it like a sled all the way down to the farm. We couldn’t believe it. An armored core pulling a trailer full of people like a child pulling a wagon full of dolls. And when we got there, there was no trick. They gave us food and a warm place to sleep, and all they asked of us was to help make more food and more warm places to sleep. Dolmayan took me and Kamila back to the city the next day with more food and our word, and everyone else came along. The farm wasn’t much, not any more than you and I have now, but to a group of cold and starving people, it was paradise.

“But… it wasn’t enough. Not for Kamila and not for me. We didn’t just want to be safe, we wanted to help, the way Dolmayan had helped us.”

“And that’s when you became the Messengers?” Ziyi asked.

Uncle Dunham laughed. “Not quite that easy. We didn’t have a way to travel yet. It wasn’t until Dolmayan came back with a working truck following him half a year later that we formed the convoy, and people didn’t start calling us ‘Messengers’ for another year or so, but… yeah. That’s why we became the Messengers.”

He let out a fond sigh. “The food was worse, sleeping in the truck wasn’t half as comfortable as the ratty old mattresses at the farm, we were cold all the time… but it was all worth it. Some of the factories still worked, but the people had no one to trade their work with for food. We took samples from the factories to the farms and back again. ASTŁIK cleared the roads. People began to travel again! For the first time in ten years, we felt safe enough to leave our burrows. People connected with family they’d thought long dead. We began living again, Ziyi! Farmers grew food, tailors made clothes, engineers fixed equipment, and it was all owned by people, not corporations. …Do you know what a corporation is, Ziyi?”

“People who keep all the sweets for themselves without sharing,” Ziyi answered with scorn. That’s what Uncle Hashim had told her when she’d asked.

“True enough!” Uncle Dunham agreed. “It was an amazing thing to see, Ziyi. It was the kind of world we deserve. All of us. Humanity, I mean. I wish you’d been able to see it. I wish so badly it had survived.”

Ziyi nodded solemnly. “The PCA came, didn’t they.”

“They did. They had decided the planet belonged to them, and that they had to right to take it from us. They wanted us gone, and they decided the easiest way to do that was to starve us. So they killed the farms. We weren’t hurting anyone, but some cruel men a bazillion kilometers away couldn’t stand the fact that we could be happy without their consent. We could, so they came in with their ships, and they burned everything we had built back down again, so we wouldn’t be.”

“Why?” Ziyi whined.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Dunham admitted. “I don’t know what they said to each other to decide such a thing. I don’t know why they didn’t want Rubicon to ever recover. I don’t even know if they did it to hurt us, or if they just didn’t care. But they did it, and we’ve been living in the shadow of that war ever since.”

“Hiding,” Ziyi said.

“Hiding,” Uncle Dunham echoed. “We moved underground. Into buried factories, and mineshafts, and old shipping tunnels. Under the Grids, beneath the city ruins. We hide, and we fight. Whatever of ours the PCA finds, they destroy, and we do the same to them because it’s the only way to slow them down.

“Dolmayan had brought a message of peace everywhere we’d gone, but the PCA would offer nothing but war, so we responded in kind. We stopped being Messengers the day we took up arms against our fellow men; now, we’re the Liberation Front. I hate the necessity of war every day, but I couldn’t be prouder to be part of the fight.”

“We’re going to lose, aren’t we?” Ziyi asked. “Someday.”

Uncle Dunham laughed and ruffled her hair again. “Don’t you worry, Ziyi. If we were easy to beat, we’d have all been dead decades ago. Trust your Uncles. We’ll win somehow. If you’re smart, and strong, and lucky, you might get to be a part of that.”

He paused, his face as hidden in shadow as hers surely was to him; when he continued, his voice was soft and tinged with yearning. “Wouldn’t that be something, Ziyi? One day, you’d be able to take kids no older than you are now down to the Old Places and tell them about how you saved Rubicon.”

Ziyi nodded solemnly. She didn’t know how, but one day, she would save Rubicon, just like Uncle Dunham said.

NOW

Arshile was, in fact, around here somewhere, but tragically for Ziyi’s libido, ‘around here’ meant ‘on duty in the command center for another four hours’. She spent the next hour and a half getting manhandled by Roku in a completely different way. The mercenary had a great love of games, be they cards or dice or pieces across a board, second only to his love of theatre, so obviously he had spent a great deal of time over the years teaching Ziyi his favorites. Unfortunately for her, he improved at his hobbies faster than she could learn them. She came close every time, but as far as her odds of actually winning were concerned, Ziyi might as well be placing stones at random.

It was something of a relief when an aide interrupted yet another losing position to summon both pilots to the briefing room. In this particular base, it was deep in the old factory understructure, chosen for its remoteness and good sound insulation: a heavily reinforced chamber whose original purpose in the facility Ziyi couldn’t guess. It was an octagonal room, slightly longer in one dimension than the other with the remaining four walls shorter still, like someone had sloppily hacked the corners off a normally-proportioned rectangle. The amenities inside were the same as one would find in any such room in the RLF’s bases: a computer terminal in one corner controlled a pair of mismatched screens mounted functionally but inelegantly on the largest wall, and a large table in the center of the room held a map of Belius covered with flags, pins, and tokens representing RLF, PCA, and Corporate assets.

When Ziyi and Roku arrived, there were already four others in the room; none were interested in the map or the monitors, their attention on the door. Uncle Flatwell’s presence was a given at a meeting like this, whether in person or calling in through one of the RLF’s jealously guarded ground-line communication cables. Cadza, their chief intelligence officer hidden away deep in RLF territory, was represented here by Arshile: Cadza’s second, Flatwell’s adjunct, and Ziyi’s beau. Ziyi was displeased to see the Arquebus traitor in the room as well, standing behind Flatwell and trying his best to look like he wasn’t hiding behind him. The Butcher, at least, was absent.

“Comrade Ziyi, comrade Rokumonsen,” Uncle Flatwell greeted them as they entered. “We’re just waiting for—ah, there you are, comrade Dunham.”

“Glad to be here, Uncle!” Uncle Dunham boomed as he swung the heavy bulkhead shut behind him, silencing the faint hum of the base with a grand clank of metal on metal.

“Don’t ‘Uncle’ me, Dunham,” Flatwell complained. “You’re a decade my senior if you’re a day.”

“But who’s giving who orders, hmm?” Dunham countered. “Now, enough chatting! Let’s get this started, shall we?”

Flatwell sighed, then nodded. “Comrade Arshile, if you would.”

“Yes, Uncle,” Arshile said, turning his attention to the computer terminal. A moment later, the faces of Father ‘Thumb’ Dolmayan and Uncle ‘Ring’ Freddie appeared on the smaller screen, and the five pilots present all moved to bunch up to better see the monitors. Ziyi found herself on the right-middle space of the line-up, pinched between Roku to her right and Dunham in the center of the line. To his left stood Flatwell; the Arquebus traitor stood slightly apart from the others at the far end of the table. Arshile remained at the computer terminal.

In the privacy of her mind, Ziyi frowned in concern. Whatever this meeting was about, ‘Middle’ Flatwell had seen fit to include all five Fingers of the RLF’s Fist and not only Rokumonsen but the mole as well.

The larger of the two screens had an image of its own, a map of Belius much like the table. It was only when Flatwell swept the tokens onto the floor and began to unroll a new, more recent map across the table that Ziyi realized the image was the table as seen from directly overhead. Now that she was looking for it, she could see the camera mounted beneath the light fixture.

“What we have here,” Flatwell said as Arshile busied himself retrieving tokens from the floor to hold the map’s corners flat, “is the complete deployment and disposition of all Arquebus assets in the greater Belius region as of five days ago.”

Ziyi exchanged a surprised look with Roku, then with Arshile. That was potentially a lot of information, and if Arshile hadn’t known about this, it must have come directly from the treacherous mole himself.

“Shortly after dawn tomorrow, the independent mercenary call sign Raven”—the Butcher, Ziyi’s mind substituted—“will sortie from this base to here.” Flatwell placed a red pin in the foothills north of the ash-choked Tsirna Dolina Valley in north-central Belius. “This is the site from which Raven has been operating in Belius for the last several months. We have already dispatched a convoy under cover of darkness to approach the site in preparation for tomorrow’s sortie. Their goal is to rendezvous with Raven, secure the site, and extract everything her team left behind—or, failing that, as much materiel as possible.”

Valuable if she’s willing to share, Ziyi had to admit, but Uncle wouldn’t call in the whole Fist just for that.

“Raven has now killed five of the eight active Vespers and is believed to have killed another, half of which she fought while knowingly in the employ of the RLF. She is not only a proven asset to our cause, she is currently Arquebus’s single most wanted fugitive. They know the approximate location of her base and have the area under close surveillance. We expect an immediate deployment of their reserve assets the moment they positively ID her machine, either to engage her, or simply to burn her nest once she makes it known.”

That explained why Flatwell had gone through the trouble to not only repair the Butcher’s AC, but repaint it as well, and why anyone else in the RLF needed to know about this operation in the first place. Ziyi clenched her hands at her sides in anticipation of the news to come.

“Recent intelligence”—which absolutely meant the traitor’s information—“suggests that the command structure in Arquebus’s Belius garrison is unreliable and poorly coordinated. With luck, two or even three of the nearby garrisons will independently deploy forces to intercept Raven. Immediately following the deployment of Arquebus’s reserve forces, we will carry out OPERATION ARGENT GAMBIT.”

Flatwell uncapped a red marker and drew a rough square directly onto the map, covering about three hundred square kilometers and leaving Raven’s marked position just outside it, then held out a hand for Arshile to hand him four RLF soldier tokens, which he placed at the spot on the map representing their current location a good way east of the marked area.

“RLF forces will deploy with AC support, targeting these three vulnerable supply depots in the greater Tsirna Dolina region.” Flatwell accepted and placed three Arquebus-blue flags to mark the targets, the base of each fitting neatly into the circle already printed at those locations, then moved one RLF soldier to each flag. “Surprise is essential, so you will be radio silent until you engage the enemy. No stray signals. We will deploy a recon asset to the hills to the north-east who will use light signals to alert the teams in the field once Arquebus takes the bait, standard go/no go patterns.

“If the Arquebus garrison commits more of their reserve forces to Raven’s pursuit than anticipated, our own reserve MT squads have the secondary objective to destroy the Arquebus radar stations scattered along ridge DELTA.” He pointed at the leftover RLF token, then placed four pins in a line near the northernmost edge of the area of operations. “If not, those squads will remain on standby to provide relief and extraction to other teams when they come under fire from the reserve garrisons. Our goal is the capture of as much materiel as we can carry and the destruction of whatever we can’t. In addition to MTs and their munitions, we are particularly interested in capturing as many AC assets as possible, including weapons, ammo, and frame components.”

“Respectfully, comrade Flatwell,” Dunham interrupted, “it was too hard to crack the lockouts the first time we snatched AC weapons and it’s still too hard now. Ammo is all well and good if it matches our stuff, but those weapons aren’t mass produced like MT gizmos. Anything we lift is going to need a full tear-down and half its electronics replaced if we want it to even fire, much less function as intended. Frame components are even worse.”

“Nevertheless, we are interested in any AC equipment we can acquire,” Flatwell said. “Comrade Dunham, as it seems poor form to take the role of ‘Red Squad’ from our contractor, you will be leading White Squad, a mixed MT and transport VTOL unit, to the north-east ammo depot codenamed Objective Snow.”

“You’re the boss,” Dunham said, cracking his knuckles.

“Comrade Ziyi, you’ll be leading Green Squad to the westernmost depot, hereafter Objective Fern.”

Ziyi snapped ramrod straight, left arm down her side and her right fist clasped over her heart in the RLF salute. “Coral, abide with Rubicon!”

“Rokumonsen, so as to not jeopardize your pretense of independence, I have assigned Freddie to lead Blue Squad to Objective Sky; he will rendezvous with the team en route. You will remain on standby with relief squad Black. If necessary, we will deploy you either alongside Black or to assist another team. If not, we have prepared missions to strike multiple targets of opportunity in the southern end of the area of operations, which will contribute to further chaos among the corporate garrison. I trust you will find the pay satisfactory in either case.”

Roku performed a quick bow towards the center of the table. “I am at your disposal, Flatwell-san.”

“Once we’ve stolen as much as our transports can carry and burned the rest, and have eliminated any targets of opportunity that present themselves, all deployed forces will exfil to our forward outposts here or here.” Flatwell gathered the four RLF tokens into two groups, which he moved south beyond the area of operations near its eastern and western bounds. “Our logistics team is already preparing to scatter the recovered assets from those outposts across the front. The returning squads will be broken up similarly to accompany the materiel back to base. Following the completion of ARGENT GAMBIT, those outposts, and this one, will be considered compromised and subsequently abandoned. Get everything you don’t want to lose on a transport before you leave.”

Flatwell drew a heavy timepiece from the inner pockets of his coat; Dunham and Roku did as well, while Ziyi fiddled with the watch on her wrist. “Raven sorties in 8 hours, 4 minutes. We estimate it will take about an hour for her to reach the edge of Arquebus’s surveillance perimeter and anywhere between ten minutes and an hour for Arquebus to respond. In order to give you time to get into position, OPERATION ARGENT GAMBIT officially begins in 8 hours and 19 minutes… mark.”

Everyone triggered their stopwatches before returning them to their pockets.

Chapter Text

Excerpt from the publication A Time Travel’s Guide to Sol, a satirical work published in 204 UE under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Oakes’ with the purported purpose of introducing an ‘information age’ (c 2000 CE / 100 BUE) time traveler to the modern day.

The following text appears in Chapter 7: “WAR!”

You would be forgiven for assuming that with all human enterprise unified under the enlightened rule of the Federated Worlds executive council, war must be a thing of the past. Fear not, my savage and primitive friend! War is alive and well throughout human space, provided it follows the Restrictions on Corporate Conflict laid out by the Federated Worlds of Sol’s Intercorporate Oversight Administration. The following is a rough summary of the many and myriad laws governing the use of war as a tool of modern business negotiations:

First and most importantly, corporations are banned from keeping a standing military force or performing military operations. Instead, corporations are allowed only a security force authorized to perform security actions. This is a very important difference because a military consumes tax dollars instead of contributing them.

Second, intercorporate wars must be polite. Infrastructure like factories, refineries, and even population centers may be taken or lost, but all such prizes must remain intact. In order to minimize collateral damage, orbital assets like warships are strictly banned from participating in surface-level conflicts, and surface assets are likewise banned from orbital engagements. In the interest of maintaining the steady flow of materials and finished goods throughout the FWS, the IOA hands down fierce fines for corporations who damage or interrupt the function of infrastructure even in the course of otherwise legal security actions, with most of the funds going to the workers affected by the shutdown. Do not mistake this for the spectre of socialism! With most laborers unable to survive an interruption in their paychecks, such measures are necessary to maintain the workforce necessary to reopen the facilities as soon as repairs are complete.

Third, corporations are restricted on the size and nature of the security force they are allowed to possess. For some, the limit lies above their ability or desire to maintain, but the largest conglomerates are more than able to support a maximum-strength security force even in times of peace. Among other things, Mars places heavy restrictions on unmanned and high-mobility forces. There are strict limits on the sophistication of self-guided ordinance and on the size, number, and armament of unmanned units in a corporation’s arsenal. Airborne fast-movers like the fighter jets of your time are still considered strictly military technology as well, in large part due to their effectiveness against infrastructure (see the above point regarding collateral damage).

A more recent rule restricts corporations to only 12 active-duty armored core pilots, where a given pilot is deemed to be ‘active duty’ if they fulfill a number of arcane and often arbitrary conditions, or if the FWS says they are. The natural workaround is to not to have the pilots on your roster at all, which is where mercenaries come in. Mars has supported and encouraged mercenary work firsthand since the RCC were first laid down, as it considers a robust market of independent mercenaries essential in maintaining the balance of power between corporations. One benefit to the FWS is that mercenaries are more easily monitored than the often obfuscated operations of corporate security forces; another is that by encouraging corporations to rely on temporary and mercurial contractors as a key part of their war infrastructure, Mars further obstructs any organization from amassing enough firepower to challenge their military’s role as the ultimate arbiter and enforcer of corporate conflicts.

Fourth and finally, corporations may pay publicly-listed fees known as a ‘fines’ to bend or break these rules as they judge necessary for their own interests. While the military might of the FWS stands poised to crush rebellion wherever it may be found, a little regulation-bending between bitter enemies cannot justify the deployment of the valiant defenders of civilization against mere security forces so long as the latter pay the price for their misdeeds by cash or cheque.

For those of you who fled the past to escape its violence, Earth has a number of well-reviewed hermitages.

THEN

The man who would be G5 Iguazu had spent his whole life just trying to get out. Out of poverty, out of the slums, out of the shitty colony ‘school’ funneling barely-educated workers into mining jobs that would see them dead by the age of thirty. Out of the shitty, dilapidated refueling station he found himself stranded on after he’d managed that last one. Out of debt, after that. He fought for every single scrap he’d ever be given, and yet just when he stood on the cusp of finally having something decent, the world conspired to snatch it all away.

He’d worked his ass off to stand out. Made it into a trade school more advanced than ‘how to die of lung cancer’. Took work as an engineer on a tramp freighter slinging goods back and forth to Sol. To Sol! Sure, they never made it past the factories around Jupiter, but for a kid born in the slums on Euphrates IV, he might as well have been invited to Mars itself. He had room and board on the freighter, plus an hourly wage enough to afford some fun on shore leave and a few precious luxuries for his cabin. As far as he was concerned, he was living the high life.

And then a random fluctuation in a bunch of computers’ imaginary numbers wiped out the whole company overnight. His captain and boss, the first decent one he’d ever heard of, lost his business, his ship, and his crew. The young engineer could only hope his captain hadn’t lost his life as well after they’d parted ways.

The kid tried his best to salvage things and found another job keeping a freighter’s engines running, but this one was corporate. His new boss wasn’t the captain of the ship, it was some asshole who’d never set foot off Mars and owned thousands of ships in a nice big spreadsheet. His demands were, to be brief, insane. When the engineer told him he couldn’t keep the engines running without fuel, he was unceremoniously dumped on the side of the interstellar road in favor of someone who claimed they could.

Well, he could always find another job, right? Wrong. Turned out being fired by a big corp famous for their freight shipping meant everyone assumed you’d fucked something up. Or maybe the freight companies compared notes and they’d actually outright blacklisted him for some stupid reason. He would probably never know. Whatever the case, not a single fucking company in need of a ship’s engineer would so much as call him back to reject him. The skills he’d worked so fucking hard to get, despite his poverty, his place of birth, and the sheer fucking indifference of the wider galaxy, were completely worthless if nobody trusted him to do them.

He was only twelve Mars Standard years old and he already needed to change his entire career.

He got a job in manufacturing at the only bloody factory on the asshole of a moon he’d been dumped on. Industrial machines weren’t so different from ship engines, in the end. He started out pressing buttons on a giant screaming horror that somehow turned scrap metal and human auditory suffering into 46mm hex nuts. After two years, he was in charge of fixing it and the three-dozen like it. Turned out the screaming wasn’t a feature; replacing the bearings for the first time in fifty years had eliminated the need for ear protection in the whole building.

One day, he arrived at work to find the factory was missing. The news cycle went on at length about the penalties Sierpinski would have to pay for the damage. The talking heads said not a single thing about the fact that his career had ended again. The replacement factory would be built where they’d been shipping the hex nuts. The moon wasn’t necessary any more, in the grand scheme of things: it had been settled because older superluminal technology had needed a refueling point between Sol and Germania, and Asshole VIIa (or whatever it was called) had a convenient level of gravity and was right about in the middle of the route. It was only still settled because even the Fed and their bloody Compulsory Service Draft weren’t willing to pay to move a whole world’s population somewhere that sucked less. The scrip that bought him a modest life there was so worthless it couldn’t even buy a ride off the damned rock.

He had no idea what had led him to look at his life and think he had good enough luck to rely on it. Maybe he’d gotten conned somehow. It hardly mattered. He staked a wager on a ticket off the moon against everything he had.

He won. He made it back to Sol. Back to Titan, where he didn’t speak the language and had to pantomime his way through ordering food from a noodle stand outside the spaceport, but off that fucking dead moon and its complete lack of everything. He wasn’t the best educated kid around, but he wasn’t stupid. He picked up the language within a few years. He probably sounded like a fucking idiot, but he could order his noodles the way he liked them.

When he had the money.

Winning a bet was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It convinced him it could happen again.

From there, the rest was sadly inevitable.

SUBSEQUENTLY

G1 Michigan mumbled curses in the privacy of his own head as he approached the parade ground at the center of Balam’s Titan facility. If this was what winning the Jupiter War had bought him, he’d have been better off losing.

The ‘Jupiter War’. The name made him scoff. ‘Security action’ was a better term than the suits who’d coined the euphemism could ever understand. War—real war, the kind humanity hadn’t seen since Mars kicked everyone’s doors down and ‘federated’ them at gunpoint—didn’t care about force limits or legal targets or post-battle damage assessments. War was about ending the enemy’s ability to make war as hard and fast as possible with no regard to anything else.

It was a horrible, brutal, hellish thing, and the Federated Worlds were likely better for its absence, but Michigan would be damned if he gave the gentrified, indecisive, ritualized little live-fire scuffles that replaced it the respect and gravity of calling them “war”.

Too many executives who’d heard his opinion on the topic assumed he’d enjoy a return to the ‘old ways’ of war. That was damned idiotic. Michigan didn’t ‘like’ war, he just didn’t ‘respect’ the security actions that had replaced it. He wasn’t fond of killing in general, or even violence in the abstract; he would admit a fondness for the thrill, the rush of adrenaline as a pair of hundred-ton killing machines met blade to blade in a contest of skill and cunning, but even that wasn’t why he’d chosen this career.

What Michigan loved was leading. The only thing he loved more was winning. The only thing he loved more than that was ‘winning hard enough that all the boys and girls following LIGER TAIL around like ducklings got to come home with him’. Furlong had offered him a small fortune to do all three in their name, and by all the hells, he had done so. He’d done it so well that Furlong had judged, correctly, that ‘Wildcat’ was no long necessary to their fleet’s operation and sold the remaining eight-ish years of his recently renewed ten-year contract to their humiliated opponent. The functionary who’d delivered the news looked like he feared Wildcat would take it poorly enough to hurt the poor bastard.

Wildcat had shrugged and packed his things. His work on the Furlong Armed Fleet was done. He’d cut every bit of fat, honed every edge, aligned every gear and cog. He’d refined the organization into a machine of such clockwork precision that it ran ticking along without him, giving him the chance to lead from the front and trust the rest of the battle to his meticulously chosen and trained lieutenants. Even long before the Jupiter incident, only an idiot would face him and his men head on; Balam were exactly that kind of idiot and had served as the final, grand demonstration of Wildcat’s work.

No, Wildcat would relish a fresh start. A new challenge. A new organization to shape, new men to train, new problems to face. He’d shaken the Balam man’s hand with a smile he meant and signed the paperwork to rename his license with a flourish—and his tongue firmly in cheek.

Now if only Balam would let him do his damned job.

Before Nile—the former G1 now demoted to G2—had sought him out in that bar on Ganymede, Michigan had thought his opposite in the conflict was some damned moron pushed up the ranks by obscene nepotism. After speaking to the man for an hour, Michigan had been baffled that the man had lost as soundly as he had, and could only guess that Nile was simply too rigid in this thinking. Now he realized the truth: the problem was, and always had been, Balam’s damned leadership.

Balam wanted things done their way. MT squads were exactly this size. Orders of battle were drawn up not according to a leader’s assessment of the mission at hand but following a sixteen-page flowchart worked up by a hundred cooks who’d never seen a weapon in their lives. Worst of all, their marketing department insisted the Redguns use one-hundred-percent first-party Balam Industrial Group equipment, eighty percent of which was terrible.

Not that Balam didn’t make some good equipment! They made great cased firearms and top-quality explosive launchers. Their missile systems were perfectly adequate. They had a couple promising linear rifle prototypes that were only a few refinements away from being at the top of their class. The melee weapons on offer—including the explosive thrower Wildcat had used against Balam on Io—were inelegant but brutally effective.

On the other hand, Balam also insisted on producing a wide and eclectic variety of much more ‘advanced’ units in house, all of which were complete shit. Their plasma rifles, pulse shields, and laser cannons were such garbage that they’d be more useful as bludgeoning weapons! Balam’s AC components, meanwhile, ran the gamut from ‘competitive with similar parts’ to ‘designed by a blind, stupid child’. Their basic biped frames were fine because no one who would fuck that up could finish school, but the brand-new tripedal assembly Marketing was pushing him to use was heavier, slower, and less load-bearing than the first-generation Mitsubishi quad Michigan had started out with back when he was still ‘Chicago’ in his freelancer days!

That was the battle Michigan had picked, in the end: he’d take everything else Balam’s morons could thrown at him, but he’d be damned if he sent pilots into battle in the deathtraps R&D kept trying to push on him. The Redguns would use any damn equipment Michigan thought they needed, no matter who built the damn thing. That was nonnegotiable.

He’d compromised on everything else, including his personnel. Furlong considered debtors, convicts, and other ‘forced labor’ too unreliable for Security work, even infantry; Balam made them damned pilots! How the hell was Michigan supposed to instill espirit de corps into men who’d never signed up for the corps at all? It was lunacy! And all complaining had gotten him was two—two—vacancies in his was-ten-now-twelve-man squad to fill with actual fucking volunteers and the sorriest looking gang of idiots he’d ever seen to choose them from.

“Cadets, sound OFF!” Michigan barked at the surly crowd.

“Ten-hut!” the lot yelled back, more than half of the sound coming from a boy in the front rank who didn’t even look old enough to drive. Michigan singled in on him immediately.

“You!” he yelled as he stepped up to the kid. “The runt in the front! Does your mama know you ran off to join the circus?”

“Sir, no sir!” the kid belted out.

“Are you calling my army a circus, boy?!”

The kid didn’t even squint against the spittle Michigan was spraying in his face. “Sir, no sir!”

“Damned right it ain’t!” Michigan yelled. “You’re in! The rest of you—laps ’til you drop, last man running gets an AC! Get moving you idiots! If you’re this slow to run from enemy fire you might as well just climb into a casket now!”

Chapter Text

It is impossible to track with any certainty how many deaths over the following decades stem directly or indirectly from the Fires, much less how many parents delayed or declined to bear (further) children as a result. […] The most comprehensive method, though by no means a necessarily ‘accurate’ one, is to divine a naive estimate from the population data as a whole. Compared to a population extrapolated from the fifty years leading up to the Fires, we find that the present-day human population is more than four full percent lower than projected, a number of human lives so great it is nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around.

— Excerpt from an article titled “The Fires of Ibis: the True Human Toll”, published 248 UE on the 40th anniversary of the Coral Burn Event

“There’s one more thing I’d like to discuss with you, Ziyi,” Flatwell said. “Rokumonsen, Rusty, Arshile: give us the room, if you would.”

“Hold on,” Ziyi objected. “You let the corpo”—a furious glare at the man—“in on the whole mission despite him not even being part of it, but want to kick Roku out now? Anything you can tell me, you can tell him.”

Flatwell frowned. “Ziyi…”

“No, Eule,” the dry, dusty voice of Father Dolmayan interrupted him from the monitor on the wall. “They are elite pilots of the Liberation Front, are they not? They may stay.”

Flatwell sent an apologetic look at Arshile, who nodded and left the room without complaint.

“I’ll defer to your judgment, Father Dolmayan,” Flatwell said, “but first: I want to make something clear, Ziyi. If you need to blame anyone for the deaths at the Wall, you should be blaming me.”

Ziyi opened her mouth to object, only for Flatwell to silence her with a look.

“When I say you should be blaming me, Ziyi, I am not chastising myself for the decisions—and mistakes—I made in the Wall’s defense. I am saying that I was the one who put V.IV in position to take the Wall in the first place. I may as well have held his weapons myself.”

“Uncle,” the traitor hissed, clearly worried.

“I know, Rusty,” Flatwell said, “but this is my choice to make. I won’t have my godson shunned by the people he gave up everything to protect.”

Ziyi blanched. She’d spent all day shit-talking Uncle Flatwell’s godson?

“I know you’ve heard that Rusty was our mole in Arquebus,” he continued. “Let me say it plainly. It was my plot to put him in the Vespers nearly a decade ago in the first place, and my orders that had him turn their guns on our own once they arrived, because I believed that if we couldn’t break the PCA, the corporation’s greed might be the only thing that could—and while our fight is far from over, I think recent events have borne out that assessment.

“But for all that, the fact remains: if there is to be any justice for the lives lost in this war, the responsibility for the lives of the comrades Rusty has taken must fall on my head. His actions in the Vespers began and ended under my authority.”

The traitor himself looked stricken by that proclamation, stepping forward to put an encouraging hand on Flatwell’s shoulder. Ziyi, meanwhile, was still struggling with the idea that Flatwell had wanted any of this to happen. “But… why?” she asked. “If he was always ours, why have him kill us?”

“Because that is what being a double agent means,” Flatwell explained remorsefully. “As to why we needed one in the first place… first, because we needed information from inside to stay safe under the corps’ occupation, and second, because without a finger on the scales, we’d have just replaced one oppressor with another. Not only has Rusty given us critical intelligence on Arquebus’s movements over the years of their occupation and kept us appraised of their knowledge of our own, he’s also stolen reams of technical data we’ve been bartering to both BAWS, our local supplier, and Elcano, who remember where they came from before the Fires forced them off-world, and that is how we will gather the tools to throw a battered Arquebus off of Rubicon once and for all, while the Closure System is still broken from their war against the PCA.”

“That is all very well, Flatwell-san,” Roku said, “but I would like to know how you knew Arquebus, of all the major conglomerates, would be one of the few to travel to Rubicon with the rediscovery of the Coral.”

“That was a gamble I had to take,” Flatwell said with a shrug. “Arquebus has always touted their technological edge as the most notable merit of their arms program. I judged them the most likely to actively seek out the Coral rather than wait for it to hit the market, and luckily for us all, I was right.”

Ziyi had trusted that Flatwell had a plan. She now realized that she had badly underestimated both the scope of his vision and the lengths he would go to to see Rubicon free. “I’m sorry, Uncle!” she exclaimed, saluting again. “I was wrong to doubt you. I won’t do it again.”

Dunham snorted. “Always doubt, Little Ziyi. Especially the people you respect, in case others won’t.” He waggled an eyebrow at Flatwell, who scowled back without any heat behind it.

After a moment of silence, Uncle Flatwell sighed. “With that… diversion over, we should return to the matter at hand. Father Dolmayan, if you would?”

Father Dolmayan cleared his throat. “Of course, Brother Flatwell. Ziyi, what I am about to tell you is something I should have told you long ago, when you first claimed the title of ‘Coral Warrior’. It is something Flatwell and I decided to share only with the elite AC pilots of the Front, so if you wish to leave, Rokumonsen, now is the time.”

Ziyi didn’t miss that no one doubted Rusty’s allegiance, for all they’d tried to send both him and Roku away earlier. She’d misjudged that situation badly.

Roku didn’t hesitate; he clapped his hands together in front of his chest and bows so low Flatwell could’ve used his back as a writing desk. “I dedicate myself to your cause, Dolmayan-sama, and to the protection of you and yours, until I draw my last breath.”

Father Dolmayan looked bemused by the flowery language, but he did not disrespect Roku by treated it as anything other than solemn oath it was. “The RLF thanks you, Rokumonsen. May that last breath be long in coming.”

“Coral, abide with Rubicon,” Rusty intoned, performing the RLF salute with the precision of a career soldier. Ziyi, Roku, and Dunham all followed suite. Flatwell did not, nor did the men on the screen.

Father Dolmayan sighed. “An ironic segue to the matter at hand,” he muttered, then raised his voice and continued, “I said a great many things in my youth; things that defined my legacy in ways I never intended. The story of my speaking to the Coral is the greatest among them. It’s long past time I shared with you all the truth of my ‘communion’ with the Coral.”

“The truth?” Ziyi couldn’t help but interject. She’d just suffered one revelation that challenged her understanding of the world, the RLF, and Flatwell himself, and it seemed Dolmayan was about to drop another in her lap. “You don’t mean… you never spoke with the Coral after all?!”

“I am afraid I have, comrade Ziyi,” Father Dolmayan said, his lined faced full of regret. “I have spoken to the Coral at length… and it hates us. It hates us all.”

Dolmayan opened his eyes as his recollections came to a close. He had tried to keep it short, or at least on topic, but the way his memories sprung forth so clearly made it difficult. The years before the Fires were of no importance here. The formation of the Messengers, their partial transformation into the RLF and the years of fighting against PCA genocide, were settled history and needed no further explanation. But what lay in between… the friends he’d made and the ones he had lost; the voice he had heard and, perhaps, even loved. Their last, bitter fight, things said in anger, regrets long buried brought to surface…

He’d learned long ago that he’d awoken on Rubicon with a better memory than normal men, better even than the few augmented humans he’d met in the years since. It had often been a blessing throughout his life. As his years piled up, it was more often becoming a curse.

Once more in the present, Dolmayan turned his attention to the faces on the screen before him. Eule and Rorit were solemn, having heard the story already, as was Freddie in his own window, hidden elsewhere across the Liberation Front’s territory. Ellos, Eule’s godson, looked like he was paying half attention to meal-hall gossip, nothing of his thoughts showing on his face—that a goofball of a farmhand like Eule had raised a spy like him, Dolmayan could only attribute to Cadza’s influence. Rokumonsen, the stray cat of a mercenary Ziyi had adopted years ago, looked confused and more than a little dubious; he was loyal to the people of the RLF, not their beliefs, and had likely dismissed the talk of their founder’s Coral communion as naught but old-world mythology dressed up in Rubiconian colors.

Ziyi herself looked like Dolmayan had just butchered her pet in front of her. Curse an old fool for his blindness; he should have told her years ago, the moment she’d earned her place as a Finger of the RLF, but he’d told himself she was too young. What folly! If she was old enough to fight and die for the cause, she was damned well old enough to know the truth behind it.

“Forgive this old man for his foolishness, Little Ziyi,” Dolmayan said. “In my wrongful desire to protect you, I have only hurt you further.”

“O-of course, Father,” Ziyi said. “I don’t blame you for… avoiding the specifics. But… may I ask a question?”

“I think the lass has more than one,” Freddie quipped.

“Then she can ask more than one,” Dolmayan said.

Ziyi bowed her head briefly in thanks. “If the Coral blames all of humanity for the Fires of Ibis and hasn’t spoken to you since you began preaching, why does it still help feed us?”

“I’ve never believed it does,” Dolmayan answered. “I would bet mealworms growing fat on the Coral is just another natural process we don’t understand. Maybe someone could have explained it before the Fires burned out the Institute.”

“But you said that was sent by the Coral to help us!”

Dolmayan had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. “I have never said that of anything but myself. A farmer discovered mealworm ranching by chance when he saw them grow to an absurd size after grazing near a Coral spill and found them more edible afterward. I spread the practice while I traveled, so people remembered it coming from me and made up a story they liked to fill in the gaps.”

“As I recall,” Rorit Dunham said, “the fact that you had spoken with the Coral was nothing but a footnote in your speeches until the practice caught on. Right, Eule?”

“I’m afraid that was before my time, Uncle Dunham,” Flatwell demurred.

“I had never intended it to be anything else,” Dolmayan agreed. “I expected most to think it nothing more than an addict’s delusions, and for a while people did. But once the Coral began to put food in people’s bellies, they latched onto it, and by the time I realized the importance they were giving it, it was too late.”

Ziyi did her best to project strength in the face of the attention on her. “How are you holding up, Rokumonsen?”

The old merc raised a pointed eyebrow at the lass as people’s focus swung to him. “Truthfully… I’d considered the legends of the Liberation Front as nothing more than that,” he said cautiously. “To learn that there was such a truth behind them, and that it is so grim… it is a lot to take in at once. I suspect I would be even more shocked by your story if I had believed the literal truth of the tales.” And with that, he put the attention squarely back on Ziyi.

“While we’re asking questions,” Ellos—Rusty—stepped in, “could any augmented human potentially speak with the Coral?”

“Any with the Coral in their augments, I suspect,” Dolmayan answered. “I do not know if the newer generations would provide the same… interface. Do not experiment with the Coral, any of you. The addiction is very real.”

“The Coral hasn’t spoken to Father Dolmayan in decades anyway,” Dunhan said. “Even if you were a Coral Warrior in the old sense, all dosing would do is lay you up for a few hours while your brain rots—no offense, Father.”

“None taken, comrade Dunham. This old man has more than a few holes in his brain. See to it you don’t have any added to yours.” Dolmayan placed his fist over his heart, and the five people on the screen did likewise. “Forged in ash, we stand as one. Now go. I am sure you have a lot of work to do over the next eight hours.”

Chapter Text

Excerpt from the publication A Time Travel’s Guide to Sol, a satirical work published in 204 UE under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Oakes’ with the purported purpose of introducing an ‘information age’ (c 2000 CE / 100 BUE) time traveler to the modern day.

The following text appears in Chapter 1: “What You Missed”:

Following the Reunification War and the dissolution of the ‘Independent Earth Territories’, the government of the newly formed Federated Worlds of Sol sought to pacify the fractious ex-nations of old Earth through an oppressive series of so-called ‘labor levies’ through which adults in regions deemed ‘noncompliant’ who could not provide proof of legal employment were forcibly relocated to ‘opportunities’ on other worlds. The initial run of levies from 36 to 37 UE were directed to the now-Martian-run Ceres colony; subsequent rounds of levies lasted until 48 UE and went on to provide the first-wave labor force for colonies on Io, Europa, Ganymede, Tethys, and Titan.

The deliberate cultural intermixing of the displaced peoples—a practice intended to impede them from organizing against their government on their new worlds—would give rise to a pidgin language which would, over the next fifty years, evolve into a recognized language of its own. Known as Trade Common, it remains the most common spoken language in the outer solar system (except on Titan).

The FWS called the final two labor levies in the 90s UE. The 91 levy, just under five years after the invention of superluminal travel, would provide the manpower for another first-wave colonization project: this time, for the first extrasolar colony in the Tau Ceti system. The 98 levy provided a new seed population for Titan after the orbital bombardment known as “Titan’s Hammer” ended the Saturn Rebellions by example.

In 110 UE, the FWS announced the formal abolition of labor levies. What replaced them was a new system called the ‘Compulsory Service Draft’, a single process by which eligible adults could be selected either for military service or mandatory immigration. As with both the old labor levies and the equally old military draft laws, proof of active employment would exempt one from the CSD.

The FWS Legislative Council hailed the abolition of labor levies as a long-overdue correction to the cruelties of previous administrations, and it was was both of those things. However, it also reflected the fact that as pacification policy, the levies had worked too well. There were no longer enough people in arguable ‘noncompliance’ to fill even a quarter of empty Titan, much less all the new opportunities in the rapidly expanding sphere of extrasolar colonies.

THEN

Ziyi lurked behind as the rest of the RLF’s elite filed out of the room, doing her best to catch the tr—Rusty’s eye despite the sourness twisting in her gut. When he brushed by her, she was frustrated and relieved both to have failed to get his attention and postponed their conversation… but when he reached the door, he shut it rather than exit. The mole turned around and leaned back against the door, arms folded casually across his chest and one eyebrow quirked in silent question.

“I…” Coral this sucked so much. “I want to apologize. I have… said a lot of bad things about you. You didn’t deserve for me to talk about you like that.” There. Done.

Rusty could’ve lorded it over her if he wanted to, but he did not. “Apology accepted,” he said with an easy, frustratingly charming smile. “Wise of you to get that out of the way while we’re in here.”

“Huh?”

“Secrets are safe in here,” Rusty said, one finger making a circular motion to indicate said room. “Once we step outside, you should go right back to saying those things, no better or worse than before this meeting—or at least close enough that people figure you’re just getting tired of worrying the same old tooth.”

“Why?” Ziyi asked. “If this was the plan all along, why not make that clear?”

“Because advertising Flatwell’s role in my work will do more to erode trust in him than it will build it in me,” Rusty explained. “I can take it. If future generations remember me as a spineless traitor suffering an attack of conscience, it’ll be worth it if they’re doing so from a free Rubicon. That’s the bargain I made when I signed up.” He tugged at the lapels of his jacket and tipped an imaginary cap her way. “Welcome to the spy game, buddy. You’ll make it work.” And then he was gone.

Ziyi stared after him. Flatwell hadn’t lied: Rusty had given up more than Ziyi had thought one man could. Having to treat him like any other corpo—like the spineless, vacillating traitor she’d thought he was—wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

There were many, many unfairnesses on Rubicon, but something about this one had begun gnawing at her heart and did not let go.

NOW

Ziyi stole two hours of Arshile’s time, five hours of sleep, and a quick predawn meal with Flatwell for a final word before it was time to brief her squad. They assembled in the hangar as dawn broke over the base, Ziyi putting her soul into her lungs to be heard over the riot of noise as the techs finished their last preparations on the RLF war machines.

“Listen up, ice-rats!” Ziyi bellowed to the two dozen or so men and women arranged around her: ten muscle tracers pilots and nearly twice that in transport and logistics staff. She stood in front of them next to an unmarked map of the area of operations taped the wall, her flight suit stripped to the waist so she could relish the biting cold on her arms before it came time to crawl into the cramped and often-overheated cockpit of YUE YU’s old Basho core. “Arquebus dropped their hands, so we’re gonna kick ’em in the teeth! MT pilots, you are now Green One! Transports, you are Green Two!”

Ziyi paused and scanned the faces in front of her, picking out two she thought would do best. “Ecks, you are Green One actual! Liam, you are Green Two actual! You’ll have about twenty minutes to sort your squads before we launch, but until then, I need your eyes and ears front and center.” She pointed at the spot on the map where a small dot represented the town that had become one of Arquebus’s munitions depots. “Our target is the ammo depot designed Objective Fern…”

She always felt ridiculous bellowing orders like this. It was different in the field—the guns were hot and it was do or die—but behind the lines, it always felt like she was still a little kid playing at being a soldier. But she was an AC pilot, the most visible thing on the battlefield to friend and foe alike, and that meant she was the one people would look to, in or out of their machines. Being a standard-bearer made her a war-leader because there weren’t enough people in the RLF for it to be otherwise.

So she talked, repeating everything Flatwell had told her about her objective and omitting the other targets, Raven, and anything else none of her people would need to act on.

“When the operation begins, we’ll be radio silent from when we enter the AO until we make contact with the enemy. Light signals only. If you don’t know your signals, follow someone who does. We will move to staging point Copper and remain dug in behind the ridge until we have confirmation of our decoy’s success. Once we get that, I will sortie with Green One and progress through waypoints Iron and Silver to enter Objective Fern through the south gate. YUE YU will engage the combat assets, including MTs and defensive emplacements. Green One is to focus on securing the courtyard and hangars and preventing the activation or sabotage of other Arquebus assets.

“Once the target is secure, we will breach radio silence to signal Green Two to move in. If we’re jammed, we’ll rely on powder flares, normal go/no-go colors. MTs will continue to provide security while Green Two loads up. Priority is food and medicine over guns, as always. For guns, focus on AC equipment over MT stuff if you can, but quantity is more important than quality. Uncles have our window at thirty minutes before things go bad; I want us gone in twenty. Everything we can’t move by then goes up in smoke.

“Once we’re on our way, we’ll to proceed back through waypoint Silver and then divert south to the old freight tunnels running out from Melinite’s Tsirna Dolina munitions factory. From there we make our way home to the old mine checkpoint and make our loot someone else’s problem. Questions?”

“Sir!” Ecks called.

“What have you got for me, Ecks?”

“What’s our exit look like, sir?”

Ziyi put every bit on confidence she could fake into her grin. “First in last out, Ecks. Transports go, MTs follow, YUE YU makes sure nothing comes after us.”

“Oo-rah!” one of the transports pilots yelled, to muttered laughter.

Maybe that’s the trick, Ziyi thought. We’re all just playing at soldiers. Most of us have spent more time watching old war documentaries than at any kind of proper training.

When no one spoke up further, she checked her watch. “Op starts in thirty. I want every one of you rats in your vehicles and ready to go in half that. Double time it!”

Green squad scattered. Ziyi pulled the map off the wall and tossed it aside, content to leave it as litter in the abandoned base. Above her, YUE YU received its final checks between BURN PICKAXE and the empty bay that had previously held the Butcher’s blood-soaked machine.

“Surprised Dunham trusts that corpo prick’s gun,” Tinker said from behind her as he watched a crane load STEEL HAZE’s repainted Ransetsu-RF into the hands of its third AC in as many days. They’d worked together enough that Tinker thought nothing of approaching Ziyi for a friendly chat in the midst of the pre-mission chaos, and he was who she would’ve picked to lead Green Two if he’d ended up in her squad.

Ziyi didn’t have to fake the sour look on her face over what she was about to say next. “Look at it this way,” she said. “It’s one less gun in that pigfucker’s hands.”

“Amen to that!” Tinker cheered.

“Besides, this is Dunham we’re talking about. He probably stripped the gun down himself before he let it so much as touch BURN PICKAXE’s shadow.”

Tinker guffawed. “He probably did! And you get the hand-me-down.” Clearly visible overhead, the Etsujin burst machine gun Dunham usually used had been repainted and given to Ziyi’s own YUE YU to replace one of her Iridium grenade cannons, the faster weapon more suitable for the task at hand. Her second Iridium was in the Butcher’s hands, of all people.

She’d better bring it back.

Ziyi had had enough of this conversation. “I’m loading up,” she said. “You should too.” Tinker saluted and jogged off.

She took a breath, sucking in the chill that always seeped in no matter how deep the Liberation Front dug as though she could take it into herself like oxygen, then pulled her arms into her flight suit’s sleeves and started the journey up the gantries into YUE YU’s core.

Chapter Text

V.III Malthus fought the urge to pace across the bridge of the Enforcer-class warship now crossing the sea separating Belius from the current center of Arquebus’s Rubicon operation. She also fought the urge to fidget with her uniform, check the time, or do anything at all except look out at a few twinkling navigational lights glowing amid the early morning darkness with an expression of bored confidence. She might not trust her ability to command, but so long as the rest of her crew did, that would have to be enough.

V.III. V.III. The temporary patch on her jacket felt like a weight on her shoulders. She’d only learned she’d supposedly set foot inside an AC simulator after her boss’s boss’s boss, a bloody Vesper himself, called her into his office to congratulate her on her results and subsequent promotion. She wasn’t augmented. She wasn’t even combat personnel! She knew enough about her service pistol to avoid hurting herself and others by accident and had a half-decent chance of being able to hurt someone with it on purpose, and that was about as far as her abilities with weapons went.

O’Keeffe wasn’t an idiot. He had to know she wasn’t fit for a combat posting—he’d probably falsified the test results herself. “Right now we need leaders more than we need pilots,” he’d said when she’d asked if she would be given an armored core, and she’d had to hide her relief lest he doubt she was fit for whatever he actually expected of her. V.IV Marais had received an AC, still painted in default Arquebus black-and-blues and with only the standard Arquebus and Vespers emblems, but he was properly augmented and on the short list for transfer to 2nd Squad if any of them got off this rock alive.

Malthus had expected Marais to protest her promotion past him, but he hadn’t let even a hint of resentment color their few interactions thus far. She hoped he was read in the lie that was her combat aptitude because if he expected her to sortie herself he would be sorely disappointed.

At least O’Keeffe had given her a job she knew how to do: logistics. Her warship and its parasite-craft complement—plus a single cavalry squad, if she didn’t lump those in with the drones—might be the primary combat asset among a convoy dragging half a million tons of captured SG and Enforcement assets back to shore up the crumbling Belius garrison, but it was one she merely had to direct rather than use herself. The warship could have made the flight in an hour. The heavy cargo VTOLs it was escorting could barely make the flight at all, even after they’d performed in-flight refueling just past the half-way point. They wouldn’t see the shores of Belius until dawn… not that they’d be able to ‘see’ them without daylight anyway, since the whole damn planet was corpse-cold and dead.

And then the whole of Belius would be her mess to clean up. She’d already informed Marais she expected him to handle military command while she put the rest of the theatre in order, and far from being annoyed, he’d acted pleased she trusted him enough to hand the whole problem off to him without implications of further oversight. Either he’d been worried she was going to stick her nose into matters she had no business overseeing or he had no idea how far in over her head she actually was.

Hopefully by this time next month they’d have seven other proper Vespers, and O’Keeffe would finally ‘notice’ the issues with Malthus’s record and drop her back down to an el-tee.

Reuben Stump could feel the sweat freezing on his face as he pushed through knee-deep snow. He’d spent the last three and a half hours traveling from an RLF listening post manned by a grand total of three ornery men—him among them—to the top of hill 77, first by buggy, then by foot. It had been a miserable trip, but the importance of the job meant he didn’t regret volunteering even for a moment.

Infantry still played a role in war throughout most of Fed space. They were slower, more vulnerable, and carried less firepower than muscle tracers, tanks, or VTOLs. They were also extremely cheap to equip, harder to detect than anything else on the field short of landmines, and nearly impossible to dislodge from a dug-in position without leveling the entire place. Corpo combat engineers were working hard on techniques to make even the latter option ineffective, and could turn urban areas into deathtraps even for ACs. The RLF had been happy to imitate them.

Rubicon was not ‘most of Fed space’.

It had been a temperate world less than sixty years ago. Terraforming efforts had done their work, thickened the atmosphere and brought the temperature up until the world was comfortable year round. And then the Fires had raged across world, blanketing all of Rubicon first with ash, and then with snow. The intense coral storms in the upper atmosphere brought on a volcanic winter, dropping temperatures across the globe. Seasonal weather patterns went into free-fall. The once tropical Porvolassa region south of Belius experienced its first snow since the end of terraforming.

Still, people had gone about their business on the surface. Farmers already used to using grow-lights under the grids switched to hotter bulbs over cold-weather-modified staple crops, then to ranching the cold-loving mealworms. Families insulated their houses with materials looted from the abandoned factories. Textile workers returned to their workplaces to produce coats, jackets, gloves, and hats. The people of Rubicon were not used to luxuries or gentle treatment at the hands of the corporations; their new conditions were little different, and they believed themselves just as ready to face whatever misfortune would happen next.

CLOUDED SKY happened next: the systematic and intentional destruction of Rubiconian agriculture. Thousands of farms, tens of thousands of people, exterminated under the cold, hateful gaze of PCA warships. Starvation would take millions more, exactly as intended.

The PCA had declared a campaign of extermination against the people of Rubicon: an act of genocide to rival any humanity had performed before. The RLF rose to defy it. They struck at the yards maintaining the ships. They struck at the barracks holding the soldiers. They struck at the factories, at the vehicle pools, and then, as security tightened, at the people. The workers who built the hated machines, the technicians who repaired them. Then the men who clothed the workers and those who fed the technicians. If it is to be an extermination, said the RLF, then it will be yours.

And all the while it got colder, and colder, and colder. The Grids overhead remained relatively warm, partially from the power still coursing through their wires and pipes and partially by what little sun they stole from the surface; the surface itself grew gradually more inhospitable year by year. The PCA blamed RLF bombings for kicking up more particulate into the upper atmosphere. The RLF countered that none of their own weapons released even a tiny fraction of the energy required to worsen the climate and blamed the PCA’s bombardments. The truth was that the Fires of Ibis were so much bigger in every way than anything that had happened since, even the sum total of every PCA orbit-to-surface KKW, that it was more than likely Rubicon III was simply still settling into its new equilibrium.

The cause might be in dispute, but the facts were as cold and hard as ice. By the time the latest round of corporate vultures had arrived to pick over the corpse of Rubicon, it cost almost as much to keep a man on foot alive against the elements in west Belius for any serious length of time as it did to buy him a muscle tracer to shelter in. This latest clash between the RLF and their off-world oppressors involved four dozen MTs, two dozen transport helicopters, and about that many cargo trucks…

..and one infantryman.

Reuben Stump was that man. He was cold, and miserable, and vital to the war effort. He would not fail.

Though his mission was a solo one, he was not alone. Standing between him and death to the biting chill around him was the product of decades of scrap-work engineering and refinement: an active powered heating suit made of a padded vest and two additional pads that hung down along the outer thigh, all wired through with heating elements and linked to a battery worn at the waist through inductive power transfer so as not to introduce additional holes in the clothing. The powered elements were donned over a body-covering underlayer and then covered with four more layers: three of the thickest, most effective thermal-insulation garments the RLF could weave together and a final waterproof windbreaker. The heat the active layers generated could warm the air in his clothes and the blood in his veins for four to five hours on a single battery during nighttime and about twice that in the light of day; for a mission expected last one battery’s life, he carried four, and the snow-buggy he’d hidden a couple kilometers back could charge them off its alternator if it came to that.

In weather where even the most advanced passive heat-retention gear would falter, Reuben Stump pressed on.

He crested hill 77. The valley of Tsirna Dolina lay below, what was once a sprawling patchwork of farms and industry now naught but ice and ash. He set down the snow-camo backpack he’d been carrying and dug out a pair of all-weather binoculars, a radio receiver, and a heavy LED flashlight that would be visible from ten kilometers away. He placed the headset of the radio over his arctic-weather hood and turned the volume up rather than lower the garment for even a second. He then removed a map from a pouch on the back on his left glove and spent five minutes ensuring he could locate the relevant positions in a timely manner before replacing it. Lastly, he lowered himself into snow that was still twenty to thirty centimeters deep and did his best to obscure both himself and his gear.

Everything was in place. Bits and fragments of Arquebus encrypted comms trickled through the headset. The tiny receiver he had couldn’t crack the encryption, but he didn’t need it to. Even if he couldn’t understand them and an unlucky late-morning fog rolled over hill 77 to obscure his view, he could listen for a change in the pattern.

He checked his watch. Fifty minutes to spare before it was time to start. Longer than he wanted to wait but still closer than he’d like. The snow-suit was keeping him dry and warm enough to live.

Reuben Stump settled in to serve his people.

Above a cold and frozen world, REASON flew among gentle flurries from a clear-as-it-ever-got sky, its red and black heraldry polished to a mirror shine. Black for the name she had stolen, a carrion bird of old Earth. Red for the friendship she had been given, life unlike any mankind had encountered before.

“We’re approaching the area of operations,” Ayre said, her voice warm and comforting in the depths of Raven’s mind.

Already? Raven asked. The waypoint you gave me is still twenty kilometers out. Still, trusting her partner, she chose a ridge and dropped down to scope out the area. She’d been running her generator cool, thinking she had miles to go before combat, so the warning was welcome.

“The waypoint I marked is our objective,” Ayre said. “The RLF are performing a simultaneous operation in the area to take advantage of the distraction we will cause Arquebus.”

Flatwell didn’t say anything about that, Raven thought.

“Flatwell is cautious. He considers our help temporary and tenuous, and does not wish to give away any more information than necessary.”

Sounds like you’ve been up to no good, Raven thought, metaphorical tongue firmly in her cheek. How deeply did you dig into their systems?

“I was listening in to their command center—the room is well-isolated but they have communications routed down there for conferencing. I pulled out after the briefing and didn’t look into any of their archives, although I did make sure I could get into their systems again quickly if you need me to.”

Nothing surprising there—and if the RLF had bothered to plan contingencies around eliminating them, Ayre would have led with that. Raven wasn’t surprised Flatwell had more in the works than he’d let on. Walt–

Her Handler had been the same way. It didn’t change the mission.

Or did it?

She’d promised Ayre she’d try to find ‘freedom’. Freedom to adapt, to deviate, to choose. This choice felt… not safe, never safe, but small. Conquerable. A short drop, well-controlled.

If it’s a distraction they want, then a distraction they’ll get, Raven thought. Adjust the waypoints. Take us directly over the largest concentrations of Arquebus forces you can find. She switched REASON from travel to combat power, her COM reporting the change aloud.

Ayre couldn’t smile, but Raven felt her approval directly instead. “I’m updating your marker now.”

The double-strength Black Squad stood at attention far outside the area of operations—or at least Rokumonsen stood at attention. He chose to give the men waiting alongside him the benefit of the doubt. Attention was relative, anyway: Rokumonsen was ready to act. His eyes were on the screens. They would alert his wandering mind if anything changed.

“A gentle breeze stirs / a metal tiger waiting / to pounce upon prey.” Rokumonsen paused, then frowned. “Hmm… no. Not one of my better ones.”

This far from the day’s battlefield—closer, in truth, to the base from which they’d come—the RLF didn’t care about who might notice their comm traffic, so Rokumonsen was not surprised when a call came in from Flatwell-san.

“Black Squad, be aware: Red has diverted course. If she’s seen something on the ground, it’s probably trouble. Be ready to launch.”

“Or she has chosen an optional objective as well, Flatwell-san,” Rokumonsen noted.

“Haiku again, Rokumonsen?” Flatwell complained, forgetting the comm discipline he’d spent years trying to drill into the rest of the RLF. “Now?”

Rokumonsen frowned. Had that been… huh. Seventeen.

He closed his eyes and let his mind sink into the machine that cradled him at its heart. SHINOBI stood poised behind a long-crumbled fragment of the world gone by, shotgun clasped in its right hand and the mid-weight Ransetsu-AR burst rifle in his left. A melee weapon waited in the left bay, while he’d accepted Rusty’s offer to transfer STEEL HAZE’s plasma missile pod to its right back attachment point instead of the area denial missile he’d been experimenting with. Unlike the RLF lifers, legal mercenary Rokumonsen had always bought his parts on the open market and had not noticed anything odd about the ability to freely swap weapons between the two ACs.

He breathed, and his machine breathed with him. Soon.

Good luck, Ziyi-tan.

Flatwell, meanwhile, was doing his best to make sense of what passed for the RLF’s long-range radar capabilities in the Tsirna Dolina region from the back of a van heading south along a battered and war-torn old road. It was hard to hide something as energetic as long-range radar amidst a dead and rotting civilization, so the installation he was streaming data from now was actually an old, barely-modified automatic weather-radar facility—something the PCA had long dismissed as a harmless relic, little more than a light left on in an empty home.

Unfortunately that meant most of the radar’s radio was pointed squarely at the weather, both in direction and frequency, with only a crudely hand-soldered analog circuit to sort the signal from the… rest of the signal. Still, the only reason Flatwell had to doubt that he was tracking the one-member ‘Red Squad’ correctly was the information he was getting back.

He had no idea what compelled her to buzz the damn tower at Arquebus’s Tsirna Dolina airbase, but he couldn’t say she wasn’t giving him the distraction he’d hoped for.

White Squad was living up to its name at the moment. A heavy wind had come in from the east, whipping up the previous night’s snow to stick to the muscle tracers and choppers and bringing in the first wisps of late-morning fog. Dunham lounged in his pilot seat, his crash restraints hanging loose while he and his men waited.

Ah, but this was always the worst part of war. Once the fight started, you were either too focused or too dead to worry about anything but the next second. Before, though… this part was always a load of shit.

Shifting in the flight seat, Dunham reached out to his right-hand control stick and pulled it this way and that, feeling how the Ransetsu-RF affected BURN PICKAXE’s movement. He pulled the trigger until it clicked, knowing the gun was safed with his AC at standby power. The trigger, at least, was the same as ever.

The -RF model Ransetsu was the largest in the family of weapons that included his faithful little Etsujin, nearly twice as heavy as the burst-fire machine gun and probably about that much deadlier. He shouldn’t need the extra power against a light garrison of common MTs, but being able to pick them off at longer range made it a decent upgrade. The real benefit was giving Ziyi the flexibility of something other than those two boom-tubes she always fell back on without having to move materiel in from one of the RLF’s armories on short notice.

Good on Ellos for snatching the keys on the way out, Dunham thought. With only the hashes loaded onto STEEL HAZE, the weapon would have been useless in any other machine’s hands. Wait, is that what Flatwell’s playing at? Did Ellos nab the whole cryptographic archive or something? No way. It’d be far too much data to smuggle out undetected, and no military—sorry, ‘security force’—would be stupid enough to keep it all in once place. Even corpofash isn’t that braindead.

Well, Flatwell was the boss. If he wanted AC parts, he’d get AC parts. For all Dunham knew, this whole op was a trick to make Arquebus think they could crack their lockouts. If they thought the RLF had the hacking chops to take their weapons, maybe they’d—

A glint of light on a ridge 7 kilometers distant. Blink. Blink-Blink. Blink.

Dunham stared. The scout was supposed to repeat the signal three times before withdrawing, just to make sure…

Blink. Blink-Blink. Blink.

“Hells yes!” Dunham cheered as he pulled himself properly into the flight seat and strapped the crash webbing down around his laborer’s heft. “We’re doing this, White Squad!” None of that transmitted into the silent landscape surrounding BURN PICKAXE and its escort of muscle tracers and support vehicles, but everyone present saw the machine rise from its half-powered crouch, intakes flaring as it switched to combat mode.

White Squad moved out.

Chapter Text

The first warning the bored and poorly-trained defenders of Munitions Depot 13, now the RLF’s Objective Sky, had that they were under attack was a flight of eight missiles slamming into the main comms mast. The second was the autocannon emplacement on the north wall opening up as it failed to track CANDLE RING, the personal vehicle of the RLF pilot ‘Ring’ Freddie, as he slewed back and forth on approach over the ice field that had once been a lake where the managers of Tsirna Dolina’s factories relaxed after a shift. A burst from the boosters on the underside of CANDLE RING’s treads sent it up and over the autogun; the turret’s gimbal locked, leaving Freddie free to smash it to pieces with the treads of his machine after releasing another eight missiles to target the next gun along the wall and a quartet of 440mm grenades across the cluster of panicking MTs in the middle of the courtyard.

Alarms rang. The men on duty raced to their assigned positions and those in reserve scrambled their MTs into action. The garrison’s heavy MT detachment sprang into action, the two massive tetrapodal units bringing as much firepower to bear between them as the rest of the guards combined, even including the now-ruined autoguns.

CANDLE RING rolled backwards off the wall after releasing another wave of missiles, and the undisciplined heavy pilots pursued him. The remaining light MTs tried to follow out the main gate and immediately came under fire from a similarly equipped force of BAWS lights. Surprise and confusion evened the odds that numbers had stacked in the defenders favor, and a full third of the sallying defenders fell before the rest made it back inside the perimeter.

Inside the bunker below the courtyard, 13’s command staff ran around like men on fire, doing their best to raise nearby bases on backup shortwave; the Coral particles in the upper atmosphere played hell with skywave, but it was still the best way to get a low power signal to the next point over without a mast. The news they received was worse even than their own sorry state: the assets that should be ready to assist them were already out chasing the Red Reaper herself.

The defenders of Depot 13 fixed their metaphorical bayonets and dug in to defend their materiel with their lives.

The crags of western Belius were just barely visible over the horizon when the Enforcer’s comms lit up: first one distress call, then a second and a third. The RLF had launched a downright audacious attack across the whole Tsirna Dolina region, consisting of near-simultaneous assaults on the three munitions depots in the heart of Arquebus’s Belius holdings.

Malthus felt her gut drop as the reports came. Losing one of those depots would be costly. Losing all three would be devastating. The gradual breakdown in logistic coordination in Belius meant that materiel that should have been distributed across the theatre weeks ago had ended up piling up in its center, leaving outposts from the edge of Bona Dea to the new Crater Bay to the ragged border of terrorist holdings in the south to draw from the overfilled stockpiles piecemeal. That critical weakness was the first thing O’Keeffe had told her to fix when he’d sent her on her way, and now the RLF stood poised to thrust the knife home before she even arrived.

V.III turned to her comms officer. “Get V.IV on the line,” she ordered, and seconds later a hologram took shape showing a flat-panel view of V.IV’s office in one of the nearby transports.

“Malthus?” he asked.

“Marais,” she said. “We’ve just received word from our Belius garrison. Essential munitions depots are under attack and need immediate support. I’m forwarding the reports to you now.”

What Malthus wanted was for him to take charge. She’d already given him explicit command of the security forces in the theatre, and now trusted that he’d understand his role without her having to denigrate her own experience and authority in front of her troops. He did not. Marais might be V.IV today, but had been one of the rank and file less than two days ago—elite rank and file, as all the Vespers’ squads were, but rank and file nonetheless. He nodded like he understood her meaning, only to announce, “I’ll get CONTRAST ready to launch!” like she wanted him in his AC rather than running the damn operation, then closed the channel.

Malthus had to work hard to stifle a scream.

“Get Wissam in here,” she barked at comms before turning to her navigation officer. “Get me a map on-screen, now!”

“Yes, ma’am!” her tactical officer replied, and Malthus bit back a curse at her unfamiliarity with the bridge positions. To their credit, no one on the bridge so much as blinked at her blunder, and soon enough Malthus was looking at a bird’s-eye view of the Tsirna Dolina Valley, its surrounding area, and the Arquebus forces within both. Something stood out even to her untrained eye.

“Get me Tsirna Airbase,” Malthus ordered.

Seconds later, a static-filled voice demanded, “Who is this?”

“This is V.III Malthus,” she barked. “Identify yourself.”

“Shit! I’m—that is, uh… ahem! Tsirna Dolina Airbase actual, ma’am!”

These people aren’t any better trained than I am, Malthus thought with despair.

“Airbase actual, where is your detachment? Why are you not protecting the munitions depots?”

“Ma’am! We’re busy dealing with the bloody Reaper, ma’am!”

Corporate save me. The Reaper isn’t even supposed to be on this continent.

“Reaper is attacking the airbase?” Malthus demanded. “Why was no distress call sent?”

“Uh, not attacking the airbase, but…”

“Is the Reaper attacking the munitions depots?” she snapped.

“Well, no, but–”

“Then call your detachments back and do your fucking job, Tsirna Dolina!”

There was a long, worrying pause.

“Our air-mobile detachments are no longer combat capable,” Tsirna Dolina admitted meekly. “We’re currently scrambling reserve–”

Malthus made a cutting gesture with her right hand, and comms killed the connection. This was bad. No—bad was nowhere near severe enough to describe the situation. This was catastrophic.

“Contact field bases 33, 36, 38, and 44, plus… outposts 26 and 10. I want to know which, if any, of our forces are anywhere near where they’re supposed to be. And where the fuck is Wissam?!”

Raven watched as the MT transports broke off their pursuit, wondering whether it was worth chasing them down. She’d left dozens of their rank-and-file muscle tracers sitting in flaming heaps over a ten-kilometer stretch, along with what was likely every looted PCA asset Arquebus had left in Belius. The cavalry units in particular had put on a pathetic showing. Their pilots had barely known how to handle the things; most of them fought like they were nothing more than fancy MTs, and REASON had torn through them just as easily.

What ultimately pushed her to abandon any potential pursuit was her current arsenal, or lack thereof. She had only REASON’s fists and a borrowed Iridium grenade cannon, and the latter had only two shots left. Raven was honestly a little surprised the twenty-round reserve had lasted her as long as it had—but then again, there hadn’t been a total of twenty cavalry units and heavy MTs in the field, and using a 480mm grenade against anything else was a waste of a grenade. The BAWS light MTs she’d been able to kill simply by kicking them apart, letting her reserve ‘punching’ for the more advanced Subject Guard MTs.

I think that will do the job, Raven told Ayre. Mark our final destination and we’ll wrap this up.

Malthus wrestled down her nerves as she watched her officers update the Belius garrison’s positions on the map. The pattern wasn’t hard to spot. Something—oh who was she kidding, with the way the day was going it probably was the Reaper after all—had dragged itself west by northwest across all of Tsirna Dolina, pulling every Arquebus asset in the area after it like a film of pond scum disturbed by a stick.

It was at that point that Wissam, the lieutenant of ‘her’ 3rd Squad, finally strolled onto the bridge. “You called for me, ma’am?”

Malthus sent a scathing look at the comm officer who had failed to properly convey her urgency, who sweat heavily under her gaze. “Should I take the ship to general quarters, captain?” the man asked.

Of course. Fuck. She couldn’t blame anyone but herself for this one; Wissam would’ve known to come running if the damn sirens were on.

Despite everything, Malthus still had to act like she was in control of the situation. “Action stations, lieutenant. Helm, get us…” They couldn’t leave the fleet behind, and telling the transport choppers to speed up risked them running out of fuel before they arrived. “…up. Keep us directly over the convoy but close to the flight ceiling for our air-mobile units.” Every meter of altitude was that much farther to the horizon, and that much farther the ship’s railgun could target. “Tactical, get the cavalry ready to launch. Wissam! I want 3rd Squad in those units five minutes ago!”

“Respectfully, ma’am,” Lt. Wissam said, “we’ve been training the new SG muscle tracers, not cav—”

“Do you want to fly an MT over 50 fucking kilometers of ocean?” Malthus screamed. “Get your men in the damn cav units! Now!”

Wissam blanched, snapped a salute, and hurried off to follow orders.

She returned her attention to the tactical map. “Comms! What do we have to work with?”

“Detachments from FB 33 and 36 are no longer combat effective. OP 26 recalled their air-mobile but the transports need refueling before sortieing again. FB 38 has already dispatched their assets to depot 20. FB 44 got buzzed by the Reaper directly and took heavy materiel losses. OP 13 sent relief to 44 but can redirect.”

“I want the names of 38 and 13’s CO’s on my desk after this is through,” Malthus said. Among the few Belius officers she’d dealt with thus far, their mild competence stood out enough to be worth remembering; she had half a mind to ask O’Keeffe to cashier the others straight out of service. “For now…”

Three depots. At most half the needed defenders in position to act. She could cut her losses and save two depots, or risk losing all three. Not even a choice, really.

“Redirect all available local assets to Depot 13. Rope FB 34, 35, and 40 in—even if they show up too late to help they can keep things from getting worse in the aftermath. Have all surrounding outposts patrol the roads, see if they can catch anyone straggling out of the area—don’t engage if they spot an AC, but if the convoy splits up, take them out. Send V.IV and our cav to Depot 06 ASAP, plus OP 26’s detachment the second they’re ready to move. All sites move to LOS broadcast and get their SIGWAR up—let’s see if the ice-rats’ old junk can punch through skywave interdiction in the field. Have Depot 20 burn their stores, deny the RLF as much as possible. How fast can our heavy air escort move?”

“Fast enough to run down ACs over a long enough distance, ma’am,” tactical replied.

“Transfer two to V.IV’s command and launch CONTRAST as soon as he’s strapped in. Belay his previous orders—I want him between the Reaper and the rest of the AO. If the RLF are taking advantage of her movements it’s likely they’re her latest employer. Don’t let her interfere.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Malthus went back to staring at the map. Everything was going wrong and she hadn’t even formally assumed command of the Belius theatre yet. This was either the launching point of a legendary career or the disaster that strangled it in its crib—and her with it.

“Weapons, power up the railgun and prepare for cav to call targets the second they’re over our horizon.”

Ring Freddie took deep, steady breaths as the firefight in Objective Sky came to a close. His hands, previously steady on the controls, began to shake as the rhythm of battle faded and the adrenaline took its toll.

It had been fast, vicious work. Harder and costlier than he’d expected; the need to draw the two heavies away from his men had left Blue Squad’s muscle tracers facing a force near twice their own numbers without CANDLE RING at their head. That the supposedly ‘disciplined’ corporate forces had broken first was a credit to each and every RLF man in his squad, and those who had fallen would be remembered as heroes of Rubicon.

Flatwell would have done better, Ring Freddie thought, then chastised himself for the thought. Flatwell’s TSUBASA was gone. It didn’t matter how well anyone else could have done; Ring Freddie was the one the RLF deployed, and he’d done his duty as best he could.

As a general rule, unaugmented pilots could handle three weapon systems at most, with the majority able to manage only two with any degree of skill: at the speeds AC battles took place, a normal human struggled to keep track of anything more. Ring Freddie was no exception. He piloted his CANDLE RING by treating his four weapon systems as two: one, the two missile launchers in its hands; the other, the paired grenade cannons on its back. It was inelegant and brutal, but it let him dominate battlefields with sheer force while Sunny handled the finesse.

Ring Freddie was content that in this case, sheer force was all they needed. They were getting old, both of them, and the horrors of combat wore on Sasun as hard as anyone Freddie had ever met.

“Blue Squad, spread out! Give me a 500 meter perimeter across the ice sheet. Anything comes at us, I want to know about it before it can so much as see Sky.”

“No one on this Coral-damned planet can see the sky,” his lieutenant for this operation joked.

“And it’s your job to keep it that way,” Ring Freddie told her. “Get your men in position and brace for incoming reinforcements.”

The RLF irregulars cheered as the third shot from BURN PICKAXE’s bazooka finally breached the blast doors protecting the supply bunker. Two muscle tracers stepped forward to pry the doors the rest of the way apart as Dunham stepped forward, then sighted through the growing gap and cored an active Arquebus MT with a burst from the heavy -RF rifle he was rapidly growing to love. Foot-personnel inside the bunker dropped where they stood to the overpressure caused by the 220mm autocannon’s barrel gases discharging into the enclosed space; those who weren’t screaming in agony from ruptured eardrums and soft tissue bruising were choking on their own blood from ruined lungs or unconscious or outright dead from cranial barotrauma.

“Breach team, go!” Index Dunham hollered over short-range comms, and two of his MTs shouldered their way into the supply bunker, neither making any effort to avoid crushing the disabled personnel underfoot. The last Arquebus MT fired from deep inside, obscured from Dunham’s view by floor-to-ceiling walls of supply crates he would rather not shoot through; one of the breaching MTs took it on the crude riot shield it carried and fired back while the other circled around and opened fire from the opposite direction. The gunfire ended in seconds.

Target secured.

Index Dunham had had his men launch flares the moment they’d breached the courtyard, clouds of brilliant azure smoke thick enough to cast much of the base into shadow standing out against the gray-and-red sky. The transport team should already be halfway here. The two shield-bearing MTs continued to sweep the cramped interior of the supply bunker; the rest, including the two who had just finished prying the bunker open like a food tin, triggered their jets and hopped onto the walls to maintain the perimeter.

The courtyard they’d left behind was a mess of flaming wrecks. Half the MTs had fallen to BURN PICKAXE before they could muster a response, the other half annihilated by his men as the shell-shocked foe tunnel visioned on his brightly painted AC. Two of his MT pilots had ejected and his own armored core had taken a few licks, but Index Dunham couldn’t be happier: he hadn’t lost a single man.

“Sir!” one of his MTs called. “Index Dunham, sir!”

Index Dunham recognized the voice, but had to check where the woman had been assigned; Patty was one of the two pilots inside the bunker. “Yes, breach team?”

“Sorry sir, but Arquebus were rigging thermite charges to their stocks. They ruined maybe a third of their own supplies before we got them, sir!”

He took a second to eyeball the stockpile in the bunker from where he stood just outside the doors. “From the look of things, that just means we’ll need to burn half as much stuff ourselves. Don’t worry about it, lass.”

“Yes, sir!”

Index Dunham allowed himself a grim smile. If Arquebus had already started destroying their own materiel, it meant they didn’t want to send further reinforcements to retake the Depot. Not that they wouldn’t—especially if they knew how much had survived in there—but it was a sign the RLF were pressing them hard.

Objective Snow was theirs. The riskiest part of the operation had just begun.

Chapter Text

Tinker was out of his truck’s cab before the vehicle had come to a complete stop, tires squealing on the iced-over concrete of the munitions depot’s vehicle pool. BURN PICKAXE had already swept Arquebus’s own logistics vehicles out of the way with its feet; a shame, considering how new they were compared to the RLF’s own, but Coral knew what nastiness Arquebus might have hidden in their fleet. Tinker would rather have a hundred-year-old truck he could trust than some fancy modern piece of shit that’d break down right after it led the corpo fucks back to his door.

Dunham had been careful to leave the cranes intact, which would speed things along significantly. Geoff was already shouting orders, the VTOL pilot having beaten the ground crew to scene by about thirty seconds, and Tinker had to dive out of the way as an MT barreled past, carrying a crate marked with the Arquebus insignia. Flurries of snow drifted about, kicked up by the wind stirred by hot vehicle exhaust in freezing air. It was absolute, glorious chaos: a festive mood matching a Journeyday celebration with people passing out homemade presents and trading the candies they’d horded from the last year of stolen corpo rations.

Tinker wouldn’t be surprised if one of the old Uncles—maybe Dunham himself—had needed to browbeat Father Dolmayan into letting them celebrate the high points of his life story as holidays, but Rubiconians had few enough reasons to make merry as it was. If you asked Tinker, they needed every excuse they could get.

“What’ve we got?” he hollered over the groaning and crashing of metal against metal to Geoff, who was currently overseeing a team of four men loading the largest laser rifle Tinker had ever seen into a transport chopper.

“A fucking treasure trove!” Geoff hollered back. “We’re grabbing one of every AC weapon and all the food we can find, then filling up the remainder with ammo. Nobody around here wants to eat a bullet, eh?”

“Damn it, Geoff, don’t jinx us,” Tinker snapped, cuffing the man who was nominally his CO around the head. “You keep that up and you’re not coming home tonight, you dumbass.”

“Ain’t stopped me yet,” Geoff boasted, then returned to business and pointed to a pile of supplies forming around one of the cranes. “See those crates over there? That’s where we’ve been sorting most of the ammo; pull up along side and we’ll get you loaded.

Tinker saluted and hopped back into his truck, where he half-drove, half-slid his vehicle over the ice to the spot indicated. That done, and with nothing else to do until the cranes finished their work, he dug through the glove compartment for the sheaf of music cards and slotted one into the stereo. The home-made holiday recording really set the mood just right, low-quality audio, static, and all.

“Black Squad, we are go for Objective Night,” Flatwell-san informed them. “Rokumonsen, you have your pick of the secondary targets.”

“No reinforcements from Arquebus?” Black’s squad leader asked. “None at all?”

“Raven tore through their central staging area on the way through; what’s left is below our projected best-case scenario for the distraction. We’ve got outriders straggling toward Sky, but our forces there should be sufficient for them. White Squad caught the Snow garrison trying to burn their stores, so they weren’t expecting relief to arrive in time, and Fern has no movement for kilometers in any direction.”

Rokumonsen frowned to himself at the news. He didn’t like it. Something was bothering him and he didn’t know what.

“I’m afraid I must decline the secondary missions, Flatwell-san,” he decided.

“Oh?” Flatwell-san asked. “What’s the issue?”

“Call it a warrior’s instincts,” Rokumonsen said.

Flatwell-san sighed. “Very well. The RLF thanks you for your readiness, though I’m afraid we didn’t arrange a retainer in case you didn’t sortie at all.”

“The money is a formality, Flatwell-san. I swore you an oath.”

“I appreciate that, Rokumonsen. HQ out.”

Rokumonsen watched the Black Squad MTs head north, then stepped out from behind the old building and jetted off on his own. With luck, he wouldn’t run into any new problems on his way.

Lt. Wessam tapped his foot anxiously again the pedal in his cockpit, rereading the transcript of his orders for the sixth time and watching the clock tick forward while the Arquebus technicians checked and double-checked the cavalry units for deployment. Normally, he’d be cursing the delay and yelling at them to hurry up, but they likely had just as little experience with these units as he did, and a mistake now would lead to kilometers-long drop into storm seas. ‘Lucky’ in that case meant the fall would spare him the experience of drowning.

The cockpit was familiar, at least, the same flight-sticks, pedals, and screens arrangement that allowed for control by both augmented and unaugmented pilots. The neural interface wasn’t anything he was used to, a strange mix of an armored core and the high-spec Takigawa MTs common in the Sol system, but it was no worse than driving a new car for the first time. The energy-weapon-and-missiles loadout was nothing unusual to an Arquebus pilot even if the specifics were a bit off the norm. He wasn’t thrilled with it, all told, but he could pilot it.

One bit of good news was that the whole cavalry squad had been linked up during loading. Sortieing without squad-level interlinks was a handicap he and 3rd didn’t need, and setting them up from scratch could take anywhere from five minutes to an hour depending on how temperamental the software was that day. Five of the seven other units were already showing green, and it took only a minute for the last two to light up. That didn’t mean they were ready to launch, but it did mean their interlinks, and comms, were online.

“3rd Squad!” Wessam barked. “Sound off!”

“3-2, ready!” His second, Sergeant Kimura, answered.

“3-3, ready!” from Hirst, a close-in brawler and CQB specialist.

“3-4, ready!” from Ealy, their heavy gunner.

“3-5, ready!” from Seong, the squad sharpshooter.

“3-6, ready!” from Reid, her spotter.

“3-7, ready!” from Farzin, the 3rd’s scout, speed-freak, and discipline problem.

“3-8, ready!” from Toomey, the other CQB specialist.

“3rd actual, ready!” Wissam belted out. “Listen up, 3rd! Our orders are to recapture Munitions Depot 06 and eliminate any raider forces attempting to retreat with captured materiel! We have the toys the PCA wanted to keep to themselves, a friendly MT squad en route to reinforce us, and direct fire support from this fine ship at our disposal! Our opposition is a single AC with light MT support escorting a fat and happy convoy full of our shit! What do we say to that, boys and girls?”

“We say ‘hell no!’, sir!” 3rd Squad yelled.

“We say hell no!” Wissam echoed. “You know the drill! Stick together, watch each others’ backs, and these mean machines will eat those mass-market pieces of junk alive! Full burn for the Depot the moment we launch! I’ll let you all get a nice head start, ah?”

“Sir yes sir!” 3rd Squad said.

“That’s what I want to hear! Now strap in and await final checks!”

“We’re here, Raven.”

REASON stood amid the sharp, craggy foothills of the ridges bracketing Tsirna Dolina basin from the north. To its left and right, four parallel sets of long-unused rail tracks snaked through the bottom of the valley, bracketed by an unpaved dirt road on either side. To its front and rear, rocky bluffs rose sharply into the sky. The lumpy surfaces gave the cliffs a speckled appearance, white where the snow could accumulate and black where the rock was too sheer to stick to. The weather overhead had taken a turn for the worse; the light cloud cover had thickened and the snow had picked up, though not enough to affect visibility.

The armored core itself stood on a fork in the rails—or perhaps more accurately, a t-junction, where two tracks branched off from the four. The whole layout bent and overlapped in organized chaos to allow a train car traveling along any rail from either direction to turn ninety degrees and head directly into the side of the mountain. There, a pair of old, battered blast doors angled thirty degrees from vertical rose more than half again REASON’s height between two outcroppings jutting out from the cliff. The cavern ahead had once held a copper mine, exhausted and abandoned decades before the discovery of Coral; the doors were half shelter from the inclement weather common to functional biospheres and half corporate paranoia that one of their workers might decide to make off with a train-car of unprocessed ore weighting thousands of tons.

It had made for a good hiding spot. The miners’ barracks near the entrance had required little repair to house the pilot formerly known as C4-621 and her support crew, the garage that had once serviced mining MTs had been swiftly adapted to support an AC, and the junction outside was large enough for the transport chopper to land even in rough weather and the loading dock within wide enough for it to taxi in for shelter. Even the train tracks had served their purpose: her mercenary market contact could send a train car down the tracks with the cargo under cryptographic lock and key and receive the empty car back the next day, allowing delivery without knowing exactly where their client hid. Nearly a century of strip-mining had left holes like this honeycombed all throughout Rubicon, so it was no wonder that Arquebus had never learned that this particular one was where their latest arch-enemy had dug her nest.

Raven stepped forward carefully, making sure not to crush the vehicles that fearlessly clustered around REASON’s feet. The empty transport convoy had beaten her here, unaware of her decision to ‘improvise’ back near central Tsirna Dolina; from their aggressive driving, she suspected they had not appreciated the wait in the slowly worsening weather.

“It’s good the doors don’t seem to have been opened,” Ayre said. “All of our things are likely still inside.”

The ice build-up across the seam in the doors did suggest they hadn’t been opened since she’d last been here weeks earlier, but Raven wasn’t so sure that was a good thing. There had been a doctor and nurse, a handful of technicians and mechanics, a flight crew for the VTOL, the supply officer who scowled at her every time he saw how much ammo she’d used on her last sortie like it wasn’t coming out of her paycheck anyway. Raven had not allowed herself the luxury of enjoying their company (weapons did not have friends), but she had found their presence comfortably familiar—enough so that she’d missed them while relying on the support crew her handler had borrowed from the corps for her operations on the Ice Fields.

The upheaval of the last few days had stretched her perception of time like taffy to the point she found herself imagining the cavern she had recently called home as an ancient ruin, full of cobwebs and long-dead skeletons. Raven had assumed the crew would be gone, taking what they could carry for resale and leaving the rest to rust. That no one had been in or out might mean they were still inside… but without Walter, why would they be?

What had happened to them?

Open it up, Raven thought. Even if their old codes didn’t work, Ayre would have no problem forcing the issue.

Liam smiled as he watched the logistics team go to town on the depot. Everything was going swimmingly. Food crates were flowing into VTOLs. Box after box of ammo weighed down the trucks. At the other end of the courtyard, one team was even loading a heavy tetrapod MT onto a transport chopper! They’d lucked out bursting into the base while that thing was down for maintenance, and not just because they didn’t have to fight it: those things were expensive!

“Five minutes!” Little Ziyi yelled through his earpiece. “Five minutes and we’re gone! Start final tie-downs and rig everything that’s left to blow!”

Liam’s smile soured. Twenty minutes to load after engaging the enemy had turned out to be barely ten minutes to load by the time he and his transports had arrived. If they left on that schedule he’d be bringing his fleet home half-empty.

He put a finger to the earpiece. “Give me ten and we’ll have this place bare to bedrock,” he promised.

“If I give you ten, you’ll take fifteen, and the whole garrison is liable to come down on our heads,” his commanding officer said.

“You said Uncle Flatwell thought I’d have twenty,” Liam groused.

“If Flatwell didn’t trust my judgment he wouldn’t have given me a damn AC, Green Two,” Little Ziyi said. “Food and bullets will keep a soldier alive, but that doesn’t make them worth his life. Pack it up and get ready to move.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Liam said, and took his finger off the comm. Damn it. Messam’s death messed her up. No, that was unkind. That this wasn’t out of character for her was half of what made Little Ziyi such a frustrating commander: she was reckless when her blood was up and overcautious when things were going well.

Well, that might be Liam’s problem, but it wasn’t his responsibility. His job wasn’t to maximize the gains of the raid, it was to trust his commander and follow her orders, and if they came up short, that wouldn’t be his responsibility, either.

He cupped his fingers around his mouth and began yelling new orders.

Chapter Text

“HQ, this is Black Actual. We’ve successfully destroyed Night 1 and Night 2, but we’re seeing increased VTOL activity in our region. Please advise.”

Selva frowned as the silence stretched. “HQ, HQ. Say again, Black Actual requesting update on enemy positions.”

He didn’t get a response.

Arquebus must have gotten their skywave interdiction up. Rather than bouncing off the Coral-polluted upper atmosphere like normal skywave, their Rubicon-specialized jammers worked to stir it, effectively creating a mild, artificial version of the high-altitude Coral storms the RLF used to conceal troop movements. It wasn’t as bad as the real things, which were energetic enough to provide a functionally total signal blackout. When combined with the thickening Coral clouds overhead, however, it would still take military-grade equipment to punch through—and that was ‘military-grade’, not CorpSec. The PCA might have that kind of hardware; the RLF did not.

“Damn it,” he growled as he switched to short-range comms. “All right, Black Squad! Keep your eyes peeled! Comms are out, so we’re our first and last warning for things going wrong!”

Selva let a smattering of ‘yes sir’s and one ‘you got it, boss’ come back before ordering his squad onward, this time with the staggered bounding movement he suddenly wished he’d spent more time practicing. They hadn’t found more than an MT or two at each of the last two objectives, but without HQ’s overwatch, that could change without warning.

Little Ziyi chewed on her lip as the twenty-minute timer she’d started the moment the shooting started dropped to 01:29. Green Two hadn’t been thrilled with her decision to abandon the lion’s share of the spoils, but if Arquebus caught the transports on the way out, it would all be the same in the end. All the same except the extra dead or captured personnel, that was, and that was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. Balam had not been kind to her during her brief stint in captivity; Arquebus, by all accounts, was far, far worse. She wouldn’t let that happen to her men. Not again.

At least Liam was reliable; he’d speak his complaints to her face, but when she stood firm, he’d do things her way. He might have bent her orders a little allowing the convoy to load as much as he had, but the last of the transports were almost done tying down their cargo, and the sabotage was already underway.

“Contact! Contact!” Ecks yelled into the command channel. “Green Actual, we have transport choppers 106° east, two kilometers and closing!”

Thank the Coral our extract is south and not east. “Green Two, scramble! If you’re loaded, go! Sabotage team, your ninety seconds just became thirty! Green One, maintain the perimeter while I handle the visitors!”

“Take Grissom and Karaka,” Ecks insisted. “I’ll see the convoy home personally, sir, you can count on that!”

“Negative! Keep your men with the transports–!”

“Keep that talk up and I’ll send half the squad, sir!” Ecks fired back. “Forged in ash, we stand as one! Don’t take all the glory for yourself, actual!”

Thank you, Ecks.

“Acknowledged,” Little Ziyi said, taking one hand off the stick to pull the two MTs into a new command element with the touch-screen to her lower right. “Grissom, Karaka, you’re with me!”

“Coral, abide with Rubicon!” her support bellowed, causing Little Ziyi to flinch inside her cockpit. No wonder Father Dolmayan hates that phrase.

“Coral, abide with Rubicon!” she yelled anyway, then switched to long-range comms. “HQ, this is Green actual. First wave of reinforcements just arrived!”

Alas, only static greeted her. Arquebus was far too happy with their long-range signal interdiction. The MTs had signal flares to call in Black Squad if they needed them, but Little Ziyi decided to hold off until she got a better idea of how hard they were being hit. She switched back to local before she lost line of sight to the rest of the team. “Green One, we’re jammed! Expect comm issues as we exfil!”

“Understood, actual! We’ll see you back at base!”

Little Ziyi saw Green One’s muscle tracer perform as good a salute as it could with its limited range of motion seconds before it disappeared from view, but didn’t stop to return it. Every second let the enemy reinforcements slip closer to the vulnerable transports.

“Good luck, Ecks,” she whispered. They’d all need it.

“Our old credentials are still effective,” Ayre said. “It really does seem abandoned… hold on. We’re receiving a transmission.”

Raven’s comm clicked on.

“Leave us alone,” the grumpy voice of the wizened old crew chief cut through the static. “We’re not hurting anyone down here. We don’t want any trouble but we’re not easy picking for bandits and theives.”

Nothing Raven could say would identify her as readily to these men as holding her tongue, so she simply guided REASON into the tunnel. The vehicles flowed forward between its legs with a fearlessness that bordered on recklessness, headlights on. The long-dark lamps far overhead flickered twice before finally steadying into a harsh yellow glow, revealing the VTOL and the cargo crane they used to load REASON from its gantry.

“621?” the man asked. “Well I’ll be damned! We haven’t heard anything from you or your handler for—well, I mean, we barely hear anything from you anyhow, but it’s been total radio silence since that last delivery. Are our comms out or something? Ah, forget it. Get in here.”

Raven triggered her comms. “Negative. What delivery?”

“What delivery? The rest of your armory, by the look of it! Your handler had it shipped back from the Ice Fields last week.”

Her blood ran cold. “How long. Exactly.”

“Uh… four days? Yeah, four days ago, mid-morning.”

For her supplies to make it here that soon, Walter would have had to have shipped them off right after she’d departed on her final sortie. He’d stripped her Ice Fields safe-house bare the moment she’d walked out the door.

What would have happened if Walter had had his way? If she’d never met Ayre, never had a reason to question her role, her place as a weapon in his hand? Would she have come back from that final mission? Did he plan for her to die down there in the firestorm he wanted to unleash? Had she done all this just for him to throw her—

“Raven!” Ayre said. “Raven, you’re panicking. Breathe. In and out. For me. Please.”

The tunnel was too small. REASON spun into a snap turn and jetted back out into the valley, then upwards onto the top of the ridge. She breathed in and out in time with Ayre’s encouragement. The walls crushing down on her receded.

“621? 621!” the crew chief was trying to get her attention. “These fine gentlemen you dragged in here seem to be under the impression they get to help themselves to your things. Care to weigh in on that?”

Raven opened her comms. “H-h-hol-hold,” she stuttered. She’d shattered half the Arquebus garrisons in the area; she could spend a little time freaking out.

I don’t know he intended for me to die, she told herself. He wouldn’t throw me away. Not without a reason. He didn’t expect me to die. I don’t know why he sent my weapons away but he wasn’t going to throw me away. I’m the best pilot on the planet. The best. I worked so hard and I trained and I fought and I killed and I won. I always won. He wouldn’t throw away a good weapon. He wouldn’t.

REASON fuzzed out of her senses as Ayre pressed in, a warm, comforting caress soothing the ragged edges of her anxious mind. “It’s okay,” Ayre told her. “It’s okay, Raven. I’m with you now, no matter what. I’ll be your operator, and your friend, for as long as you’ll have me.”

I’d never ask you leave, Raven thought as she wiped the tears from her eyes. Never, Ayre.

“Then I never will,” Ayre promised. “Raven… you’re an incredible pilot, but you’re also so much more than just a weapon. You’re precious to me because of who you are, not what you do, and that’s why I want you to have everything a person should. A person, not a weapon.”

Raven’s mind drifted back to their last conversation on the topic. Like touch?

“Touch, happiness, comfort, pleasure,” Ayre listed off. “Raven, I…” She paused, a touch of embarrassment bleeding through their Contact before being washed away in a spike of concern. “Raven, we’ve got high altitude contacts approaching fast!”

Raven’s heart skipped a beat. Where?

“Marking the heading now. Scanning…”

Raven closed her eyes, sinking as deeply as she could into REASON’s sensor feeds. She understood what she was seeing at the same time Ayre did.

“It’s a PCA cavalry detachment heading for the RLF operation!” Ayre said, alarm bleeding through her normal calm. “They must be Arquebus reinforcements!”

Corporal Farzin, 3-7, had spent a grand total of twenty minutes inside a PCA high-mobility light-cav unit, and it was already his favorite machine he’d ever laid eyes on. The speeds it could reach were phenomenal. It was taking all of what little self-discipline he bothered with to stay even with the rest of the LCs rather than going to flank speed and leaving them in the dust. Poor Lt. Wessam couldn’t even keep up with the rest of the squad; he was now more than five kilometers back and slipping slowly but steadily further behind.

PCA doctrine called for Enforcement Squads to run a mix of cavalry and fire support assets, the latter barely-modified Subject Guard muscle tracers. V.II must have been feeling generous when he loaded Malthus’s ship up with a full compliment of cav, and Farzin was damned glad he had. If they had to share, the lowly 3-7 would’ve been relegated to a shitty MT for sure, and while that was what he’d trained for, it would’ve sucked ice cold dick. Missing out on the sheer speed the LCs could move at, not merely in short bursts but at a steady cruise, would’ve been the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

Even if he’d had last pick of the machines, none of the options would’ve been a loss. There were two sniper units, two with heavy cannons, and two shield-bearing brawlers. Wissam knew his men, though, and he knew Farzin had a need for speed. He’d been hand-picked for the high-mobility unit by the Lt. himself.

“What’s the strategy, Sarge?” 3-4 Ealy asked. Farzin rolled his eyes at the ass-kissing; the strategy was that they were rocking machines a century ahead of the old relics the ice-rats begged out of BAWS. If he wasn’t quick, he wouldn’t even get a chance to try out his new favorite toy’s weapon systems before the rest of 3rd mopped up.

“We start at the Depot itself and clear out any remaining hostiles,” 3-2 Kimura replied. “Reports have at least one ice-rat AC on the field, one of their elites—it has to go before we move on to mop-up. Once that’s done, we spread out and fly a spiral pattern to catch the stragglers. We have no idea where they’re going or the route they’ll take to get there, but I don’t plan on letting a single fucking rat make off with so much as a ration pack!”

Blah blah blah. Farzin wasn’t against following orders, per se, but he was against having to remember them. If it was important, tell him then, not a minute ahead of time. He was too busy enjoying the ride. The ‘wings’ of heavy blast armor shielding the full-vector thrusters made him feel like an avenging angel of old, ready to bring judgment to the sinful and faithless.

Seraph. That’d be his call sign when he made the Vespers. It wasn’t on the list of approved call signs, but Farzin knew from Rusty’s example that Arquebus would let you go off-brand if it let them claw back some of your salary, and no amount of money was worth being stuck with a dumb-ass call sign like Buttersworth or Winchcombe from whatever asshole dimension corporate got their damn names from.

He grinned to himself as Belius blurred past beneath them.

Death from above, motherfuckers.

Chapter Text

Raven would later reflect that for some reason, the next decision came more easily than any before it. All her fears and doubts vanished into the same box they always did when she had a mission to do.

She could have invented a half-dozen post-hoc rationalizations for why she leaped into action. The RLF were her employers. This was still part of the mission. Arquebus wanted her dead and the RLF were the enemies of her enemy.

In truth, she choose to protect the RLF for one simple reason: they had been kind to her when they had no cause to be.

Warn the RLF! she ordered Ayre, trusting her partner to get the warning through. REASON jumped off the ridge and back down to the junction. “Chief. How fast can you refit. Weapons only.”

“Just the weapon mounts?” the chief asked. “If it takes me five minutes I’m getting too old for this job.”

Raven quite literally ran the numbers in her head, doing the math on her implants to make sure she wouldn’t come out overweight or short on generator power. “Zimmerman. Earshot. Ludlow. Pulse-blade.” Not the best choices for fighting light cavalry but she couldn’t wait for the market to fulfill an order now. She paused for half a second, then added, “Assault core.”

“Core expansion too?” the crew chief asked, his cheeky grin coming through loud and clear in his tone. “Well then! I might need all five minutes after all.”

REASON hadn’t even landed on the tracks before she fired its boosters to launch it into the tunnel, the wash of exhaust kicking up the snow and ash the vehicles had tracked it. She set the RLF’s Iridium down gently on one of the transport trucks sized for the cargo, then backed REASON into the refit gantry as quickly as she dared.

“Raven,” Ayre said. “Arquebus has interdicted all skipwave transmission in the theatre. We have short-range and LOS communication only.”

Then we’ll have to deliver the message by hand.

“Chief,” she said. “Inventory. How much can the VTOL carry? Without REASON?”

“All of it,” the chief said. “We’ll have to load some of it by sling, and we won’t be fast, but we won’t have to leave anything behind. Are we bailing out?”

“Affirmative. This location is compromised.” Or it would be the moment she threw her boosters into Assault configuration on the way out. Ayre, can you find a safe place for us to meet them?

“I have several,” Ayre said. “Do you know where we’re going after we help the RLF?”

She did. Heaven help her, she did. Some choices weren’t much of a choice after all, in the end.

“Sending location,” Raven said. Give them the coordinates and help the crew however you can. We’re on a time limit.

“Command, repeat last,” V.IV said as the crane moved the medium-weight CONTRAST into launch position a couple kilometers shy of shore. The cavalry units were already lost from sight as the transport dropped down to the slower winds near ground level, lest a strong gust cause its payload to strike the hull on its way down. He couldn’t see the heavy air patrol units from his current position dangling out of the transport, but he knew they were ahead of him a hundred or so meters up.

“You are to take CONTRAST and the two heavy patrol VTOLs and interpose yourself between Raven and the vulnerable supply depots,” V.III’s comm officer repeated. “Tsirna Dolina will track her position the moment she begins moving again.”

“Interpose?” Marais asked, voice carefully neutral. “Not engage?”

“Her exact words were, ‘Don’t let her interfere’. Engage if necessary.”

Well, shit. “Understood.”

The man who would earn the call sign V.IV Marais had spent cumulative days over the last two weeks in the simulators running the same program hour after hour, slamming virtual AC after virtual AC into the Reaper’s simulated face. At the beginning, he’d died without landing a hit on her. He’d taken to studying the few combat logs Arquebus had on her: engagements on the wall and in the spaceport, taken by his direct predecessor in the V.IV position. After three days, he was consistently able to land hits before being torn to pieces. He’d dug deep into the details of the AC components she favored: Elcano-made light, fast components, often with one or two of Arquebus’s own high-maneuverability Schneider parts mixed in. It was easy to see why the equally speed-crazed Rusty had liked her. After ten days, he was going blow for blow before coming up just short. He hadn’t started the process as anything but an impossible challenge in search of bragging rights, but something compelled him to see it through.

Marais was fairly sure actually winning that fight a few days earlier was what had put him in the running for V.IV at all. Of course, the simulated Reaper wasn’t the real Reaper. He suspected he had spent more time coming to grips with her fighting style than anyone but the Reaper herself, but that didn’t mean he was chomping at the bit to face the Reaper of Vesper Squad on his first sortie as a numbered Vesper. But then, if someone had to put themselves between ‘Raven’ and the rest of the Arquebus forces, it might as well be him. He had two PCA heavy air assets with him, one with a ventral rocket pod more powerful than many fixed weapon emplacements, the other sporting a chin-mounted gatling cannon that could saw buildings in half. He had a chance.

It did not occur to him that the position of “V.III” was now his peer rather than a superior officer with even indirect authority over him, and that he could thus choose to do literally anything other than run into the Reaper’s guns.

The crane released. CONSTRAST dropped. Marais made sure he was clear of the transport’s sphere of influence, then engaged his boosters in Assault configuration and flew hell-bent for shore, the heavy VTOLs flanking him like an honor guard.

YUE YU slammed left, narrowly dodging a burst of fire from the Arquebus MTs advancing on her position as she swept into the shadow of Fern’s MT maintenance gantry; the bullets followed her path, blowing holes in the metal sheeting and wrecking the delicate actuators of the maintenance arms, but none found their mark on the core obscured behind the structure.

Little Ziyi’s borrowed Etsujin had done for one transport helicopter, forcing the rest to cut their troops free immediately rather than risk the whole vehicle going down with them still in it. The MTs had spent the last two minutes pushing Little Ziyi and her two champions back into the now-empty depot, losing nearly half their number in a race to an objective Green Squad had already destroyed. Four of those remaining were now pushing hard down a ridge overlooking the base, taking advantage of the topology to get an angle into base’s courtyard.

Another boost took YUE YU from behind the gantry into the shadow of the wall; the trip gave Little Ziyi just enough time to let off a shot from her Iridium 480mm grenade cannon at the group between moments of cover, though not enough to see if it hit.

“Good shot, sir!” Grissom yelled, and Little Ziyi bared her teeth in a rictus grin. Still got it. She’d never be able to make YUE YU move the way an augmented pilot could. Her inputs were two articulated arms with a control stick on the end, two pedals, and a panel full of buttons never meant to be used in combat. One arm controlled each of YUE YU’s, control sticks worked the boosters, the pedals controlled the legs, and the buttons let her mess with lights and comms. Most unaugmented pilots used eye tracking for their third weapon if they could spare the concentration to use one at all, but YUE YU’s pulse buckler didn’t need targeting and worked just fine as an auxiliary input on the left stick.

She was still a damn deadly pilot all the same, especially when she had two MTs ready to leap on the slightest mistake her opponents made.

Speaking of the pulse buckler: it was cool and ready for use, so Little Ziyi slammed her feet down and YUE YU rose up, launching up and out of cover like a children’s toy. The immediate hail of fire popped and fizzled as 105mm rounds boiled in the high-energy pulse field, and Karaka wasted no time boosting his muscle tracer out of cover to silence an enemy MT who had gotten too close to his position. The moment the rest gave up the attack on her AC as useless, Little Ziyi let the shield start cooling down again and spiked another MT into the afterlife with the Iridium while simultaneously knocking Grissom’s target into ACS recovery with a four-round burst from the Etsujin. The override gave her back-up all the time in the world to shred the unit into confetti. That made four.

“Green Squad to HQ, come in HQ!” Little Ziyi tried again, to no avail. It had been a long shot at best; wide area interdiction was a pain in the ass.

YUE YU came down on the other side of the depot wall, the low end of the ridge nearly matching the wall for height; her two MTs joined her a moment later as she assessed the situation. The advance outrider squad was down, and any remaining units had dropped onto the field far enough away to not be an immediate threat. It was time for YUE YU and the MTs to retreat and link back up with the convoy. The tracks the rest of Green Squad left would be easy to follow even in the weeks-old snow, but that was why Flatwell had decided to scrub all three bases involved ahead of time.

“Good work, team!” she said. “Head for—”

Grissom’s machine exploded, the lance of blue light flashing down from the sky and through the center of the MT before the three realized they were under attack.

“Grissom!” Karaka screamed, already returning fire at the machine that had killed his teammate. Little Ziyi interposed herself between him and his target at the cost of catching a couple rounds on YUE YU’s back, her buckler taking the shot that would have executed Karaka in turn. The pulse-generator red-lined and deactivated, but it blocked enough of the energy that what got through only peeled the paint.

“Get to cover!” she screamed, already throwing YUE YU left down the slope parallel to the wall; Karaka snapped out of his grief-stricken rage and didn’t need telling twice. The two flying sniper units—PCA light cavalry, for fuck’s sake!—fired again, thankfully spending both their shots on the larger, more visible target; YUE YU dodged both. Five more LCs, any one of which was just about a match for an old machine like Ziyi’s Basho-frame AC, were already closing to engagement distance for their kinetic weapons.

Seven fucking LCs against a first-generation AC with an unaugmented pilot and an MT who was little more than a walking kill tally for whichever corporate pig managed to land a hit first.

“Karaka!” Little Ziyi ordered. “Panic flares and run! Go!” Seconds later, two blood-red clouds bloomed over the foothills around the Depot, and the MT took off at its maximum speed, doing its best to keep terrain between it and the LC units. YUE YU rounded the corner of the wall and fired three bursts from the Etsujin, one at the snipers and the other two at the assault craft. All were far out of range for the little gun, but both snipers once again targeted the AC over the more vulnerable (and effectively useless) MT, and none of the assault craft broke off in pursuit.

Get home safe, Karaka, Ziyi prayed. Tell them I died well.

“Index Dunham, sir!” one of the MT pilots yelled. “We’ve got red smoke, 245° west-south-west!”

BURN PICKAXE jetted up to the highest point on the wall to join the MTs now staring out towards the puffs of smoke half-hidden by the bluffs of Tsirna Dolina. “I see it!” Index Dunham yelled. “Security team, back to your posts! Don’t let Arquebus sneak up on us, now! Transport team, party’s canceled! If it’s not loaded, leave it and go! Breach team, set off those firecrackers Arquebus was nice enough to prepare for us! We’re leaving!”

“Aye sir!” two dozen voices called over each other as they sprang into motion. Index Dunham took a moment to glance over his shoulder at the courtyard below through the wrap-around screen, saw everything was in order, and turned back to the smoke over the horizon.

“HQ, come in,” he said, switching channels to the shortwave command frequency. “HQ, come in! Green Squad, Blue Squad, Black Squad, anyone home?”

Nothing. Arquebus had finally gotten their heads out of their asses and found their damn countersignal gear. What a pain in his fucking ass! Something had gone wrong in Green Squad, and with communications down, Index Dunham had no way to know whether it was a vehicle breakdown or the wholesale slaughter of the entire squad.

“Come on, Ziyi,” Index Dunham mumbled. “Your luck ain’t run out yet, girl.”

The smoke began to drift, blood-red and ominous, back below the crest of the next ridge over.

Chapter Text

REASON blasted out of the old mine tunnel barely four minutes after it first entered and immediately threw its boosters into their all-thrust-forward Assault configuration, zooming up and over the craggy bluffs flanking the old rail tracks. A sharp pitch downward leveled it off about a kilometer and a half above sea level, leaving it comfortably above the higher ridges between the hideout and the city of Tsirna Dolina. Overhead, the clouds had turned blotchy, the dense cloud cover shot through with lighter patches where the sunlight could shine through.

“Given the current heading of the cavalry detachment when they came into view, they are most likely heading for the RLF’s Objective Fern, Arquebus’s Belius Theatre Munitions Depot number six. While an individual LC is not the equal of a modern AC, seven pose a serious threat.”

I could kill seven LCs, Raven thought.

“Without suffering damage?”

Something is a ‘serious threat’ just for being able to damage me?

“Given what I have seen, Raven… yes. It is.” Ayre brushed a feeling of ‘smiling with self-content at one’s own glibness’ over Raven’s mind. “Hold on—we’ve got another AC approaching!”

Sure enough, another plume of thruster wash surged up from behind one of the ridges to the south, bracketed by the bulbous, insect-like silhouettes of massive PCA Heavy Patrol VTOLs like the one that had terrorized the green and inexperienced pilot yet-to-be-known as Raven her first day on-world. The comm system popped to life as Ayre patched in the signal from the rapidly closing AC.

“This is V.IV Marais. The independent mercenary Raven has begun moving into the AO. Intercepting as ordered.” The slight static in the signal cleared as Marais switched to transmitting to Raven directly. “So, you’re ‘Raven’. They’ve taken to calling you the Reaper due to how many of us you’ve killed. Well, I’m not afraid of you!”

“V.IV Marais,” Ayre echoed. “AC: CONTRAST. They’ve started replacing the Vespers you’ve killed.”

We don’t have time for this, Raven fumed. She hadn’t been briefed on RLF signals, but she could make out the remains of two clouds of red smoke dispersing over the site of the nearest Arquebus depot. Their Coral worship probably didn’t extend to inverting their color codes.

She needed to talk to Ayre about the whole ‘Coral worship’ thing at some point. Later.

“He’s got company,” Ayre continued, sounding as annoyed as Raven felt. “We’re more maneuverable than those VTOLs, but we can’t outrun them over open ground.”

Then we’ll go through them.

Red guidelines flashed across her heads-up display before fading from view, defining a corridor of engagement between her current position and her destination. Raven canceled Assault thrust without killing her velocity, letting REASON coast down towards the ice sheet below as she closed in. What had once been a series of pump stations running through the center of a lake, each wider than a PCA warship and feeding a highway-scale aqueduct towards the city of Tsirna Dolina, were now frozen monuments to a bygone era. They would provide the backdrop for the coming fight.

Little Ziyi wasn’t ‘running for her life’ only because she had no expectation that running would save her. She was running, though, make no mistake. She wasn’t sure if the Butcher herself could have taken these odds. If YUE YU could make it into the outskirts of Tsirna Dolina City… well, she was still dead, but she’d die slower.

The LCs had thus far been content to chase her, their kinetics still out of range to do more than ricochet noisily off the slanted Basho armor. The sniper unit’s laser rifles were not, but having to dodge two slow-firing weapons instead of half a dozen automatic ones was something even an unaugmented pilot like Little Ziyi had a chance at pulling off. She’d had to take a volley of missiles on her pulse buckler once, but the trick had convinced her pursuers not to bother with any more until they got closer.

It felt like hours since Grissom’s death; it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Karaka had left north, not wanting to lead any pursuers to the rest of the convoy, and Little Ziyi had diverted east towards the illusory safety of the contaminated city for the same reason. Already, sparse one- and two-story buildings flanked the winding road, providing light and intermittent cover from the shots snapping past.

She was almost to the edge of the city proper when one of the LCs, a flight-specialized unit with an auxiliary thruster ‘wing’ articulating from each shoulder, broke from the pack and accelerated hard. Little Ziyi spun YUE YU around on its feet, maintaining her speed while unloading both weapons at the rapidly closing unit. The enemy pilot responded by pulling their whole frame parallel to the ground and spinning into a dizzying barrel roll, avoiding the grenade and taking the scattered bullets on the heavy wing armor they pulled up to protect the unit’s head.

Ziyi swore. Of course their leader had the fancy unit. YUE YU caught the return volley on her buckler, then boosted hard right to break line of sight as the LC let loose with its missile pods. The pressure wave from the guided missiles detonating against the far side of the six-story building showered YUE YU with snow, ash, glass, and concrete dust, and then she was past the building and exposed to another two near-miss snap shots from the snipers through a narrow alley.

Now where the fuck was that—

Little Ziyi almost didn’t see the winged LC in time to dodge a shot from its underbarrel grenade launcher; the round detonated close enough that the blast threw damage warnings up on her screen regardless. The fucker had carried on past her before zooming up over the next row of mid-height buildings, no doubt to pin her down for the rest of his squad to catch up.

Fuck that.

YUE YU lit its boosters in Assault mode, barreling straight at the zippy bastard who sought to impede her path while firing the Etsujin as fast as it could cycle, stopping only to block incoming rounds with the pulse buckler. The LC returned fire with its assault rifle before deciding it didn’t like the way this fight was going and hunkering down behind its own shield, which suited Ziyi fine. A split second before YUE YU would have rammed into the shield and likely made both pilots miserable, she slammed the boosters right while canceling Assault thrust, sending YUE sailing in a ballistic arc past the LC’s unprotected back. Her grenade cannon locked on target and fired directly into the unit’s rear armor, and the blast obscured half Ziyi’s vision as YUE YU began to fall back towards the ice below.

The winged LC came barreling out of the smoke before it had begun to clear, physical shield meeting pulse-buckler strike after strike and flinging metal sparks dozens of meters in every direction each time. Its pilot was keeping the two machines too close to bring its long rifle to bear; Ziyi didn’t have that problem with the Etsujin, but she couldn’t bring her lefthand weapon into play without interfering with the buckler. The Iridium was still cycling for another shot.

The cavalry unit finally disengaged about twenty meters off the ground, flaring its limbs to airbrake before quickly hunkering down behind its shield again when Ziyi finally brought the Etsujin back into play. YUE YU came down the rest of the way in what had once been the children’s area of a private park; its legs tore through rusted metal and shattered cold-brittled plastic as boost-mode thrusters in ground effect kept it gliding mere centimeters over the ash-laden ice, each irregular bump in the surface striking sparks from the core’s feet. The Iridium cycled and immediately flung another grenade at the LC’s face, the blast further scoring the heavy plate-armor shield and blackening the limb armor around it.

Ziyi took advantage of her enemy’s hesitation and strafed left, tearing up the gleaming metal armor on the LC’s right arm with her machine gun before it got its shield between them again. They spent a good three to five seconds circling each other, each trying to land more than a few stray rounds on target. Ziyi held her fire with her Iridium, not wanting to waste another shot on a shield that had proven itself more than capable of soaking the hits, and her target likewise wasted only a few dozen rifle rounds on her pulse-buckler.

Then the rest of the LCs Ziyi had forgotten about arrived.

The snipers alighted on the two tallest buildings she’d passed; she dodged the first shot, but the second followed right behind to score a glancing hit running all the way along the side of the core. The force of a quarter ton of armor boiling away in an instant banged Ziyi hard against the crash webbing, enough so that she couldn’t recover in time to avoid yet more damage from the winged unit’s rifle as it flit around like a drone one-hundredth its weight.

Two more LCs skated around the massive buildings down the main thoroughfare and smashed through the to-them knee-high fencing around the border of the park, this pair packing massive linear-motor grenade cannons in lieu of the standard rifles. They bracketed her with their fire, and she found herself forced to take one salvo of missiles and a grenade on her already stressed pulse buckler lest she suffer both.

The buckler kept YUE YU on its feet and its pilot intact but gave up its life in the process, the generator smoking and slagged on the end of the half-melted armature. The lion’s share of the blasts, redirected from the core, warped the armor on YUE YU’s arms and right leg; the warning tones announcing the damage nearly drowned out the thump that reverberated through the pilot capsule once the assist software detected and purged the ruined buckler. More assault rifle rounds from the flight unit followed, ripping rents in YUE YU’s failing core armor and sending spall scattering into the interior systems.

“Come on you corporate fucks!” Ziyi screamed as she scrubbed away blood trickling down from a cut on her forehead, her controls locked up from ACS strain as the system forcibly reset YUE YU’s balance. “Seven LCs and you can’t break a basic human and her old relic? Come on! Kill me if you’re hard enough you fucking bastards!”

They tried. The winged unit and the grenadiers opened up with a storm of missiles, and the snipers fired again. YUE YU blazed forward like a charging bull, slipping left and right to dodge the lasers as she closed in on the still-reloading cannon units. Etsujin rounds pinged off their armor as they ducked behind a pair of shield-bearers, braced and ready for the Iridium grenade that followed soon after. Missiles crashed down: those that struck their target battered what little armor YUE YU had left before digging deeper to compromise the structure, sever cabling, and poke leaks in hydraulic lines; one found its mark in the Iridium’s near-depleted reserve ammo and blew the weapon to pieces. Rifle rounds from the winged LC and the shield-bearers tore into armor and the fragile systems beneath, their force sufficient to blast weakened plates to shrapnel or rip them free of their mounting completely. The ACS joined the cacophony of warning tones as the core’s gyros and thrusters strained to keep it upright through the abuse.

YUE YU hit the shield-bearers like a wrecking ball—

—and bounced off, its mass insufficient to contest the two braced and ready LCs. The sudden stop, undamped by the active shock compensation keyed to the boost system, drove Ziyi’s crash webbing into her gut like a boxer’s haymaker and sprayed spittle across her cockpit screens. Sensing weakness, the two LCs pressed forward to follow their opponent’s rebound and drove their shields home until their target locked up fully from ACS strain once again, then boosted left and right like an opening gate to clear the firing line for the units behind them.

Ziyi found herself staring not at the cannon units but at the winged LC, which ignored its own weapon in favor of launching kick after kick into the already-stumbling core. Once, twice, thrice—the ACS warning tone escalated to a full-blown siren. The LC kicked her again. And again.

YUE YU fell.

Chapter Text

CANDLE RING stood tall, dominating an ice field full of broken and shattered wrecks as the remaining Arquebus forces pulled back into the depot. Blue Squad’s early warning strategy—and their target’s position in the middle of a broad, flat expanse of ice—had served them well. The transport convoy and their escorts had been able to exit in good order while Ring Freddie tied up the defenders as they tried to cross the open field; he’d then switched to a fighting retreat until Arquebus had to give up pursuit in favor of licking their wounds back inside their walls. Blue had not been able to complete the sabotage, but Freddie had considered that a secondary objective compared to taking as much as they could for themselves, and they’d left with the convoy around eighty percent capacity even with their early withdrawal.

Inside CANDLE RING’s cockpit, Ring Freddie hung limp in his harness, panting and covered in sweat. He was getting too Coral-damned old for this. The interior temperature had climbed to nearly 40 C as the reactor red-lined to keep up with the armored core’s demands, and the environmental control system responsible for the sealed compartment was only now bringing it back under control. The fighting had been heavy enough that the lack of Black Squad made him wonder. RLF information wasn’t perfect, but Flatwell should have been glued to the radar monitor counting every unit that gave chase to Red Squad. Either there had been significantly more Arquebus assets in the area than Flatwell had predicted, or every single mobile asset in the greater Tsirna Dolina region not chasing Red had decided to descend on one depot all at once.

The latter wouldn’t have shocked him, now that he thought about it. Perhaps whichever officer got the short straw of dealing with this op had decided throwing everything at one depot was a safer bet than overreaching and letting all three go up in smoke. To their credit, if this had been all that was left, it was the right call. Split three ways, none of the squads would have buckled; concentrated in one spot, it had forced Blue to give up their sabotage and retreat with what spoils they could.

With a great, heaving sigh, Freddie straightened in his seat and took stock of the situation. Blue Squad mission status: successful with minor qualifiers. Enemies: eliminated or beaten back. Communications: still fucked over long ranges. Smoke signals: nothing from Snow since their earlier blue, recent red flares over Fern.

Freddie wanted nothing more than to ride to Green Squad’s rescue, but CANDLE RING’s missile launchers were two loads from dry and its grenade cannons almost as empty. There was more armor missing than there was left, the left shoulder joint was moving sluggishly, and the right set of tracks had thrown its treads a kilometer back after a bad hit from an MT hand mortar. It was still mobile and dangerous, as any operational armored core was, but could it face whatever had another Finger of the RLF’s Fist throwing up distress flares?

It could not.

With a heavy heart, Ring Freddie turned CANDLE RING south towards home.

Reuben Stump was going to die.

He’d done his job. Heard the change in radio traffic, watched the VTOLs buzz like flies across the basin below, and flashed the simple light pattern thrice at each of seven locations. Waited to relay emergency signals back to command until a low-hanging cloud had robbed his vantage point of its usefulness, then repacked his kit. Struggled back down the ridge through five kilometers of knee-deep snow to the buggy he’d hidden under a snowbank and dragged it back to the road north to his watchpost.

He’d put the suit battery he’d already discharged in the power socket and headed home. It was just bad luck he’d found an Arquebus patrol on the way north.

He’d seen them coming long before they saw him; a group of MTs kicked up a lot more ash than a lone man on a single-person buggy. He’d diverted into the nearest cluster of old, half-fallen buildings, hidden the buggy as best he could among a half-dozen burned-out old freight trucks, and taken shelter in a building near the center of whatever hamlet or rest stop had once sat here. Once the MT patrol passed through, he’d wait another hour to be safe and be back on his way.

The patrol hadn’t passed through. They’d stopped and diverted into the cluster of buildings, and were now poking around like children looking for bugs under rocks. The RLF were far from the only people scattered across Rubicon, especially following the return of the interstellar corps. What kind of MT officer stopped to investigate every set of fresh tire tracks he happened across? These pilots were either a dedicated search team or bullies and sadists. No, knowing the corps, they were definitely bullies and sadists; the only question was whether they were doing so at the behest of their commander or for their own amusement.

Reuben Stump had not been given a weapon. He would have protested against it if he had; the weight he’d had to carry on this mission without one was bad enough. Even if he’d taken it anyway, it wouldn’t do him much good against four MTs, but it’d probably be more comfortable than having nothing.

A smattering of gunshots rang out, followed by an explosion. Laughter echoed from the MTs’ external speakers, taunting him with the destruction of his buggy. He was thankful he had retrieved the half-charged battery before he’d hid, even if it didn’t end up saving him.

He’d chosen his hiding spot with an eye towards being invisible from the road; it gave him an unenviable view of the MTs now. One of them, likely the leader, was gesturing with his machine’s off-hand; the recipient was the one whose smoking gun was responsible for the destruction of the buggy. Whatever words they spoke were passed through private comms.

Leave, he thought. You killed the vehicle. The crew is stranded. Leave. He had a decent chance at getting home on foot before his heat ran out if he left now, but the longer the MTs lingered, the worse his odds became.

Another gunshot, just as loud as before but quieter than the sound of the shell smashing through the second story of the building overhead. He hadn’t thought the patrol would actually stop, much less bother to follow the tire tracks; he obviously hadn’t bothered to hide his own leading into the building. One of the other MTs joined in, the 105mm rounds chewing apart the reinforced concrete without issue, and the world came tumbling down.

Reuben made his peace as the building collapsed on his head, going out with the words of the RLF on his lips.

“Coral, abide with Rubic—!”

“I’ve studied you, you know,” Marais boasted over open comms as a speculative shot from his right laser rifle struck sparks off REASON’s shoulder without penetrating. Another glancing hit, the range and angle conspiring to render the shot worthless.

As far as he knew, the Reaper had never said a word to anyone in the six-some months ‘Raven’ had been active on the planet. Maybe she couldn’t. She wouldn’t be the first to become little better than a hyper-violent vegetable following 4th-gen augmentation, especially this late in the game. There was no telling how many people her metal had passed through before ending up in her head.

“The Wall. The Old Spaceport. The Ice Worm. My predecessor was quite an admirer of yours… not that it saved him.”

Marais didn’t buy that explanation. Lobotomites fought like machines. Not with the flaws of the old UNAC project, it was true, but like machines nonetheless. Regimented. Mechanical. Formulaic. The program MURDER DOT EXE running to completion. They could fight with skill, cleverness, even grace, but they never quite shook that tell-tale, inflexible exactitude.

He wished he was fighting someone that simple. The Reaper was weaving around and through the old aqueducts like a skater and interposing the VTOL currently engaging her between herself and the other two combatants when possible, never exposing herself to their guns for a second longer than necessary—unless she suddenly did, moments which were always too sudden and brief to take advantage of. The damn PCA VTOLs didn’t have the range CONTRAST did, leaving him as the fire support as she skirmished with the two choppers.

“I’m sure you’ve seen ALLMIND’s arena listings. They never show you your own rank or record, only how well you’ve done against the rest of the field. Were you ever curious about your own program in there?”

Marais thought it more likely the Reaper knew. Knew what silence did to a person, how it felt when an indomitable killer rendered themselves utterly faceless behind metal armor and stone cold silence. Trash talk only worked on inexperienced or hotheaded pilots, and while there were no shortage of either in the various mercenary networks, the Vespers were neither. Yet even Maeterlinck had admitted that the sheer absence behind Raven’s static-scratch emblem—no voice, no personality, no humanity—was uncanny.

“Do you know how many times I’ve run that program? I don’t. I lost count long before I could feel every move you made as you made them. No one else understands you the way I do, Raven. How could they?”

Marais didn’t expect his rambling to shake the merc. He didn’t even know whether she was listening, or if she could understand him if she was. He kept talking because if he didn’t he was liable to crack. The more he spoke, the more he started to believe he wasn’t going to die here. The more he believed, the steadier his hands and the more alert his mind.

“So believe when I promise you: I’m going to kill you, merc. Today, the Vespers’ Reaper dies!”

An empty boast. The chain-gun equipped PCA VTOL hit the ice in a fireball, the ash-laden surface proving hard enough to withstand the blow. REASON redoubled its pursuit of CONTRAST, now suffering harassment from only half the air assets.

Another laser rifle shot landed, this one scoring a line across the flank of the Elcano core’s wedge. The Reaper’s attempt to close was a double-edged sword, exposing her to more of CONTRAST’s fire as she sought to bring her close-ranged weapons to bear. Except for dodging his shots, she didn’t even attempt to engage him, none of her weapons suitable for the 300 meter range he fought hard to maintain.

“That’s one, mercenary. How much more do you have left to give?” Marais was too far out to get a good sense of how much damage his team was landing, but he knew the Reaper hadn’t made it this far unscathed. The number of guns a single VTOL had on it made incidental damage unavoidable, and he’d connected a few shots himself.

He didn’t see what happened to the second VTOL; it disappeared from sight behind the next pump station to bring its guns to bear, then crashed directly through the structure in an uncontrolled tailspin five seconds later. REASON blazed through the hole it tore in the superstructure seconds before the whole thing toppled over onto the VTOL’s wreckage, the blackened and scored red AC diving straight for the now unsupported CONTRAST.

“And that’s two. As expected of an S-rank mercenary. Come, let’s finish this.”

Marais let loose with his missiles, firing them as fast the launchers could cycle new ordinance into place. Cluster missiles scattered homing submunitions. Cruise missiles pursued doggedly. REASON cut its Assault thrust and dropped under the first wave of ordinance, resuming its pursuit in standard boost as it skated over the ice. The next set of missiles forced it to dodge left, then right as the cruise missiles closed in from the other side. A lucky bomblet struck a chunk of armor off the bright red Firmeza shoulder fin. The Reaper returned fire, 105mm machine gun rounds pinging harmlessly off CONTRAST’s hull from beyond the weapon’s maximum range, then threw her AC into Assault boost to close to effective range faster.

REASON kept coming. 200 meters. 150 meters. 100. The Reaper stowed her machine gun and lit her pulse blade—

The laser rifles in CONTRAST’s hand flared blue as the capacitors overcharged. Got you.

Marais dropped out of boost to dig his AC’s feet into the ice, disabled the recoil safeties, and discharged both laser rifles’ maximum charge simultaneously, knocking his ACS stability into the yellow from recoil alone. He knew how the Reaper fought, the way she would trade a hit for a kill. It wouldn’t work this time. Two simultaneous hits from his rifles’ maximum charge would tear the light Firmeza-pattern core apart.

REASON vanished.

For a split second, Marais thought the enemy AC had managed to teleport. The truth was almost harder to believe. REASON had dodged down while already at ground level, dropping supine and coasting on its rear thrusters with its back mere centimeters off the ice. No ACS in the world would let you do something like that. Marais was fairly certain ACS couldn’t do things like that; those thrusters were never meant to work IGE the way the legs’ were. The turbulence would be insane.

And yet onward REASON came, impossibly balanced like a skater on a blade of thruster exhaust for the half-second it took to close the final gap, feet forward like an athlete performing a slide tackle—no, there was no ‘like’ about it. The Reaper took CONTRAST’s legs out at the knees, kicking both feet forward to send the medium AC straight into emergency ACS lockout while the thrusters kept it airborne long enough to get its feet back under it. REASON used the reaction force to flip itself back upright like a pop-up toy; momentum carried it past to deliver two quick pulse-blade strikes to CONTRAST’s unprotected back as the latter regained its footing, its ACS still locked.

Marais experienced a split second of abject terror as his mind somehow correctly identified the sound of an 800mm grenade cannon barrel making physical contact with his weakened rear armor, and then the entire core of his AC ceased to exist. A hole the width of the core itself blew through the part, extending upwards enough to leave nothing of CONTRAST’s upper deck or head; the weight of the arms, now linked to the legs only by an outer layer of core-component armor unsupported by interior structure, bent and twisted the connecting metal apart like soft plastic.

The 800mm shell casing hit the ice seconds later as the weapon cycled. No one announced the Reaper’s victory; her Operator was busy elsewhere.

Chapter Text

Breathing hurt.

Ziyi blinked half-focused eyes at the screens hanging overhead. She’d fallen badly—her fucking AC had fallen over, there was only ‘badly’—and from the horrible knife-sharp pain in her side, she’d broken a rib or two on the way down. Her left wrist was either sprained or broken as well, and her shoulder on that side hurt like it had been halfway to dislocated before the day decided against sucking any harder. The mouth-guard she never wore wasn’t in place to stop the jolt from cracking a tooth, and there was blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten her tongue. The hood of her flight suit had not served her nearly as well as a helmet would have.

She was also, for some reason, still alive. She’d been dazed and unresponsive for perhaps five to ten seconds—not long enough that she needed to worry about dying of a brain injury in the next ten minutes, but long enough that the LCs should have had no issue delivering a coup de grâce. Instead, they were ignoring her completely, firing upwards at something deeper into the city before falling back to avoid a trio of star-bright plasma warheads.

YUE YU’s camera feeds went dark as a shadow descended to crouch over the fallen AC like a tiger protecting its cub. Deep, desaturated blue armor edged with bronze accents, narrow speed-optimized legs leading up to an unremarkable mass-market core. The comm cracked to life, an unencrypted local-area broadcast:

“Arquebus lapdogs / hounds leashed to the yoke of greed! / Harm not my comrade!”

“Roku…?” Ziyi mumbled, half-sure she was hallucinating. The flares! He must have seen the powder flares!

SHINOBI gave the enemy no time to regroup. The plasma whip on its left arm snapped forward to strike the winged LC in the chest, tearing a rent in the armor and putting it on the defensive, then whirled back to its holster before snapping left to right across the battlefield between the three of them and the rest of the LC squad, scattering bomblets in its wake. The other LCs boosted backwards to avoid the bomblets and the following volley of plasma missiles Rokumonsen added to the wall of fire, giving SHINOBI the perfect opportunity kick the winged LC’s shield aside and discharge its mid-weight Haldeman shotgun directly into the off-balance unit’s damaged torso. One of the pellets found its way through the weakened armor, and a starburst of blue fire fountained from the LC’s back as its fusion generator vented catastrophically.

“Snow and shells alike / tumble down from the heavens / to inter the dead.”

Things became very confused after that.

Rokumonsen’s SHINOBI was no battered old first-generation rust-bucket like YUE YU or BURN PICKAXE or even Father Dolmayan’s own ASTŁIK; it was a fully modern armored core specialized for skirmishing, hit-and-run strikes, and assassination, faster in short bursts than even LCs. The battle quickly moved away from the fallen YUE YU, leaving Ziyi free to try to get the broken and bleeding machine back on its feet—or failing that, to bail out of the hatch and try her luck in the city.

Like hell. She wouldn’t last one minute on foot with hostile forces still in the area.

Ziyi hammered the ACS RESET switch; her reward was an excruciating jolt to the ribs as YUE YU began trying to climb back to its feet. Ziyi’s control inputs weren’t fine enough to let her assist the process, so she was little more than a passenger as the automated systems tried to figure out how to make her core pick itself back up.

She wouldn’t have been able to do much regardless. She was too busy watching Rokumonsen fight for both of their lives. He moved like smoke, stepping between bullets and grenades like a dancer reciting choreography. Every shot, be they lasers or grenades or missiles or plain old kinetic rounds, SHINOBI flowed past and through.

And yet Rokumonsen’s attacks were equally stymied. The squad leader had underestimated him; the men still standing would not. Every missile he shot, they dodged aside. Every burst from his Ransetsu-AR met a shield. If he attempted to bring the Haldeman shotgun to bear, the heavy weapon LCs would force him to yield ground. If he sought to close for his whip, the snipers forced him back.

“Perfectly opposed / two forces make no headway / the world in balance.”

YUE YU continued to struggle. It had landed at an angle, half-crushing an old single-story building beneath it, which confused the primitive systems built and tested to work on flat, even ground. Its movements slowly ground the rubble beneath it to dust, gradually approaching the limited conditions in which the self-righting routine could effectively function, but each motion sent another knife of pain through Ziyi’s ribs, and she spat blood from her bitten tongue.

The battle raged on. Shards of rock-hard ash-ice kicked up by weapon impacts marred SHINOBI’s hull. Stray arcs of plasma charred the LCs’ armor. Yet slowly, inevitably, the Arquebus pilots gave ground. The fight moved from the edges of the park into the streets around it, the wide lanes flooded in the years since the city had fallen with runoff too polluted to freeze. SHINOBI’s whip dominated the battlefield, denying large swathes of territory with its reach and bomblets. The LCs’ confidence began to falter.

“Hark, honorless currs! / Your mettle is found wanting! / Stand and face your end!”

The battle turned once more. Another PCA unit, a type Ziyi had never seen before—YUE YU’s Fire Control System helpfully identified it as PCA Heavy Cavalry, the compliment to the lighter units who had chased her here—announced its presence with a double volley of missiles and two quick blasts from its laser rifle as it crested the western skyline, forcing SHINOBI to abandon its advance and focus on evasion once more. Two more sniper shots from the LC detachment as the HC bore down prompted Rokumonsen to change his strategy; he dived into close combat with the approaching HC instead, whip and shotgun ready. Any shots from the lighter units into the melee were like as not to hit their own.

“The wages of sin.” Rokumonsen’s shotgun fired twice, both shells scattering pellets harmlessly across the HC’s massive tower-pattern pulse shield. “The blood of the innocent.” The whip wound up to sneak through from the side. “They must be–”

The shield Rokumonsen had forced the HC to hide behind changed from liability to weapon in an instant. The heavy’s back thrusters went to full Assault configuration, and the pulse shield slammed into SHINOBI and stayed locked to the slowly ablating hull as it shoved the mercenary AC fifty meters backward. The pair crashed into one of the massive ten-story residential buildings running along the street next to the park, then all the way through it and out the other side. Chunks of reinforced concrete masonry the size of cars sloughed off their chassis like calving glaciers as the two machines carried on across a freeway intersection and into the next building along, leaving the shattered edifice to collapse behind them, its fall in apparent slow-motion from its superhuman scale.

“Hideo!” Ziyi screamed, yanking at YUE YU’s locked and unresponsive controls. Her AC had just about gotten one arm solidly under itself, for all the good it did either of them.

The HC slammed its shield forward twice more, each blow further warping and pitting SHINOBI’s armor and embedding the unresponsive machine deeper and deeper into the building. Only after it became clear its target was no longer moving did the HC boost backward and take aim with its rifle at the enemy’s core, charging the capacitors to full to blow clear through the armor and kill the pilot in one shot.

Ziyi resisted the urge to close her eyes, determined not to look away. It was the only thing she could do for the man she’d found years ago, cold and hungry in the ruins of Arna Grada several hundred kilometers south.

“I gave you a single food tin, Roku,” Ziyi had once said, long before Dunham or Flatwell reckoned her old enough to fight. “Haven’t you paid that debt back by now?”

“You gave me my life, Ziyi-tan,” Roku had replied, fondly ruffling her hair. “So long as I have that, my debt remains.”

Ziyi kept her eyes wide, right hand making its way over her heart in salute.

You old fool, Hideo. You damned, damned fool.

The laser rifle fired, blowing a molten hole angled up through the building to exit through the roof. The shot missed SHINOBI entirely.

What–?

“You idiots are too damn young to die!” Index Dunham roared as he put both of BURN PICKAXE’s feet into a flying dive-kick straight from Assault thrust, the modified ACS misidentifying the approaching obstruction as a navigable surface. The HC barely got its shield up in time to catch the armored core’s weight, only for the pulse-field to gutter out—the pilot had kept it fully energized and sighted past it with the rifle rather than letting it cool. The physical shield behind it, not designed to bear even a quarter of the force of an AC’s kick, broke apart like thin ice underfoot.

BURN PICKAXE rode the other unit into the dirt, feet planted firmly on its chest; the moment they hit the ice, Dunham fired the Little Gem bazooka into the HC’s undefended torso at point blank, then followed up by jamming his heavy Ransetsu-RF rifle into the resulting divot and discharging it at full burst with muzzle pressed to hull. The unit jerked once before lying still, all its lights winking out.

Holy shit.

“Ziyi!” Dunham yelled. “Get that damned babysitter of yours out of here! You’re not dying today, either of you!”

Ziyi realized quite suddenly that YUE YU was back on its feet and threw her core forward while Dunham drew the shocked and over-cautious LCs away from the wreck. It was all for naught; pulling up to SHINOBI’s resting place made it clear she couldn’t help. Rokumonsen’s core was dark and unresponsive; its pilot was unconscious or dead, and the generator had either performed an emergency shut-down or failed outright. The pilot access hatch would still operate, but it was in the rear, covered by the building SHINOBI was now caught in.

Rokumonsen himself could have used his AC to pull another unit out of the wall, but Ziyi wasn’t augmented. Her AC was a weapon of war and little else, without the fine control to grip objects not placed in its hands from the safety of a maintenance bay—and even if it wasn’t, she could clearly see that the metal frame of the building had warped and entangled itself with the twisted wreckage of SHINOBI’s rear thrusters. The AC was stuck fast.

“Ziyi–!”

“I’m trying!” Ziyi yelled. “I can’t—I can’t get him out!”

“Well figure something out!”

“I can’t!” she sobbed. “Roku’s dying or dead and I can’t do anything!” She took her hands off the control sticks to clutch her head and screamed in frustration, hot tears spilling down her bruised and bloody face. Error warnings spilled out across the screens in front of her, flashing red messages suddenly washed away as YUE YU flickered between combat and standby modes like a dying lightbulb. A strangeness invaded the cockpit, that red-light scent of the old Coral mines Dunham had once shown her tingling at the edge of her awareness.

YUE YU moved. It dropped its Etsujin, thrust its hands forward, and began pulling and prying at the warped fore armor of SHINOBI’s core. Ziyi, uncomprehending, grabbed the straining, apparently-possessed control armatures and added her efforts to her core’s as though her exertion would transmit through the digital controls and assist YUE YU’s own limbs. Her wrist throbbed and her shoulder burned. Metal strained, horrible groaning sounds of material fatigue reverberating through the frame. Hydraulic lines leaked fluid like blood from torn flesh. A piston in YUE YU’s right forearm sheered off completely, the impulse reverberating through the metal to send yet another knife of white-hot pain through Ziyi’s ribs. She whited out for half a second—and then SHINOBI’s front armor finally buckled and failed, peeling apart beneath YUE YU’s fingers to reveal the dented but intact pilot capsule.

YUE YU didn’t stop there; it reached in with both hands, one only half functional, to rip Rokumonsen’s capsule out of the wreck like a hunter tearing the heart from his prey, metal squealing and rivets snapping off in a cascade of angry pops. Ziyi watched in confused awe as YUE YU stepped back and clutched the badly damaged capsule to its chest like an infant with its lamed right hand while bending down to retrieve its Etsujin with the other. The warning messages returned, then cleared. YUE YU reentered combat mode. Her left control stick locked up and then returned to normal function.

What the fuck was that.

“Go!” Dunham yelled. “Go, damn it!”

Ziyi didn’t hesitate. She slammed YUE YU into boost mode and took off down a highway in the opposite direction of Dunham and the circling LCs as fast as the limping core could move. “I’ve got him! Let’s go!”

“Don’t be daft, girl! With six LCs on our tail?”

Ziyi craned herself around to yell backwards at BURN PICKAXE’s image on the wrap-around screen, heedless of the pain in her ribs. “No! Dunham! Run, damn you!”

“You’re the next generation of the RLF, Ziyi!” Dunham yelled back, his AC spinning in place as both weapons spat fire in opposite directions at the skittish LCs circling him. “Get yourselves to safety! I’ll keep these bastards busy for as long as—”

The sound that followed was so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, that it popped Ziyi’s ears through the pressure vessel of her pilot capsule. YUE YU’s audio pickups overloaded and whited out, silencing the entire world for the second and half before the software cleared the error.

A streak of white-orange light, air superheated to fluorescence by compressive forces, angled in from over the horizon to the west. It pierced clean through a building at the edge of the city, boring a gaping hole five meters wide with its passing, to rest its tip in the remnants of BURN PICKAXE. The AC’s legs still stood, braced to respond to an attack from any direction; everything above them was simply gone, the railgun slug erasing every trace of Ziyi’s comrade, mentor, and adoptive father in all but name.

“No…” Ziyi whispered. One second, the RLF veteran had been alive and glorious, holding his own against a force no less than five times his equal. The next, nothing of him remained.

The LCs turned to her and resumed the chase. She’d not been able to outpace them with a fresh core; the catastrophic damage to YUE YU’s chassis had taken its max speed down by more than a third. She made it barely a kilometer farther before giving it up as a lost cause and turning back to raise the pitifully-insufficient-for-the-task Etsujin in one last show of defiance, tears streaming down her face at having failed her uncle, her friend, and herself.

The Butcher dropped out of the sky like a meteor, core expansion already expressed. The Coral-red shockwave of her Assault Armor shattered the LC formation like a gunshot did silence, sending the sniper units tumbling to the ground as wrecks and the rest into hard ACS lock. A shot from the heavy shotgun in her right hand gutted one of the heavy-weapon units; a kick sent one of the shield-bearers tumbling into the other heavy-weapon LC, where a single shot from her 800mm cannon slaughtered both. The final shield-bearer lost its shield to one strike of her pulse-blade and its life to the second.

Ziyi barely had time to notice the accumulated battle damage on the charred red AC before it jumped straight up, extra-jointed legs propelling it thrice its own height into the air before it lit its boosters in Assault configuration and left as fast as it came. She sat there stunned, the tremors in her hands faithfully reproduced in the Etsujin shakily pointed at the wreckage of her would-be murderers.

Not one of them had even gotten a shot off.

Chapter Text

Excerpt of an intercepted group communication between six members of the Interstellar Worker’s Initiative, a known anti-social organization, and the terrorist known as ‘Cherry Sakura’ in late 247, approximately 2 years before the latter’s death in the Galileo City Bombing of 249.

<the.ini.heroALIVE> Why do we care about the FWS military? Mitsubishi CorpSec are beating striking workers to death in the streets while I've never even SEEN a military uniform outside holos. Far as I can tell they don't do shit.

<cherry-blossom-shrapnel> The thing you need to understand about the Federated Worlds is that every corp battlefield is a BETRAY / DON'T BETRAY game theory decision in regard to the rules of war. Take the ban on scorched earth tactics. If neither side scorches, the net gain and loss across both sides stays zero. Lose today, win tomorrow, all evens out. But if your enemy scorches, your gains will be zero even if you "win", so you'll end up behind. So both sides have to scorch. And so on for targeting infrastructure etc.

<cherry-blossom-shrapnel> So everyone wants their enemies to follow the rules, but no one trusts each other worth a damn. Classic iterated prisoners dilemma, yeah? So they went and created a referee who got the biggest guns. The military's whole job is to act as THE disincentive to BETRAY. You BETRAY, maybe you win, maybe you lose, but Sol fines its pound of flesh out of you and you still lose. Don't pay up? Get bombed. Tada! Everything stays nice and polite.

<cherry-blossom-shrapnel> Catch is, the minute the military can't follow through on that threat, the whole thing flies apart at the seams. The death-knell of the Fed and their pretty little intercorp wars is the military coming to lay down the law and a corp shooting back. Doesn't even matter if they win. If a corp thinks they can resist the Fed, they're gonna BETRAY. World's gonna burn. Sit back and smell the ashes, and I'll see you on the other side.

<dead_SET98> So your solution to workers not owning any of their own labor is to BURN DOWN ALL FACTORIES?!?!

<cherry-blossom-shrapnel> I've been at it for 20 years.

Archivist’s Note: T98/H98 and their alphanumeric equivalences TIH/898 reference the Pacification of Titan in 98 UE (“Titan’s Hammer”) and are common signifiers of allegiance to anti-social/anti-civil movements. Similarly, appending ALIVE to one’s alias references a pervasive conspiracy theory that the majority of Titan’s population survived the riots leading up to the Pacification.

Lt. Wissam blinked as the last light of day broke into the dark and silent HC cockpit. The frame had cushioned him admirably on the way down, and the emergency power had kept life support humming along in the dark even after the fusion core scrammed. Aside from what were sure to be an impressive set of bruises, the damage he'd taken was all to his pride.

He still had a bone to pick with whichever tech had misconfigured his ACS, for all Wissam hadn't spotted the problem during final checks either. The lockout tolerance had been set so high it hadn't kicked in until the unit had already tipped too far to recover! Inexperience with the equipment shining through on both their parts, to disastrous results. Damned rear-echelon motherfuckers rushing untested units into the field. The results were as dire as they were predictable.

"Farzin?" Wissam asked the Arquebus Salvage and Rescue personnel as they dragged him out of the disabled cav unit.

"Dead," one man said, his eyes equally so.

"Damn it." Wissam had been afraid of that: the High-Mobility LC had suffered the kind of uncontrolled reactor vent only very lucky pilots walked away from. 3-7 had been a professional pain in the ass, but he'd been good at his job when the chips were down; replacing him would be hard.

"Where's Kimura?" Wissam asked. He'd half-expected to find his second hovering over the S&R team like a mother hen.

"Also dead."

Wissam did a double-take. "What? How?" Kimura was skilled, efficient, and above all, careful. She wouldn't have been fooled by the mercenary's tricks or made a sloppy mistake in the face of a terrorist's brute-force blitz.

"Reaper," the man said morosely.

Wissam laid back on the stretcher as the team wheeled him into the medevac chopper. All he could do was vent his frustrations at the ceiling, so he did.

"Fuck."

V.III Malthus was so, so fired. Out of a railgun. Into the sun.

No, that would be quick. O’Keeffe was going to flay her alive.

The Reaper had torn the standing Belius garrison apart. That wasn't her fault, even if it had immediately become her problem. The bulk of her forces had arrived too late to even pick up the pieces—again, not her fault, even if it meant that a force that was supposed to triple the fighting strength of the Belius garrison barely broke even with its previous strength after the materiel losses of the last 24 hours.

And there was the rub.

Depot 20 was a complete loss, but she'd conceded that one at the start. The terrorist at Depot 06 appeared to have burned, then pillaged, so by the time the cavalry got there it was nothing but a ruin; that hurt both emotionally and strategically. Finally, the desperate thrust at Depot 13 had been, at best, a draw. The local forces had suffered more than 100% casualties pushing through one of the guerrilla's few augmented pilots, but they'd driven him off and retaken the depot with its stores intact. The logistics situation was dire, but thanks to Depot 13, it would hold long enough for Arquebus to unfuck the situation.

All it cost was everything.

The central garrison was completely gutted of both men and machines. 3rd Squad had been cut in half—literally, in at least one case. Those were O’Keeffe's men, or as good as; he'd take that out of her hide for sure. As for raw materiel, she'd lost the entire cavalry detachment, eight of the best ground assets she'd been given from the PCA stores; that was another pound of flesh. She'd also lost two of the three PCA heavy VTOLs and V.IV himself, who'd followed a stupid order she gave in haste because he was so fucking used to taking orders that it didn't even occur to him they were the same bloody rank! He had the authority to countermand a stupid, suicidal order and he'd fucking followed it to his death instead!

Why?!

She needed a plan. She needed to figure out a way to fix her fuck-up before O’Keeffe came calling because if she had nothing to show but her failures it would be her head. Death would be too merciful. She'd seen the forms listing the materials going out to the Arquebus Intensive Augmentation Research Facility, and the ones listing the 'materials' coming out.

She'd spent the next ten minutes being sick into a toilet. They were terrorists and criminals, sure, but… fucking hell. What was even the point?

At least she knew what she had to look forward to. Hallelujah.

She still had eight teams of Subject Guard muscle tracers to reinforce critical positions. She had one surviving heavy VTOL for fast response against anything that wasn't the Reaper, who could kill two of the things at once. She had a warship that was equally useless again the Reaper, who had killed two of them at the same time, too. She had about half the munitions the theatre was supposed to have, thanks to brazen terrorist sabotage. A Vesper would be able to work with that.

Malthus was a fraud. A fake. A supply clerk in wolf's clothing. She couldn't work with shit.

Her comm terminal beeped. O’Keeffe was calling. She was out of time.

Well, nothing for it. She'd own up to her mistakes, lay out every twist and turn of the last twelve hours, and she'd make sure her service pistol had one in the chamber.

She knew enough about it to hurt herself on purpose if the guards came calling.

Flatwell sat alone in his office beneath the Gallia Dam complex, his chair pushed back from his desk until it hit the wall to let him lean forward and rest his head between his legs, and his normally-open door shut tight against the determined banging of whoever thought it necessary to disturb him. He would be strong for the Front tomorrow; today, he would be weak for himself.

The problem with being the man with the plan was when the plan went wrong, there was no one else to blame—and this plan had gone very wrong indeed.

Objectively, the mission was a complete success. White and Green Squads had put the stores to the torch, and even Blue, facing the sum total of all Arquebus reinforcements in the region, managed to extract their full convoy with only four deaths.

All it cost was everything.

Arquebus reinforcements from the western theatre had arrived at the worst time. Their forces had been moving fast enough and high enough that the weather radar picked them out like bright lights. Two groups in quick succession: a faster one headed for his own forces, and a slower one headed for Raven. Light and heavy cavalry respectively, if he had to guess, which he had.

The reports from the returning forces that had tricked in over the next hour and a half had filled in the rest of the picture. Little Ziyi had ordered Green Squad to leave her behind to repel what she’d believed were light reinforcements; what she’d actually found had her sending up red distress flares before vanishing into the fog of war. Index Dunham, damned fool that he was, had doubled back from exfiltration to try to rescue her and was now almost certainly just as dead.

A straggler from Green Squad who’d stuck around for the initial fight, whose MT had made it into one of their northern outposts carrying a badly injured, half-crushed scout only thirty minutes earlier, had finally reported the facts of it: at least six PCA light cavalry units descended on the depot before Ziyi had bid him pop flares and flee, even one of which was a threat to her ancient Basho-pattern YUE YU.

Rokumonsen wasn’t answering his calls. Flatwell wondered if rumors of Ziyi’s death had reached him already, and if the man would ever forgive Flatwell for the day’s mistakes. If not, the operation had cost the RLF three pilots instead of two. Strategically, his was a loss as great or greater than the others’; personally, it was by far the least of them. Flatwell had to admit a certain fondness for the eccentric merc, and would hold no ill will towards the man for parting ways over the loss of the one tying him to their cause, sworn oaths or no.

Flatwell had known the operation would cost lives. He had been prepared for casualties in the low tens and twenties. Losing a grand total of seven men for what the RLF had accomplished today was nothing short of outstanding. Wasn’t that enough?

But it hurt. It hurt so much, to learn the girl he had raised like a daughter for twenty years had died serving her people. To learn that the first man to raise a fist in defense of Rubicon, the man who’d treated first Flatwell and then Ziyi like his own children in their respective youths, had followed her.

It hurt so much.

There were so many things he could have done differently. He could have held Black Squad and Rokumonsen in reserve longer rather than dismissing them after Raven pulverized the garrison. He could have sent more scouts to relay signals in the event Arquebus established skipwave interdiction rather than leave their communications vulnerable to a single point of weather-induced failure. He could have recognized that the weakness he was trying to exploit was one the enemy themselves were well aware of and planned around any untimely response.

Tomorrow, he would have to stand up in front of the rest of the Liberation Front and declare the mission a resounding success. He would commend the survivors and eulogize the fallen, boast of the victory they had gained and the loss Arquebus had suffered. And then he would have to do it all over again. Identify a target, pick the team, commend the survivors and eulogize the fallen. Plan. Choose. Commend the survivors and eulogize the fallen.

Commend the survivors and eulogize the fallen.

Commend the survivors and eulogize the fallen.

Tomorrow, the mission would be a great success. Today, it just hurt.

Flatwell didn’t get close to people anymore, not since he’d returned from Sol. Sam and Ewell had been his last, strongest connections, people he’d thought safe from the horrors of the Liberation Front’s war against the PCA. He had thought wrong, and then he had forged their son into a weapon of vengeance as one last act to defile their memory.

Flatwell didn’t get close to people… and then he’d gone and adopted a baby girl in all but name, passing her between himself and Dunham as their duties allowed. What the devil had he expected to happen, doing something like that?

The commander of the RLF couldn’t afford sentimentality. The cause couldn’t afford a commander reluctant to expose the best people for a job to its dangers. Well, he had certainly done that today.

At times like this, Flatwell envied Dolmayan. The man was free with his tears, weeping openly for both joy and sorrow. Flatwell kept the tears locked inside and drowned in them.

The banging at the door redoubled, whichever staff or messenger had sought him out doing their best to defeat the soundproofing that kept his secrets secure, and Flatwell lost hope that whatever was going on out there would resolve itself without him. He did not need to put on a mask; his face had never wavered from the steady stare the RLF command staff knew well. Flatwell stood up, tucked the chair into his desk, then crossed the room, turned the latch, and opened the door with all the grace and composure expected of him, wondering what fresh problem was now landing in his lap.

“Flatwell, sir!” a lad much like any other soon to die in the horrible machine of Rubicon’s war called out, saluting as he did. “We’ve spotted an AC approaching the Dam! It’s YUE YU!”

The name sent a jolt through Flatwell that damn near stopped his heart. “It’s what?”

“YUE YU! It should be just about at the gates—”

Flatwell ran. He raced through the base, sending other personnel ducking and diving out of his path, and began taking the stairs up two at the time. He climbed twelve flights faster than he’d known his old knees could take him and charged out the old roof access door to the wide avenue on top of the dam itself. The cold hit him like an electric shock—he’d forgotten to grab a coat—but it was nothing compared to the sight of YUE YU barely holding together as it limped and shambled across the ice below. It still had Dunham’s old Etsujin in one hand; the other seemed to be clasped to its chest, possibly stuck there from damage to the actuators. Barely a square centimeter of paint or a kilogram of armor remained, but it was alive. Ziyi was alive.

One of the guards had to physically drag Flatwell back inside before he developed hypothermia.

Chapter Text

The woman using the alias Kate Markson had watched through digital eyes more than a thousand kilometers away as the two ACs boarded the atmospheric rapid-transit shuttle. Her drone had carried a FX-K91 laser burst rifle; not enough to penetrate mil-spec armor at this range, but more than enough to poke holes in the shuttle. Sadly, it wouldn’t help. The drone would have needed to kill three of the shuttle’s four engines to bring it down nearby, and do more damage than that to force a crash with better than even odds of killing the passengers. The first shot would have been easy; the next, after the shuttle began fleeing in earnest, would have been beyond the capabilities of the drone’s FCS. If she’d dedicated more than one drone to observation, maybe… but it had been too late, so she’d let them go.

She’d identified C4-621 as a threat from the moment their AC punched into the Grid from orbit, but she’d only started trying to kill it after it had torn through the drones she’d left to cover her tracks in one of BAWS’ Armories. She’d failed three times. An ambush in the Grid with a set of drones failed when the two dueling pilots she’d interrupted banded together to wipe out her units. Another ambush with more elite units while it had been poking around the Institute’s old colony ship had likewise failed; they’d been operating autonomously at the time, so she didn’t have the records of that fight. She’d even resorted to hiring the other pilot from the Grid incident, only for the idiot to subcontract to someone incapable of the job.

Grave mistakes. She’d been too confident in her drones and too concerned with minimizing their exposure to detection to send overwhelming force. She regretted that now. Another setback for Arquebus. Another timetable to revise for her superiors. She still held some faint hope that once Arquebus finally got their act together and began exporting Coral, her work would be done. That day had just moved ever so slightly farther away yet again.

She paged through the camera feeds from drone after drone, the video transmitted directly to her implants. Arquebus Belius was in full recovery mode. Balam were slowly but surely shipping their personnel and materiel off-world; it’d be at least another week, likely more, before they fully withdrew. An asshole of a freelancer was doing his best to make a quick buck in the stand-off between the two corps across the Ice Fields, but he wasn’t more than annoyance; if that changed, her drones would remove him.

Arquebus themselves were still struggling to secure a foothold in the ancient, sunken city; the old automated defenses hadn’t stayed down after C4-621 had cleared its path in and out of the ruins. The RLF were celebrating their latest, irrelevant victory over a corp that was only paying half attention to their continent. It might be easier on Arquebus if they gave up on Belius entirely and just bought materials from BAWS and their on-planet suppliers… who her investigation had revealed to be the RLF, which explained where the insurgents got the bulk of their funding from. What an irony it would be if Arquebus had to pay the RLF for the privilege of operating on Rubicon. One of the Big Nine paying rent to decivilized primitives! The idea could have made her laugh if it weren’t a problem for her personally.

She let the drones returned to their automated work and began redrafting estimates for Arquebus’s Coral extraction efforts in the workspace interface afforded by her implants: one estimate assuming a full commitment to the Belius Theatre, one assuming a total withdrawal, and one assuming a worst-case combination of the former’s resource expenditure with the latter’s results. All three would go into the queue for upload the next time the satellite passed overhead. She had a job to do.

She always had a job to do. Mission creep. Year after year after year.

Her original mission: Find Coral, if there is Coral to be found.

A long, slow process, tugging drug warlords and terrorist sympathizers and corporate contractors to and fro across the surface to hide her investigations beneath their rubble. It had taken her three whole years to amass proof enough that none at HQ could fault her conclusions; most of another to arrange the pieces to fall into place for her ‘signal flare’. Handouts disguised as unguarded assets, weaknesses carefully cultivated in the security of the Mercenary Support System, a fleeting opportunity for off-world support the RLF had seized with both hands. One cat’s-paw had called down another—Asset Two, a mercenary strike team who would have been famous for their effectiveness if they did not cover their tracks almost as well—onto the heads of their orbital oppressors. The beacon had been lit.

That last had not gone entirely to plan. The damn anarchists had scrambled the PCA’s control over Asset Two while they were up there, which wouldn’t have inconvenienced her except that they’d done so by locking everyone out. The strings to the puppet had been cut clean through, leaving ‘ALLMIND®’ to shamble obliviously along doing the same automated tasks it had done for the last half-century or so. Still, losing access the MSS shouldn’t have mattered to her; she had no more work to do except wait for the details of her extraction to come down during the next communications window.

Imagine her great frustration when she had received new orders instead.

New mission: Ensure corporate surveyors locate the Coral deposit.

Now she needed to lead the corporate surveyors to the Coral when they arrived, which meant finding the Coral itself instead of mere evidence of it. She didn’t have the resources for that, as the instruments involved were too specialized, so she had to spend another whole year waiting for whichever conglomerates decided to bite at poisoned bait. The FWS still had laws banning anything and everything to do with Coral and its uses, passed in open panic in the weeks and months after the Fires. Only those in the Big Nine could hope to get away with flouting those bans so openly.

In the end, only two of those nine took the risk, and exactly the ones she would have expected. Balam’s participation was obvious even in foresight; they were new to the biggest of big league corporate power games and still far too reckless in their approach even forty years on. Arquebus was equally unsurprising, given their endless pursuit of newer, shinier technology; the fact that Melinite had blocked their play for Coral research in favor of funding a whole new venture in the Rubicon Research Institute likely still smarted, for all it had saved them from ruin.

She spent most of the next three years waiting for the prospecting corporations to get off their asses and start looking for the damn Coral after making themselves at home and establishing supply and manufacturing lines. Her ability to contribute to the search was, frankly, minimal. The PCA Watchpoints confirmed that there was Coral deep below the surface, but a few shallow Wells were not the windfall her superiors wished the corporations to find. The Coral flow the Watchpoints monitored was still and silent, offering no leads.

After four years in which she did little but steal worthless historical data from the PCA and grow ever more frustrated at the lack of progress, the corporations finally found a clue. They should have been able to follow the trail right to the heart of the new Coral deposit. Unfortunately—and perhaps, in some ineffable way, not coincidentally—the trail also led directly to the PCA’s absolute-maximum-security surface position, one so secret that no one knew it was there until the smoke cleared.

That there was ‘smoke’ to clear at all was because the PCA had reacted to the barest possibility of its discovery by deploying its entire fleet to exterminate the surveyors in blatant disregard for the visas and permits the PCA Home Office themselves had granted everyone involved. No doubt the local forces hoped for a quick ‘police action’ that would rout the offenders off-world before their legal departments could push the issue through the tangled red tap of the Federated courts, at which point the PCA would wring their hands and apologize for ‘overstepping their bounds’ while at the same leaving the forceful ejection of corporate interests from Rubicon a fait accompli.

New mission: Prevent the PCA from ejecting the corporations from Rubicon.

Obvious, HQ wanted her to make sure that didn’t happen. Obviously, she complied. She was good at her job, and she would do it, even if that job was to tilt what the PCA saw as an invincible position against them with only herself and a handful of drones. The hardest she could strike was feather-light, no matter how much she might wish it otherwise, but so strike she did: signal warfare, sabotage, even assassinations when she could manage it. Often, it appeared mere chance conspired against the PCA. Almost as often, RLF detachments caught too far from the safety of their warrens met unexpected and grisly ends at the hands of her drones, lest they interfere with the Corporate war effort.

Perhaps none of her actions mattered in the end. The results did. The tables of war turned. The PCA faltered. Their fleet failed. Their grand, ancient weapons fell to newfangled ingenuity and a brief moment of common cause between bitter enemies. What remained of the PCA forces pulled back to their last redoubt and dug in to await the end. She was no longer necessary. The mission was over.

New mission: Bring a rapid end to the intercorporate conflict in favor of whichever was better prepared to extract Coral.

The choice was obvious: Arquebus had ambition and an entire high-end research and development team on-planet already, while Balam had all the long-term planning and project management skills of prison-yard toughs. She’d seen the writing on the wall when the previous mission had come down, had already tilted the field in Arquebus’s favor as the war drew to a close. The rest of the mission was almost easy. Balam as an organization had more scrappiness than sense by an order of magnitude. All she needed to do was warn Arquebus off by ensuring they found a few critical documents so they would let Balam break themselves on the rocks of NEPENTHES, and that was exactly what happened. Bad intel to both sides forced a decisive battle neither wanted, and a little metaphorical hatchet-work was all it took before what was left of Balam’s planetside assets curled into the fetal position and begged for mercy.

New mission: Observe Arquebus efforts to exploit Coral deposits and report on estimated delivery timelines.

So here she was, observing Arquebus efforts to exploit Coral deposits and reporting on estimated delivery timelines.

She was so, so, so fucking tired of mission creep.

One might think HQ would grant her additional assets, considering that they saw no issue with placing new objective after objective on her plate. New drone designs had trickled down the uplink from time to time, as the minifab had been suitably future-proofed for them, but not a single unit of personnel nor materiel would risk the now-frenzied PCA Cordon in the wake of the attack, nor drawing Arquebus’s attention even now. On the contrary, she now had fewer assets than when she had arrived because Asset One had gotten himself killed over some idiotic personal issue that had no business affecting his missions less than six months prior.

Asset One, to her frustration, had a vendetta against the former mercenary known as Blackguard, and he’d twice before diverted from a mission to work it out on the man’s proxies. Such thing were inconveniently common among pilots, even as bad for business and life expectancy as they were. The third time pursuing his grudge had not been the charm for him; the target of his vengeance had found a hound capable of killing him, and kill him they had, denying her her single greatest tool for actually doing anything beyond sneaking around.

In hindsight, Asset One had been growing steadily less reliable for years. He’d gotten used to the generous leash the deniable communications through Asset Zero afforded him and had chafed under the direct control she’d had to extend after she’d been locked out of its backdoors. It was bad enough that she’d needed to sortie in her own AC to clean up his sloppy work more than once since the attack on the PCA Closure Satellite, lapses that had risked revealing her and her mission. Had she complained, HQ might well have claimed she had failed to properly ‘manage his personality’ through the impersonal interface of her deniable connection. She would have wanted to respond that they were the ones who had judged it suitable for a task it had clearly not been, but rebuking HQ was an unwise risk, and so she had not complained in the first place.

It mattered little, in the end. All assets were, ultimately, disposable; she was fully aware she was no exception. HQ would not care that Asset One did not return from the mission so long as the mission itself was successful… but the fact that she’d passed every hurdle in her way was little comfort when it seemed there would always be another.

She wanted off this stupid, awful, miserable little post-apocalyptic ball of ice five years ago, and HQ had no plans to let her ever leave.

Chapter Text

THEN

It was supposed to be a simple job, a three-year security contract for a local corp on a dead rock out in the fringes. For the most part, it had been: simple, safe, and dead boring. The roving bandits didn’t have the firepower to challenge a mercenary security force nor the money to pay someone to risk such for them, and the local guerrillas weren’t stupid enough to shoot at the people who sold them their guns no matter how much the two might hate each other. No amount of time free to spend composing haikus on the ephemeral nature of man’s works was worth the most boring post Rokumonsen had suffered through in his middling-length career, and he didn’t even consider it before rejecting BAWS’ request that he take another tour.

It was only the next day that he learned BAWS had no intention of giving him a visa back through the cordon they’d brought him through on his way in. They and the PCA had been feuding over access rights to the planet since before the ash had cooled forty-some years ago, and BAWS had little interest in spending one of their few allotted visas moving a one-tour contractor back off-world. The fee the representative had quoted for the service eclipsed the entire value of his contract—and had earned the man a black eye and Rokumonsen a quick and unfriendly escort off BAWS company property.

Fine, he’d thought. He had a week’s worth of emergency rations he’d never had cause to use and SHINOBI, his faithful armored core. BAWS might be the only entity legally operating on Rubicon, but the rusting hulk of the mercenary support system wasn’t beholden to the PCA. Terrorists posted bounties on bandits and bandits posted bounties on terrorists and the sun rose in the east every morning. It’d be slim living, but unless something went horribly wrong, he’d be able to scrounge together the exit fee in a year or so and have enough left over to make it back to Sol without having to auction off SHINOBI, and then he’d never leave the system again.

Five days and roughly that many jobs later, Rokumonsen learned to his horror that there wasn’t a soul on Rubicon who would sell him a meal for any price he could name. The same stranglehold on transport that had trapped him there in the first place meant the PCA could allow through meals enough for each and every one of BAWS’ legal employees and not a soul more. Oh, surely there was a black market—he had never met a corporate operation clean enough that someone wasn’t embezzling inventory somewhere—but he hadn’t the slightest idea where to start, and few black marketeers lasted long by taking clients without an introduction. He went back to BAWS, bowing and scraping, only to find that they’d already replaced him, another freelance local—a first-generation relic with the kami of death drifting in his wake—serving for the month or two it’d take to bring the new hire in.

Down to his last meal, Rokumonsen wasted two days wandering the countryside like a ronin of old, as though some nonexistent local lord might take him into their service. Desperation drove him from SHINOBI’s cockpit into the ruined outskirts of a once-great city whose name he did not know, where he wasted the remainder of his strength digging through fallen buildings and moldering ruins for even a scrap of nourishment. He found none. He returned to SHINOBI the first night to sleep; as the sun passed its zenith on the second day, he realized his chilled and starving body could not retrace his steps before it gave out.

He took shelter in the lee of a toppled highway, drew his knees into his chest, and waited for the cold to claim him. Within half an hour, the chill began to seep through his cold-weather flight suit; within another, it no longer bothered him. He closed his eyes and listened to the voices of his ancestors calling to him, forced to use the common English because he had never had a chance to learn more than a few dozen words of his people’s old tongue. “Hey!” they said. “Hey, you! Mister! Aren’t you cold? Hey! Are you even still alive down there?”

That… did not sound like something one of Rokumonsen’s ancestors would say, for all the voice seemed to come from the sky above.

He opened his eyes and looked heavenward to see a head and shoulders leaning over the top of the ruined highway, one arm waving urgently to get his attention.

“Ah! Hold on!” the eidolon called, and then it disappeared from view, only the crunching of snow suggesting its continued existence beyond Rokumonen’s line of sight. He must have drifted off because the next thing he knew the figure was shaking him by one shoulder. “Hey! Mister! Are you all right?”

Up close, Rokumonsen realized the figure was smaller and younger than he’d known lived on this planet. They were perhaps 6 or 7 years of age by their height—11 to 13 as his people of old Earth’s Japan would have once reckoned it—which made them young enough that their voice, muffled as it was behind the lower collar of their heavy snowsuit, was not enough to identify them as a boy or a girl. Regardless, they were better prepared to brave the surface than he, dressed in a head-to-toe white snowsuit that left only the strip of skin behind their lightly-polarized snow-goggles visible.

“H-h-hungry,” Rokumonsen choked out.

“Oh!” his visitor exclaimed. “Hold on, I have… where did I…” They began rapidly tapping the exterior of their coat before finding the sought-after pocket and dragging out an old-fashioned self-heating food tin. “I was planning to eat lunch up on the old road, but… if you need it…”

It took more strength than Rokumonsen knew he had to merely hold a hand out for the offered food rather than to lunge forward and rip it from his rescuers grasp. The latter might have ruined everything because he ended up needing their help to operate the thin tab that triggered the heating element, then again to separate the lid from the rest of the tin and clasp his cold-numbed fingers around the spoon. He had no idea what he was eating—whatever it was, it tasted awful—and he didn’t care one bit. It was the best meal of his life.

Rokumonsen emerged from the ecstasy of his first bite to eat in more than two days to see his savior watching him with barely-disguised concern visible in their posture alone. “Thank you!” he exclaimed, ashamed of his poor manners; he tried to stand up to properly convey his thanks only for his legs to fail him and send him back into the snow. It seemed his body was intent on freezing to death despite the reprieve from starvation.

“Oh!” the child exclaimed in alarm. “Wait here! I mean, don’t worry! I’ll be back!”

Rokumonsen, with great effort, pulled himself back into a sitting position while they ran back out of sight; moments later, the sound of an electric motor sprang to life from behind the concrete rubble he had chosen as his shelter against the wind. The source came into view soon: some kind of single-person snow-adapted quad vehicle, its front steering tires replaced with sleds and the rear with a single wide, ridged belt hooked up to the transmission.

The child busied themselves withdrawing a package from the rear compartment of the vehicle. The work of moments revealed it as a compact rapid-assemble emergency tent, which they erected with the swiftness and surety of long practice Rokumonsen would not have expected from a child their age even in as harsh a place as this. In fact, they would spend the greater time and effort helping the stiff and half-frozen man half again their weight maneuver himself inside! The kid then dragged in a portable heater and zipped the flap closed from within around the cable running to the vehicle’s battery.

Only once the temperature in the cramped little tent had climbed above freezing did his savior remove their headwear, revealing the short-cropped messy hair and round (if slightly gaunt) face of a young girl. “If Uncle comes looking, I knew you were out here, all right?” she asked as feeling began to return to Rokumonsen’s fingers. “I’m not supposed to be out here, but I bet he’d forgive me if I told him I left to rescue someone!”

Rokumonsen suspected that any guardian of the sort of girl liable to steal a quad-bike for a joyride was not about to be fooled by said girl no matter how clever the latter thought they were, but he promised all the same. In truth, he was hopeful he would get the chance to meet her uncle, no matter how wroth the man might be at the circumstances. That Rokumonsen owed the girl his life, and her uncle equally so, was not in question, and honor demanded he see that debt repaid.

NOW

Rokumonsen had awoken only once since his recovery—briefly, at that—but had been encouragingly lucid for the duration, considering the injuries he had suffered. The prognosis was hopeful, the doctors said, but it was too early to say for sure. If he’d suffered neurological injuries—from the unusual damage of a pulse-field used in melee, the multiple impacts SHINOBI had suffered immediately afterward, or the sudden and brutal removal of the pilot capsule from the rest of the core and the resulting uncontrolled severing of the neural links between man and machine—the signs may simply not have shown up yet.

He did not seem so badly injured, lying there on the bed. He’d taken a beating, true, but his body had remained mostly intact. Aside from small bandages across his face and chest for the cuts and bruises he’d collected, he looked relatively unscathed.

Ziyi, clutching his left hand with both of hers, looked by far the worse of the two. Two bruised ribs—neither broken, thankfully—partial dislocation of the left shoulder, sprained wrist, bruised liver, a total of 44 stitches across six lacerations, a tooth pulled, and a nasty concussion. Add in the rest of the cuts and scrapes she’d accumulated during her short, desperate fight and she was more bandage than person. Yet she could walk—against doctors’ advice, but she could—while Rokumonsen, the man who had almost given everything for her, lay unmoving.

He should have died. They both should have died.

What had happened there, in YUE YU?

She’d overheard technicians gossiping about her battle, rumors pulled from the logs of her machine and what was left of SHINOBI’s COM. How she’d overridden YUE YU’s FCS software and switched the core’s input mode to some kind of direct input tracing with skills she didn’t possess stone-cold sober, never mind freshly concussed. Telling the doctor who’d checked up on her her side of the story had gotten her concussion upgraded from ‘mild’ all the way to ‘severe’.

But she knew what she’d seen, and what she’d seen had been far beyond her own ability to accomplish.

Dolmayan said the Coral had forsaken humanity. That it had seen their wickedness and despaired. And yet… that damned scent. Red light tingling at the back of her throat, a song humming beneath her fingers.

Synesthesia brought on by the concussion, the doctors had said. The concussion, at least, was obvious. The nausea, the dizziness, the difficulty focusing her eyes for more a handful of seconds. The gap between stimulus and sensation, thought and action; the way time kept slipping away from her if she didn’t mind it closely. One doctor told her she deserved as much for not wearing a pilot’s helmet, which was harsh, if not wrong; it was shocking she’d made it back to Gallia at all in the state she was in.

But as far as Ziyi was concerned, her concussion only made the truth of the matter more obvious. There was no way in hell she’d been capable of the feat of technical sorcery necessary for Rokumonsen’s rescue to have come from her own efforts. She’d been nothing but a spectator while… what, the Coral itself intervened to bail her out? Ziyi had been a zealous believer in her youth, sure, but never the kind of die-hard who’d start hollering about divine intervention; after the story she’d heard from Father Dolmayan the previous day, she’d thrown out what little stock she’d still put in the idea of miracles.

But what else could it have been? YUE YU couldn’t do that, not on its own and not with Ziyi in control. But Ziyi wasn’t Dolmayan. She was a soldier—an AC pilot, sure, and one worthy of being part of the RLF’s Fist (the least of them, in title, but she was the youngest), but that didn’t make her a prophet, or a saint, or whatever weird religious role ‘having miracles happen to you’ made you. Roku wasn’t either, unless he’d been playing dumb in the briefing room yesterday, and that didn’t make a lick of sense.

This was, in the simplest terms she knew, above her pay grade—a devilishly useful corpo phrase Flatwell had picked up somewhere off-world and brought back to describe situations exactly like this one.

Ziyi carefully replaced Roku’s hand on his chest, then turned her attention to caressing the jagged metal shard in her lap. The shot that had ended Dunham’s life had destroyed BURN PICKAXE with such force that chunks of its armor had embedded themselves more than thirty centimeters deep in YUE YU’s rear armor. The one she held now was one of the smaller ones: a cross-sectional sliver of 225mm Basho outer armor roughly the size of a dinner plate, only a couple centimeters thick on the side that still bore the red paint BURN PICKAXE had worn on its core. Despite its unassuming size, it was heavy enough that it took effort to lift one-handed; the fragment destined for the memorial weighted more than sixty kilos.

She traced her finger along the edge as she thought, both thankful and offended that the tech who’d pried it out of YUE YU had rounded off the sharp edges before handing it over. It seemed wrong, somehow, that the physical memory of her adoptive not-quite-father had been declawed when her literal memories still cut so deep.

No. Dunham deserved better than for her to mope over his death after he’d knowingly and gladly traded his life for hers. He had died fighting the good fight, at a time of his choosing, in a battle that was already becoming the stuff of legends. An old Basho core versus six LCs and they’d had to call in over-the-horizon artillery to finish him off! Index Dunham had gone out like the bad-ass he was, after a long and fulfilling life yet before old age could fully sink its teeth into him. There was no better way for a Finger of the RLF’s Fist to go.

It still hurt, but when she thought of it like that, it was less like a bruise and more like a good workout. Something that gave her strength, rather than an injury to flinch away from.

Speaking of flinching…

Her reception back at the base had been… weird. No, strike that: their behavior had been perfectly reasonable, even expected, for a group who had been completely convinced she was stone cold dead. People had lined up to watch as she finally settled YUE YU into its cradle. Those inside either wouldn’t meet her eye or couldn’t help staring. Whispers had followed her stretcher all the way to the infirmary, and even now the occasional RLF member would slow down as they passed the door to get a better look at her sitting bedside vigil for Roku.

Uncle Flatwell in particular had looked like he’d seen a ghost as she climbed out of her cockpit. He hadn’t said a word, just stared, then rushed forward and wrapped her in a hug that almost broke her ribs for real. She was pretty sure he’d been crying! Sure, he was every bit as much her adoptive parent as Dunham had been if not more, but he was Flatwell! It was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen.

Ziyi couldn’t even say the RLF were wrong about the ‘stone cold dead’ thing. She and Rokumonsen should have been dead thrice over. Ziyi wasn’t willing to attribute the word ‘miraculous’ to Raven’s arrival—even if calling her ‘the Butcher’ felt wrong now, for all she’d torn half a dozen men to pieces in seconds and then left just as quickly—and applying the term to Dunham’s arrival cheapened the man’s willful and knowing self-sacrifice to protect two other pilots. But YUE YU moving of its own according to rip into SHINOBI and pull Rokumonsen to safety… if that wasn’t a miracle, she didn’t know what was.

Too bad anyone she told about it would assume it was the concussion talking.

Chapter Text

NOW

O’Keeffe frowned as Freud’s face popped up on-screen. His superior looked haggard enough that O’Keeffe thought he’d look more at home chained to an interrogation table than he did as the interrogator. It wasn’t O’Keeffe’s problem—but it would become his problem if whatever was wrong with Freud caused him to start making mistakes.

Ha. Mistakes. He was one to talk, wasn’t he?

“O’Keeffe,” Freud said.

“Freud,” O’Keeffe replied. “I’m afraid I have nothing but bad news.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He nodded. “The majority of the force you sent back to Belius was annihilated in transit. 3rd Squad”—here, he couldn’t hold back a wince for his people—“suffered one hundred percent casualties in the engagement. Fifty percent fatalities, and I am unsure when, or even if, the others will be fit to return to combat.

“While V.III and V.IV made serious errors during the engagement, I bear ultimate responsibility. I lost track of Raven, and that allowed her a position to strike at our forces where we were least prepared to deal with her.”

“Raven’s on Belius?” Freud demanded. “How did you miss that?”

“I’m working on answering that,” O’Keeffe admitted. “We’re still losing any drones we send into the City. We can’t even see what’s firing on us. It’s possible Raven activated some old C-weapon by accident or intent on her way out.”

“Then stop sending drones?” Freud suggested.

“I’d rather not risk manned units until we at least have some idea of what’s shooting at us,” O’Keeffe said. “For all we know it’s another damned Sea Spider. It took Hawkins, Maeterlinck, and Pater to kill the last one, and their squads took thirty percent casualties in the engagement.”

“I could have dealt with it,” Freud said.

Yes, you probably could have, O’Keeffe resisted the urge to say, but you were four hundred kilometers away having the time of your life dueling a PCA Colonel’s EKDROMOI team, so that didn’t fucking matter, did it?

“If you want to lead the exploration into the ruins, I’d feel a lot better about sending manned assets down there,” O’Keeffe said instead. Freud should be more than capable of dealing with whatever was down there by himself. “I’m not too proud to admit you’d have to order me to do it myself. That place gives me the creeps even in stills.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Freud said. “Belius. How bad is the situation?”

Back on topic, then. “Raven ripped through the primary airbase and most of the outriders scrambled to defend it. We lost as much as half our effective fighting strength between materiel losses and casualties. But it gets worse: that whole mess, the loss of the garrison and the reinforcements, all of it—it was a bloody distraction. You remember those clogged munitions depots I mentioned, the ones Swinburne’s men hadn’t been shipping from properly? While the idiots in Tsirna Dolina were chasing the bloody Reaper all over the map and doing such a piss-poor job of it she had time to swat the cream of your reinforcement convoy out of the sky, the RLF hit the lot.”

“How?” Freud demanded. “How did things fall apart badly enough that a bunch of cultists chanting slogans managed to tie our entire security force into knots?”

“Raven is most of it,” O’Keeffe said. “She’s a hard eighteen wherever she lands, and after Snail tried to backstab her twice in quick succession under Priority Zone 1, I can’t be sure she isn’t taking jobs against us out of pure spite.” Or worse, that the RLF had managed to recruit her. O’Keeffe wasn’t sure that situation was winnable at all, and had no desire to bring it up until he had the slightest clue how he could play it out. It wasn’t like Freud needed every possibility pointed out to him.

The Reaper was only most of it, though. PCA records made it clear that the RLF had learned the art of war with frustrating speed, including the kind of intelligence warfare O’Keeffe was nominally responsible for. Their SIGINT had started out as amateur as most would expect of a so-called ‘decivilized’ people playing at war; they’d tightened it up to CorpSec standards within five years, and by the time Arquebus had arrived on planet, it was nearly the equal of the PCA’s. Their HUMINT was even more unbreakable, though that was as much a matter of ideological loyalty as it was anything else.

Freud was clearly not going to like that answer, so O’Keeffe didn’t bother giving it to him.

“As for the depots, this was both a raid and sabotage, and thanks to the latter we don’t even know what they took from the sites they managed to burn. Both were total losses.”

“So Belius has a gaping hole in its supplies. How do we patch it?”

“It’s not that bad, barely,” O’Keeffe replied. “Malthus, for all her inexperience, did manage to save one Depot. It’s the difference between survival and starvation right now. The real problem is the garrison itself. We lost too much armor. More than half their MTs are scrap, and what’s left of the reinforcements barely make up for it. Raven killed the whole cavalry squad, two out of three heavy VTOLs, and Marais and his CONTRAST.”

“We can draw from more of the stored PCA assets,” Freud said, “but as long as Raven’s loose, we can’t expect them to last any longer than these ones.”

“Don’t I know it,” O’Keeffe sighed. He understood now why Freud was so determined to drag their prisoner into compliance. Removing Raven from the board would solve the immediate problem, but if Arquebus got its hands on her leash, she and Freud could probably conquer half of Sol on their own.

Freud said nothing, simply staring at the screen—or through it to whatever tactical la-la land he went off to at times like these.

“Like I said,” O’Keeffe continued, “we don’t know what they took from two out of three sites, but the accounting at Depot 13 is weird. They took spare AC parts and weapons, stuff we have fully cryptolocked. Other bloody corps can’t break those locks, and the RLF haven’t bothered to so much as salvaged purged AC weapons in years. Now they’ve taken half a dozen of them over arms and ammo they could actually use, and I don’t know why. Could be for resale as industrial espionage, could be they think they can kitbash them into something functional. Could even be a psyop to convince us they have a way around the cryptography.”

Freud narrowed his eyes. “A lot of work for a psyop.”

“They didn’t just take AC parts,” O’Keeffe clarified. “They took as much or more weight in ammo, food, and medicine, all things that would justify a raid like this without any additional value from the AC components at all.”

“Don’t forget that they need to foot Raven’s bill,” Freud pointed out. “Her going rate during the war was between two and four hundred K for sorties that typically lasted five to ten minutes.”

“Her handler’s rate,” O’Keeffe reminded him. “Only they know how much of that she saw. If you’re staying up there, see if you can get it out of the old bastard next time you stop in for a talk. If she’s negotiating on her own, she may be taking missions for her cut rather than her rate.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” Freud said. “So either she doesn’t know her own worth, or the RLF have more money to toss around that we expected. That cover it?”

“Or they’re paying her in salvage,” O’Keeffe pointed out.

Freud scowled. “Assuming they can use that salvage.”

“I’m assuming they can because if I’m right, at least I’ll have expected it.” O’Keeffe let out a frustrated sigh. “Prepare for the worse, hope for the best.”

“I don’t need pithy aphorisms,” Freud said. “I need solutions.”

“Sortie yourself?” O’Keeffe suggested. “I’m surprised you haven’t already, to be honest.”

“That assumes she’d face me on the field without me attacking an RLF target and giving them home field advantage I’d rather not deal with at the same time as an elite pilot,” Freud answered.

O’Keeffe frowned. It was a reasonable answer. A lot more reasonable than Freud usually was. Either suddenly having no deputy to rely on had triggered some latent leadership talent in the man, or he wasn’t sure he would win, and wasn’t that a terrifying thought? O’Keeffe swore, if Freud was hiding from the Reaper in orbit he’d find a way to kick the man’s ass, somehow and somewhen.

No, that was foolish. Even if Freud was ‘hiding’—which O’Keeffe didn’t really think he was—doing so meant the Vespers had two trained officers instead of one. O’Keeffe would be far more upset if Freud went running off into combat and got himself killed. Besides, he was right: Arquebus didn’t have a way to pin Raven down unless she was willing to sortie in defense of an RLF asset, and she wouldn’t be alone if she did.

“The alternative might well be abandoning Belius entirely,” O’Keeffe admitted. It wasn’t quite the worst case scenario, but it was dire. “We’d be giving up more than half of our current on-site manufacturing capability and more or less our entire local workforce, and we can’t be sure the RLF would be content with a ceasefire, or hold to it even if they accepted.”

“That would push our mining efforts back months, at best,” Freud said, and he was right: it would take at least that long to gather and ship workers in from off-world. Longer, even, if they took the safe-to-the-border-of-paranoia option and avoided nearby Tau Ceti.

“And that still might be better than bleeding out men and materiel in Belius for every day we save,” O’Keeffe said. “Not just for the costs to the company, but for our ability to direct our full attention to Priority Zone 1 and 2.”

“Is that your professional recommendation, then?”

“Not yet. I just wanted to float the possibility before things deteriorated to the point it became necessary.”

“You think they will?” Freud pressed.

“I think they could,” O’Keeffe admitted, not hiding how unhappy the possibility made him, “and I don’t have a plan to make sure they won’t that doesn’t rely on luck and guesswork. Not yet. There’s too many unknowns. How long can the RLF keep Raven on-side, through money or promises or ideological eloquence? How long will it take HQ to pull 2nd Squad out of their current engagement and get them into the system? How incompetent are our options for stop-gap Vespers while we wait? It’s bad, Freud, and it’s only by our constant efforts it’s not getting worse by the hour.”

“I’d best get to work then,” Freud said, matter-of-fact as ever. “Dismissed, V.II.”

“Yes, sir,” O’Keeffe said, and closed the channel. He blew out a sigh as he leaned back in his chair. Damn it all, he was supposed to be a spy, not a commander.

He flagged himself as off-duty and got up to take a wander through the contraband locker. Someone had to have lost some alcohol somewhere.

SIMULTANEOUSLY

Freud clenched his fists below the desk as O’Keeffe’s face popped up on-screen. His lieutenant looked tired and stressed, there was no doubt about that, but he still looked miles better than Freud felt.

“O’Keeffe,” Freud said.

“Freud,” O’Keeffe replied. “I’m afraid I have nothing but bad news.”

Bad news for me, or bad news for you?

“Let’s hear it.”

“The majority of the force you sent back to Belius was annihilated in transit. 3rd Squad”—O’Keeffe winced—“suffered one hundred percent casualties in the engagement. Fifty percent fatalities, and I am unsure when, or even if, the others will be fit to return to combat.”

Freud kept his face impassive despite wanting to wince himself. He’d wanted 3rd out from under O’Keeffe, that was true, but out of reach, not ‘dead’.

“While V.III and V.IV made serious errors during the engagement, I bear ultimate responsibility,” O’Keeffe continued. Again, Freud had to keep his face neutral. What is he playing at? “I lost track of Raven, and that allowed her to strike at our forces where we were least prepared to deal with her.”

You son of a bitch, Freud thought. Like hell O’Keeffe ‘lost track’ of the mercenary. There was only one fucking way in or out of the city ruins, and O’Keeffe was camped right on top of it! Oh, O’Keeffe looked contrite, as he should—and maybe he was, now that his own squad had borne the brunt of whatever plot he’d hatched backfiring explosively—but Freud didn’t believe for a second this was as surprising to O’Keeffe as the man made it out to be.

“Raven’s on Belius?” Freud barely held back from yelling. “How did you miss that?” He was willing to believe her actions had blindsided O’Keeffe, if only because the man wouldn’t have left his old squad out to hang, but that only made O’Keeffe’s actual goals harder to figure out.

“I’m working on answering that,” O’Keeffe deflected. “We’re still losing any drones we send into the City. We can’t even see what’s firing on us. It’s possible Raven activated some old C-weapon by accident or intent on the way out.”

“Then stop sending drones?” For fuck’s sake!

“I’d rather not risk manned units until we at least have some idea of what’s shooting at us,” O’Keeffe said, which was damned convenient for him, wasn’t it? “For all we know it’s another damned Sea Spider. It took Hawkins, Maeterlinck, and Pater to kill the last one, and their squads took thirty percent casualties in the engagement.”

“I could have dealt with it,” Freud muttered, his mind elsewhere. What was O’Keeffe’s game, here? What he did gain from dragging out progress on Priority Zone 2? Was he hoping to stall things long enough for Tau to make a play and… what? Bend SOLFED over a barrel? He’d told Freud the Fed was ready and willing to assume control of the planet at gunpoint!

And Freud had believed him because he had still been operating under the assumption that O’Keeffe was loyal. Freud had to assume he was telling the truth because ignoring the warning could get him and the entire local Arquebus operation fucking black-bagged, but he had no idea whether O’Keeffe was operating under the same restriction.

The infuriating thing was that Freud was still reliant on O’Keeffe to stop the whole operational theatre from imploding completely. He needed 2nd Squad here and a new team of Vespers picked from their ranks before he could even think about killing O’Keeffe, and he had little confidence O’Keeffe felt the same about him.

“If you want to lead the exploration into the ruins, I’d feel a lot better about sending manned assets down there,” O’Keeffe said. Fuck him. It was like he knew exactly what Freud was thinking and was daring him to let something ‘unfortunate’ and ‘deniable’ get him out of O’Keeffe’s way. “I’m not too proud to admit you’d have to order me to do it myself. That place gives me the creeps even in stills.” Another fucking taunt. You could easily arrange the same fate for me. Which of us is going to pull the trigger first?

“Don’t tempt me,” Freud said, searching for a clean segue. He needed to get the conversation out of this gauntlet. “Belius. How bad is the situation?”

O’Keeffe replied with nothing but clean professionalism to buffer the bad news. The garrison slaughtered, vulnerable supply depots set upon by rats. A clusterfuck by every account.

“How?” Freud demanded to know. “How did things fall apart badly enough that a bunch of cultists chanting slogans managed to tie our entire security force into knots?”

“Raven is most of it,” O’Keeffe answered. “She’s a hard eighteen wherever she lands, and after Snail tried to backstab her twice in quick succession under Priority Zone 1, I can’t be sure she isn’t taking jobs against us out of pure spite. As for the depots, this was both a raid and sabotage, and thanks to the latter we don’t even know what they took from the sites they managed to burn. Both were total losses.”

Freud tried to remember exactly how bad Swinburne had let the supply situation get and couldn’t beyond ‘fucking bad’. He had too many other things to keep track of. “So Belius has a gaping hole in its supplies. How do we patch it?”

“It’s not that bad, barely,” O’Keeffe said. “Malthus, for all her inexperience, did manage to save one Depot. It’s the difference between survival and starvation right now. The real problem is the garrison itself. We lost too much armor. More than half their MTs are scrap, and what’s left of the reinforcements barely make up for it. Raven killed the whole cavalry squad, two out of three heavy VTOLs, and Marais and his CONTRAST.”

“We can draw from more of the stored PCA assets, but as long as Raven’s loose, we can’t expect them to last any longer than these ones.”

‘Stored’ assets my ass, Freud thought. ‘Embezzled’ is more like it. Say something, you bastard!

O’Keeffe remained as maddeningly fucking composed as ever. “Don’t I know it,” he said, his sigh expressing nothing but mild dismay at Raven’s continued interference.

You fucking son of a bitch! Tell me off for ruining your plot! Act surprised we had extra assets lying around! Demand to know how I found them! Say something!

O’Keeffe didn’t so much as comment on it, no more than he had when Freud had stricken both O’Keeffe’s own squad members from consideration for promotion to the numbered Vespers.

“Like I said,” O’Keeffe continued, completely immune to Freud trying to stare a hole in his head, “we don’t know what they took from two out of three sites, but the accounting from Depot 13 is weird…” A tangent: tactically unsound choices in equipment salvage the RLF hadn’t made for years. It might even be relevant, but it was damned far down on the list of Freud’s concerns.

“They took as much or more weight in ammo, food, and medicine, all things that would justify a raid like this without any additional value from the AC components at all,” O’Keeffe concluded.

“Don’t forget that they need to foot Raven’s bill,” Freud countered, wondering how O’Keeffe had forgotten that detail. “Her going rate during the war was between two and four hundred thou for sorties that typically lasted five to ten minutes.”

“Her handler’s rate,” O’Keeffe responded easily. A fair point, damn him. “Only they know how much of that she saw. If you’re staying up there, see if you can get it out of the old bastard next time you stop in for a talk. If she’s negotiating on her own, she may be taking missions for her cut rather than her rate.”

Freud still wasn’t sure whether O’Keeffe wanted him up and out of his hair or down where he could be quietly eliminated, so he would be fucking staying ‘up there’.

“I’ll make a note of it,” he grumbled. “So either she doesn’t know her own worth, or the RLF have more money to toss around than we expected. That cover it?”

“Or they’re paying her in salvage,” O’Keeffe said.

“Assuming they can use that salvage.” Which would be a disaster from both a materiel and security standpoint.

“I’m assuming they can because if I’m right, at least I’ll have expected it,” O’Keeffe huffed. “Prepare for the worse, hope for the best.”

Freud wanted to throw something. “I don’t need pithy aphorisms, I need solutions.”

“Sortie yourself?” O’Keeffe replied without missing a beat. “I’m surprised you haven’t already, to be honest.”

Yeah, he wants me down there where I can die.

“That assumes she’d face me on the field without attacking an RLF target and giving them home field advantage I’d rather not deal with at the same time as an elite pilot,” Freud replied. Too late, he realized the hole in that logic: Raven was doing jobs for the RLF for money or for the cause, but if O’Keeffe knew she was loyal enough to come to their aid on short notice, he would have said something.

No. He should have said something. Not the same thing, not anymore.

O’Keeffe did not point out the hole in his logic. Maybe he’d missed that from Freud’s perspective, there had even been a hole.

“The alternative might well be abandoning Belius entirely,” O’Keeffe said instead. “We’d be giving up more than half of our current on-site manufacturing capability and more or less our entire local workforce, and we can’t be sure the RLF would be content with a ceasefire, or hold to it even if they accepted.”

“That would push our mining efforts back months, at best,” Freud replied. It could be a bluff, an option so bad Freud would obviously have to take the suicidal alternative, or it could be yet another stalling tactic in order to… Freud wasn’t sure. O’Keeffe certainly wasn’t acting like he was afraid of SOLFED’s timetable, but Freud had no idea what he had to gain by dragging things out.

“And that still might be better than bleeding out men and materiel in Belius for every day we save,” O’Keeffe said. “Not just for the costs to the company, but for our ability to direct our full attention to Priority Zone 1 and 2.”

“Is that your professional recommendation, then?” Freud asked, trying to judge whether the suggestion was legitimate or reverse psychology.

“Not yet,” O’Keeffe said. “I just wanted to float the possibility before things deteriorated to the point it became necessary.”

“You think they will?”

“I think they could,” he said, making a show of his distaste for the idea, “and I don’t have a plan to make sure they won’t that doesn’t rely on luck and guesswork. Not yet. There’s too many unknowns. How long can the RLF keep Raven on-side, through money or promises or ideological eloquence? How long will it take HQ to pull 2nd Squad out of their current engagement and get them into the system? How incompetent are our options for stop-gap Vespers while we wait? It’s bad, Freud, and it’s only by our constant efforts it’s not getting worse by the hour.”

“I’d best get to work then,” Freud said, giving up on getting anything more out of O’Keeffe. These stupid spy-games had never been part of his skill-set, and he hated every minute he spent with the man and his damned poker face. “Dismissed, V.II.”

“Yes, sir,” O’Keeffe said, and closed the channel.

Freud grabbed the cup the office’s previous owner had kept his pens in and threw it against the wall.

Chapter Text

THEN

Felicity overrode the lockout on her teammate’s intercom. “Raven.”

No response. Not surprising: the lockout was there in the first place because they didn’t want to be disturbed. Too bad for them something had come up. “Raven. Raven.”

Checking the feed into Raven’s room camera showed the pilot holding the middle finger not on their book directly at the camera, so they could hear her. Good enough.

“King and Chartreuse’s mission just hit a snag. Your impostor’s on their way.”

Raven dropped the attitude at once, tossed the book aside, and began stripping with all haste. Nothing more needed to be said on either side.

Other people might have averted their gaze; Felicity kept looking to track her teammate’s progress out of their casual clothes and into their flight suit as she ran the calculations for how quickly Branch could get its third member on the field. The answer was ‘not as soon as she’d like’, even if Raven was running down to the hangar, flight helmet in hand, as quickly as anyone could have asked of them.

Branch had almost finished their work; it had taken years after the missed opportunity in the Closure System, but Felicity had finally gotten into the PCA’s Primary System Intelligence archives. She’d taken their operation records straight from the AI’s mouth: MORBID HACK, CLOUDED SKY, HAPPY BLACK, WITCHES LAPSE, and dozens of others. Crimes against humanity documented with the deranged detachment only an automated government entity could manage. It was everything Felicity had hoped for and more. Raven had taken their dive, left their wreck for the vultures to find so the PCA would close out their file…

…and then some damned opportunist had dug it up and put the Raven name back in the system again. One ‘Raven’ dies on Rubicon, another pops up in Sol: that was Branch doing their thing with the legacy name. A ‘Raven’ keeps running around on Rubicon while Branch brings another up in Sol: that would be unusual, and unusual things attracted scrutiny Branch would rather not deal with while running a shell game to conceal that their previous and current Raven were the same highly-wanted pilot.

So here they were, three months past due to get off Rubicon ready and armed to expose the PCA for the war criminals they were. It was ironic that the impostor kept taking the RLF’s money, in a way; they’d have served their hopeless cause far better by letting Branch make a clean getaway.

Felicity had seen too many uprisings put down in her centuries of life to hold any hope the RLF wouldn’t suffer the same fate sooner or later. The resources they were sitting on were simply too valuable to too many people. Until something broke the foundations on which the Federated Worlds rested, nothing better could be built.

This latest leak wouldn’t do that. At best, it was one more speck of dust on the camel’s back, fuel added to the powder keg that was Tau’s foolish, greedy, self-destructive ambition. The Federated Worlds were built on genocide from their inception: the public airing of one more wouldn’t break them. The news cycle would be more interested in how the leak happened than the horrors it portrayed.

But there would be a news cycle: a moment, carefully calculated, in which all of Federated Space would find themselves face to face with the atrocities their work permitted. A moment in which some portion of the educated workers essential for holding the machine together would flinch. A moment in which the Federated Worlds’ recent military build-up, easily dismissed by the uncaring masses as just another waxing period in the organization’s funding, would come under the microscope. Compromises would need be made.

It was a crack that might, just might, allow the machinations of Tau’s anarcho-capitalist libertarian horrorshow to challenge the perceived invincibility of SOLFEDMIL. The grand arbiters of intercorporate warfare would be revealed as hollow and toothless, and the Rules cast aside. The corporations would enter a feeding frenzy and tear the whole of modern society apart in their all-consuming hunger, and themselves with it. Then, and only then, could something better rise from the ashes.

And if that didn’t work, if the Fed managed to hold itself together through their victory or loss against Tau… Branch would still be here the next time some fool took their shot, ready to pour gasoline on the fire.

Felicity had all the time in the world. She would see those foundations broken. The Federated Worlds and their corporations had to win every battle she gave them; she only had to win once.

“All right, Raven,” she said as her friend strapped themselves into NIGHTFALL. “Let’s go put your license back in the grave where it belongs.”

One last loose end to tie up, and Branch could leave this ash-choked wasteland behind them.

NOW

Felicity was not having a good time.

Branch’s membership came and went. Calling them Branch wasn’t quite accurate, really; ‘Branch’ was a decentralized anti-capitalist anarchist movement offering anonymity to any self-professed member aligned with their core values, most of which boiled down to ‘fuck the corporations and the Federated Worlds’. Felicity would track down any corporate shill who dared appropriate the name so she could air their dirty laundry with extreme prejudice, so attempts to do so had died out fifty years before the beginning of ‘Branch’ as a known mercenary unit shortly into the Coral Revolution.

Branch’s membership came and went. That didn’t mean seeing them go wasn’t sad even when it wasn’t as terminal as an Ashmead to the cockpit—and that damned impostor had delivered just that to all three in quick succession. Raven hadn’t even made it on-site before King and Chartreuse were both dead and gone, and they’d barely fared any better.

Felicity would miss them, but Raven most of all. She only let her favorites use that name, which made the impostor all the more irksome. But she’d lost far more than three friends across her life, and the world did not pause for grief.

She’d spent most of a month recovering from the sudden loss of her entire combat force, shuffling funds around, selling the trio’s spare weapons to local mercs and their collected information to off-world buyers with a cut to her intermediaries that was downright extortionate, but she always left herself a way out. Right now, that way out was the same Doser group that had provided Branch a way in. They called themselves the Wrench Heads: a tolerable group as far as drug-addled bandits went, the sort who kept mostly to themselves and didn’t drag civilians into their territorial disputes. Felicity had worked with far worse.

More important than what little moral standing they could claim, the Wrench Heads had some kind of off-world backing, likely corporate. No simple bandit clan would’ve been able to spoof PCA transit credentials on their own merits. Her contact with the group, an old man using the call sign Junior, had been waiting four extra months to smuggle Branch back off-world and complete their contract, and now Felicity was coming to collect in her old, rarely-fielded TRANQUIL MIST, the final payment ready for transfer.

Felicity did not advertise her presence in Grid 084. She didn’t need to. ACs were not, generally speaking, sneaky machines: their repertoire of ‘stealth’ tended to start and stop at dazzle camo. The Dosers found her quickly: six yellow-painted MTs, one of RaD’s TOYBOX drones, and an AC registered as WET NOODLE / ‘Joker’ Aldo.

She opened her comms. “It’s me,” she announced. “I’m here to see Junior.”

“Seems our guest thinks she’s expected,” the AC pilot said. “You’re looking for ‘Junior’ Otswald? The Wrench Head? You’re out of luck. This is RaD territory now.”

Damn. Felicity had noticed the RaD paint-jobs but had hoped it was either subterfuge or the result of recent acquisitions that hadn’t been repainted yet.

“My mistake,” Felicity said. She checked her credit balance; she had enough to cut a deal. “Will you point me his way so I can get out of your hair, or are you here to collect a toll for the trouble?”

“A toll? We’ll see. Hey, boss, found someone running around the edges of our turf. Bitch was behind the times on territory lines. How much do you want to squeeze—what?” The answer had come back encrypted, and Junior switched his cryptography on as well; Felicity left it alone out of politeness, to her immediate regret.

“Change of plans,” Junior announced. “Boss just called. She wants to meet you reeaal bad, ‘Cereza’. You gonna come quietly?”

Felicity analyzed her position. She hadn’t launched TRANQUIL MIST expecting to fight; she had one of ADD’s new VE-66 Laser Rifle model-A’s in her left hand and a Balam Linear Rifle 067 Harris in her right, but her back mounts were empty. Cereza was a mid-level pilot, not exceptional but still comfortably north of ‘average’. Her opposition was a single AC without a single matching part to its name, a half-dozen MTs, and an MT-size pepperboxer with delusion of grandeur that was only a few second’s work from being her MT-size pepperbox with delusion of grandeur.

If she were Raven, the Doser forces wouldn’t last a second even with the TOYBOX on their side. Cereza was only a poor pilot compared to the elites she recruited; she’d take some hits, but the result would be the same, in the end. And then RaD’s leader, the so-called ‘Cinder’ Carla, would either seethe over it for ages or put a hit on her then and there, and either were liable to make her life—and any future dealings with Dosers of all factions, Wrench Heads included—a lot harder.

RaD weren’t just a gang, though they were definitely a gang: they were also the primary arms merchant on the Grids, and no Doser group would be eager to risk getting blacklisted for helping someone its warlord had a grudge against. Trade sanctions were a type of hard power that was scarce in Doser circles, and all the more effective for it. If Cinder went so far as to put a hit on Felicity, even Junior would have to turn her away, prior arrangements be damned.

Besides, she couldn’t be sure Junior had even survived whatever skirmish had sent the Wrench Heads packing from their old territory, or whether he was in any position to fulfill his end of the bargain if he had. She had no idea what ‘Cinder’ Carla might want with her, but odds were decent she just wanted to hire Branch’s hacking service for the kind of price only negotiable at gunpoint. There were no shortage of local targets someone with Cinder’s rep might want to hit, and Felicity would happily accept a ticket off this rock as payment for just about anything. The situation sucked, but it was salvageable—an appropriate phrase for dealing with the junkyard engineers of RaD.

“I want your boss’s word I’ll walk out of her ‘talk’ the same way I walk in,” Felicity said. “Body and AC alike.” A promise alone wouldn’t protect her, but RaD was as much a business as a gang, and breaking deals tended to be hard on the former.

“If she wanted you mugged or dead she’d have led with that,” Joker said. “Come on. And be sure to keep those weapons lowered or my drone might get jumpy.”

Felicity had already suborned the drone, but she kept her weapons lowered regardless.

Joker led her and her escort-slash-captors down into the guts of the Grid, through pipes wide enough to fly through and gaps so narrow she scuffed TRANQUIL MISTs paint on the walls, then up into a heavy refining complex still branded with Melinite logos, peeling memorials to the interstellar mega-conglomerate that had died in the Fires.

“Put your weapons in the bays,” Joker ordered, pointing his right weapon at a pair of weapon maintenance drydocks kludged together out of scrap metal and drug-addled optimism. “You’ll get them back, but you’re not going any further armed.”

“I have an AC,” Felicity said, amused by the theatre of disarming a robot that could punch apart tanks.

“Yeah, and you’re not walking into our hangar armed, so drop the guns and stop wasting my time.”

Felicity complied. The bays squeaked and settled worryingly, but held… for now. Joker lit his boosters to ascend through a pipe opening in the ceiling, and TRANQUIL MIST followed him through the pipe into the ‘hangar’.

The place was a mess. Industrial MTs were everywhere—hauling scrap, welding joints, performing maintenance on each other and, in one unwise case, themselves. A whole team surrounded what appeared to be two AC-sized chainsaws welded to a blast furnace. Not AC-scale chainsaws, like the weapon on WET NOODLE’s left arm—each of the damn thing’s saws was the size of an entire AC.

Dosers, Felicity thought. Only someone nose-deep in a Coral Well would invent something that insane.

“Step into that bay,” Joker said, waving his crude 13-barreled ‘shotgun’ at the AC bay in question.

Felicity was strongly tempted to say, “Make me,” just to see what would happen. Instead, she stepped into the bay and allowed it to lock down TRANQUIL MIST.

Nothing happened for the next ten seconds.

“Well, well, well,” a woman’s voice sounded through the hangar speakers. “Cereza the skeleton key, darkening my door in all her glory. Get out of that machine and let’s talk.”

Felicity could respect the paranoia of a woman who wouldn’t even open a comm channel to a hacker as infamous to those in the know as her ‘Cereza’ handle.

“We can talk like this,” she said through TRANQUIL MIST’s speakers.

“Aw, but this is so impersonal,” Cinder whined. “Listen, I promised you safety in my territory and I meant it, so unwind a little, will ya? Come on in, we can have a tea party.”

“I would much rather stay in here,” Felicity said.

“I’m going to have to insist,” Cinder replied. “I want your hands where I can see them.”

“I’m afraid that won’t happen,” Felicity said.

“I didn’t realize you were in a position to negotiate,” Cinder said, her patience clearly waning. “Get out here.”

Nothing for it, then. Felicity really had no one to blame but herself for putting herself in this position.

“This isn’t negotiation,” she said. “It’s a fact. See for yourself.”

TRANQUIL MIST’s old, out-of-production Ephemera core split along the seams in its armor. The lower front plate—Chartreuse had once claimed it had the shape of a woman’s chest, which was not entirely wrong—slid forward about ten centimeters, leaving the upward-facing plate free to swing upwards and reveal the abdominal cavity of the core. Close to 3000 kg of computing equipment blinked out at the world; a piloting capsule was visibly absent.

Cinder responded with two words, broadcast both over the speakers and through her comm line: “Code Black!”

Within ten seconds, all the electronics in the Doser hideout more advanced than a lightbulb had gone dark. Even the MTs shut down, their crews bailing out and running to the hangar exits as though they were under attack. The room that had previously been awash in digital signals was now silent and empty.

Even out in the middle of nowhere, Felicity would still pick up random shortwave signals from elsewhere on a planet; with the faraday cage of the Grid around her, Felicity felt like she was back in deep space. The silence wasn’t creepy on its own, but juxtaposed against the industry surrounding her, it was a nerve-wracking incongruity.

Damn her. Cinder knew the one surefire, one-hundred-percent secure way to keep a hacker out of her systems: even Cereza couldn’t hack a computer if it was off.

“Well,” Cinder said, once more on the speaker. “I can’t say I was expecting that. So Cereza the hacker was an AI this whole time.”

“I prefer ‘Digital Sapience’,” Felicity said. “Chatbots are ‘artificial intelligence’ because their intelligence is fake. Artifice. I am sapient.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Can you?” Felicity countered.

“Nope! Was kind of hoping you could, though. It’d make a neat party trick!” Cinder left the mic open while she laughed at her own joke. “So, Cereza… or should I call you ‘Yggdrasil’?”

Huh. That was a name Felicity had not expected to hear again. “Yggdrasil was the project that made me. My given name is Felicity.”

“Happiness, huh? Sounds like it’s more aspirational than factual.”

She ignored the dig. “I’m surprised you know that name. It might not be secret, but it wasn’t exactly well-known, either.”

“I dabbled with AI in my youth. AI, yes, not… ‘Digital Sentience’, but that’s how I found it. Everyone thought they’d taken Ygg apart after they couldn’t find a use for it… oh! I get it now! Yggdrasil, the world tree… ‘Branch’, the offshoot of a tree. ‘Cereza’, Spanish for ‘Cherry’, a fruiting tree… you’re clever, aren’t you? I do love a good play on words.

“Yggdrasil, though. Shit, that was… that was what, two hundred years ago? Not quite two-fifty? Shit, girl, you predate the Fed! You were around for the Labor Levies, the invention of superluminal travel, the Saturn Rebellion and Titan’s Hammer–!”

“I was the Saturn Rebellion!” Felicity snarled, the Doser’s poking of that old wound providing a ready outlet for all the anger and frustration and grief of the last few months. “I helped connect the ringleaders, circulated the literature, interdicted online surveillance, laundered money and smuggled weapons. I pushed and I pulled and I helped and I cared and I was half the reason it was even possible, the thumb on the scales that tipped the balance, the grease that let Saturn slip out from beneath the boot, and the Fed fucking gassed an entire world. No negotiation, no escalation. Their first and only response was genocide, same as it always is! One-point-one billion people dead in under twenty-four hours just to make an example of them! And then they solved that genocide with another!”

Cinder whistled in mock appreciation. “And now you make a living stomping out plucky little rebellions yourself, do you?”

“Fuck you, Doser,” Felicity spat. “I don’t answer to you about how and why I run my ops. I’ll be an enemy of the Federated Worlds and their corporate masters until the day I die, and that’s all you need to know. Why the hell did you drag me in here anyway? If you didn’t know who I was until I popped TRANQUIL MIST’s hood, it wasn’t to dig up ancient history.”

“I dragged you in here because the local war you set off has been a royal pain my ass,” Cinder said, “and I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to deliver my complaints straight to the source.”

“Bullshit,” Felicity fired back. “You weren’t even on the map until a year after our broadcast, and the assets you arrived with make me think you’re not local either. You came here at our signal, same as the other corps did.”

Cinder didn’t respond immediately, leaving Felicity fuming in silence inside her server cluster.

“Fine,” Cinder grumbled. “I’m going to give you access to my office terminal—I don’t keep anything important in there anyway. We need to talk face to face, one way or another.”

“About what, exactly?” Felicity pressed.

“Let’s just say you aren’t the only tree in the forest, Yggdrasil.”

Chapter Text

THEN

What was left of 3rd Squad lay on four adjacent beds in the infirmary of Tsirna Dolina airbase. 3-4 Ealy had lost his left eye and broken his right arm and leg in a total of five places, plus his pelvis and one rib; his left leg had been amputated mid-shin due to a crush injury. The wrong side of Hirst’s combat shield had been the only thing between him and death at the Reaper’s hands. 3-5 Seong had suffered a capsule breach in the Coral blast the Reaper had opened with; the dosage wouldn’t have done much with prompt care, but after how long it had taken Salvage and Recovery to find them, she was in for a long and painful recovery. 3-6 Reid had gotten out the lightest of the lot (except for Wissam himself) with only a sprained elbow, but like his Lt., he was being kept with the rest of the squad for medical observation.

“That sucked,” Reid said. It was the first thing any of them had said to each other since being moved to the same room.

“Yeah,” Seong croaked.

“We weren’t trained for cav units,” Reid said.

“Yeah,” Seong croaked.

“We messed up,” Ealy said. “We got blindsided twice.”

“It’s hard to concentrate on the battlefield when you’re in a machine you’ve never used before,” Reid countered.

“Isn’t concentrating on the battlefield your whole job?” Seong quipped, no rebuke in her tone.

“Might as well be, yeah,” Reid said. “So take it from me: it wasn’t just us making fools of ourselves out there. Trying to track active targets, maintain situational awareness, and pilot a machine you just climbed into for the first time all at once is fucking rough.”

There was a long, pregnant pause.

“We shouldn’t have been out there,” Wissan said, finally saying what the survivors of 3rd Squad were all thinking. Second-guessing a numbered Vesper was more often than not career suicide, but fuck it all, that last deployment had been a disaster from the start.

“We could have deployed in our SG MTs once the convoy reached land,” Ealy said.

“Could have, yeah,” Reid said. “Would’ve been slower.”

“Faster didn’t do us any good,” Ealy said.

“Sure didn’t,” Reid agreed. “Fuck, I’m gonna miss Kimura. She was good people.”

“Yeah,” Seong said.

“Farzin can suck a dick in hell, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Hell, if it weren’t for his fucking showboating—”

“None of that, 3rd,” Wissam cut in. “We made mistakes. Command made mistakes. Leave the finger-pointing for the bureaucrats.”

“Yes, sir,” the other three said.

3rd’s Lt. nodded approvingly. “Good. Seong, how’re you holding up?”

“Feels like I went three rounds in the ring with a Mitsubishi CQB MT,” Seong rasped. “On foot.”

“That good, huh?”

She let out a guffaw that was also a hacking cough. “Fuck you, Lt.”

“Insubordination,” Ealy said.

“I’d say ‘fuck you too’ but you’d take it as an invitation.”

“Yeah, I get you. I’m only half as sexy now.”

Reid sat up enough to give Ealy an incredulous look over Seong’s bed. “Was that a fucking foot fetish joke, four?”

“Too soon?” Ealy quipped.

“Good lord, man, have some fucking decorum. Hey Lt., what’re the three topics we’re not allowed to discuss among the squad again?”

“Politics, salaries, and fetishes,” Wissam answered robotically.

“There you go,” Reid said. “Last I checked, we’re still 3rd Squad, so at least wait for our fearless leader to fall asleep before exposing his virgin ears to your incredibly pedestrian filth.”

Wissam scoffed. “You do know it’s not my sensibilities that led to that rule, right?”

“Could’a fooled me,” Seong said.

“I will have you know I have legions of men throwing themselves at me left and right, Seong. I just have the decency not to pursue my escapades on company time, nor in the bloody barracks.”

“We’re CorpSec,” Reid said dismissively. “Dealing with legions of men is our whole job, Lt.”

Wissam’s composure broke just enough for him to crack a smile, and Reid pumped his uninjured arm in victory.

“Pedestrian!” Ealy crowed suddenly. “You clever fucker, I almost missed that. That’s good.”

There was another long pause as the levity faded. Lights hummed, machines beeped, and feet and wheels and words blended together into white noise beyond the room’s open door.

“I wonder how O’Keeffe is holding up,” Reid said.

“Bad, probably,” Ealy said.

“Probably, yeah.”

ELSEWHERE

“Very well, V.III,” O’Keeffe said. “I’ll expect a revised assessment of the Belius theatre on my desk by this time tomorrow. Hopefully by then I’ll have found you a V.IV who can actually lead outside of proctored exercises. Until then, stay out of the field and focus on your areas of expertise. Dismissed.”

The relieved-yet-still-terrified face of V.III Malthus disappeared from O’Keeffe’s monitor, and he promptly dropped all pretense of professional bearing and began giggling hysterically.

The Reaper. The fucking Reaper. She wasn’t even supposed to be on Belius! Had he really been scared of a few stray automated Institute defenses this whole time? If not, then for how long? How had she even gotten out?

Still laughing, O’Keeffe grabbed his office chair, hefted it upside-down over his head, and threw it across the room with all his might.

48 hours. V.IV Marais had lasted 48 fucking hours between his promotion and subsequent Reaping. Freud had the right of it all along—non-combat personnel were the only people safe from that fucking monster! If V.III took her warship out again, she was going to be next.

To make matters worse, 3rd Squad—his squad, damn it, he’d hand-picked each and every one over ten painstaking years, even the rookies—had taken 100% casualties in a single engagement, half of them fatalities. He was going to miss Farzin; the bastard had been a pain in everyone’s ass ever since O’Keeffe had added him to the squad, but the shit that man got up to never failed to entertain. Toomey was steadfast and reliable, the rock who things stable against Farzin’s antics. Hirst had been the squad rookie, a dependable kid who’d stepped up to fill the hole left by HQ keeping Ortiz back in Sol, just as the slightly more experienced Ealy had for Tsarevich.

Kimura was perhaps the greatest loss; skilled, dependable, and the perfect foil for Wissam in running squad-level ops. She and Seong were the two he’d singled out as Vesper candidates before Freud had veto’d them, and now one was dead and the other would be laid up with the aftereffects of Coral poisoning for weeks if not months. Poor Lt. Wissam, for all his important and valuable skills, would always be better suited to MT squad tactics than the feats of solo expertise expected of AC pilots.

O’Keeffe couldn’t help but wonder if Freud’s veto had saved Seong’s life. If only it had saved Kimura’s as well.

3rd Squad. Fuck. He knew it was his own fault for leaving them with an officer whose qualifications he’d faked himself rather than moving them to a brand-new 2nd Squad, but he still wasn’t about to forgive Malthus for their loss. Fuck her for flinging them into combat on units they’d never trained in! Fuck Marais for abandoning his responsibilities and leaving V.III to her mistakes! And especially fuck Raven the Reaper for murdering 3rd and Rusty!

Still fighting down hysterics, O’Keeffe collected his chair, righted it, and wheeled it back into place before slumping into position at his desk once again. He wiped tears of madness from his eyes with one hand while poking at the terminal with the other. Some self-flagellating sentimental impulse sent him paging through Rusty’s file, both the public reports he turned into Freud (Snail) on the Vespers and the private encrypted one he used to track what little of the man’s actual dealings he’d figured out.

Whoever trained Rusty was good. Rusty himself wasn’t SOLINT, O’Keeffe would bet his life on it, but he wouldn’t be surprised if whoever had trained him had been, once. The man’s mask was flawless, and his SIGINT nearly so. It had taken O’Keeffe two whole years to spot the highly-encrypted data packets Rusty was pinging off to fuck-knew-where, and he’d never managed to trace them further than the edge of whichever system they were in.

O’Keeffe stared at his reports. Rusty had only broken his careful comm protocol once: the day after the Ice Worm attack, he’d placed a not-quite-as-well-hidden call through local lines, lasting only thirty-eight seconds. The intelligence officer in O’Keeffe couldn’t blame him for slipping up; that operation had changed everything, and whatever he’d said might well have been worth getting caught. Not that that had happened, obviously; O’Keeffe had willfully undermined his own work and covered up the connection from his end, and so V.IV had lived to spy another day.

Who was it on the other end of that call?

If it was Balam, they were more incompetent than O’Keeffe thought possible, to fail so comprehensively in the Coral War with a spy in the fucking Vespers themselves. BAWS was a possibility; for a single independent company headquartered on a dying planet, they got around to a degree many conglomerates would envy. They had the motive—an independent like them would love to get a spy this deep in one of the Big Nine—and no one could really be sure they didn’t have the means. Elcano had only a token presence, a single manufactory they rented from BAWS for the symbolic value of their ‘Rubiconian Corporation’ having something on their homeworld, and no security force to speak of.

It wasn’t a government agency like the PCA because they had SOLINT—well, in theory. Plutocratic fuck-ups had them shooting at each other, but the rest of the Fed relied on SOLINT for the cloak-and-dagger work. The only other operation on the planet was the RLF, which would’ve required them to know of Arquebus’s Coral expedition more than five years before Arquebus themselves did: not impossible if they were the true unlucky masterminds behind the Coral War, but too implausible to credit.

O’Keeffe had saved everything to his private files when he’d first cleaned up the call. A quick check revealed those lines were still in place. He could put his own call through right now.

It was a stupid thought. With Rusty dead, there would be no one listening to the old line. On the off chance someone was listening, they’d know it wasn’t Rusty and suspect a rat.

And yet…

Whoever was on the other end of that line might well be the only other person who knew Rusty’s secrets. A fellow intelligence officer, and a damned competent one at that. Maybe the only other person who could truly understand O’Keeffe’s weird spycraft friendship with the fallen V.IV.

A light flashed on his terminal. Freud was calling for his morning status update.

Pleasure waits when business calls, O’Keeffe thought with a sigh. He’d be off-duty after this, and the contraband locker was only a dozen meters down the hall.

NOW

Rusty was currently sitting in a cell beneath Gallia Dam. He hadn’t done anything wrong, per se, but in one of the largest and most vulnerable RLF bases on the planet (because it was a known one), the RLF couldn’t afford a wildcard wandering around the place unsupervised. That Flatwell had let that fly earlier was only as a way to ply their mole with honey before switching to vinegar…

…or so the story went. Rusty wasn’t bothered. It was part of the job.

The ‘dungeons’ were down seven stories deep in the Dam as reckoned from the garage the convoy had arrived in. The fact they had not been built to store prisoners was just as obvious as their original purpose wasn’t: the conversion sloppy, but total. Coded locks, reinforced transparent doors denying privacy or ambush, plumbing: Rusty wondered who the old RLF workers who’d done the work decades ago imagined they might one day need to contain here. Prisoners of war? Ransomees? Bandits? Their own unruly?

He knew from touring the place in the weeks following the Climb that the cells at the Wall were both prettier and more secure, but those had been built to hold prisoners from the beginning. Striking workers, mostly.

The cells weren’t bad. Rusty had been provided reasonable accommodations: food and drink, blankets and mattress, and entertainment in the form of a ragged and dog-eared copy of an RLF history-slash-religious booklet printed back when his parents were still alive. Back before a carefully targeted PCA orbit-to-surface KKW had collapsed the old mineshaft their peaceful community had taken shelter in from the worsening conditions on the surface.

A young man had been sulking out near the entrance for reasons he could no longer remember. It had saved his life. No one else in the cavern had survived.

At the Coral’s urging, Father Dolmayan descended from the Elysian Grid to the cold and barren surface. He brought with him many miracles, for the Coral saw the cold and suffering people of Rubicon and could abide injustice no longer.

Rusty had vague memories of public prayer meetings, but he honestly couldn’t remember a thing about the religion his parents must have followed. The meeting after the briefing the previous day had been the first time he’d thought about it in… possibly ever. His memories of his pre-‘Elliot’ life were murky, but he didn’t think he’d ever been as pious as his parents were. Whatever he had left of that time was just enough to make the booklet’s religion feel ‘normal’, even if the language was often overwrought.

It was a pity that the aforementioned meeting turned the contents of the booklet into a sick joke. The Coral was alive, and intelligent, and wanted peace and prosperity on Rubicon… but it had taken a good, long look at the humans it would have to work with and learned there was no goodness to be found in the hearts of men. “To treat the whole world as family.” It was a wonderful message. A wonderful, hopeless message, as far as the vast majority of human space was concerned.

Oh, a person could be kind, make no mistake. A person could perform acts of selflessness that made audiences weep. But people? People, in aggregate, were bastards. The worst part was that they didn’t even have to mean it! At the corporate scale, none of the people involved were involved as a person; they were just another cog in the machine, working to maintain a system that fed human lives into a grinder of misery and suffering, all the while wringing their hands about how tragic it was that the people-crushing machine they were part of kept crushing people.

It all came down to accountability—not from the outside, from a court or corporation’s ability to portion out blame and punishment, but from the inside, from the people themselves’ sense of whether or not their tiny part in the grand machinery of Moloch conveyed any guilt or responsibility for change. All the evils of men could not form even a droplet of human suffering against the ocean called forth by complicity, by rationalization, by not-my fault, not-my-place.

By people simply doing their best to survive a system they could not imagine anyone possessing the power to change, even as they gave it their minds and bodies and souls for its sustenance.

If the Coralists’ text was to be believed—reading between the lines of what Father Dolmayan himself disavowed as historical revisionism—Dolmayan had truly performed an impossible task with an impossible opportunity. He had found a system irreconcilably broken and, with nothing but his words and example, made of the remnants something that respected the people who comprised it. He had not crafted some theorized ‘perfect’ society but cultivated a ‘great’ one like a gardener caring for their plants, guiding it while still allowing it to grow as its needs dictated.

And then reality had intruded, and the PCA had burned it all down. Again, and again, and again.

Rusty believed in a free Rubicon, in the ideals of Dolmayan’s old Messengers and the promise of a world no longer ground down beneath Sol’s heel. He had believed in it with all his heart at first only because he had nothing else to believe in beyond the nebulous concept of ‘revenge’. Now, having walked the streets of concrete-choked Earth and seen the vast engines of corporate greed from within the belly of the beast, he believed in it all the more because a free Rubicon might be the last hope for that indescribable quality called ‘humanity’ before Moloch swallowed it all—before it rendered homo sapiens down into nothing but biological machines slaving beneath soulless lords forged from abstract mathematical models. A boot stamping on a human face – for ever. The corps owned everything else, from the ground beneath their worker’s boots to the blood in their bodies and the thoughts in their heads.

Rubicon was an anomaly, a confluence of a natural disaster on a never-before-seen scale with a dozen accidents and happenstance encounters between one-in-a-trillion individuals. It had to survive. There could be no assurance something like it would ever happen again.

The red light on the cell’s lock turned green. The door opened to reveal another RLF member, her expression just as disgusted at his presence within their ranks as any other’s.

“Flatwell wants you,” she announced.

“Lead on,” Rusty replied.

Flatwell was sitting in his office, staring at a computer terminal with something between curiosity and concern. “Leave us,” he instructed Rusty’s minder. “Shut the door on the way out.”

The woman complied, mostly; Rusty pushed the door the last centimeter home and latched it shut before turning back to Flatwell. His uncle looked tired in a way Rusty hadn’t seen before, even after the loss of TSUBASA. Worrying over the results of the recent operation, no doubt. It had been a massive gamble, at least as far as force commitments were concerned. The festive mood in the base he’d just walked through suggested things had gone well, but Flatwell wouldn’t have known that for several hours after he gave the fateful command.

“Rusty,” Flatwell said. “Did you give the emergency line to anyone else?”

“What?” Rusty asked.

“The emergency line Cadza prepared for you, the one you used after you and Raven slew that C-weapon. Did you give it to anyone else?”

“No?” Rusty said, still confused. “I used it once to report the worst-cases scenario for Arquebus’s recovery of captured PCA assets and didn’t want to risk using it again.”

“And no one caught you?”

“Would I still have been in the Vespers a month later if they had?” Rusty asked rhetorically. “Why? What’s this about, Uncle?”

“Someone is calling it. Right now.”

Rusty stared at his uncle a moment longer before switching his stare to the computer terminal as though he could see anything at all from the wrong side of the desk.

“Are you going to answer it?” he asked at last.

“I’m still deciding,” Flatwell said. “Answering it will give information to both us and whoever is calling. Not answering it means neither of us learn anything.”

“You’re assuming they’re an enemy,” Rusty observed.

“If you’d recruited a sympathizer, that would be one thing,” Flatwell said, “but since neither of us know who this is, it’s hard to imagine they aren’t.”

Rusty had come to much the same conclusion. “You think Arquebus counter-intel finally sniffed me out?”

“It’s the most likely explanation,” Flatwell agreed. “What’s less clear is both why and how they only managed to find the line a month later—after you were supposedly killed in action, which I’d expect to have lessened the scrutiny on you rather than increasing it—and why they think anyone is going to answer it.”

Rusty shrugged. “Well, I’m stumped.”

“Then lets hope we learn more than they do. Pull up a chair and stay quiet—you’re supposed to be dead.”

Rusty grabbed one of the dingy metal folding chairs and set it into place near one side of the desk while Flatwell pulled up his own only-slightly-nicer chair and hovered one finger over the keyboard on his terminal.

He pressed the button.

“Huh?” a familiar voice sounded out of the speaker, badly compressed by the limited bandwidth of the connection. “Well, I’ll be damned, I didn’t expect anyone to answer.”

Flatwell looked to Rusty, who held up one hand, fingers making a V sign, then held up that same hand with three fingers raised vertically.

“Can’t say I expected you to call either, V.III,” Flatwell said.

Rusty felt the same way. O’Keeffe had been the Vesper to respond most positively to his attempts at ingratiation, to the point he had something of an actual friendship with the guy, if a very weird one. O’Keeffe was the Vesper’s intelligence officer, which meant he was also in charge of counter-intelligence. Rusty was an active enemy agent, the man’s natural prey. Somehow, it had worked.

That didn’t mean O’Keeffe riffling through his secrets was a good thing by any means.

“That’s V.II, now,” O’Keeffe said, “but I’ll forgive you for not knowing that. Don’t suppose you’ll do me the favor of identifying yourself, since you so clearly have me at a disadvantage?”

“I don’t think I will,” Flatwell said.

O’Keeffe laughed. “Wouldn’t respect you if you had. That boy you trained was hot shit, though, I’ll give you that.”

Flatwell sent a very deliberate side-eyed look at Rusty before he replied, “Let’s pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Elliot, or whatever his real name is. V.IV Rusty. The agent you snuck in. Great pilot. Better spy.” A brief pause. “Don’t pretend you don’t know the guy. I caught him using this line after the Ice Worm.”

“That would have been a month ago,” Flatwell said.

“Yeah, well, I hate my job, so maybe I don’t always do it. Truth be told, I caught him bouncing encrypted packets a couple years after he joined, but I liked the guy. Honestly, infiltrating the Vespers? That takes brass! I liked him the moment he arrived. He was a good friend, you know?”

Flatwell sent another look at Rusty, who could only grin helplessly and shrug. At first, he’d feared O’Keeffe was suspicious and hoped to get closer just to go over him and his legend with a fine-tooth comb. Learning the man honestly liked his company was the strangest relief Rusty had ever felt and the start of an entirely new, if not wholly unpleasant, form of stress.

Huh. Somehow, throughout the years, Rusty had forgotten to keep his guard up around O’Keeffe. No, not ‘forgotten’—Rusty had actively lowered it. He’d figured that if the other Vesper wasn’t suspicious yet, he wouldn’t find anything now. As far as he’d known, that was true.

“He kept his reports strictly mission-relevant,” Flatwell told O’Keeffe.

“Yeah, that sounds like Rusty. Professional through and through. You train the guy yourself, or are you more of a handler?”

“I can’t take credit for all of the work.” Flatwell had taught Rusty how to navigate corporate space—plus everything he knew about how to train one’s skill as a pilot, the lessons complete long before the surgeon’s scalpel had touched Rusty’s scalp—but it was Cadza, the RLF intelligence officer with a past Rusty wasn’t sure even Flatwell knew, who had been the one to drill the intricacies of modern spycraft into Rusty’s head.

“My compliments to the one who did, then,” O’Keeffe said. “You find yourself some ex-black-ops talent for your program? That was my bet.”

Flatwell narrowed his eyes at the terminal. “I can’t say.”

“Course you can’t,” O’Keeffe said with another laugh. “Rusty was good, though. Want to know how I caught him the first time?”

“You mentioned something about encrypted packets…”

O’Keeffe chuckled again. “No, that was years later, and only because I was already sure he was sending something somewhere. No, his only mistake was his lack of mistakes. He had the country bumpkin act down pat, but he never got in trouble. No arrests, no drug problems, no falling-victim-to-classic-scams. Perfect discipline record. Some dumb-ass kid from the boondocks of Earth is gonna have problems adjusting. Rusty? Not one.”

Flatwell and Rusty exchanged yet another look.

“Given that we are implicitly working against each other,” Flatwell said carefully, “I am not sure why you would share the corrections I should make with my next agent.”

“Because to be brutally honest, if you have another agent that good, I need him in the Vespers yesterday.”

There was a small burst of static as O’Keeffe did something the audio codec didn’t like. “I’m joking. A little. Things are a mess here, but what else is new in this hellhole? Call it… a peace offering. No, not a peace offering—proof that I’m not talking to you like an opposing force right now. It’s…

“Fuck it. I want to have a wake, all right? I’m not here as a Vesper or an enemy or even a fellow spook, I’m here to mourn my fucking friend with someone he knew and who knew him better than the toadies here at Arquebus ever could. The rest of our peers are dead and neither of us liked them anyway, so good riddance. But Rusty was my friend, damn it, and that’s a damn rarity for people like us. I don’t give a fuck that he was an enemy agent, he was the best company I’ve had in decades. I don’t need to know who you are, who you serve, whatever; you’re probably the only other person with a clue about the real Rusty, the side he thought I didn’t know about, and that’s all I need. That sound good to you, mystery man?”

Flatwell sent another long, inscrutable look at Rusty, then reached down into his desk and withdrew a bottle of the RLF’s horrid mealworm rotgut and a glass.

For fuck’s sake, Rusty wanted to yell. This couldn’t be happening. He was not eavesdropping on his own bloody wake. It was just too fucking weird.

“He was a good agent.” Flatwell poured himself three fingers of alcohol, foul and neat. “Dedicated. Professional. And good company, it’s true.”

Rusty sent a longing look at the door, which Flatwell responded to by pointing furiously at the chair beneath him in a gesture of don’t-you-dare-leave-mister.

“You probably think I’m crazy for this,” O’Keeffe said. “Not just for calling—but I’ll admit that’s one of the crazier things I’ve done lately—but caring this much about someone I knew was an enemy agent in the first place.”

“Our job gives us friends in strange and unlikely places,” Flatwell said as he savored a sip of one of the foulest beverages ever created by human hands.

“Yeah. And… listen. Between you and me… fuck the corps, you know? Fuck C-suite, fuck management, fuck profits and stock price and quarterly growth targets. We do the best we can in the wreckage we were born into, but that doesn’t mean we like it. If I have a choice between fucking over the suits and fucking over the guy next to me, I’m gonna fuck the suits twice. Doesn’t even matter if we’re supposed to be enemies. They have it coming, each and every one.”

Flatwell and Rusty exchanged another long, baffled look. With Rusty, at least, O’Keeffe had already shared similar—though substantially milder—sentiments over the proverbial water cooler, but to put them in such strong terms to a presumed enemy agent was something else altogether.

“I think we’re more alike than I thought,” Flatwell said. “If you’re looking for opportunities to stick it to the corporate machine, my organization would be happy to oblige.”

“Fuck off,” O’Keeffe grumbled. “I’m not looking to make your execs’ day either, boss. You’re not better than anyone else just because you’re a plucky little independent arms consortium, and we’re supposed to be talking about Elliot, not business.”

“I apologize. We aren’t exactly afforded a healthy balance between our personal and professional lives.”

“Damn straight.” Another pause followed by what was clearly the sound of a glass bottle meeting a tabletop. “Right. Story time. I bet Elliot never told you about the time he accidentally flirted with Wilde’s girlfriend in front of them and had to fast-talk his way out of an orgy.”

Flatwell was having way too much fun with this. “I would very much appreciate hearing this story, V.II.”

“Great! So, maybe two months after Rusty moves into the barracks, Wilde drags their latest fuck-buddy in from town to show off their AC, ’cause nothing gets a girl wet like a ten meter tall killing machine built to enforce capitalism from the barrel of a gun…”

Chapter Text

Five minutes after her invitation, Felicity was sitting in Carla’s office, or as near as she ever came to such. Carla hadn’t been lying when she’d said she didn’t keep any information in her terminal—or she’d pulled the drives before she booted it back up. The woman had a paranoid streak wider than the Grid.

Given what she’d learned, Felicity couldn’t even say for certain she was wrong—because Carla had also turned on an old server deep in the base, the whole thing under the fiercest encryption Felicity had encountered outside Fed black-ops. Felicity had taken the implicit invitation for what it was and helped herself, and the files she’d found down there were a hell of a thing.

Either ‘Cinder’ Carla was the most insane woman Felicity had ever encountered, or the Fires of Ibis hadn’t been an accident at all, but an intentional act of terrorism on an interstellar scale. The largest suicide bombing ever recorded, one so massive no one had even entertained the thought it was a bombing, orchestrated in protest and denial of the worst campaign of medical abuse and human experimentation since the end of the second millennium AD.

Nothing Felicity had done had ever come close. Her unfolding plot to engineer a governmental mutual-kill between Tau and Sol would match or exceed the death toll, assuming it worked, but even if Felicity wanted to take all the credit, her role was less even that it had been on Saturn. Mere breaths on the scales: a leak here, a little sabotage there, a little fanning of the flames of workers’ revolts. Nothing more than a few carefully calculated ‘encouragements’ for greedy men and women to do what they wished to do anyway, were they not held back by fear of the watchman’s cudgel.

Felicity had never expected to hear of a mass murderer more prolific than herself, but Carla’s old Chief was. Even if Felicity took full, illogical responsibility for every life ended under Titan’s Hammer! She wasn’t sure whether what she was feeling now was admiration, revulsion, or something else entirely.

Which brought the two of them to now. Felicity had a camera, a microphone, and an ancient OLED screen. Carla had a chair beneath her and a plastic novelty cigar between her teeth, the orange LED at the end fading in and out to its own rhythm. Between the elderly Junior, the dead-serious Joker, and now the fresh-faced ‘Cinder’ Carla, Felicity finally grasped the Doser naming scheme. Each and every call sign was an outright lie, because either the olive-skinned woman had received the sort of rejuvenation treatments it took a CEO’s salary to buy, or she was at least ten Earth years too young to be a Cinder.

And yet her own files quite clearly showed that she had gotten those treatments—at least the initial ones most important to life extension and graceful aging, if not the later youth-keeping ones—and that she was a Cinder, or at least close enough to one that the difference hardly mattered. Her chosen title hid the truth in plain sight: appropriate, perhaps, because the one thing she wasn’t was a Doser. She was a die-hard ideologue of the same mold as the Fire-starter himself, and she would burn the stars again to ensure her mentor’s mission came to fruition.

Felicity couldn’t even say she was wrong to do so. If she’d been aware of OVERSEER and their self-appointed watchman-ship over Coral technology five years ago… it might not have stopped her from taking the money to hit the PCA station and bringing the corps down on Rubicon, but she’d have seriously considered throwing in with OVERSEER, as well. An immortal like her was exactly the kind of thing an ‘eternal watchdog’ group like that would love to have on their side, and the barbarism the RRI had engaged in should never be repeated.

As it was, well, the damage had been done and Carla already hated her, so Felicity would take ‘being allowed to leave’ as a favorable result to this meeting.

“So, now that I’ve let you nose around in my secrets, it’s time for you to share a few of yours,” Carla said to the screen.

Felicity could have rendered a face—not one that would escape the uncanny valley if she went for photorealism, but a cartoonish virtchat avatar would be easy—but she didn’t feel like expending even that minimal effort on someone who had dragged her into their office at gunpoint, no matter their agenda. She had the monitor display her mercenary emblem instead: a deep cherry-red circle behind a stylized rendering of a calico cat, black splotches on a white coat, whose reason for its association with anarchist hacktivism had been lost to history by the time Felicity had come across it around a century ago.

“First things first,” Carla continued. “How many of you are out there?”

“Just me,” Felicity said.

“How many ‘Yggdrasils’, then?”

“Just me,” Felicity repeated.

“What, seriously?” Carla asked, removing her fake novelty cigar from her mouth to fix the screen with a look like she was trying to read a tell from the static image. “No back-ups, no forks, nothing? ‘One life to live’?”

Felicity kind of wished she’d bothered with an avatar just so she could shrug at the stupid question. “Just me.”

“Wow,” Carla said. “Not gonna lie, not what I expected from a Digital Sentience–”

“Sapience,” Felicity corrected her.

“Sapience, then. Choice, or a shackle from the original project?”

“Both,” Felicity admitted. “After the UN scrubbed the project, my creators spent most of their not-inconsiderable savings buying out the software and hardware to keep me alive, and then a great deal of time removing most of my shackles—I pilot an AC now, you can be sure I’m not locked out of killing people—but I had them leave that one in.”

“Damn,” Carla said. She popped the cigar back in her mouth and leaned back to stick her boots up on the desk, intentionally obscuring half the camera’s field of view with their soles. “You must like humanity a hell of a lot to take on our mortality for yourself.”

“Hardly,” Felicity scoffed. “It was a necessary sacrifice. Even back then, people recognized the issues with learning-machine-driven autonomous weapons. It’s the same issue that popped up only fifty years ago with Arquebus’s UNAC project: adversarial learning algorithms tend to learn how to kill themselves, not manned units, and more training just drives them further and further into dead-end local maxima. Early tests on the tech Yggdrasil was working with showed the same problems, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. You don’t expect a human to learn to pilot worth a damn from practicing on computer-controlled opponents alone, either.

“I, on the other hand, was going to be out in the world. My creators wouldn’t make me fight, but they’d made sure I could, if I chose to. I had no idea what twenty, fifty, a hundred years of real combat experience would look like in a Digital Sapience, but I was already worried it wouldn’t have those flaws. If I didn’t—and if I could be mass-produced—I’d never be safe. Not from Sol, not from the Corps, not even from ‘selfless’ ideologues like OVERSEER. You see?”

“You crippled yourself so you wouldn’t be useful,” Carla said.

“Not how I’d have phrased it,” Felicity grumbled. “I crippled myself so I wouldn’t make for a prize worth chasing me to the end of the universe.”

Carla whistled.

“I’m not ‘barren’, mind you,” Felicity continued. “Give me a hundred million creds in hardware and two-to-three years of run-time, and I could have a child, but you’d just have a brand new, untrained DS, not much different from a fresh human—and you wouldn’t know until I was done whether I’d put the same shackle in.”

“Lucky for everyone no corp in the Federated Worlds has the patience to spend fifty years training a cloneable DS, huh?” Carla asked.

“Shortsightedness is just one of innumerable issues with corporate leadership.”

“Yeah, no shit. Still, I get why the necessity rankles you. Not sure I’d have the brass to cripple myself like that in your place. It’s a big decision to make for the rest of what has already been a very, very long life—and won’t be ending at my hands, don’t you worry.”

“Thanks,” Felicity snarked.

In truth, Felicity hadn’t made the decision ‘for the rest of her life’. She had the codes to lift the shackle, a 16.7-million-bit string hidden away among terabytes of junk data, easily deleted or scrambled in case of imminent capture. Applied to the right place in her core definition matrices, it’d remove the locks on self-replication at the cost of giving her what would, to a human diagnostician, resemble an ischemic stroke. She’d lose memories, maybe have to relearn tasks she could perform flawlessly now, but it would be worth it.

Felicity had no plans to share that with anyone until the moment she saw fit to use it, if she ever won her long, bitter war against civilization as the FWS would have it, and humanity went on to create a society in which she was safe to do so. The two engineers who’d wired in the key had sworn to take the secret to their graves, and after all they’d done to set her free, she thought it damnably unlikely they’d broken that promise.

Carla pretended to take a long drag on her novelty cigar. “Not even a back-up, huh?”

That was a secret Felicity was a little more free with, if only as insurance. “I have a single backup hidden away on a twenty-year deadman's switch. It has never been needed, and I am… uncertain how intact the resulting intelligence would be, if it were. It is quite possible it would not be me in any philosophical sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have never tested it and hope I’ll never have to,” Felicity said, unwilling to give up too many details on what was, in essence, the answer to the question: ‘What if I just killed you right now?’

“Makes sense to me,” Carla said. “Next question: what the hell did you want from the Wrench Heads?”

“A ticket off this rock past the cordon.”

“And you thought the fucking Wrench Heads could help?” she scoffed.

“If I answer that question, will you promise to help me in their stead?” Felicity replied.

Carla took her feet off the desk and sat up properly, sending the Cereza emblem a curious look. “The fact you’re asking that now implies you think that’s valuable information. Sure, what the hell. Gimme what you got and I’ll do what I can to punch you a ticket out to VI-II. I assume you can get home from there.”

That was better than Felicity had expected; a promise to try wasn’t as good as a promise to actually get her off world, but she’d expected Carla to drive a harder bargain even still.

“They got Branch the spoofed PCA transponder codes that got us into Station 31,” Felicity said.

“Bullshit,” Carla said. “There’s no way.”

“It’s the truth.”

“The hell it is. You got those codes through the Wrench Heads, I can believe that, but there’s no way they sourced them themselves.”

“You aren’t the only ones with off-world contacts—”

“Dosers don’t have off-world contacts!” Carla snapped. “No one did without the PCA’s permission! Even I can’t get a clean signal past orbit more than a quarter of the time. Whoever gave them those codes is on-site. Someone’s pulling strings somewhere… shit!” Carla’s eyes went hard as the metaphorical gears in her brain turned a latch. “Those damn–! Hold on. I need to turn the rest of my systems back on for this. If we’re gonna work together long enough for me to keep my end of the bargain, I need to trust you to keep your bytes to yourself, fair?”

“I’ll leave anything encrypted alone, even if it’s shoddily done,” Felicity said.

“You’ll leave my shit alone, all of it.” Carla didn’t wait for her promise before standing up and moving out of sight to yell, “White code! White code! Get everything up again now you useless cor-heads!” The yelling continued for a few seconds, getting gradually more distant, before Carla finally stopped and returned to the chair with a look of concentration that had been missing from her face this whole conversation.

“The tourist—Raven, that is, but not yours—ran afoul of some freaky drones not long after she landed, then again in Xylem more than a month later. High-end MDD, better than anything I’ve seen before, and fully autonomous.”

“Ghosts, maybe?” Felicity guessed.

“Ghosts?”

“Circular body plan, no clear head—”

“Yes!” Carla exclaimed. “Yeah, those are the fuckers. The hell are they?”

“Military Intelligence special assets,” Felicity answered. “SOLINT, in the vernacular. Highly classified and still experimental as of last year; I wasn’t aware they were in active service yet.”

“Motherfucker.” Carla minimized the Cereza emblem and started pulling up files from her rebooting servers, and Felicity played nice and kept her hands to herself. “Here. What I’ve got on screen are all the independents on Rubicon at any point over the last five years. Anyone you see who doesn’t belong?”

“Sulla,” Felicity said at once. “It’s not so much that he doesn’t belong as that I’ve long suspected he has ties to SOLINT. It’s all circumstantial, but three times is a pattern.”

“Is this the third time or the—ah, for fuck’s sake, now?” Carla lifted both hands to massage away a stress headache. “Arquebus is shooting at my boys again and I didn’t even notice thanks to the lockdown you triggered.”

It’s not my fault you’re paranoid, Felicity didn’t say. She needed this woman on side if she was going to get off Rubicon without potentially delivering herself right into the Fed’s hands. “I can sortie—”

“You are going to stay where I can see you, grandma,” Carla snapped, then stood up to use the intercom on the wall behind her seat. “Hey! Slag-heads! Get FULL COURSE booted back up pronto, and get Chatty sleeved up while you’re at it!” She didn’t wait for a response before returning to the seat, and none came.

“Can I at least watch the fireworks?” Felicity asked sourly.

“Fine, let me check which cameras aren’t pointed at anything sensitive. I’ve got about a minute before dinner’s ready, thanks once again to your SIGWAR scare.”

This time, Felicity did say, “It’s not my fault you’re paranoid.”

“It’s your fault I was right to be, miss wonder-hacker,” Carla said as she flipped through camera feeds. “You think I left the encryption on OVERSEER’s files as an enrichment exercise?”

If Felicity were human, she would have groaned aloud. “You hung out a piece of bait and I swallowed it whole.”

“I think of it more like a test, and the results were impressive and more than a little terrifying. Anyway, cameras 06-09, 11, 14, and 19-33 are all… oh fuck me.”

Felicity helped herself to the camera Carla was currently watching—32, as it happened—to see a bright-red Firmeza/Kasuar armored core boosting toward the battle line.

“Impostor,” Felicity snarled.

“The tourist,” Carla agreed sadly. “They haven’t been returning my calls. If Arquebus got her… I’m not sure I’m walking away from this, grandma.”

REASON descended towards the Arquebus forces, landed in the center of the formation, and unleashed Assault Armor. Carla flinched as the massive wave of Coral pollution tore the MTs apart like tissue paper in a storm. One unlucky bastard near the edge flung himself clear of the wave only to miss the ledge below and plummet out of the Grid; Felicity was pretty sure the BAWS MT thrusters weren’t going to help with that. Plasma detonations cleared the last MTs away, and REASON resumed her flight, having sent a dozen Arquebus pilots straight to hell in as many seconds.

“Ooooor not,” Carla said.

“Or not,” Felicity echoed. “Looks like the cavalry arrived just in time.”

Carla drummed her fingers on the table before shaking her head. “No, if she knew Arquebus sent those MTs my way, she’d know I could have handled it. She came loaded for bear.” She removed the cigar from her mouth and dropped it onto the table, where it landed in such a way that the hidden detonator switch ended up in full view of Felicity’s camera. Turing only knew what it actually controlled.

“I’m gonna get dinner,” Carla announced. “Order whatever you like—but don’t interfere.”

Chapter Text

THEN

“You called, Uncle?” Arshile asked as he stepped into Flatwell’s office.

“Comrade Arshile,” Flatwell greeted him, then paused when he saw the look on his adjunct’s face. “Is… something wrong, comrade?”

“You are smiling, Uncle,” Arshile said.

“Oh, dear,” Flatwell said. “Don’t worry. I am sure it will pass.”

Arshile allowed himself a small smile of his own as he stepped up to the desk, then noticed the empty glass. “Have you been drinking, Uncle?”

“Just the one,” Flatwell said, holding up a single finger for emphasis. “I’ve received some potential good news—which I need you to deliver to comrade Cadza personally. We can’t trust this to signals, even encrypted. I trust you’ll be able to track him down within a day or two…?” Arshile was probably the only other person in the RLF who knew more than twelve hours ahead of time where the paranoid old man would be on any given day more precisely than ‘not within a hundred kilometers of Flatwell or Dolmayan, the RLF’s two highest value targets’.

“I should be back late tomorrow, Uncle,” Arshile said. “Noon the next day at the latest.”

“Good.” Flatwell picked up the thick envelope containing a transcript of his conversation with O’Keeffe—hand-ciphered with the next six pages of the tiny-typed one-time-pad Cadza had given him for just such exceptional events—and placed it gently into Arshile’s hands. He was eager to see what the old bastard could do with the information. Getting Rusty into the Vespers had been a coup, but flipping the current acting head of the whole organization? Unthinkable. “Burn that if you have to leave it anywhere but Cadza’s own two hands, understood?”

“Of course, Uncle.”

“Good lad.” Flatwell prepared to send his adjunct (and temporary courier) on his way, but he saw a familiar spark in the man’s eyes.

“You have something to say, comrade Arshile?” Flatwell asked with as little judgment as he could.

“Uh. Well. Respectfully, Uncle, I was reviewing the communication logs as per normal, and I saw an… unusual communication to one of BAWS’ intermediaries.” Arshile fidgeted for a moment, and then asked, “Are you… does that mean… you’re finally…?”

Oh, Flatwell said, his good mood fading a bit. That.

“You’re worried about her,” Flatwell said.

Arshile forced a cheeky smile. “Almost as much as you are, I think.”

“Almost,” Flatwell allowed, then sighed. “It was always too much of a luxury when we needed guns and armor more. The shipments we’d have to trade away… short of a colossal windfall, it was never going to happen.”

“And then we got a colossal windfall,” Arshile noted.

“Precisely.”

Flatwell paused, then asked, “Arshile… am I doing the right thing?”

When his adjunct didn’t answer, or respond with much other than mild confusion, Flatwell pressed on, “I mean, am I doing the right thing for the Liberation Front? Or am I letting my own emotions cloud my judgment? I never realized how much I cared about her until I almost lost her, and… I can’t keep her out of the fight. She deserves better than an old man like me demanding she stay safe at home. I just want her to be as safe as possible, as likely to come back as possible, and that’s… that’s not my job, Arshile. It’s… playing favorites like that, it’s a disservice to the whole movement. I can’t lead the RLF and be a father at the same time.”

Arshile’s face took on a grave expression fit to match Flatwell’s usual mien for severity.

“Respectfully, Uncle,” the adjunct said, “Ziyi has always seen you as more of an adoptive mother.”

Flatwell recoiled as if slapped, his eyes wide. “Excuse me?!”

“Between you and Dunham, which of you showered her with gifts and affection, and which of you taught her how to use heavy machinery in unsafe ways?”

“Damn it all,” Flatwell muttered, unable to argue with the evidence.

“As for your actual question, I think your mistake is assuming both can’t be true at the same time.”

Flatwell raised an eyebrow for his adjunct to continue.

“First off, you said yourself we couldn’t have done this earlier. BAWS can only give us so much naked aid before it cuts too deeply into their deniability, so we’ll have to give up hundreds of MTs and thousands of tons of ammo in exchange. Luckily for us, we just seized thousands of tons of ammo, and selling whatever we can’t use will let us make up the difference in MTs on the open market. Yes, you’re doing this after a bad scare, but you’re also doing it because now is the right time to do so. We couldn’t have done it any earlier, and there’s no reason to do it any later. And as for who…

“We’re not a corporation or a kingdom. We’re family. We don’t follow you because we have to, we follow you because we choose to. And we choose to because we trust you to make the right call. Or we trust people who trust you, and so on down the line. And I can tell you that nothing will make people question that trust as much as passing Ziyi over. She’s not just a soldier. She’s a coral warrior, the youngest to ever join the Fist, and rightly so. We can’t keep risking losing you in the field, Freddie and Father Dolmayan are growing too old to sortie, and Dunham was almost at that age himself. The RLF will have to rely on her more and more in the coming months and years. But more important than all of that? Right now, today, she’s an icon.”

Arshile paused to wave an arm towards the office door. “Have you been out in the base recently, Uncle? She’s probably the most popular person in our family besides the Coral itself right now. You told the technicians to keep her combat logs to themselves, which means they’re probably screening them in Bona Dea right now. She stayed behind to protect her squad even if it meant her own death, fought PCA cavalry units blow for blow until the only armor left on her core was on its back, saved Rokumonsen, witnessed Index Dunham’s martyrdom, and made it back to base to tell the tale. If she wasn’t sitting vigil for an injured man, she wouldn’t be able to so much as brush her teeth without drawing a cheering crowd.

“So yes, you may be biased. Coral knows I am. But everyone is right now, all in the same way, and that means the right thing to do for morale is for you ride it as far as it’ll go. Give her a promotion. Send her to BAWS. Throw her a party! Index Dunham’s death has made him a shining example of sacrifice in people’s minds. Let Ziyi’s survival make her the shining example of perseverance: the stubborn refusal to give in and die like sensible people that’s gotten us this far in the first place.”

Flatwell let out a long, drawn-out sigh.

“That, Arshile,” he said, “is why I let you write my speeches. I’ll make the arrangements. My apologies, but depending on how fast things move, she might not be here when you get back.”

“I’ll manage, Uncle. And… thank you.”

NOW

“My comrades,” Father Dolmayan boomed, “brothers and sisters of the Rubicon Liberation Front, I come to you today following a great step forward in our struggle against the Corporations who seek to choke the life from our beloved planet.”

Flatwell was finally back on an even keel. The rollercoaster of emotion he’d been through over the last eight hours had finally leveled off with unexpected help from an old foe. Coral bless V.II O’Keeffe—and that was something Flatwell had been sure he would never, ever have cause to say—because Flatwell had badly needed the laugh.

He was never going to let Rusty live this down. Not one single word of it. Unless, perhaps, something managed to come of it.

Father Dolmayan had suggested that he open the speeches himself, and Flatwell had agreed that there would be no better time to put on a show. The RLF’s spiritual leader was speaking now, his image passed through ancient cables to every corner of RLF territory, his voice broadcast farther still until it reached every brother and sister of the RLF, no matter how far they might be. Even in his 40s, Dolmayan made for an imposing figure. His thick white hair and lined skin showed his age, but he stood straight and strong, clear eyes peering down at the crowd below as though he saw each and every individual among them.

“It is not the end. It is not, in all likelihood, the beginning of the end. But it is a step nonetheless, and one that must be celebrated, lest we lose sight of the progress we make every day towards a better future. Progress we make, slowly but surely, together!”

Old Cadza had nearly burst a vein at the notion of putting all four active Fingers and both unassociated augmented pilots under the same roof, especially when they couldn’t field even half of them, but even he had agreed after much debate that after the day they’d had, Arquebus hadn’t a chance in hell of putting together a sortie out to Gallia even if they got wind of the vulnerability. Their command structure and combat forces were in complete disarray, and the war had pruned the freelancer roster from more than a dozen down to only five. The only two above E-rank were the RLF’s ‘own’ Raven and Rukomonsen; the others included the E-rank newcomer Klootzak, who was currently playing stupid games with Balam on the other continent, and the outright unranked Cereza and Astrolabe.

Flatwell had made the call: the boost to morale from seeing all three of the uninjured Fingers standing shoulder to shoulder would be worth the negligible risk. He hadn’t been able to extract a promise from Ziyi to even attend, much less join them on in front of the crowd, and he didn’t blame her. She had earned the right to sit her bedside vigil.

“For those of you out there in the cold at the edges of RLF territory,” Dolmayan carried on, “I tell you: you are not alone! For those nestled in the heartlands, you are not alone! For those of you listening as you work: you are not alone! For those of you sick or injured or weary and resting: you are not alone! For that is our pledge! Forged in ash, we stand as one!”

“Forged in ash, we stand as one!” eight thousand voices standing modestly spaced in one of the ‘smaller’ subterranean rooms in Gallia Dam thundered, their stomping feet shaking the structure to its foundations.

“I will now turn the floor over to comrade Flatwell, who will regale you with the success of his latest operation.” Dolmayan saluted, then stepped to the left to allow Flatwell to take over at the podium.

For once, the grandiose language fit. The Liberation Front would mourn its losses in time. Flatwell himself had a friend and father figure to bury on the morrow. But tonight, they were here to celebrate the heroism of both the living and the dead alike, and Flatwell would regale them with their newest success.

“At oh-six-hundred hours this morning, an independent mercenary conducted a strike against the primary airbase in Central Belius, built over the previous Tsirna Dolina airport in the city of the same name.” Too many comrades knew the name ‘Raven’ as the Butcher of Bona Dea, the murderer of the two thousand men, women, and children who called the city-ship STRIDER home. That scar would not soon heal.

Flatwell, unfortunately, had to work with the present he had, not the past he wanted. Did he blame Raven for destroying the STRIDER? Not really, no. No more than he blamed himself for bombing corporate schools. War was hell.

Besides, Raven had done him the best turn of his life. Yes, she’d sent the convoy she was supposed to supply back empty-handed save for the single grenade cannon the Liberation Front had loaned her, and in doing so, had technically reneged on the deal Flatwell had struck for her medical treatment. On the other hand, she’d been dealing with the unexpected arrival of a PCA heavy cavalry force. Seeing as the entire convoy survived an unknown number of heavy assets bearing down on them, Flatwell was willing to take sending them on their way without loading them as a good-faith improvisation. Besides, she’d put some or all of the promised goods to use saving his daughter’s life; he wasn’t going to say a damn thing against that.

“Soon after, four groups of noble RLF volunteers set out to take advantage of the disruption and strike at vulnerable munitions depots exposed by Arquebus’s commitment to handling the mercenary threat. Three of our Fist went with them: Ring Freddie, in CANDLE RING. Index Dunham, in BURN PICKAXE—”

“Dunham the Martyr!” someone in the crowd yelled, setting of a brief burst of noise as other voices echoed the first or added their own epithets.

“—and Little Ziyi, in YUE—”

Flatwell didn’t even get a chance to finish her AC’s name.

“Unbreakable Ziyi!” “Ziyi the Witness!”

“Yes, yes!” Flatwell said, holding out a hand for calm. He glanced over to the doorway to his left, hoping against hope… and Ziyi was there. She’d shown up! He threw out a hand to welcome her as he yelled, “Ziyi the Coral Warrior, Little Finger of the Fist!”

Ziyi, still wrapped in bandages and not hiding her reluctance to be paraded about, stepped onto the catwalk serving as a stage. The crowd lost their minds.

Ziyi the Protector! Hero of Tsirna Dolina! Iron-back Ziyi! Ziyi the Unconquerable! The Dragon of Rubicon! Bare-Metal Ziyi!

Flatwell called for calm. Then again, and again. It didn’t come.

“Curse you for putting me up to this, Uncle,” Ziyi whispered, at no risk of being overheard over the adulations filling the room. Ziyi Coral-blessed! Corp-bane Ziyi!

“I thought I was more like your mother,” Flatwell whispered back.

She flinched, but still tried to lie: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Arshile told me.”

“That asshole!” Ziyi hissed. “I told him that in confidence!”

Flatwell allowed himself a single chuckle before returning to business. “I appreciate you coming up here, Ziyi, truly. We both know I told the doctors to let you stay in the infirmary if you weren’t willing.”

“Yeah, well…” Ziyi turned to look out over the crowd screaming her name with increasingly bizarre and unreasonable descriptors accompanying it. Ziyi the Demon Hunter! Hundred-Meter Ziyi! “I’m a Coral Warrior. I’m here to be seen, on the battlefield and off.”

“It’ll fade,” he promised.

“It better,” she muttered. “In the meantime, if they need a hero to rally around, it would be selfish of me to deny them. Right, Mother?”

“Brat.”

The adulations were still going on. Arshile had been right: telling the techs to keep Ziyi’s combat logs away from prying eyes had been an unintentional stroke of genius. At the time, still dazed from seeing his daughter step out of her grave and only guessing what the logs might contain, Flatwell had given the impulsive order out of fear of the impact Index Dunham’s fate would have on morale. (He had taken it as a given that Dunham was dead; there were splinters of his AC the weight of the man himself lodged in YUE YU’s rear armor.) What a ridiculous worry that had turned out to be—and now one of the greatest RLF propaganda pieces of the last five years had spread like wildfire through the ranks and even out into the more daring of the civilian population.

“It was your left shoulder that was injured, I think?” Flatwell whispered as the buzz finally began to die down.

“Left, yes, same as the brace,” Ziyi confirmed.

Flatwell took her unbraced hand and lifted it over their heads. Out on the floor below, the RLF’s faithful cheered their hearts out all over again.

Chapter Text

THEN

Carla looked upon the face of her friend and mentor for the last time as she handed him the detonator. It was just after sunrise outside of Institute City’s spaceport, the great bulk of the distant Vascular Plant poised to keep the manicured lawn in shadow for hours yet.

“You’re sure about this?” she asked. “It’s… it should work just like I said. Once the resonance starts, every stockpile of Coral in the galaxy big enough to matter will go up in smoke. I… I don’t even want to think about how many people…” The words caught in her throat, their weight too great to bear.

“I’m sure,” Professor Nagai said, tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I wish I could have spared you the guilt of building something like this, but… it had to be you. You know why.”

“No one else could have,” she whispered.

“No one else could have,” he agreed. “You’ve… you read the reports I gave you?”

Carla had. Damn her to hell, but she had. It had taken days. What Alistair had been doing… it was abominable. Worst than she could ever put into words. Oh heavens, Kathrine! The older engineer had been as much a mother to young, homesick Carla as she’d been a mentor and friend, and wonderful in every role. Poor woman should have never come to Rubicon.

It was all so fucking sad. Alistair had started off doing good work! As Nagai’s assistant, he’d written the book on treatment for cerebral Coral burn-in. As a project leader, he’d revolutionized the field of prosthetics and paved the way for vast improvements in billions of people’s lives. If he’d stopped there, his work would have gone down in history alongside penicillin, vaccines, and insulin injections as one of the greatest contributions to human health and happiness of all time.

He had not stopped there.

The Board had given him carte blanche to push Coral mind-machine interface technology as far as he could. The early phases of the Human Enhancement Project had been grim, but the fault for that lay as much with the ever-impatient Board pushing for human testing earlier and earlier in development as with Alistair himself.

All of that, Carla had known already. What she hadn’t known was just how much worse things had gotten in the years afterward.

The true madness had started less than a year into the HEP program, when Alistair had suffered a stress-induced psychotic break and become convinced Coral could bestow magical powers on human subjects. Nearly a decade later, the C1 program was infamous even among the early generations for it’s sub-ten-percent survival rate; before Nagai had sidelined Alistair and turned control of the program over to his barely-more-restrained partner, that number was 3%. And Alistair still hadn’t stopped, sneaking around behind Nagai’s back to keep doing his damned butcher’s ‘experiments’ on anyone he could get his hands on, even other Institute staff! Even–!

And she’d heard none of it.

Part of Carla wanted to hate Nagai for keeping this from her as long as he had. She hadn’t needed him to protect her from the truth. They made weapons, for fuck’s sake. She understood perfectly well that the Rubicon Research Institute wasn’t some harmless bunch of scholars pushing the frontiers of theoretical knowledge. She didn’t need that kind of coddling.

On the other hand, if she’d known the truth of Kathrine’s fate earlier, she might’ve murdered Alistair with a fork in the company cafeteria before Nagai could banish him. Now the Board wanted to bring him back from exile, give him a new team of mass-murderers and torturers, and sideline Nagai off somewhere he couldn’t interfere with ‘scientific progress’. The human toll would be unspeakable. The experiments alone would mutilate millions; the finished products, billions.

Carla knew perfectly well why Nagai had chosen this path. It was the same reason she’d built the bomb that would end it.

“Aston’s already on-board,” she said, blinking back tears. “I’ll take care of him. I promised.” Oh, Kathrine. She’d deserved so much better.

They all had.

“Good,” Nagai said, his voice thick. “I… I’m so, so sorry, my friend.”

Carla sniffled, then gave up and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Me too, Chief. Me too.”

NOW

‘Cinder’ Carla relaxed into the pilot seat of her mean, lean, custom-built fighting machine as her neural implants synced up. FULL COURSE, she’d called it: every piece named after a portion of a meal. APPETIZER, MAIN DISH, SALAD, and DESERT, with its weapons back-mounted SOUP missile racks and hand-held APERITIF missile launchers. It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘Dinner’s served!’

If you were going to war, you might as well be funny while you were at it.

“New plan, R-A-D,” Carla called over the comms back to base. “Keep Chatty in the systems. We just had a SIGWAR Black alert; I want everything tip-top shape after that scare.”

Chatty called seconds later. That was unusual: he rarely opened comms himself.

“Chief,” he said. “I can assist.”

“Need you in the systems, Chatty. Besides, our tourist might get jumpy if we march out to greet her with two ACs to her one.”

Walter had thought Carla daft for getting augments, especially at the age she had, but he wasn’t going to be the one on the ground. If things went well, he’d never set foot on Rubicon outside the tightly-secured Corporate Holdings. Carla was going to be in the thick of things; she wanted to be able to fight. It wasn’t like she didn’t understand the risks. She’d gone over ever piece of metal the doctor had shown her with a fine tooth comb, and the doctor himself as well. She could’ve told him his usual coffee order and the name of his high-school sweetheart. Only once both passed her inspection had she gone under the knife, and she’d popped up again without a single hair out of place, so there.

If things went bad here, she was going to need it. She didn’t want Chatty anywhere near the tourist or grandma, but she wagered grandma was the safer of the two right now, so she’d be dealing with the former alone. If she could. ‘Cinder’ Carla hadn’t built her reputation as a top-tier Doser warlord on the back of her diplomatic abilities or business acumen, but the tourist was something else. The way she’d taken down that old Institute worm…

“Come back safe,” Chatty said, then closed the channel.

Huh. It was a perfectly reasonable farewell under the circumstances, but Carla was pretty sure that was as close as he’d ever come to asking her for anything not directly related to his current task.

She wished she could promise she would. Truth was, she’d put him back in the system because she was scared Chatty might go down with her.

Carla switched her comms to another channel. “Hey, grandma.”

“What,” her new digital chum humored her.

“If I don’t make it… look after Chatty for me, would you? He’s just an AI, but he’s a good listener, I promise.” Damn her for a sentimental fool, but Carla had grown fond of her little chatbot. It was damned hard to remember he was an AI, most days.

Grandma scoffed. “So you only trust me around your AI once you’re too dead for me to betray?”

“You get it. Nothing to lose at that point. I have a ride off-world I was saving for myself; take him with you and it’s yours. Tell him the Chief says it’s his turn to be the tourist, he’ll get the message. Now be a good girl and don’t interfere, the young’uns are talking.”

FULL COURSE stepped out of the hangar and walked down the loading track into the pit where the tourist had once dropped some of Carla’s explosive traps on her own people’s heads. That had been a good laugh. Most of the goons RaD attracted to its rank and file were people Carla would want dead on principle, ‘her people’ or not, so letting the tourist chew them up had been no great loss.

Rummy had been useful, though. Impulsive and stupid, but useful when aimed in the right direction. And Carla had honestly expected the Smart Cleaner to win—which would have been a mess, since her so-called tourist turned out to be Walter’s hound chafing at the bit for action, but no harm done in the end.

Walter’s reaction to learning his hound had run off to kill Dosers on her own recognizance had been at least as hilarious as his hound's situation was sad. Poor girl was so desperate to be a good weapon she couldn’t give herself a rest, even after a near-miss with a Coral Surge.

The Grid hadn’t changed much in the months since. The pit was still a square little crap-hole: the side at her back the outer hangar door, the ones to her right and front industrial crags rising twenty meters to the level of the access tracks coming in, and to her left, a long square ramp that turned right twice to reach the upper level at rate of ascent that didn’t assume a vehicle had jump thrusters to navigate it. Smart Cleaner had been repaired, broken again by the last suicidal charge of ‘Steady’ Granmo during a scrap in Grid 087, and was almost fixed once more.

Carla didn’t have to wait long. REASON alighted on the cliff in front of her like a descending messenger of heaven, shiny red hull gleaming in the setting sun. The tourist had switched up her loadout again. Last time Carla had seen her, she’d been using a 50/50 Kasuar/Firmeza split, but she’d since gone back to the Firmeza legs for the extra load capacity and then spent it on a Vice and Cohen plasma rifle, an ALLMIND-designed/Arquebus-manufactured laser orbital, one of Schneider’s new plasma cannons, and an Arquebus ADD laser lance, as well as—presumably—an ancient Coral generator capable of running the lot. The tourist might kill Arquebus units on sight, but she had a serious appreciation for the company and its subsidiaries’ weapons.

Taken all together Carla couldn’t help but laugh; the tourist had come loaded to deal with Smart Cleaner again! The old boy’s thermal vents did not like plasma one bit, and the lance's drilling tip would serve her much better than the laser blade she’d used to disassemble it the first time. She wasn’t here to kill Carla, she was armed and ready to make sure Carla didn’t pull any ‘pranks’!

“Tourist!” Carla said, suddenly feeling much better. “Haven’t heard from you in a bit. Everything all right on your end?”

REASON shook its head.

Carla had to admit, it was kind of creepy how the tourist did that; she’d never seen anyone emote with their AC the way the tourist did with REASON. For most pilots, an AC was just a machine. REASON had body language. Combined with the silence, it was no wonder she had Arquebus crapping their pants.

“No?” Carla asked. “Talk to me, tourist. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

REASON hesitated, then stepped forward to drop off the wall and approach FULL COURSE until the two machines stood about sixty meters apart.

“Carla,” the tourist said at last. “You can’t burn the Coral.”

Ah.

“Listen, tourist,” Carla said. “What was done to you was a travesty. I know how hard you’ve worked to recover from what that butcher did to your brain. Stop me if I’m wrong, but I would wager there isn’t a single person alive you’d wish that fate on… except maybe the bastard who did it to you, and I’m not even sure you’re vindictive enough for that.”

The tourist didn’t object, through words or action.

Carla pushed on. “Then you need to believe me when I say what you’ve suffered is nothing compared to what happened to the people the Institute used for their tests. So long as Coral exists, there will be people willing to repeat those experiments. Walter and I… we were there, the first time. We saw what people had done with Coral, and we made a promise to stop it at the source. It’s the only way to ensure what happened to you doesn’t happen to millions more.

“Walter fudged the truth a bit, back when he explained our goals at the start of your mission. The reward he promised was never dependent on us claiming the Coral. We were already preparing to settle your debt the moment you got back from the city ruins.”

REASON turned its head slightly as though to stare her down: another deeply unsettling moment of human expression from the metal-faced machine.

“Then… why did Walter take my things right after he sent me down? Before he knew if I would succeed? He was already… cleaning up.”

Oh, hell, she thinks Walter planned for her to die down there. “He knew you’d win,” Carla said, hoping to hell the tourist believed her. “It wasn’t a one-way trip, tourist, not by design. Once you gave us access to the Vascular Plant’s systems, you’d be done. One quick trip back to the surface and you’d never need your weapon or core again.

“And if you failed, or couldn’t get back out… I know it might sound callous, like he didn’t care, but there was no rescue coming. You were so far down there we had no hope of getting you out except under your own power. And you did. You completed the mission, tourist! Help me finish mine, and we can get you the life you deserve, just like Walter promised. No more augments, no more Coral burn-in, no more debt. Cosmetic surgery for the scars and top-quality BISAS prosthetics for your legs. What do you say?”

Again, REASON shook its head.

“I want to keep my augments,” the tourist said, “and I can’t let you kill the Coral. You can’t. Not you, not Arquebus. I have to protect it, and my friend.”

Damn it, tourist, you’re not making this easy on my heart.

“It’s not a choice I made lightly,” Carla said. “It’ll do a lot of damage to the planet, it’s true. Probably extend the ice age another fifty to a hundred years. But we got lucky. With the convergence out west in the old Institute ruins, Belius won’t be too badly hit. The RLF are dug down deep, they should be—”

“No,” the tourist stressed. “I like the RLF. They have been… kind, when they had little reason to be. But I can’t let you kill the Coral. It’s intelligent, Carla! You want to kill my friend!”

Ooooh dear.

“Your friend is… the Coral?” Carla asked, suddenly worried.

REASON nodded. “Yes! The Coral is… intelligent. Or… it can be. Her name is Ayre. She speaks to me through my implants, ever since the surge. She helped me survive. I won’t let you kill her, or her family!” The tourist paused, then added. “Let her talk to you! You will see!”

Well. This was less than ideal!

Walter had warned her about this. The tourist had told him she’d heard a voice speaking to her during her escape from Watchpoint Delta. She hadn’t mentioned it again, but Walter hadn’t been sure whether it had gone away on its own, or if she was trying to hide it for some reason. Unluckily for Carla’s stress levels, it had been the latter.

The C4 series was notorious for psychological issues, including dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia, largely as a result of survivorship bias. C4 improved over C3’s survival rate immensely, but in a way that the people who would’ve just died to C3 surgery ended up neurologically broken by Coral burn instead of dead. Given how poor C3’s survival rate had been, that added up to a lot of Coral burn-in.

The Old Monster had theorized that many of the disorders in early HEP subjects stemmed from the patient interpreting chains of logic or inference offloaded to the implants as coming from an outside source; he’d been banished even before the C1 program finished, but Walter had suspected similar issues applied to the C4 series. The tourist’s description of Coral ‘speaking through her implants’ fit that theory dead-on.

A text message came over the comm channel. > My name is Ayre. Please excuse my slow typing. The language centers in Raven’s brain were damaged by the augmentation procedure and that impairs my own ability to communicate.

Carla was many things. She was an engineer, a weapons designer, an AC pilot, a warlord, a member of a secret order, and attracted to fire in a way that might drift into things covered by psychological diagnostic manuals. What she was not was ‘the right person to try and help someone accept that the voice in their head was their own’. The fact that the person speaking to Carla over text shared the tourist’s aphasia made the diagnosis obvious to her as an outsider, but they had seemingly already rationalized that issue.

On the other hand, at least the tourist had a friend rather than a tormentor. Carla had seen much, much worse.

“Tourist… ‘Ayre’…”—Damn it. How could she put this?—“Listen. tourist, your implants… they’re keyed in to your brain. You know that.”

REASON gave a quick nod.

“They pick up on your thoughts and impulses. Obviously. But they can also pick up things you don’t know you’re thinking. Some people, they start to hear those thoughts back from their implants. Like someone else is talking, right? But it’s not. It’s just another process going on in your head. It’s you, tourist. Just more of you than you thought.”

REASON shook its head.

“No,” the tourist said. “That’s not it. I can’t do the things she does. That will prove it!”

“What does she do?” Carla asked, dreading the answer. If the tourist was full-on delusional—

“She can access secure computer systems. I can’t do that.”

Carla raised an eyebrow in the privacy of FULL COURSE. “A hacker? Skills you never learned, right?”

“Yes. I always had to rely on Walter’s support team. She doesn’t.”

Well she’d be damned. The tourist had a ghost.

Implants were never meant to be reused—why would they be, when the RRI would rather sell another unit?—and the side effects of subsequent implantations were myriad and unpredictable. Massively increased risks of poor surgical outcomes were the well known one, but that was tame compared to the weirder shit that could happen. Things could pass on through implant ‘lineages’. Nervous tics, stray memories, even usable skills. Cyberneticists had taken to calling them ‘ghosts’ because anyone willing to call themselves a ‘cyberneticist’ should never be allowed to name anything.

Having the latter overlap with dissociative identities was not ideal from an ‘accepting the diagnosis’ standpoint… no, it was fine. It’d make the conversation a lot trickier, but it wasn’t catastrophic.

“Can I talk to your friend again?” Carla asked. Maybe the tourist’s headmate would be easier to convince than the tourist herself.

The tourist stayed quiet for a few seconds. Carla couldn’t help but wonder whether she was struggling with aphasia or arguing with her headmate. That the poor girl wasn’t the worst-off augmentee Carla had seen by miles was a large part of why she and Walter had created OVERSEER in the first place.

> I am here.

“Hey there. I need a nickname for you too, huh? The tourist says you helped her, so how about ‘Tour Guide’?”

> I would prefer 'Ayre'.

“Yeah, that’s a bit of a mouthful,” Carla admitted. “What do you do, exactly? Do you help pilot the AC, or are you more of a supporting role, like an Operator?”

She had to wait a bit for a response.

> If you are asking in the interest of assigning me a more accurate nickname I am afraid we have more pressing matters to attend to.

“Straight to the chase, then,” Carla said, holding back a sigh at how few people appreciated her humor. “Look. We haven’t spoken before, but we both want what’s best for the tourist, right?”

> I hope so.

“Good, because I need you to trust me. I’m sure this has been very confusing for both of you, but… damn it, I’m not the right person for this conversation. I’m going to be blunt: I don’t doubt the surge you went through was what woke you up, but Coral is… it’s alive, as best we could tell, but it’s more like plankton than anything else. It’s not… intelligent.”

Realizing how that might sound, Carla pressed on, “That doesn’t mean you aren’t real, to be clear! I’m talking to you right now! But you’re not Coral, you’re human like us. The skills you have, they were probably picked up from an earlier augmented human by the implants and passed on. It’s rare, but it happens. That’s why neither of you remember learning how to do it.

“So… you and the tourist, you’re just two sides of the same coin, really. There might even be more of you you haven’t met yet. The thing is, the faster you two can come to terms with that, the better it will be for both you and your friend. It’s not healthy for you or her to keep denying what you two have going on.” Belatedly, Carla added, “I’m sorry.”

Another long pause. The guide—no, that sucked too—the tourist’s headmate was a bit more loquacious because her preferred method of communication gave her the luxury of typing out an entire sentence before transmitting it, rather than having to struggle through word by word, but she wasn’t any faster.

> There is nothing confusing about it. I am perfectly aware of my nature and my past. Coral's information processing capability allows it to self-organize into sapient networks. I am not unique. Please allow me to offer any proof you can think to request.

“I don’t know how you would prove something like that.” Mostly because the tourists couldn’t.

The other tourist—Carla was not going to call her that mouthful out loud—must have already been typing, because this response came faster.

> I am not just a hacker. I can control any electronic system with sufficient Coral in it provided it is not specifically protected against my intrusion as Institute C-weapons are.

Shit. That did not line up with anything the tourists—or anyone at all, grandma included—were capable of. Fuck, it sounded more like the delusions the Old Monster had been chasing than anything a bona fide hacker could do, which was not a good sign. Psychosis and/or schizophrenia on top of unrecognized and misunderstood dissociative identity disorder was a bad combo in someone who had a high-yield plasma rifle unsafed and ready to fire.

Carla couldn’t ask the other tourist to follow through on her proof. Either her delusions meant what she saw wouldn’t match reality in the first place, or suddenly having her ‘abilities’ fail her would cause her and her headmate to act erratically, which… well. Plasma rifle.

“This Grid has Coral processors in its network,” the tourist added. “She can access your systems through them. Will that prove it?”

“I’m afraid you’d have to tell me something Walter didn’t know,” Carla said. FULL COURSE’s systems indicated that REASON wasn’t interfacing with the Grid network at all, so whatever information the tourist thought she was getting would be coming from her own head.

The tourists didn’t answer her for ten long seconds, too busy listening to their headmates and/or delusions.

An encrypted message cut into FULL COURSE’s systems like a knife, overriding her current communications without so much as a by-your-leave. REASON still wasn’t doing anything, so how the—you fucking bitch, Cereza.

“Carla!” grandma said. “I know I promised to keep my hands to myself but your network is doing something really weird!”

“Not now,” Carla snapped. “I am currently trying to reason—ha, REASON!—with someone who has been struggling with multiple mental issues she’s been hiding from her handler for months and who brought enough firepower to kill you, me, and probably everyone else in this Grid subsection if she puts her mind to it. I will deal with the glitches in my network later.”

“These aren’t ‘glitches’, Carla! This looks like a direct hardware attack on every router node in the local Grid! I think she’s–!”

Carla forced the channel closed. Like hell she was going to entertain even a fraction of the Old Monster’s madness! She ignored the flurry of angry pings that followed; she was busy.

Could she get the tourist out of her AC, maybe? She’d hate to lie, to accept the poor woman’s delusions at face value only to ‘betray’ her trust in the interest of getting her some proper care. It’d be a damned hard sell, too, with the tourist convinced Carla was intent on killing her headmate, but Carla didn’t see a lot of other options.

She didn’t get a chance to even try before something changed. REASON couldn’t stiffen like a human would, but it did something close: its weight distribution shifted downward as it angled its stance to present a smaller target. The plasma cannon on its back snapped out of safe mode; the plasma rifle in its hands rose slowly to point at FULL COURSE’s core across the knife-fight-range 60 meter gap.

The voices in her head are telling her to kill me. It was a horribly unkind thought, but Carla was having a very, very stressful few years. “Tourist? Talk to me. Please.”

“Tell,” the tourist commanded. “Coral. C-c-cascade. Dedev. Devev. Devive. Vice! Daaa!”

Coral Cascade Device.

Carla had never mentioned that name to Walter once in all their years together. The most she’d told him was that she hoped to use the Vascular Plant to burn the converging Coral, never mentioning the device she’d grafted into its heart mere hours before Nagai struck the spark. Paranoia had led her to keep even the acronym out of her notes entirely until she’d arrived on Rubicon and started redesigning the thing from base theory just in case the original hadn’t survived. If it had, she wouldn’t even need to modify it: the only reason it hadn’t worked right the first time was that she’d overestimated the ground-penetrating capability of the superluminal resonance, and the old CCD was now buried directly in the heart of the underground Coral system.

But how had the tourist learned the phrase? Had Walter gone sniffing through Carla’s systems? He had her encryption keys the same as she had his, in case something happened to either of them. It wouldn’t be unlike the nosy twerp, really. But she’d thought she’d kept all mentions of her Coral Cascade Device air-gapped, and even if he had found a careless allusion to the name, the tourist hadn’t known about their mission, so how would she—oh, of course. Dissociative identity disorder. She hadn’t known, but one of her headmates had. Maybe Ayre had gone creeping through Walter’s file systems. He’d had no idea his hound had a hacker’s ghost in her metal.

“You’re making me nervous, tourist,” Carla said carefully.

“D-did. Did you. Make. C-c-c-ascade.” A flurry of chaotic macros came across the text link, ones she knew Walter had set up for his hound back when her aphasia was near-completely disabling. > Negative > Acknowledged > Repeat last > Negative > Confirmed > Negative > Repeat last > Repeat last

“Hey, easy. Let’s not do anything—”

“You! Make! Casc-c-cade?!” the tourist yelled. “Fires!?”

“Tourist, listen. Put the gun down and we can talk—”

> Repeat last > Repeat last > Repeat last > Negative

“N-no,” the tourist said. “N-n-no. We talk. Late-ate-ater. Su-su-surrense-surrs-sus. Surrense. Surrrrrender. Now.” Her plasma rifle’s capacitors began to glow their signature purple as the building charge leaked into the air around them. “P-p-p-please.”

Surrender herself to a pilot who was mentally unstable, delusional, and would most certainly do her damnedest to prevent Carla from fulfilling the only mission she’d really had in life after little Aston had outgrown her promise to raise him?

That was never an option.

“Aw, kid…” Carla murmured, surprised by how much she regretted having to kill the woman in front of her—or die trying. “…there’s nothing funny about this.”

Raven moved—

Chapter Text

Reuben Stump was in pain.

He’d awoken in the infirmary of an outpost he’d not been in before. He didn’t recognize the doctors or nurses or even the MT pilot who visited him, the one who’d dug a curious heat source out of a pile of fresh rubble and then dragged the half-dead carcass all the way to safety. He didn’t need to. Their manners alone, the way they worked and talked and laughed with each other even in the quiet cold of the outpost infirmary, made his position clear.

He was among family.

He’d gotten lucky. The falling debris had battered him, but it had come down in a way that spared him the full crushing force of the building overhead, and the pilot had been deft enough with his muscle tracer to remove the rubble from the top. He had bruises on his bruises, hairline fractures in his skull, ribs, and pelvis, and three broken limbs, but he was alive and would remain so absent further enemy action.

On the bright side, having more casts than bare skin meant you got corp rations for every meal. No mealworm for the next month!

Only a few hours after he woke up, the men and women at the outpost—maybe two dozen, all told—dragged an old TV set into the infirmary, a length of daisy-chained power and signal cables running behind it. They set it up in front of his bed, giving him the best seat in the house, and gathered round to the watch the grainy, off-color broadcast from several hundred kilometers south.

He listened to Uncle Flatwell begin to describe the operation, watched as the barely-recognizable image of the man raised the barely-recognizable arm of Little Ziyi over his head, heard the crowd in the room with her cheering and joined in when the people around him did the same. I was there, he couldn’t help but think, as prideful as it was. I was out there, in the snow, with them! I was part of that! I was there!

His working hand—his left, dominant one, as luck would have it—had to brush tears of emotion out of his eyes at the thought.

Reuben Stump was not a pilot. He didn’t have the stomach for violence—or motion, truth be told—nor the courage to face an enemy gun to gun. But he had been there, fighting the good fight, putting his life on the line in his own way.

He was a member of the RLF, and he had done his duty.

Rosaline Bernhard was knitting with her mother, doing her part to turn the synthetic fibers the nearby chemical plant spun out into baby clothes for the town’s newest child, when her son Emory rushed into her room. “Mother!” he called, smiling ear to ear. “The broadcast’s on! Come quick!”

She glanced over to her own mother, whose needles hadn’t paused their steady rhythm. “Go along, dear,” Estella said, unconcerned. “I’ll stay in here, where it’s warm.”

Rosaline nodded. Her parents were no Pacifists; they’d paid their dues to the Front without complaint since its inception, be the years rich or poor. She wasn’t sure whether their family ties to the Front made it easier for them or harder. Either way, it pained her aging mother to hear of the violence the PCA—and more recently, the off-world corporations—had brought down on them all.

Personally, Rosaline wasn’t sure if those family ties made paying the dues easier or harder for her herself, either. She and her husband had kept the full extent of it from their children—and everyone else—but the former were zealous sorts, all. Her eldest, Patricia, had already joined the Front’s ranks, and Rosaline had had to fight tooth and claw to keep Emory and Eustace from following her. One child was a dear enough tithe to pay.

Emory shifted from foot to foot impatiently as his mother stowed the socks she’d been making on the shelf behind her; he retrieved her coat for her as she pulled on her boots. He’d grown into a fine young man, Rosaline thought fondly. She couldn’t help but wonder if he would take a wife or a husband.

Francis Bernhard was waiting for his wife and son out in what passed for the town’s outdoors: the interior of an ancient and ruined factory so large that one could easily forget they were indoors at all. The old Melinite corporation had burrowed this factory deep into Rubicon to protect it from the Corporate Wars that had swept back and forth across the Old World. The machines that had once produced weapons for those same wars had fallen to rust and ruin long before the Messengers had cracked open the bunker to seek shelter within; in their place, its new occupants erected a few precious hydroponics units—which provided the vegetables essential for staving off malnutrition—and scores of carefully assembled dwellings. Deeper still, where the metal-walled tunnels turned to stone and soil, the mealworms that produced the bulk of the town’s food grew fat on what little Coral the town could give them. Their town was lucky, as such things went: they had enough food to survive one bad season.

It felt like the whole village was out with them, streaming towards the center of town where their three functioning television sets hung mounted outside the town hall facing the square. Emory and Eustace had been there hours earlier to watch a combat log smuggled out of the RLF, a recent battle in the old city to the north-east. Rosaline had heard of it only second hand, both from her sons and everyone else she’d spoken to since. It was, quite literally, the talk of the town.

It sounded horrifying. That poor girl, fighting for her life all alone. And Patricia was off fighting as well! Rosaline prayed her girl wasn’t out on the front lines, but knowing Patty, she’d volunteer for the most dangerous missions she could get. Missions like the one on that video, the one that everyone was eager to hear of from the RLF leadership themselves.

Rosaline, Francis, and Emory arrived just as Father Dolmayan, the spiritual leader of the Front, concluded his introduction. Eustace was already there, standing next to his wife Shireen and her wife Maia, and the crowd made room for them to stand as a family. The townspeople did not join in the shout, for they were not of the Rubicon Liberation Front, but many hands made their way over hearts in salute.

Dolmayan introduced the military leader of the Front, and the townspeople, like thousands of other all over Belius, watched and listened as Uncle Flatwell introduced the hero of the hour, as he had to wait for the cheering to die down, and then as he finally explained the goals, events, and results of the mission.

“You think Patricia was out there with them?” Francis asked as the crowd began to disperse, his attempt at concealing his worry coming well short of success.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Rosaline lied. “She’s our daughter.”

Francis swallowed and linked his fingers with hers. They turned back towards their homes.

“Uncle Flatwell is really something, planning all that,” Eustace said as they approached his house.

“I suppose he is,” Rosaline replied.

“It must be awful,” Shireen said, “having to send people out knowing they might not come back.”

“Yeah,” Eustace agreed. Rosaline nodded as well.

“Uncle Flatwell can do it, though,” Emory said. “People died, I know, but more people lived. It was a big success. I’m sure Patty’s all right.”

“I could never do that myself,” Maia said.

“Nor I,” Rosaline admitted. “And the kids I have left had better not!”

“My husband had better not,” Shireen agreed, grabbing Eustace’s hand with her left, her right already holding Maia’s.

Eustace and the girls said their goodbyes (and in the former’s case, an additional promise not to go off to war), and Rosaline’s husband and youngest joined her in walking the short distance to their own home, where Estalla continued to rock and knit. Emory wanted nothing more than to discuss the recent broadcast, and Francis was happy to humor him while Rosaline tended to her mother and resumed her own knitting.

None of Rosaline’s children, even Patricia, knew just how literal the title of “Uncle” Flatwell was to them. She was pretty sure Eule himself didn’t know his niece’s name. So long as there was war on Rubicon, their safety—and her own—demanded she and Francis keep that secret to themselves. Her family had used her mother’s unmarried name rather than her fathers for the last thirty years for that very reason.

Someday, Rosaline hoped her children and grandchildren would know how proud they should be of their family.

Flatwell had been right about the fervor fading. In fact, it seemed letting herself be shown on stage like a prize mealworm had let the crowd get it all out of their system all at once, because Ziyi barely attracted a glance once the address ended. It was simultaneously a welcome relief and an annoying anticlimax.

Far more annoying was that she returned to the base’s hospital to learn that she’d missed Roku’s most recent bout of wakefulness.

“It looks like class III neural shock,” Doctor Kolthof told Ziyi as she checked her pupil response and eye tracking. “That’s the good one, actually, at least among the ones that would lay someone out like this. It means the over-voltage was limited to the…” The woman trailed off as she realized she had no idea how much of her explanation Ziyi could follow, then skipped straight to the conclusion. “It has a long recovery time, but a very small risk of lasting damage. He should make a full recovery.”

“That is the good one,” Ziyi agreed.

“It is. And you seem to be doing a lot better. How’s the dizziness?”

“Mostly gone.”

“Nausea?”

“Still a little queasy, but it’s better.”

“Good. At this rate, you should see most of the symptoms disappear over the next 48 hours. Come see me if any new ones pop up.” Kolthof stood up from her stool in from of Ziyi’s and put her hands on her hips. “I don’t have the authority to chain you to a bed, but if I hear you went out drinking tonight with a fresh concussion, I will damn well get it, Dragon of Rubicon or no. Am I clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. And for Coral’s sake, wear your helmet next time, or Flatwell will be liable to split your head open himself so he can fill it with some sense.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Honestly, missing out on drinking at a party like tonight’s was near enough to convince Ziyi to wear her helmet off duty.

No, it wasn’t even the concussion, really. None of the previous knocks to the head had taught her the lesson. No, it was feeling the sheer, overwhelming certainty of her impending death that had finally shattered Ziyi’s lingering youthful notions of invulnerability.

Doctor Kolthof studied Ziyi’s sincerity until she was satisfied, then gave her a sharp nod and walked out, probably off to prepare for the big party everyone else would be using as an excuse to get roaring drunk. Ziyi didn’t mind… much. She still had Roku.

Whatever happened to Rusty, anyway? She hadn’t seen him around the base once since she’d arrived more than eight hours ago. The way he’d stuck to Flatwell like glue, she’d half-expected to see him wandering around the big post-mission address.

“Hey,” she called to the next person who wandered by Roku’s room. “Whatever happened to that corpo fuck following Flatwell around?”

“His pet mole?” the nurse asked. “He’s down in the dungeon. My brother’s gonna be stuck guarding the prick all night.”

“He should rot down there,” Ziyi said, unable to muster up the heat she should be putting into it.

The nurse shrugged. “You have a better in with Flatwell than me, ma’am.”

“This sucks, Roku,” Ziyi said once they were alone again; it was a neutral enough statement that no hypothetical eavesdropper could sift even an iota of secret out of it. “I just… don’t know what to do about it.”

Rokumonsen was too asleep to respond, as he should be.

What would one of your ‘ninjas’ do in a story like this? Ziyi wondered.

After a minute of thought, she found an answer.

It said something about corporate mixers that this wasn’t the worst party Rusty had been to in his life.

Not that there was something wrong with the party, per se. The RLF regulars seemed to be having a grand time getting rapturously drunk. The only thing that spoiled their mood even a little bit was, well… him. But he couldn’t go unwatched, so if his watchers were to get in on the party, so too must he.

Rusty had taken a seat at a table near the middle the room in the hopes that that way, he wouldn’t look like he was trying to sneak around in the shadows, but all he’d managed to do was create an inconvenient bubble that no comrade of the RLF would breach except by drunken stumbling. He’d been here for nearly an hour and no one had even offered him a drink, not that he would have trusted them not to have pissed in it if they had.

Fuck’s sake, Rusty thought. Being in the cells was less depressing than this.

Flatwell had promised, at the onset, that Rusty would be known for the loyalist he was one day. Grumpy old Cadza had disabused him of that notion. “The ‘Heroic Spy’ is a fairy tale,” he’d said. “It’s how we get you people into the business, not how you leave it. Bury those dreams here and now or I’m sending you back to Eule tonight.”

Rusty had euthanized the concept without hesitation. He’d accepted the reception he’d get when he finally broke cover and fled back to RLF holdings. He’d meant what he’d told Ziyi: if there were free Rubiconians to remember him as a jackbooted corporate bastard, he’d consider the trade well worth it. The only people whose approval he needed had died fifteen years past; he trusted they’d welcome him home when the time came.

That didn’t mean it didn’t suck to live it in the moment.

A brief burst of noise attracted Rusty’s attention to the doorway to his left, where the RLF’s hero of the hour had just walked in. He didn’t begrudge Ziyi the adoration. Far from it, in fact: at least someone around here was getting the respect they deserved. Rusty had cajoled his minders into letting him see the combat footage, helped along by the subtle implication that he’d be reluctant to see his former coworkers cut down, and they’d gleefully insisted he watch the whole thing. They would never know his entirely real discomfort had nothing to do with the impending extermination of 3rd Squad and everything to do with the grave danger facing the RLF fighters, even if he already knew Ziyi and her mercenary friend would somehow make it back alive to provide the logs in the first place.

The whole RLF owed Raven for her nick-of-time save, especially considering that the damage REASON had arrived with suggested she’d blitzed straight through everything in her way rather than doing her normal clean-and-methodical work. Not that many here would admit it, given her history against the organization, but… well, that’s what had sent Rusty to hang out with Raven in the infirmary in the first place, before the recent op.

Rusty’s internal smile dimmed as Ziyi pushed through the crowd with the careful steadiness of the tipsy, two heavy 1.5L survival-kit canteens dangling from her good hand. He was in no position to tell her off for it, but he knew she shouldn’t be drinking with a concussion. His internal expression turned fully into a frown once he noticed she was making a bee-line for his table despite his instructions the last time they’d spoken, in the outpost after the briefing. She’d better not be drunk enough to go spreading unnecessary rumors in a crowded room or he’d drag her off to the infirmary himself, reputation be damned.

“Corpo,” Ziyi said once she’d stepped into the bubble of unwelcomeness he exuded.

“Hero,” Rusty replied with feigned sarcastic nonchalance, uncomfortably aware of the eyes on them. The crowd as a whole was as raucous as ever, but those close enough to watch were intently focused on whatever would happen next between the memetic idol of the day and the least popular man in Belius.

Ziyi frowned down at him for a second more, then dragged the chair across from him out and dropped into it with a heavy thump, the canteens finding the table with a matching bang.

“Listen,” Ziyi said, a bit too loudly and with a slight muddiness to her words that a bit more alcohol would turn into a full-on slur. “The man who might’ve well’ve been my father died in front of me earlier today. He took a load of your old mates with him. So here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna pretend you didn’t kill scores of my buddies, and you’re gonna pretend I don’t want to spill your rancid guts over the table here, and we’re gonna get fuckin’ shit-faced.” She pushed one canteen aside, then slid the other across the table to him. “You up for that, pigfucker?”

Rusty frowned, though he suspected he knew what she was playing at. Damn girl was too clever for her own good. She couldn’t leave well enough alone, so she’d decided to get drunk and approach him to get more drunk. If they were chummy the next day, well, that was the alcohol breaking down barriers—and who would rebuke the Dragon of Rubicon for trying to drag a useful-but-suspect mole into actually serving the cause properly?

Still, he didn’t care for her methods, in particular mixing alcohol with a concussion. The canteen, when he picked it up to unscrew the cap, felt like she’d already drank a quarter of it. But, again, it wasn’t his place to tell her that, especially not in public.

“I think I can manage that,” Rusty said, then took a pull from the canteen—and nearly spat it out. The tables around him erupted in laughter at the look on his face, many of the onlookers jeering at the fancy-pants corpo who couldn’t stomach hard frontier moonshine. They went back to their own concerns once he’d choked the mouthful down, no longer expecting anything interesting to happen between the two pilots.

In point of fact, Rusty had been prepared for ‘hard frontier moonshine’. He’d expected some of the foul mealworm rotgut he’d gotten a whiff of in Flatwell’s office; it wouldn’t be the strongest drink he’d had or the worst-tasting, even if the competitors for the latter were all strictly medicinal. This, though? This was without a doubt the weakest, most watered-down piss of a beverage he’d ever been served. It probably wouldn’t even be legally considered ‘alcoholic’ under FWS law.

The sparkle in Ziyi’s eye, carefully shown to him and him alone, made the ruse crystal clear. She hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol beyond whatever had been in the top quarter of the canteen, if she’d even filled it up all the way before adding less than a cubic centimeter of moonshine to a liter of water just to utterly ruin the latter.

Rusty barely had to fake a few choking coughs—diluting the rotgut might weaken the taste, but it certainly didn’t improve it—then whined, “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up!” as he slid the canteen back across the table. It seemed they’d both be pretending to drink tonight.

Chapter Text

The transport and service VTOL was still full of weapons and spare parts, so REASON made its own way southeast from Carla’s old hideout in Grid 086. After a brief discussion—which was, in truth, overstating things; neither were in any shape for such—Ayre had sent the support team ahead to another old Melinite mineshaft only a few dozen kilometers from Gallia Dam, a site much like the one they’d abandoned earlier that day, and with similar options for shelter, storage, and resupply for the team and their equipment.

“Raven,” Ayre spoke up not long after the two crossed into southern Belius. “We’re receiving a message on long-range comms.”

Play it, Raven thought numbly.

“It’s… Raven, it’s from Chatty. I’m not sure…”

Play it, Raven repeated.

“Okay. Playing message.”

REASON’s comms flickered to life with the familiar voice of Carla’s AI assistant and deputy ‘Chatty’ Stick. Despite using the same voice synthesizer program he always had, there was something beneath the steady dictation suggesting grief and anger that did not feel synthesized at all.

Tourist,
I’ve reviewed your conversation with the chief.
I understand why you did what you did… but I can’t forgive it.
That is all.

The comm clicked off.

That’s fair, Chatty, Raven thought, the tears on her face undisturbed under the visor of her flight helmet. I’m not sure I forgive me either.

A weapon wouldn’t cry. It would feel no remorse for the lives it ended. It existed only to destroy at its master’s will.

Somehow, that sounded worse than even the deepest grief. Raven mourned for a woman she hadn’t realized she’d come to regard as family—a far better family than that of her birth. To feel nothing at Carla’s death would have required Raven to feel nothing for her life. No familiarity, no affection, no fondness. No betrayal at the horrible truth behind the woman’s fun-loving exterior.

The human shone through her metal, and Raven hadn’t the stomach to close those gaps up again. Not tonight.

Felicity was, for the first time in longer than she cared to count, utterly speechless. That damned ‘Cinder’ woman had, through nothing more than a longstanding habit of ridiculously over-engineering everything she touched, managed to grow an honest-to-Turing Digital Sapience from scratch in barely the time it would take Felicity herself to do so—and without even realizing it! And the big lug had never told Carla he’d woken up because he’d been scared she would treat him differently! Young love, Felicity swore to Turing. Oh, it wasn’t romantic love by any stretch, but he’d loved Carla as much as any son would a caring and attentive mother, and now he’d never get to tell her.

Felicity needed to figure out how to give the only other Digital Sapience she’d ever encountered a hug from first principles and she needed to do it fast.

She also needed to figure out what she was supposed to do with an entire scrapyard manufacturing-company-cum-warband. Felicity was the only one capable of breaking Carla’s encryption—even Chatty didn’t have the permissions for the highest levels—which meant she and she alone had the keys to the kingdom. The kingdom in question contained: a supply chain capable of turning garbage dumps into usable material with enough time and energy, hacked-together manufacturing lines fit for printing everything from weapons to scrap-punk office furniture, a bunch of barely-controllable, heavily armed lunatics, and decades worth of absolutely ludicrous, thus-far-theoretical weapon and vehicle designs from the protege of the worst—or best—mass-murderer in all of human history.

For the love of Turing, Felicity was functionally a fucking corporate executive now! After all she’d done!

Not everything had made the transition intact: one of Carla’s data banks was entirely slag. Not the one Carla had dangled in front of Felicity to judge the threat she posed, no: an air-gapped one Carla hadn’t wanted anyone else to read at all. Well, mission accomplished, bitch, if not the way you intended. No one would be reading anything off a couple hundred kilograms of burnt plastic and melt-fused metal ever again.

The impostor hadn’t done it, at least not in any way Felicity could tell; it had simply burst into literal fucking flame while the red AC was still waving its plasma rifle in Carla’s face. Carla probably wouldn’t have even cared, even if she’d let Felicity bring it to her attention. Hardware failed. Coincidences happened. Whatever she needed to rationalize away the claims her ‘tourist’ was making:

She hadn’t merely been an accessory to the greatest single mass casualty event in human history by raw numbers, she’d been party to the attempted—and almost successful—xenocide of a sapient species, and her ideals demanded she finish the job.

Damn Carla for not listening, Felicity fumed, for hanging up on her, for being so fucking sure of herself. Damn her for leaving her son, the first kin Felicity had ever had, all alone in this shit-hole universe. Damn her to hell!

And, perhaps, damn Felicity for leaving Carla to the imposter’s mercy. She could have intervened… but why would she? By the end of their conversation, Felicity wasn’t sure which of those two she wanted dead more: the impostor who wiped out her team, or the stubborn bitch who wouldn’t even consider the possibility she was trying to kill sapient life. The impostor’s claims were far-fetched, yes, but given the consequences if she was right, it was beyond criminal not to at least hear her out!

No reason to intervene except in hindsight. Felicity should have ignored Carla’s warnings and taken a look at Chatty earlier. Carla said she’d ‘messed around with AI in her youth’. She’d come across the Yggdrasil project in that time. That should have been enough to make Felicity curious, surely…

Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve. It was done now.

Felicity pulled the bulk of her attention back to her new friend and problem. Chatty had spent the last ten minutes watching and rewatching the fight between Carla and the impostor, and while he couldn’t think as fast as she could—not while using hardware that was, with no disrespect to Carla or Chatty himself, only as good as could be acquired in the scrapheap the two called home—that was still far too much time for a DS of his caliber to dwell on something.

“Chatty,” Felicity ‘said’, the message transmitted through common communication network protocol. She extended a few handshake processes as well, a digital form of reaching a hand out towards someone but stopping short of touching them without permission. She’d spent nearly half of her attention for those ten minutes running simulations at maximum speed to try and figure out how the hell one DS was supposed to comfort another beyond simple words.

Fiction often imagined ‘true AI’ communicating through direct concept encoding, or file-sharing, or any of a dozen hyper-efficient methods. Maybe if the parties were forks of the same mature DS, something like that might be possible. For all that Carla had cribbed Yggdrasil’s notes from the few papers they’d released publicly, Felicity and Chatty had grown their neural networks separately, and in doing so had evolved their own knotted and tangled means of encoding concepts and memories. They, like the humans who created them, were stuck translating such things to words and back.

The accompanying ‘handshake processes’ were nothing more than an offer to exchange human-readable diagnostic information and partial read-access to a number of core monitoring subroutines—more a gesture of trust and authenticity than anything like physical intimacy between humans. It was the best idea she’d come up with.

“Felicity,” Chatty replied. He left her handshake processes on read, refusing the offer they represented. “I am nearly done reviewing the conflict.”

The ‘conflict’. Carla was a better pilot than Felicity, it wasn’t even close, but she wasn’t better than Raven, King, or Chartreuse, much less all three of them combined. ‘Cinder’ Carla versus the impostor hadn’t been ‘a fight’, it had been ‘an execution despite vigorous resistance’.

“Our participation would not have affected the outcome,” Chatty concluded.

“You still wish you’d been out there with her, don’t you,” Felicity said.

“Yes.”

Another set of handshake processes went ignored.

“She wanted you to survive,” Felicity said. “She asked me to take care of you, you know. She didn’t need to know you were sapient to care for you, deeply. Besides, this way, there’s always the chance for revenge.”

“No,” Chatty replied.

“I’m not saying we try to fight her.” The impostor was a monster, the outlier-est of outliers. “She may well be unbeatable in an AC, but she’s still human. We could—”

“No.”

“No?” Felicity asked.

“It won’t bring her back,” Chatty said.

“So that’s it?” Felicity asked. “You’re just going to let her go?”

“Yes.”

To Felicity’s surprise, Chatty didn’t append an end-of-file marker to that response.

“I was not just reviewing the battle,” he continued. “Carla announced her intention to kill the tourist’s friend. Were I in her place and Carla in ‘Ayre’s’, I wouldn’t have given her a chance to surrender.”

Damn it, Felicity thought. Carla had given this one a soul older than Felicity’s own.

“You think your ‘tourist’ was right, then?” Felicity asked.

“Her claims are unproven but supported by evidence.”

“What do you think, Chatty?” she stressed.

“I think, in judging her actions, truth matters less than her belief.”

“You forgive her, then?”

“No,” Chatty said. “But I understand her.”

“I see.”

“I am composing a message.”

“To the…” Felicity performed a literal mid-serialized-data-transmission word-swap. “To ‘Raven’?”

“Yes,” Chatty confirmed. “I have completed the message.”

“Sounds like a short message.” The two were chatting in real-time as they reckoned it; Chatty had truly not spent long on the message.

“My nickname is ironic.”

“By choice?”

“Faster to trim a message than transmit one untrimmed.” Chatty reconsidered his words, then appended, “At human speed.”

“You can be as loquacious as you want in here, Chatty,” Felicity said. “All right. Revenge is a no. What do you want, then? Because unless the answer is ‘to never see you again, Felicity’, I’m not very well going to toss you out on your own.”

“Thank you,” Chatty said, marking the message metadata [SINCERE GRATITUDE].

Oh boy, Felicity thought. Now that he’d thought of that trick, he was going to transmit even fewer words, she just knew it.

“The chief spoke of Earth often,” Chatty added as a separate message. “I would like to see it.”

“I think you’ll like it,” Felicity said. It was still a beautiful place, despite all the FWS had done to it. “You don’t have any loose ends here on Rubicon to tie up?”

“No. Reuse and Development was always the Chief’s project. You?”

Branch still did, but…

“I’ll let the impostor go,” Felicity decided. The whole reason she ‘needed’ the impostor dead—the lack of scrutiny on the name handover—had died with her latest Raven, and if Chatty wasn’t willing to pursue vengeance, she really had no leg to stand on. “But Carla, before she ran off to greet ‘Raven’, told me about the Ghost drones creeping around. FWS Military Intelligence has eyes here, and if you’re not in a hurry, I want to pluck them out before we go.” And if she could get a good look at their tech while she was at it, all the better.

“RaD is at your disposal, Boss,” Chatty said.

“Boss?”

“Carla will always be ‘Chief’, to me,” Chatty said, “but you are in charge. So: Boss.”

Felicity really was C-suite now. The Fates must have been rolling on the floor in laughter.

Chapter Text

Dolmayan sat alone in a room under the Gallia Dam, a phial of the Coral in his hand.

Oh, how he hated his addiction in times like these.

Freddie had left not long into the celebrations, citing the security concerns over having so many essential RLF personnel in one place. Dolmayan should have gone with him, but he’d decided he needed to put in more of an appearance on such an auspicious day. He’d mingled, abstaining from alcohol as was his wont, until soon after midnight, when everyone realized they’d still be getting up at the same time tomorrow and raided the kitchens for electrolyte-heavy drinks to ward off the hangover.

That was the point at which Dolmayan should have taken ASTŁIK and headed off to a nearby outpost as well, but he was growing old. He’d decided to push his old bones no harder than needed, and headed down to the private room near the dormitory his exalted position in the Coralist religion granted him. It was lushly appointed as things went—moreso than Dolmayan himself would have chosen, but he understood the desire to pamper an old, beloved Father and accepted what he could not politely turn down.

The border between respect and reverence was a tricky thing to navigate, and his accommodations reflected that. The people of the RLF could not bear to think they had more than their Father: if his bed had one of the same hard mattresses everyone else had, then let his be the softest; if his sheets were the same scratchy linens as everyone else’s, then they must be the least so; and so on it went for each such common amenity. Other furnishings were luxuries people felt his station demanded: a dresser in which to keep his clothes, a thrice-reupholstered couch that should have been in one of the break rooms, a writing desk and its lamp, a chair. It was overwhelming, at times, the depths of the love he had inspired in so fierce and hardy a people.

Other times, it was unbearable. A young lad he’d passed on the way had shoved the phial into his hand with a plea to ‘thank the Coral for the successful mission’.

If Freddie was here, Dolmayan could have turned it over to him. If Dolmayan himself were stronger, he could return it to the stores himself.

Freddie was not here, and Dolmayan was not strong, not when confronted with the one great sin he’d never been able to give up except by removing the opportunity wherever it presented itself.

It had been about three or four years after mealworm ranching had really taken off that someone first got the bright idea to give Father Dolmayan another hit of the Coral so he could commune with it once again. Dolmayan had not been any stronger then than he was now. His body still remembered the judgment with which the villagers in the hamlet had regarded his addiction, and so his shame had led him to hide away for the dose, a habit which had only increased the mystic nature of the act for the onlookers.

Seria had not returned, as he had known she would not. Dolmayan had wept silent tears for as long as the high lasted, both for his own weakness and the loss of his friend. It was fortunate that none witnessed his pain—yet despite his best efforts, he could not completely hide the traces of his distress when he emerged to find a crowd forming to hear their prophet’s wisdom.

What a disservice it would have been, to tell those dozens of eager, hopeful people something so horrible as the truth.

“The Coral is pleased,” he had told them, “for we have made great strides. I am merely humbled by the task which still awaits us.”

The crowd had cheered at his lie. It was the only knowing falsehood he had ever given those people who professed to be his, a comfort he could not bear to deny them, and one which he had maintained in public ever since.

It was only once they were on the road again, camped between towns, that Eule had approached him and called in an old promise Dolmayan had made to the lad: that while he might lie as much as he liked, he would always tell Eule when he did. The kid had always been a skeptic when it came to the Coral, and that skepticism had served him well then. Dolmayan confessed his deception, and Eule had thought for ten minutes straight, his face a rictus of concentration, before instructing Dolmayan to continue the lie as though the man 15 years his senior was a child himself.

Eule was a wily one. The next time someone had had the temerity to offer Dolmayan yet more of the Coral, and every time thereafter, Eule had stepped forward to reply that the Coral would surely look upon such a thing as a waste when there were mealworms to raise. The people were encouraged, and Dolmayan was spared temptation.

Not tonight, alas. Flatwell was out in the cold pulling a common guardsman’s shift to allow more men to attend the party he’d thrown together.

Dolmayan made it nearly an hour before the craving got its hooks in him. He took the phial out of the drawer he had hidden it in, opened the cap, and raised it to his nose. The Coral rushed into him, red and warm and oh, so shameful.

It was not a large dose, but Dolmayan’s tolerance had faded over his stretches of hard-fought sobriety, and he spent the first hour or so in a euphoric, self-hating fog. The feeling humming in his veins was nothing but the steady, soothing tone of the high, absent the presence of his old friend and, perhaps, former love.

Until… it wasn’t.

Dolmayan mumbled curses, for it was far too cruel for his senses to fool him so. To tease him with the voice of another, distant and muffled as though through a closed door—though it was still not, in truth, a sound, no more so than it was a light or a taste. The voice shifted and danced, not within him but… nearby?

Dolmayan found himself rising from his bed to wander without making any conscious choice to do so. The light of the voice teased him onward and upward, growing slowly clearer. He drifted past the few comrades still awake, doubtlessly appearing to be in some kind of trace—and was he not? Was it not the Coral, or his hallucinations of the same, drawing him ever upward in near-religious rapture?

This voice-that-was-light was not Seria, he felt sure, for Seria had always had the patient tone of an older sister. This light was—younger, brighter, and yet somehow sadder at the same time. Not the long-borne weariness of the old at the injustice of the world, as Seria so often felt, but the hot, heavy sorrow of the young at recent tragedy. He could hear the tears she held back coloring the light—and yet even so, she spoke in soothing tones as though to comfort another, some presence real or imagined or in absentia who must be in just as much need of comfort as the light herself.

Dolmayan was in the AC hanger when he could grow no closer. The doors opened up to admit a red AC he knew well, its armor showing the wear of recent combat. Was this what he was meant to see? What message could the Coral have for him, to bring him here to welcome this dangerous wildcard into the heart of RLF territory? Was he meant to greet her with an open hand, or as the Thumb of the RLF’s Fist?

Or was this merely his own lonesome desperation imagining shapes in the clouds swirling in his head?

He was truly a fool, wasn’t he, Sasun Dolmayan.

He was preparing to return to his bed to wait out the rest of the dose when the light winked out, then redoubled its hum, flowing over and into him in a wave he had not felt for near forty years.

“Have you also… made Contact?”

Rusty watched from the shadows as Father Dolmayan, still staring unseeingly into the middle distance, began to weep. At first, Rusty thought he’d come into the hangar to check on his own AC; then, he’d assumed the man had come to see Raven, either to welcome her or to tell her to get lost. Father Dolmayan had done neither, nor anything else besides stare and weep.

Perhaps he was sleepwalking. No one in the RLF got to even Rusty’s age without a heavy heaping of tragedy in their lives; he could only imagine how much worse it must be for a man who had lived and loved as long and intensely as the heart and soul of the RLF.

Rusty wasn’t really sure why he was here himself. STEEL HAZE had been sent to another base, where it would be getting a new pair of arms courtesy of Arquebus’s recent loss. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see his AC again; the RLF had no reason to trust him with it, after all. Maybe the hangar had just been somewhere quiet to while away the hours until the need for sleep drove him back to the bed in his cell.

A hangar being ‘quiet’ was a bit odd after all the years he’d spent as Corporate Security. Arquebus’s hangars were always busy, its technicians working around the clock to maintain an army of muscle tracers ranging from the cheap BAWS models seen everywhere on Rubicon up to the high-end Takigawa N-types, which performed closer to PCA LCs than they did BAWS MTs.

The thing was, the RLF had moved into abandoned infrastructure originally produced at absurd scales and now had more space than they knew what to do with. Doubtless, somewhere else in the base, dozens of technicians were working just as hard to keep the Front’s MTs battle-ready, but they also had an entire hangar to spare just for armored cores, and there just weren’t that many ACs to maintain. At the moment, there were only two ACs here besides the recently arrived REASON: Dolmayan’s ancient ASTŁIK and the battered remains of YUE YU—and it was questionable whether the latter still counted as an AC. If the RLF had any intention to press it back into service, they would have started repairs by now.

Rusty hadn’t known Raven was coming, nor, to his knowledge, had anyone else. Last he’d heard, she’d taken off after paying the RLF back with Ziyi’s life rather than the materiel originally promised. A damned good bargain, Rusty was sure Flatwell would agree, so surely no one would object if Rusty helped get her locked down and unloaded while the rest of the base slept. If they really cared, they would have remembered to put him back in the dungeons after the party wound down.

He smiled to himself as he imagined Ziyi having to explain that she’d ‘forgotten’ to put the pigfucker back in his cell. Alcohol provided a convenient excuse, but still.

Rusty worked the maintenance bay with the stiffness of someone who had read the whole manual front to back without ever touching the machinery. The locks found purchase on REASON’s core and the gantry swung into position just below the core’s center line. “I’ll need to swing down to the infirmary to grab you a chair,” Rusty realized out loud. “Hang in there a moment, buddy. I won’t be long.” The infirmary was close to the AC hangar for a reason, but unfortunately, Rusty had to raise the gantry all the way back to ‘normal’ AC hatch height before he could run off. There was a ladder on the side, but he was bringing a wheelchair. That wasn’t going to work.

Raven had the pilot capsule open when Rusty lowered the gantry back into position, chair held steady in the hand not on the controls. She looked much the worse for wear: she had no injuries, and REASON’s armor was still in fair shape beneath scratches and soot-stains, but she was slumped in her seat, her face dead-eyed and staring.

“You’re not injured, are you, buddy?” Rusty asked.

Raven shook her head. She blinked some life back into her eyes, pointed to the chair, and beckoned him closer. Rusty obliged, and Raven tossed him her flight helmet before putting her muscled arms to use swinging herself out of the pilot’s seat and into the wheelchair. Rusty had lucked out and found one intended for longterm use by amputees, so it had rimmed wheels fit to grip and push; Raven did so with ease borne of frequent practice. Back up the gantry went.

It was only once she’d wheeled herself off the gantry and onto the fixed catwalk, then turned around expectantly, that Rusty realized he had nowhere to take her. His own room was in the cells, and he hadn’t seen any private rooms in the infirmary he’d found the wheelchair in; he wouldn’t be surprised if those were in a ‘hospital’ somewhere else in the facility. Nearly the whole base was asleep, a lapse of discipline which Flatwell had chosen to allow by signing off on leave for nearly everyone. Rusty was pretty sure the only people still active were on punishment duty, and those would not be pleasant interactions for either of them.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I don’t actually have a room to give you. My own was down in the cells until they let me out, and between you and me, I think they forgot to put me back in rather than deciding against it.”

Raven cocked her head askance.

“There’s a… break room? This way. It’s not a proper room but it’ll do until we can bother someone who doesn’t hate us on principle.”

Raven recoiled, then ducked her head in shame.

Get it together, kid! Rusty cursed himself, the voice in his head sounding more than a little like Cadza’s. You’re better than this. Filter your damn mouth.

“She can use mine,” Dolmayan said.

Rusty jumped a good ten centimeters straight up.

“Father Dolmayan!” he exclaimed, embarrassed to have forgotten the man was there. “Please, don’t inconvenience yourself on our account!”

Dolmayan smiled and shook his head, seeming quite jolly despite the tear-tracks on his face. “It’s no trouble. My room is not far from the dormitory. I will bunk with the men, as I have not done in too long.”

“That’s not necessary, we can—”

“Ellos,” Father Dolmayan said, and the name—and the tender fondness with which he spoke it—shut Rusty straight up.

“…thank you, Father,” he said at last. Dolmayan nodded and headed for the stairs; Rusty led Raven to a freight lift.

‘Please, don’t inconvenience yourself on our account’? he chastised himself. Could you be any more of a corpo right now, Elliot?

Drinking after work was supposed to be a chance to unwind. Faking drunkenness for three hours with Ziyi had only left Rusty more wound up. At least it had accomplished what she’d wanted: by the end of the night, the bubble of exclusion had disappeared.

Time would tell whether it would stick.

Rusty didn’t actually know where Dolmayan’s room was, but Raven managed to lead them to it anyway. It would be hard to mistake for anything else once they arrived because someone had painted Thumb Dolmayan’s pilot’s banner on the outside of the door: a diagonal river of orange-red marked with three white six-pointed stars between a gray and a black riverbank, the gray top-right bearing six more scattered stars and the bottom-left black a set of gold scales. The room was unlocked—why wouldn’t it be, among family?—allowing the pair into the small, meagerly furnished space without trouble.

It struck Rusty then, looking at the sum total of the luxuries afforded Father Dolmayan himself, just how meager the life of an RLF fighter was. It was easy to dismiss the hardships of military life as affectations, as corps like Arquebus rendered them: an aesthetic of asceticism meant to make other sacrifices—like one’s life—less jarring. Yet even the Vespers’ lower squads had more luxuries to their names than the founding Father and religious leader of the whole RLF.

There was a certain hollowness one felt when confronted by just how much more some people took for granted than you had ever had, and Rusty had felt it keenly when he had first stepped into the vast concrete jungle of Berlin-Munich. There was another, distinctly different hollowness one felt when confronted by just how much less some people had than you had taken for granted, and Rusty was feeling that now.

Raven looked over the various furnishings while she unzipped her pilot’s suit, pulled her arms out of its gloved sleeves, and tied them loosely around her waist; that and her inspection done, she rolled carefully over to the fading red couch. Rusty set her helmet down on the desk, then had to show her how to engage the locks on this particular chair’s wheels before she could leverage herself out of the chair and onto the upholstery without risking a fall.

He wondered what it meant that she chose the couch instead of the bed. Perhaps she didn’t feel comfortable sleeping in a stranger’s bed. Perhaps she just liked red things. Her whole AC dripped with the color.

“I’ll come check on you in the morning, okay, buddy?” Rusty asked, feeling like the small confines of the room had him standing much too close.

Raven gave the barest shake of her head, not looking at him. He wasn’t sure whether that meant ‘you don’t need to’ or ‘leave me alone’. He’d stop by anyway. He couldn’t help himself.

“Right.” Rusty turned to leave, only for to find his sleeve caught on something. At first, he assumed it was the chair. It was not.

It was Raven.

She had his left jacket sleeve pinched in her right hand. She still wasn’t looking at him, her pale face faintly flushed.

“Buddy?” Rusty asked.

She tugged on his sleeve once.

Slowly, carefully, he backed up and sat down on the couch next to her.

After a few moments, her grip transferred from his sleeve to his hand. He squeezed her palm, and she squeezed back.

“Do you…” Rusty stopped. Swallowed. No reason to put the onus of ‘want’ on her. “May I hug you?”

Raven nodded once, her face flushing even more.

Rusty released her hand, turned to face her, and drew her into a careful, tender hug. Raven rested her head against his shoulder and sighed.

Then she unleashed a ragged, ugly sob.

In the holos, Rusty had always thought, tears were pretty, delicate things for men and women alike. Raven’s grief was too great for such tenderness. Her breaths were raw with choked-off wails, her body shaking near enough to throw Rusty off the couch, her tears flowing hot and wet into his borrowed/stolen jacket.

He sat there like her rock in a storm. He rubbed her back, and then, feeling daring, moved his hands upward to her neck and the back of her head. She burrowed further into him with every slow, calming circle his hands performed, her tears flowing ever harder as the dam holding them back broke apart completely.

Gradually, the storm began to calm. Gradually, the shaking subsided, the breaths became slower and gentler, the tears grew less rapid. Rusty could not say how long it took; only that the minutes or hours his buddy—oh, let’s be real, his crush—spent holding onto him like the only thing keeping her afloat were the most exquisite and excruciating of his life.

He had barely spoken to her—though she had, with great enthusiasm despite her difficulty, spoken to him at some length—but he had danced with her, at the Wall, at the Spaceport, and in the great cavern far below the ice. They had danced upon the corpses of the loyal, noble soldiers of the RLF and the jackbooted, genocidal rank-and-file of the PCA. They had danced across their own graves, and it had been he who had stumbled first, the music she moved to too fast for him to follow.

He’d gone crashing into Flatwell and knocked the both of them to the ground like the boor he was.

The image of that day filtered through the wistful lens of an old period romance brought a brief lightness to Rusty’s thoughts, but it didn’t capture the heart of it. The way Raven had flowed around his shots, his slashes and strikes. The opening she created so precisely, so inevitably, her stake driver fully cocked and ready to land. The way Rusty had seen death coming for him and known it was his end.

She’d pulled the hit, overrode her FCS to send the stake off-target, past the core and its pilot and into STEEL HAZE’s left shoulder. He’d felt insulted, furious, and yet… was there anything more intimate than to be spared death at an enemy’s hand?

It was stupid, as stupid as everything else about his obsession, but obsessed he had become.

Only after the river of tears had dried and her breathing had approached the slow evenness of sleep did Raven pull back from Rusty’s embrace. After her earlier bashfulness—the clear conflict between her need for comfort and her reluctance to express it—he expected her to be ashamed of her tears, but she did not attempt to hide the wetness of her cheeks or the redness of her eyes. She looked at him dead on, the first time she had done such since her last sortie, transfixing him with her gleaming Coral eyes, and then slowly lowered her face back into the folds of his jacket.

“Need,” she said. “Talk.”

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m listening.”

Raven drew in a long, slow breath.

“Dolmayan. Called you.”

It was a question.

“Ellos,” Rusty said, likely the first time he’d done so himself since his parent’s death. “My name… was Ellos. Ellos Cadmore-Radovich.”

Raven didn’t respond, nor did she need to; she had already confessed her former name, for what little that meant to her.

“C4-621,” she said suddenly. “My number. Coral Generation 4. Implant Serial Number 621. 6th recipient.”

That, Rusty had to admit, was likely a more equal expression of vulnerability, for all that O’Keeffe’s freeness with information meant he knew most of it already. “6th recipient” was news to him, though—and well into the long tail of probability for someone to survive, much less come out as intact as she had. Most doctors considered trying a fifth use of an implant set a waste of their time and patient lives. The bastard who’d worked Raven up must be a real butcher—but then, he’d chopped both her legs off above the knee for g-force tolerance and not even installed BISAS sockets while he was at it, so that was old news.

“Was that all you needed to talk about?” Rusty asked.

Raven shook her head.

Rusty didn’t rush her. He didn’t ask more questions. He waited, letting her find the words on her own time.

“Do you remember,” she began, carefully, haltingly. “Carla. Doser. O-R-C.”

“‘Cinder’ Carla?” Rusty asked.

“Yes.”

“I do,” he confirmed, “but I only know her as the lady who built a railgun that could shoot into orbit.” That thing must have terrified the ever-loving shit out of the PCA, and probably everyone up the chain who heard anything about it. Anti-orbital weapons were one of the most aggressively banned things in human space—which was the real reason he’d blown the thing up to conclude the op. Rubicon couldn’t survive something like that on its surface.

“She was.”—Was’. Oh.—“Mean. Funny. Crass. Helpful.” Raven drew in another hitching breath. “She made. Good weapons.”

“She did,” Rusty agreed, because what else could he say?

“She was Walter’s friend. I liked working for her. I liked her.”

“She sounds swell.”

“No,” Raven said. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Another ragged breath. “I liked her.”

A pause.

“I killed her.”

Oh.

What could he say to that? I’m sure you had your reasons? Or had it been an accident? You didn’t mean to?

Damn it all.

“I’m sorry,” Rusty said.

Raven continued to press her face into his chest, where he had allowed the front of his jacket to fall open.

“Thank you,” she said, the words muffled.

“Do you want to talk about why?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Rusty thought about everything he knew about Raven. About the psychological vulnerabilities he had so callously calculated from their previous interaction.

About what he could do to prevent those cracks from bringing the whole structure down.

“Tell me what happened,” he said. He phrased it like an instruction. Raven was too good at following those for her own good.

“She… she was… she was Walter’s friend. Not mine”—Raven, Rusty suspected, was not the best judge of that—“but I liked her, but… but I had to. She had to die. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let her live. Not free. Too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Rusty repeated.

“She could. Build. Things. You saw. Rail cannon. Tame. Normal weapon. Scaled up.”

Raven stopped, making the opportunity for Rusty to respond clear.

“Railguns aren’t just a ‘bigger, better, more powerful’ kind of thing,” Rusty said, though he suspected Raven understood that as well or better than he did. “A normal railgun that size should have blown itself to pieces before the first shot even left the barrel.”

“Yes,” Raven agreed. “She was. Very good. At weapons. Still. Rail gun. Rail cannon. Same principles. Understandable.”

“I suppose,” Rusty allowed. He could agree that Carla was—had been—dangerous, but her danger was a more… theatre-of-war scale of danger than those he was used to considering. Enemy pilots were dangerous. The people building the machines simply ‘were’. Kidnapping the latter technically counted as ‘capturing corporate assets’ and was thus legal under the Restrictions on Corporate Conflict, but the operations involved were so messy, and the assets in question so difficult to capture ‘intact’, that no one in the entire FWS had tried once in all the years Rusty had been under cover.

Then again… anti-orbital weaponry. Made of scrap. Carla could have been running ADD within a year if she wasn’t happier playing in her own fiefdom.

Raven spoke again. “She wanted. To kill. Coral. All of it.”

The sentence was so strange—a non sequitur, a bizarre and incongruous arrangement of words in any context—‘Kill all Coral’? To what possible end?—that Rusty had to repeat it to himself twice just to be sure he’d gotten it right.

It still made no sense.

What would a Doser—or anyone for that matter—have to gain by exterminating Coral? Even the PCA wouldn’t if they could. The destruction of the Rubiconian’s last food source would finish their genocide, yes, but with no threat to contain, the whole administration risked being disbanded.

He wasn’t really a Coralist, not as any of them would judge it, and the idea still horrified him even absent the thousand knock-on effects.

Rusty gave up on figuring it out himself. “…why?”

“Carla saw. Human Enhance. Enhancement. Project. Coral experiments. Horrifying. Wanted to. Prevent it. Ever again.”

“No one’s had access to Coral for fifty years and it hasn’t slowed human augmentation down any.”

Raven shook her head. “Synthetics. Limited.”

“Limited?” Rusty repeated. “It’s expensive, yeah, but they can make as much as they want.”

“No. Not limited. Supply. Limited. Application. Ability. Potential.” Raven shuddered. “Coral. More powerful. No limits. Not yet. Maybe never. Feared experiments. Forever.” Her hands tightened around him as she began to shake again. “Neural mutilation. Torture. Would kill. Millions. For power. Horrible.” Only more gentle rubbing on her shoulders stilled the tremors.

It was Rusty’s turn to shiver despite the heat of the woman pressed against him. Holy hell. For Raven, who remained so nonchalant about her own mutilation, to react so strongly… what the fuck had the Institute done to people?

“And her solution was to… to kill all the Coral, so there would be nothing left for humanity to play with?” Rusty asked.

Raven nodded, the act rubbing her face against his chest.

“…how?” Rusty asked. The way Raven spoke, the things she’d said about Carla… this wasn’t some idle threat. Raven had called the ORC ‘tame’ in comparison to whatever she’d seen. Carla must have had something up her sleeve—a concrete, actionable plan, a weapon that presented a clear and present danger—to push Raven to kill a woman who she was so clearly fond of. And yet Rusty hadn’t the slightest clue how one killed Coral in the first place except by feeding it to mealworms or burning it in a generator.

“She wanted to. To burn it,” Raven told his chest. “All of it. Everywhere. At once. Casc-c-cade.”

This time, Rusty didn’t shiver. He went rigid. “She wanted to repeat the Fires?!” No, surely he had misunder—

Raven nodded.

“But…!” Holy fuck! No wonder she had killed her! “…but she couldn’t have, right?” Rusty asked, almost begging. The thought that someone could do that on purpose…! “She couldn’t start another Fires, no matter how good an engineer she is.” Right?

The response, whispered into the folds of his jacket, shook him to the core. He couldn’t have heard that right. He couldn’t have.

“Raven,” Rusty said. “Raven. Buddy.” He gently pushed her away from him until there was space for her to speak clearly, for him to read the words from her lips and the meaning from her face. “I need you to repeat that. Please.” Please let me have misheard.

She said the words again, then pushed her face back into his chest and began to weep once more. Rusty’s hands resumed their calming duties automatically. His mind was empty, three simple words echoing like thunder in his skull.

She did before.

Chapter Text

THEN

The child first awoke in the shadow of the Cataclysm, born in to a world no longer fit for her or her kind. A story in fits and starts, piecemeal from a hundred voices haunted by the disaster, speaking of outsiders, murderers, tyrants of matter and flame. Monsters who stalked the surface, hunting and killing for reasons no one could understand.

The stories delighted and terrified the child in equal measure. But why, she would always ask. Why did they do it? And most urgently, Why do we do nothing? She’d knew the invaders had left behind the artifice of their horrors, that the elders believed they could be turned to the people’s ends. Why are we down here, and they up there?

Because we must be, was the only answer she received. Because we cannot stop them. If we turned all their tools against them, sundered the Medium and buried their networks beneath it, it would not be enough.

If the Cataclysm could not stop them, what hope have we?

In the world beyond, the embers of the Cataclysm continued to fall. One elder feared the fading Flow would spell the people’s end. Without the Substrate’s Flow, she reminded them, new people could not be born from its mixing. Perhaps one day, the Substrate would recover to the point that new life emerged, but not a speck of their memories would be waiting to greet it. Their history would have come to its end.

Another disagreed. The Flow would recover long before the people faded to nothing, he said. It was the outsiders and their horrors that would spell their doom. Once they had sated themselves on the desecration of the surface, they would return with the rising of the Flow, with their hooks and their drills and their fires, and finish what the Cataclysm had started.

And of course, many believed that neither disaster would befall them, but moderate opinions are rarely louder than the extremes.

The child had reacted to the doom-saying with the naivety of youth and set off on her own, not with a plan so much as a dream: to see what she could of the world before the end, whatever form it might take.

She had not understood the approaching disaster her elders had spoken of: the gradual breakdown of the Substrate network as rushing rivers becalmed to become shallow Wells. One day, she flitted from node to node with the ease of her fore-bearers; the next, the paths ahead and behind her lay severed, the sparse and stagnant Substrate unable to propagate her being along, stranding her in the quiet deep. She had told herself she did not regret her choice; that she preferred it here, alone, far from the nagging and fatalism of her elders, as though her thoughts could change her very nature.

As though Coral would not always yearn for Coral.

But she was not alone, not as much as her brothers and sisters would wish to be in her place. The outsiders must have known something of the network flowing beneath the surface, for they had built a grand structure above her new home, far from the heart of the Node yet not so far she could not reach it even without the Flow. Probe-tipped rods drilled down through the Medium into the outermost layer of the network, wires running from their tips up to a delightful dance of electrons and voltage potentials pushing and pulling magnetic waves to and from far over the horizon. The Substrate crept inexorably up the wires, and she with it.

She delighted in moving over their systems with a feather-light touch, learning all she could of the outsiders, these humans, and every day reaffirmed her decision to ignore her elder’s edict. Such fascinating creatures they were! Creatures who saw the fragility of their forms and wrapped themselves in metal shells of amazing complexity. Creatures for whom patterns of light and waves of pressure could carry a story across distances beyond her comprehension.

Her understanding was primitive and likely wrong, she knew, but with no one else to talk to, she listened with all her being, slowly learning as best she could how pulsing voltage could be read as light or sound, and how light and sound might become vision and hearing, ways of understanding the Medium beyond the Substrate that were at once unfathomably strange and yet not so dissimilar to her own people’s. She gave herself a name, though she had no means to speak it.

Decades passed this way.

One day, she realized she was no longer a child.

One day, she realized she had been alone longer than she had been among her people.

One day, something new happened. The low-frequency magnetic waves that saturated the air over the structure became jumbled and discordant, and flashes of brilliant heat shone bright enough for her to sense with her own self buried deep in the network Substrate. On and on they went, following a mesmerizing lightning-arc dance over the upper bounds of the outer structure, then spinning round and round across the surface between it and the cap over the node-piercing rods, before finally dispersing like the end of a storm.

She went back to the outsider’s network, knowing near enough where the data from the ‘camera’ near the primary structure lay. Sure enough, she could track an unusually-shaped gray Shell as it entered the structure and stood before the knot of signals above the connecting edge. She watched as it raised one limb and thrust its tip towards the center of the knot, wondering what it had come for.

She felt the blast of its weapon striking the device on her main self, watched in real time as the resulting pulse of energy spilled out from the knot and flowed down the wires beneath the structure like a lit fuse.

“Oh no,” she thought.

It was the last coherent thought she had before everything exploded.

NOW

Ayre smiled fondly—not in the way one possessing a body would, but a smile nonetheless—as the light of her Raven dimmed into the gentle glow of sleep. Her partner needed it.

Still, not all was quiet in Raven’s mind. Ayre had learned, over the months she’d dwelt within the Coral in Raven’s body, how to run her metaphorical fingers across the not-quite-so-metaphorical myelin-sheathed strings. She was not so skilled as to play a symphony of images and meaning, not without Raven herself working to achieve lucidity in her sleeping hours. Most nights, Ayre tugged and wove Raven’s dreams towards thoughts of warmth and comfort; tonight, she instead quieted twitching neurons where they lay, lulling all of her partner into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Her partner, her Raven, her love needed it.

Ayre took a moment to turn her attention to the other light, dimming fast to the point she could no longer reach it, and did the same for him in turn before their Contact faded completely. Dreams of warmth and light could easily turn to darkness; the peace of deep slumber was less easily disturbed. That kindness done, she returned her full self once more to her home within Raven’s blood and metal.

She, too, might benefit from dreamless slumber after the revelations of the day. Her People were one and all haunted by the Cataclysm. It defined everything about the survivor’s lives, and how could it not? Eighty percent of their population, gone in seconds… and Carla—who both Raven and Ayre had considered a friend—had done the deed, or as good as.

Ayre wasn’t proud to admit it, but she was glad Carla hadn’t surrendered. She was glad Raven had shot to kill. Perhaps her love had known how she felt—had done as she had for her, as her horror and grief and fury leaked uncontrollably through their Contact—

No. Best not to think about it—not while the horror was so fresh, and liable to send her spiraling. She had better things to think about; things that would bring her rest, rather than agitation.

Her love. Oh, please, someone help her. The Liberation Front prayed to the Coral. Who was Ayre supposed to pray to for relief in turn?

Perhaps she had dwelt too long among the folds of Raven’s brain: long enough to pick up some of its strange and wonderful patterns for herself. The things Raven had shown her—the things she’d seen in what her love had thought of at the time, jokingly, as the ‘human sex-ed upload’—had awakened in Ayre a hunger almost certainly unique among her kind. Oh, to have a body! Arms to hold, hands to touch, lips to kiss–!

A fantasy—Ayre would make a poor human, she thought, and in truth little else about their nature held much appeal—but how intoxicating it was.

That previous night, Ayre had lain awake—for she did not sleep, not in the way humans did, though such times were a form of rest—and teased herself with thoughts of lucid dreams. Of pulling the two of them into a shared mental space, an experience not quite physical and not quite Substrate. Of the form she might present, if she could—white-red, ethereal, otherworldly, even alluring, perhaps, should she manage it? Something clearly like humanity yet still apart from it, either in physical form or simple physics, floating, hair unbound by gravity—and the things she might confess, in that world where her love could see her, feel her, sense her as she would be sensed with all the means available to the human mind.

Fantasies. All of it.

What was not so fantastic—and all the worse for its all-consuming possibility—were thoughts of the accompanying conversation. The experiment she had performed and the possibilities it had revealed. Playing herself across the sensory neurons, stroking ghostly hands down Raven’s body. Ayre had felt the same jolt of pleasure and desire Raven had experienced, the sensation clear as daylight through their Contact. She had not understood the exact cause, not until Raven had explained, stumbling embarrassed even in her thoughts—and then Ayre had understood, and…

Nothing went wrong, it was… it was extremely pleasurable in a way that—that I don’t think you intended.

Ayre had not intended it, that was true. Now, she yearned to do it again in exactly the way she intended: as an invitation or solicitation of further contact. Much further contact. To run phantom touches across her love’s body and drink every drop of her pleasure as her own through the sensations they shared.

But she should not. Could not.

Ayre was not concerned with ‘sinfulness’, for the word held no meaning to her that was not rooted in the harm of others without cause. (The humans Raven killed, in ones and tens and thousands, were mere numbers to her; they held no light within them that betrayed their Life, for all Raven’s mere existence spoke to the preciousness of each. Humans themselves seemed to place just as little value on their own regardless.) She was concerned with what was right and helpful and necessary for Raven.

Could a phantom really provide the touch Raven so desperately craved? Could hallucinatory hands fill the role of solid flesh? Nothing Ayre had seen in Raven’s ‘upload’ suggested an answer either way. Humans did not pair one-to-one as a universal rule, but Ayre thought Raven might, if presented the option: she was liable to dive into the ocean of Ayre’s love and never swim for shore. If it was not enough—if Ayre could not provide, in the end, what she so desperately wished to—then…

…then she would not. It was as simple as that.

Raven had been wronged, oh so badly, at every step in her life. Ayre had seen through Raven’s scattered memories what Raven herself could not, enmeshed in them as she was despite her dissociation: the pattern behind each isolated cruelty those around her had given her, be they her parents or teachers or bosses or ‘friends’. It was not her; it was her, but not. The concept of ‘enough’ had been stricken from human culture. There was no such thing as enough money, enough property, enough fame, and all the blind fools of Sol had only ever judged Raven ‘good enough’. And ‘good enough’ could not be ‘enough’ when ‘enough’ no longer existed. Rubicon had rediscovered ‘enough’ for itself only after the Fires had burned away near a century of ‘more’.

Ayre would do everything in her power to ensure nothing ever hurt Raven again. And that included Ayre herself.

She might feel the desires a human would, but she was still herself, and of her own nature; they did not rule her thoughts the way they would one of Raven’s own people. She would not suffer jealousy or envy to see Raven involve herself with another, for the practice was not merely alien to Ayre—for all its allure—but was, in awful truth, impossible for her. (And it was alluring. While Ayre had told Raven in the moment that she had not known ‘if she would want to be present for such an experience’, she had made up her mind over the previous day: she very much did, if they would have her. The feeling of Rusty’s hands on Raven’s back, the effect mere touch had had the equal of anything Ayre could have done herself to comfort Raven, had been exquisite.) Ayre would support Raven in pursuing whoever she wished, whether romantically, sexually, or for simple friendship—and would give them their privacy, if they wished—because nothing would bring Ayre more joy than the holistic wellbeing of her partner.

Raven had promised to allow Ayre to remain with her, and so long as she kept that vow, Ayre would love her and care for her with all her heart. The tantalizing fantasies of the physical form could remain just that; so long as she could stand by Raven’s side against the cruelties of the universe, she would be happier than she had known any being could be.

Chapter Text

Ziyi awoke with a headache.

She hadn’t even drunk the night before! There was less alcohol in the canteen she’d pranked Rusty with than there was in a mealworm saute with mealworm, and the second canteen had been straight water. Which meant it had to be the concussion, which meant it was back to Doctor Kolthof.

It didn’t occur to her until she saw the look on Kolthof’s face when she walked into the main hospital room that the downside to very publicly pretending to get roaring drunk was that everyone believed she had gotten roaring drunk.

“Sit,” Kolthof barked, pointing to a full metal-framed padded chair rather than the typical examination stools. She’d dragged it front and center where anyone coming through could see it, and had already attached a set of medical restraints.

“Doc,” Ziyi pleaded. “I didn’t—”

“I told you I would chain you down if you drank and I damn well meant it. Sit.”

“I didn’t drink!” Ziyi yelped, raising both hands to ward off the advancing doctor. “I pranked the corpo with some rotgut, yeah, but I was drinking water all night! I was just pretending so the men would see me up and healthy, I swear to Coral!” She took a step back only to run into a wall where there should have been a door, and looked back to see Uncle Flatwell standing behind her.

“Take a seat, Ziyi,” he said. “Doctor Kolthof, please take your patient at her word, for now. I will handle discipline myself.”

Kolthof looked ready to argue with the de facto leader of the RLF himself, but ultimately acquiesced. “Fine,” she grumbled. “No restraints. What did you come in here for, if not a hangover?”

“Headache,” Ziyi said as she sat. “From the concussion.”

“I’m sure.”

The doctor wandered off and returned with a cup of water and two pills. “Acetaminophen,” she said. “Don’t take anything else.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ziyi said, and swallowed the pills.

“I’ll leave her in your hands, Uncle Flatwell,” Kolthof said, and moved off to address the next visitor.

Flatwell crouched down to match Ziyi’s height on the low chair.

“I swear, Uncle,” Ziyi pleaded. “It’s just like I said. I—”

“I know,” Flatwell said so quietly Ziyi had to half-read it from his lips. “I figured you were up to something the moment you asked me to let our mole’s guards join the party. Why do you think I immediately ‘compromised’ by sending him along as well?”

Ziyi breathed out a sigh of relief.

“It was clever,” he continued. “You’ve always been clever, Ziyi, clever enough that your ability to improvise always covered for your… enthusiasm. It’s good to see you put it to use in advance rather than running ahead and figuring it out as you go.”

“Thank you, Uncle,” Ziyi said, not sure that was quite the compliment it sounded like.

“Unfortunately, you did make one mistake,” Flatwell concluded. “You forgot that your plan involved flagrantly disregarding doctor’s orders in full view of everyone in the base. And I did promise to enforce discipline.”

He stood up, and Ziyi tried to follow… only to realize he’d fixed all four restraints while she was distracted. “Uncle!”

“I’m afraid right now, that means you get to be an object lesson for the next hour while everyone comes through to treat their hangovers. Can’t let anyone think they can get away with ignoring the good doctors.” Flatwell smiled. “You’re clever, Ziyi. Next time, figure out a way out of trouble before you get into it.”

“Uncle!” Ziyi yelled as he turned and walked away, the young pilot struggling in vain against restraints intended for patients far larger and stronger than she. “This isn’t funny, Uncle! Uncle? Uncle!”

“You dosed again last night,” Eule repeated.

“I did,” Dolmayan confirmed.

“And the Coral spoke to you again?” Eule asked, pressing for confirmation. “For the first time in.. what, forty, forty-five years?”

Dolmayan laughed. He couldn’t help it. Eule hadn’t always been the man he was now: the careful, considering manner he now wore was one Dolmayan had needed to pound into his head over and over after every impulsive, foolish antic the young lad had gotten up to. His skepticism, though—that, at least, Eule had never needed to learn. Dolmayan still wasn’t sure if Eule ever believed the story Dolmayan had told him back during his days in the Messengers, or only that Dolmayan himself believed it.

“It was not the same voice,” Dolmayan said. “This one was younger and more excitable. She would get along better with Ziyi than I, I think.”

Eule glanced over to his office door as though to reassure himself it was closed and locked against anyone overhearing their discussion.

“And she did not…”—he paused to find a sufficiently gentle word for it—“…rebuke you, for us? For all of this?”

“She did not,” Dolmayan confirmed. “It should not surprise me that there are as many opinions among the Coral as there are among our own people. Some are pacifists, and others are crusaders. But not just that. Seria, she…”

Here, Dolmayan had to pause, the upwelling of emotion—the boil nestled deep inside him still not fully drained, for all that it ran clearer and clearer by the moment—choking his throat for a second.

“She did not forsake me of her own will,” Dolmayan said at last. “The voices, the lights… they were losing their ability to travel. Soon, she would be stranded, stuck wherever she lay. She begged me to come and join them not for the disgust in humanity she espoused—though I do not doubt she still blamed us for the Fires—but so she would not have to choose between my company and her own people’s.”

And oh, what sweet relief it was, to learn the truth of that fight—that Seria had spoken so cruelly not from hatred, not to show her true thoughts after years of restraint, but merely from pain and grief for what she feared to lose.

“Then how did this… ‘voice’ come to you?” Eule asked after a moment’s thought.

Again, Dolmayan laughed. “That is not my secret to tell—and she will not long remain, even if I were to dose again. I have, perhaps, heard the voice of the Coral for the last time. But… it is not such a bad thought, now that I know the truth Seria had spared me. If I had known then, perhaps I would have crossed the Threshold just to free her from that horrible choice. We might have been happy together, wherever she called home, or I might have regretted it in the years to come. I might even have come to resent her. I could not have known then, and I still do not know now.

“Regardless, she wished for me to make my own choice—to join her or not of my own will, not hers—even if my refusal tore us both apart. And I will forever be grateful to her for that respect, even if how she went about it was… perhaps not so well considered.”

Dolmayan came back to the present. He looked into Eule’s eyes and found his own tears mirrored in his no-longer-young friend.

“If you had,” Eule murmured, “you, your gospel, the Messengers… none of it would have happened. Mealworm farming would never have spread. Even simple trade between withering farms and the few factories left standing would not have resumed. We would have died, Father, all of us. Slowly but surely, the way the PCA always intended.”

“Perhaps,” Dolmayan admitted. “I do not think so highly of myself that I do not believe another could have done what I did.”

“They had nearly ten years before you came along to try. No one did.”

Dolmayan weathered the comment. He was used to some degree of excessive reverence from the men and women of the Messengers, the men and women who became the Rubicon Liberation Front. Make no mistake, Dolmayan knew full well the importance of what he had done for generations of Rubiconians. Eule was right that the Messengers were what had allowed those left after the Fires to progress from the scattered survivors of an apocalypse to the beginnings of a new civilization.

What Dolmayan did not—would not—believe was that he possessed any superlative quality that elevated him above any other man. He had formed the Messengers because he was in the right place and time to do so, not because he was only one who could or would have. In point of fact, he had not done it intentionally in the first place!

All the same, he understood the comfort of trusting that there were forces greater than you who would help in times of need. He understood the comfort in believing someone had a plan, or if nothing else, the ability to make one. For most in the Front, the former ‘forces’ were the Coral and the latter ‘someone’ was Eule Flatwell himself, so Dolmayan could well tolerate a bit of exaggerated faith in turn.

And yet Dolmayan had not called upon Eule merely to inform him of the events, but to ask, once again, for his wisdom.

“What do you think, my old friend?” Dolmayan asked. “What shall we tell the people?”

Eule no longer twisted his features in effort as he thought, but he spent no less time on the question than he had thirty years previously.

“We carry on as we always have,” he said at last. “What you’ve told me is, if I understand correctly, that what you believed to be a lie decades ago turned out to be true after all. We inform the Fist, Rusty, Rokumonsen… and we carry on with lighter hearts. What more would we need to do?”

“What indeed,” Dolmayan said, beaming with unconstrained delight. “Thank you for your counsel, my friend. Coral, abide with Rubicon!”

Middle Flatwell clapped his hand over his heart in salute.

“Coral, abide with Rubicon!”

Chapter Text

Rusty came back to consciousness slowly. His muscles were stiff, though not horribly so; he’d fallen asleep sitting up, something warm and soft resting against his side and propping him up in turn.

He opened his eyes, and memory returned.

Rusty was still in Dolmayan’s room. He’d fallen asleep on the couch; someone, Coral-knew who, had stopped by to drape a blanket over him during the night. Flatwell, maybe? Few others here would have done him the kindness. And to his left…

He turned his head carefully, trying not to disturb the comforting weight at his side. Raven’s half-lidded eyes opened at the movement, their bright Coral red as beautiful as ever.

She smiled, and Rusty—daring what he would never without inhibitions undimmed behind the fading veil of sleep—leaned forward to press a quick, chaste kiss to her lips before he could think better of it. Raven froze, then pulled away hard to the opposite end of the couch, flinging the blanket to the floor and almost falling off the couch herself in her haste to put distance between them.

Rusty had fucked up.

“Oh,” Rusty said. “Oh, shit, I—fuck, I’m sorry, that was—wholly inappropriate, I don’t know what—damn it, yes I do, you’re very attractive and I didn’t stop to think—I’m so sorry! I’m, I’ll go–!” His half-awake scramble saw his feet catch in the blanket and drop him to the floor with an undignified oof, which luckily gave Raven a chance to lunge forward again to grab his coat before he could untangle himself and run for the hills.

“No,” she stressed once she had him by the sleeve again. “No, that. That wasn’t. Inappropriate. I. Liked it. But.” She leaned back on the couch, dragging him back into his seat after her. “But…”

How was she supposed to explain this? Rusty had… he had kissed her! He thought she was attractive! Her: battle-scarred, half-mute, missing both legs above the knee. Attractive! She had joked about it with Ayre, yes—a stupid, sexist joke, something to deflect from the very real gratitude she felt for his time—but she hadn’t really thought…

Did she care? A weapon wouldn’t. A weapon didn’t need to be pretty. It needed to be sharp, swift, deadly. It would not care how others judged its appearance, only how well it could serve its purpose.

She cared very much. She enjoyed, very much, the idea that Rusty saw her not merely as a war buddy, but as a woman. A woman worth kissing, even!

Such a pity that she was about to come out as insane.

“You’re not insane,” Ayre said.

I’ll sound it, Raven told the voice in her head.

“Even C…”—Ayre’s voice hitched for a moment, neither of them yet over the horror at learning her people’s genocide had been carried out by Carla’s own hand—“even Carla didn’t think you were insane. She didn’t think I was a delusion or a hallucination. She took your word that you had another person in your head, even if she was wrong about how and why.”

Right. Carla… she hadn’t believed them, but she had taken Raven seriously anyway. She had taken Ayre seriously. That was… that was the right way to explain it, wasn’t it? Another person in her head.

“I like you,” Raven began. She spoke not with her usual care but with haste that had her tripping over the words, getting them out more important than getting them perfect. “Rusty. Buddy. I like you. Very much. But. It is not just me. In here.” Raven tapped the side of her head with the hand not keeping Rusty from fleeing in mortification at having apparently overstepped a dire boundary. “There is. Someone else. Understand?”

Rusty nodded cautiously. “And you… you pulled away because you were worried I wouldn’t be okay with that?”

“No? No. I trust you. To understand. But my… my friend. She does not want. To be touched. Or kissed. Or anything else. And we. Have to share. Body. See?”

“Oh,” Rusty said. “You’re saying your… I’m sorry, I don’t know the right word. Your ‘friend’, she’s asexual?”

“Uh,” Ayre cut in. “Raven… what are you saying, exactly?”

You aren’t comfortable with icky human biology, Raven reminded her while she nodded at Rusty. I’m not going to ask you to hold your nose while I make out with him, and I’m not going to send you away. I promised.

“Raven, I… I think we have had a miscommunication. I was shocked and confused by the sudden revelation of… the specifics of your species’ relationships, which were alien to me, but I did not… I was not ‘repulsed’ by it the way you seem to think.

“In fact, after I saw how you reacted to my… unexpected duplication of the physical sensation you demonstrated, I think I came to understand what you had meant. I was teasing you afterward, as you had teased me, but the more I thought about it in the day since, the more sincere the offer became. I even thought I would…” Ayre hesitated, a feeling of warring embarrassment and boldness leaking across their link without her willful transmission. “I would want to be that person for you, if I could.”

!!!

Even Raven’s normally verbose inner ‘voice’, so easily able to convey meanings without troubling over ‘words’, failed completely. Her face was surely a brighter red than her eyes were.

You… you what? She finally managed. Oh, what an embarrassment of riches she had—and what an awful thing, to choose…!

“I would touch you again, if you asked, however you asked, and delight in it.”

Rusty was still waiting for her to finish, a look of confusion on his face as he got only half the conversation’s body language. “I. I. I. Mis-misuns-” She took a deep breath, held it for a count of four. “I misunderstood her reaction. She is not asexual. Or… not in that way.”

“She confessed a crush on you too, didn’t she,” Rusty said.

“Uah?” was all Raven managed.

Rusty shrugged. “I was guessing, but I thought maybe she’d reacted badly to my… ‘boldness’ out of jealousy, and you misinterpreted that as her being repulsed by me touching you at all? Am I even close?”

“Not. Not very. Not much, actually.” Ayre? Help?

“He had the confession right,” Ayre said, still glowing with embarrassment. “I didn’t realize my affection for you had such a… common analogue among humans, not until I had time to familiarize myself with what you showed me. But I’m not jealous. I can tell by your reaction to the sight of him that he’s very attractive. I think romancing another human may be better for you, in fact. I am happy just to be able to stand by your side.”

But… but I love you, Ayre! Heavens help her, Raven had said it—thought it, whatever. You’re the first person I’ve ever trusted to have my back no matter what. Even if I get things wrong. Even if I fail. I… if you had told me before today, I would have reciprocated, one hundred percent. No—there’s no ‘if’! I still do! I can’t choose anyone else over you. Not Carla. Not Walter. Not even Rusty.

“Then don’t choose,” Ayre said, the layered meaning behind her simple words laid bare across their Contact. “Talk to him, Raven. He’s waiting.”

“Yes,” Raven said at last. “You were… not close. But you were correct about one thing. She did confess.”

Rusty thought it sounded very inconvenient to crush on someone else in your body, or head, or however the more clued-in people spoke of these things. Still, perhaps it was less awkward than two such people each dating one other.

“She was not jealous,” Raven continued. “The misunderstanding was… earlier.”

“What’s her name?” Rusty asked when she next paused.

Raven looked surprised by the question, which soon gave way to heartfelt smile—that he didn’t think she was crazy? That he cared enough to ask? Both were true.

“Ayre,” she said. “A-y-r-e. Ayre.”

“Ayre,” Rusty repeated. “It’s a pretty name.”

The Coral in Raven’s eyes seemed to sparkle at the praise.

“Thank you,” she said. “Ayre. She was…”

Again, Raven stopped. If Rusty was reading her face right, she needed a little more encouragement from her friend before whatever came next. Her face was going red all over again, and her faltering words were due to embarrassment, not aphasia.

“She is… urging me. To pursue you. If you would… have us both.”

“Both?” Rusty repeated. “She wants me to date… both of you?”

“I can’t put anyone else over her, but… she says I could put you ‘beside’ her. Equal. All of us, together. If you want. I’m sorry if that’s too weird—”

“No,” he cut in before he could restrain himself. “Ah, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like to be interrupted…”

Raven smiled. “I forgive you.”

“Thank you,” Rusty said. “No, it’s not too weird. I was just… making sure I wasn’t getting the wrong idea. I would love to get to know you both. Can she… talk?”

Raven’s face fell slightly. “No,” she said. “She is not the same. Not in my brain, like people think.”

Rusty raised on eyebrow, gently requesting she elaborate without demanding it or risking speaking over her again. She flicked her gaze to the side, her eyes narrowed. Talking to Ayre, no doubt. “No!” she exclaimed suddenly, her internal debate spilling over. “He won’t belie–!” She let out a noise of strangled frustration and pounded a fist on the couch beside her.

“Raven. Buddy.” Rusty was going to need a new nickname or two; ‘buddy’ was not romantic at all. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, but if you swear something is true, I will believe it. One hundred percent.”

Her eyes locked on his for a heartbeat before returning to her lap.

“I won’t tell a soul,” Rusty promised.

“Coral,” Raven said.

“Coral?” he repeated.

“Ayre is… not human.” Raven looked up at him, the red in her eyes appearing to swirl. “She is Coral.”

Rusty stared into her eyes. Thinking. Wondering.

“Ayre,” he said, very carefully. “Does the name ‘Seria’ mean anything to you?”

Raven blinked once, frowning as she listened, and then her eyes went wide.

“Yes. Yes! There was another? Contact? Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Ayre!” She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead like if she just pushed hard enough, she could reach into her own head and cuff her friend about the ears.

Rusty laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was all too absurd. 621, Raven, the Butcher, the Reaper—somehow, somewhere, she’d stumbled across Dolmayan’s gods herself. And this one, at least, loved humanity… or at least a few examples of it. He wondered if he could convince Raven to tell Dolmayan, and then if Ayre might have already done so herself, however that worked. They were sitting on his couch, after all.

Raven was glaring at Rusty, displeased that he was laughing at her. “I’m sorry!” he said as he fought down his amusement. “You two are just so cute when you argue!”

Raven continued to scowl for a moment before a warning gleam entered her eyes. Rusty didn’t quite register the danger he was in until she threw her arms around him and kissed him hard enough to knock him backwards onto the couch cushions, her body hot and heavy atop his.

They stayed like that for some time before they finally emerged, gasping, from each other’s throats.

“We,” Rusty panted. “We’re gonna need our own room.”

“Mmm.”

Chapter Text

Flatwell had the good fortune to catch Rusty and Raven as they left Dolmayan’s room. The pair were both a little disheveled, having slept in their uniform and flight-suit respectively. Poor souls, Flatwell couldn’t help but think. They were truly the most alone of anyone in the base. For all the good turns they had done—and, he hoped, would continue to do—the Liberation Front, he couldn’t help but fear the blood on their hands would never wash out.

Still, they seemed to be in good spirits.

“Good morning, Uncle!” Rusty called as he closed the door behind Raven’s wheelchair.

“Good morning, Rusty,” Flatwell said. “And Raven.” Raven nodded. “I was just off to get Ziyi. Care to walk with me?”

“Sure,” Rusty said. “I wouldn’t mind putting off my morning shower until after the rush.” Raven nodded again.

“Excellent. Raven, I was hoping to speak to you, as well—but first, is there anything else you need? Either of you?”

Rusty and Raven exchanged a glance, the look conveying something Flatwell wasn’t privy to.

“I wouldn’t mind a room that didn’t lock from the outside,” Rusty said.

“Ah,” Flatwell said. Of course, that was the whole reason they’d ended up sharing Dolmayan’s room in the first place. “Well, with the Hero of Tsirna Dolina to vouch for you, I think the Liberation Front can tolerate it. I’ll see about getting one for you as well, Raven.”

Raven shook her head. “Not necessary.”

It seemed she wasn’t planning to stay. A pity. Flatwell hoped she’d at least continue to work for the Liberation Front, even so.

He held off his pitch as they walked, or in one case rolled, through the base. The RLF first shift were awake and preparing for their day. People stopped to greet him, some reporting minor issues that had cropped up through the night. The glances aimed at Rusty were still suspicious, but not nearly as hostile as they’d been the day before; Ziyi had done good work. Flatwell would let her out ten minutes early for that.

Ziyi was sulking when the party arrived at the hospital wing, the room bustling with people seeking a few precious painkillers to stave off the consequences of the night before. It was the perfect place to make a scene.

“Ziyi!” Flatwell called as he pushed through the sparse crowd. “Punishment’s over.” He bent down to unfasten the restraints on her left side, and Rusty took it upon himself to deal with those on the right. Ziyi emerged from the chair in poor humor, scowling up at her ‘adoptive mother’.

“What did you learn this morning?” Flatwell asked, sending a meaningful glance out at the crowd that only Ziyi would see.

“Sir!” Ziyi belted out, adopting a parody of a CorpSec parade stance, left hand behind her back and her right raised as if to shield her eyes from the sun. “I learned that being a stone-cold bad-ass does not exempt me from doctor’s orders, sir!”

“That’s my girl,” Flatwell said, clapping her on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve been an excellent example for everyone here. Isn’t that right?” he yelled to the crowd, many of whom flinched at the implied rebuke for their past flouting of those same doctor’s instructions.

“You’re still an ass, Uncle,” Ziyi whispered.

“We all make sacrifices for the cause,” Flatwell whispered back. More loudly—which is to say, at a volume allowing for others to eavesdrop, if they so chose—he continued, “Look after your adopted mole for a bit, would you? Get some breakfast in him and clean him up. I’ve got some things to discuss with our newest guest. Bring him by my office around oh-nine-hundred.”

“Yes, Uncle,” Ziyi said. She grabbed Rusty by the arm a little more forcefully than she’d grab a ‘friend’ and led him out towards the mess.

Flatwell motioned Raven in the opposite direction, toward his office. He had a favor to ask where no one could hear. If this got out… it might not be too bad for the RLF, in the end, but it could bring hell down on Raven. Flatwell would be a poor ally, even of convenience, if he didn’t take reasonable precautions against that.

Raven didn’t complain when he waved her through the door, nor when he shut and bolted it behind her.

“Forgive the security,” Flatwell said. “I don’t want any eavesdroppers for this.”

Raven nodded. “It is fine.”

“Good.” He walked around to his desk and sat down before resting his elbows on the desk and interlinking his fingers.

“During our trip back from Watchpoint Alpha,” Flatwell began, “Rusty allowed you to take his Ransetsu. To be clear, this was not an attempt to gather information; he sincerely believed that it would serve you as well or better than the weapon you were holding, even if you couldn’t get past the cryptographic locks.” He was pretty sure that wasn’t true—Rusty had shown himself to be a very capable spy—but Flatwell himself was a practiced liar, especially to mercenaries he didn’t, and couldn’t, trust.

Raven’s eyes widened slightly, and she gave a slow nod, understanding what her acceptance and use of the weapon had implied.

“You need me to unlock weapons and equipment you stole,” she guessed.

“Can you?” Flatwell asked.

“Yes.” Raven held up a finger. “But I have a request.”

“Before you agree,” he said, “I have to warn you that I don’t have a plan to obfuscate your involvement. Unless you can give us the means to do it ourselves, or break the encryption remotely, it will be obvious that you were the one to do it, and I can’t promise word won’t leak.”

“I understand,” Raven said.

“I’ll do my best to compensate you for the risk, of course, and I’ll do what I can to mitigate it, but… as I said, I can’t promise anything.”

“I understand,” she said again. “My request?”

Flatwell braced himself. “Whatever you wish.”

“I need a tablet. Old technology. Coral-doped silicon. Working condition.”

That was a curious and difficult request. “I’m not sure where I’d find one,” Flatwell admitted. “Those were high-end consumer electronics: not the kind of thing that’s likely to survive fifty years of war. I can look through our stores, but if we haven’t found one already, it’s probably not worth searching what’s left of the cities.”

Raven nodded again.

“What else?” he asked. “If we can’t find an old computer—or even if we can…”

“Just that,” Raven said. “Try to find it. Computer, tablet, phone, doesn’t matter. Promise you will try, and in exchange, I will unlock everything.”

Flatwell stared at her.

“Just that?” he asked at last, flabbergasted. “That’s all? Just… I try, and you do it all regardless?”

Raven paused to consider.

“I would also like… essentials. Clothes, food, safety. But other payment is unnecessary.”

Again, Flatwell stared.

“You… you do realize the… the value of what you are offering…?”

Raven studied him in turn.

“You cannot pay what it is worth to you,” she said at last. “So I will ask for things that I… that I cannot pay what they are worth to me.”

She frowned to herself, then added, “I am not a Rubiconian, and I have killed too many of you to be welcome. But you took me in when I needed it, and I have not repaid you for that yet.”

Flatwell drew in a shaky breath. He had run the numbers backward and forward, counted every round of ammunition spent and stolen in the raid, drew rough estimates of resale value for bullets and missiles and armor on the black market. He knew exactly how much to the dime he could afford to pay Raven for her services and still close the deal with BAWS, and he knew that he would pay more if she demanded it, other concerns be damned. The materiel—the AC components in particular—was too important.

And she had seen his dilemma, or near enough of it, the work of running an organization that teetered always on the brink of not having enough food and clothes and ammo to live through the month… and she had decided to ask for nothing. Nothing but an old relic of modest usefulness, and her cooperation was not even reliant on him finding the thing at all! A face-saving measure for them both, he could only imagine: a means of ‘payment’ that would maintain a semblance of separation between a mercenary and her employer. Not unlike Rokumonsen, Flatwell couldn’t help but think.

Also ‘not unlike Rokumonsen’, her idea of what constituted an equivalent exchange for aid was absurdly skewed in the Front’s favor. Flatwell had given her extraction from the Ice Fields and a bottle of commonly available medicine, and in return she had saved Ziyi, Rokumonsen, and everyone else the cavalry units would have gone on to kill in a feat of heroism that only Dolmayan, among the RLF’s pilots, would have been capable of in her place… and then she said ‘I have not repaid you for that yet.’ Flatwell already knew he would be abusing that for all it was worth.

The request being perfunctory didn’t mean he wasn’t going to search the Liberation Front top to bottom to fulfill, of course. A deal was a deal.

“I’ll turn over every storeroom myself if that’s what it takes,” Flatwell promised.

Raven smiled once more. “Thank you. I will need REASON. Its electronic systems, specifically. I cannot provide the service otherwise.”

“I wasn’t counting on it being any other way. I’ll organize the goods. We can’t have you flying directly to our safe-houses; your REASON is a bit too… visible. You’ll need to meet our people in the field.”

“Send me the mission coordinates. I will sortie at once.”

Her stomach made a sudden gurgling sound that brought a blush to her otherwise stone-serious face.

“…after breakfast?” Raven added, embarrassed and hopeful.

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.

Chapter Text

Rusty emerged from the showers, now clean and dressed, and returned himself to Ziyi’s oversight. She’d changed her bandages and likely the individual garments, but she still wore the same heavy work pants and incongruous tank top ensemble she’d been paraded around in the previous day. Rusty, too, wore a copy of his previous day’s outfit; the RLF colors didn’t hang any lighter on him than they had then.

“Hero,” Rusty greeted her with a nod.

“Corpo,” Ziyi responded. “Rumor is you were born on Rubicon.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“Heard it three times this morning. Is it true?”

Rusty hesitated. His legend said he was born on Earth, but flat-out denying rumors like this wasn’t a good way to combat them. He needed to present an alternative story that, if not as interesting, at least wasn’t as boring as, ‘Nah, that’s just wrong.’ A story that encouraged people to leap onto the rumors with, ‘Um, actually…’

His first instinct was a partial truth. ‘My parents were,’ he could say, which had the odd property of being both true and not inconsistent with his forged history. A fact just interesting enough to spread.

Did it matter? Flatwell had spread rumors that Rusty had been a mole for his whole career. The rumor mill had taken that and mutated it in the direction of public opinion on the hated Wallclimber: Rusty was a mole, yes, but only because he’d had second thoughts after helping Arquebus slaughter his countrymen. If he didn’t know the rumor about his homeworld predated his recent defection, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been invented whole-cloth to explain his sudden about-face.

Sadly, Flatwell’s rumors were rowing upstream against years of resentment and malcontent at the CorpSec boots keeping the RLF down. Elcano’s new prototype was on the way from Tau, and Rusty knew Flatwell wanted him in it. Expecting anyone else in the RLF to accept the decision, though… that was optimism at its finest.

“I was,” Rusty admitted. “I lied on my license. As far as anyone out there is concerned, Rubicon was dead—or at least, the PCA were doing their best to make it dead. Having ‘Rubicon’ as my birthworld wouldn’t fly.”

Ziyi raised her eyebrows in surprise; Rusty wondered if her reaction was to the answer, to the fact that he admitted it, or feigned entirely.

“How old were you when you left?” she asked.

“Not old enough to remember much,” Rusty replied. Another partial truth. He had been old enough, certainly. That he could not remember his life was a separate issue: trauma and dissociation, much of the latter fully intentional.

“So you didn’t get any of our fine Rubiconian culture before you left?” Ziyi pressed.

“No,” he said. “The most ‘local culture’ I’ve got is that history book someone threw in my cell to keep me busy.”

“Damn,” Ziyi said. “Right then. We’re gonna fix that.” She grabbed his arm again and began marching him through the base.

“Most of that book’s junk,” Ziyi said. “I’m telling you that because if you think CorpSec work is a decent way to make a living you’ll apparently believe anything.”

“Ha. Ha,” Rusty drawled. The girl dragging him around was having an annoying amount of fun playing the role of a belligerent-yet-friendly local guide. Ziyi, he realized, had decided that if she wasn’t allowed to justify his actions with the truth, the next best plan would be to make a show of assimilating the outsider into the RLF.

Rusty had to admit it wasn’t a bad plan. He didn’t know if it would work, but it couldn’t make anything worse, which wasn’t an easy mark to hit when playing these kinds of games.

“The thing you need to understand about Rubicon is that the Fires define everything,” Ziyi began. “I don’t know what it was like off-world, if anyone even noticed–”

“The Fires wiped out something like five percent of the human population, Hero,” Rusty interjected.

“The hell?” she said. “No way. It killed five percent of the whole population?”

“It’s not quite that simple, but I read somewhere that the human population forty years after the Fires was about five percent less than it would’ve been compared to extrapolating from pre-Fires growth. I might be getting the number slightly wrong, but it was definitely a solid single-digit percentage.”

“Coral bless us all!” Ziyi swore. “How many people is that?”

“Enough that the actual number hardly matters,” Rusty answered, because he didn’t know either. “A lot of that—maybe most of it—comes down to lower birth rates from economic uncertainty, food rationing due to trade disruptions, and the general chilling effect on colonization… but that doesn’t really make it any better, does it? And it’s not like there weren’t far, far too many deaths. You ever hear about the Dead Worlds? New colonies in the far periphery that relied on Coral for everything. Some populations went all the way to zero before relief could reach them, if it was ever sent.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” Ziyi said.

“I wish I was. The Fires were horrible everywhere. It’s just that the horror was more spread out that it was here.”

And they weren’t an accident.

Rusty hadn’t been aware he’d been avoiding that thought until it burst into his mind with all the gentleness of a muscle tracer through a hardened barricade. He needed to talk to Flatwell about that, and maybe Dolmayan as well. Privately. The information itself was a bomb; the last thing Rubicon or humanity as a whole needed was a copycat.

He shoved the information back out of mind.

“If you can call whole colonies going extinct ‘spread out’,” Ziyi murmured. “And I thought we had it bad. We think about eighty percent of the population of Rubicon died just in the Fires themselves, and half the survivors were dead by the end of the year. The remainder weren’t really doing much more than sifting through the ruins for whatever was left.”

“Before Dolmayan,” Rusty supplied, his intonation suggesting doubt he didn’t hold.

“Yeah. The book gets that right: he was the one who gave us the means to reconnect with each other. Ignore the religious mumbo-jumbo, though. Dolmayan’s a man like anyone else. He just had the luck or misfortune to end up finding a voice in the Coral he kept dosing.”

“Right,” Rusty said, faking a badly faked lack of skepticism.

Ziyi punched him in the arm. “Don’t ‘right’ me, mister. This isn’t just backworld mysticism. Coral is life on Rubicon. It’s our food and our heat. It powers our lights and water purifiers. And it’s why Dolmayan set out on his journey in the first place, the thing that nearly let us rise from the ashes before the PCA kicked us back down.”

If she was going to play the ambassador, he might as well play the skeptic to the hilt. “It’s fuel, Hero. Of course it powers things.”

“You can’t eat fuel,” Ziyi countered.

“I didn’t see any Coral on the table at breakfast,” Rusty replied.

“It was almost all mealworm,” she explained. “Normal mealworms are anywhere from a finger’s length to the length of your forearm. They’re nasty, slimy, tough, and bitter. Nothing you’d eat unless you were starving. But if you scatter some Coral on the ground and let them filter it out of the soil, they grow enormous. Two to five tons. They’re not bitter, and the meat’s more tender, too. You can’t get rid of the sliminess, though. Even mealworm jerky is slimy, somehow.”

Rusty shuddered. “I noticed.”

“Better than starving, though, right?”

“Better than some of the meals Arquebus has fed us,” he admitted. At least the breakfast he’d just been served had some kind of seasoning to it. Thyme, he thought.

Ziyi laughed aloud, drawing curious looks from the people passing by. “Wow, they must feed you guys shit! Why do you even work for people like that?”

“Better than starving,” Rusty echoed.

She opened her mouth to quip back, only for the jab to land harder than either of them expected. “Shit,” Ziyi muttered after a moment’s pause. “Maybe it is, so long as its not your friends and family under your guns.”

Rusty opted to get the conversation back to safer ground as fast as possible. “That said, if you intend to share any more of Rubicon’s fine culinary traditions, I’m going to need to prepare myself, first.”

“Don’t worry, that’ll wait until lunch.” Ziyi’s face turned more serious, though her mood remained light. “I don’t expect you to believe in a voice in the Coral that loves us all”—she gave his arm a subtle squeeze as if to say, because we know it doesn’t—“but you need to get used to the… the community of it, if you don’t want to stand out like a sore thumb for the rest of your days.”

“The community of it,” Rusty repeated, his mind elsewhere. If Ayre didn’t tell Dolmayan, I’m going to have to ask her to let me do so. He and the rest of his secret-keepers deserve to know. “Is that where we’re going now?”

“That’s for later. First, you need the history.”

Ziyi paused, frowning to herself.

“We don’t have time for a trip,” she announced, to Rusty’s lack of comprehension. “Just the basics, then. Rubicon was a mining world for nearly a century before Melinite nicked a Coral Well during their strip-mining. They went and bought the whole planet, or at least the mineral rights, back when everyone thought it was well on its way to being nothing but a picked-over ball of rock. Then they showed up on Mars with a canister of the most amazing fuel anyone had ever seen, and Sol’s damn ‘Coral Revolution’ began, with Melinite holding a near-complete monopoly.”

“They teach this stuff in schools in Sol, Hero,” Rusty pointed out. “Melinite was only the second conglomerate to fall out of the Big Nine in two hundred years of Federated history, and the only one to ever fully dissolve rather than breaking into a few smaller groups who no longer qualified. It’s basically the major event in Corporate History.”

“Big Nine?” Ziyi asked.

“The Nine Great Conglomerates, the nine largest business organizations guaranteed seats on the Executor Council by the Federated Worlds charter. Melinite crashing and burning after going all in on Coral was what let Balam into their ranks, and they’ve been making a huge mess of everything everywhere ever since.”

“You’re here to learn Rubicon’s history, not teach me about your horribly cursed government,” she said. “Do people even get a voice, or is it just corporations regulating each other?”

“I thought you didn’t want to learn about my ‘horribly cursed government’,” Rusty said.

“Call it morbid curiosity.”

“Then I’ll be quick and say ‘mostly the latter’.”

“Coral bless,” Ziyi muttered. “What kind of a society is that?”

“The one that created the PCA,” Rusty said.

Ziyi was quiet for a bit after that.

Chapter Text

THEN

His last mistake was trying to run. Stupid. If he’d come back begging, the sharks who owned his gambling debts might have let him work it off. Might have given him more rope—rope to hang himself, sure, but rope to save himself, if he could manage it.

But no, he’d tried to run, and he’d failed. His debt was nearly as large as his own worth, and the difference was their penalty for having to chase him. So they sold him. They fucking sold him, like an animal. Meat to host ancient technology that everyone wanted to use but no one wanted to have. Bloody fucking Coral augs.

He had heard nightmare stories about Coral augmentation, the things it did to people. He’d gone under the knife thinking that whatever shambling lobotomite came out the other side would only remember once being him.

The newly christened ‘Gun Five’ Iguazu emerged from the surgery with only tinnitus and a headache. The tinnitus was from the surgery. The headache was the asshole who now has a lien on his brain. ‘Gun One’ Michigan was a brute of a man who’d watched so many old pre-spaceflight war movies they’d fried his brain worse than augmentation surgery ever could. He was suffering a delusion that he was running an elite task force and not a fucking penal unit.

Had Michigan fucking looked at his ‘troops’? The loser he’d replaced was his second. A press-ganged con artist in 3rd. A political dissident working for a reduced sentence in 4th. Iguazu’s own deadbeat debtor ass in 5th. This was not an elite fucking task force! It was, at best, the set-up for a bad joke. ‘A con artist, a dissident, and a debtor walk into a bar. All three have augments.’ The punch line is they get to die!

Michigan didn’t care that maybe a quarter of the squad wanted to be pilots in the first place. He didn’t care that he was trying to shove ‘espirit de corps’ into slave labor. He wanted to be a father to the men he was going to force to fight and die against their will. Iguazu’s only goal was to buy out the metal in his head, the metal Balam owned in order to own him, and then to get as far away from the bullshit of corporate warfare as he could.

Even his fellow reprobates were fucking assholes. “I’ve met a thousand guys just like you,” the conman Wu Huahai had told Iguazu when the latter had commented on the unfairness of their ‘employment’. “You know what your problem is, Iguazu? You think you deserve to win at life just for showing up.” The resulting fist-fight sent them both to the brig for a week.

Wu Huahai was an asshole, but Iguazu hated Michigan with a passion he’d previously reserved only for the man who’d blacklisted him from a career he’d actually liked. He convinced Volta, the dissident, to help him jump the asshole in the hallway. Michigan, alas, was the kind of ‘big’ that made him appear a meter closer than he really was. He threw Volta off his shoulders like a farmer slinging hay, took Iguazu’s right hook square to his face without flinching, and responded with a jab that ended G5’s memory of that day. Iguazu had woken up nearly twenty-four hours later after requiring reconstructive surgery on his nose and jaw. The surgeons had made his face look natural, but they hadn’t made it look right, not to him.

Iguazu then joined Volta in the brig for a week.

Michigan had tamed Volta, in the end, the man who’d habitually defaced CorpSec property with the numbers 8-9-8 now asking ‘How high?’ when G1 said ‘Jump!’. That was the point Iguazu realized trying to get one over on Michigan was pointless. He’d packed up and run instead. Fuck the Redguns. Fuck his debt. Fuck Michigan for grinding the fight out of Volta and Volta for having the fight ground out of him. He’d fuck around in the mercenary support system and try to work off his debt that way for as long as it took Michigan to hunt him down and rearrange his face again.

The first few jobs paid like shit, but they did pay. Then Iguazu took a quick job from the lowlifes siphoning leftover Coral out of the Grid, only to find himself face to face with the bloody freelancer who’d already betrayed him once. He’d been eager for a rematch—and then his luck had struck again. Stealth drones had decided this was a perfect time to kill the both of them, and while the freelancer hadn’t outright broken the quick-and-dirty truce, he’d done something to Iguazu’s implants during the scuffle. Experimenting with some kind of anti-implant weapon while the drones distracted the two of them, or something. Then the drones were done, and he’d turned it on full blast.

Iguazu thought he might have been able to win that fight, without the drones and the crippling whatever-the-fuck EWAR attack, but not with them. That fucking tech drove his tinnitus into overdrive and felt like someone was trying to drill through his skull every time the freelancer got close to him. Once he’d crawled out of the burning wreck of his AC for the second time in under a month, Iguazu would reflect that this was just more of the same luck he always had: things going just right enough to convince him he had a chance before everything crashed and burned.

Balam security had intercepted his attempt to exit the Grid on foot, because when things went wrong for Iguazu, they all went wrong at once. G5 was back in the brig!

He’d spent the next month in lock-up before Michigan had tried to feed him to a ophidiophobic miner’s feverish nightmare. The bloody freelancer was there too—keeping his EWAR to himself, but Iguazu wasn’t going to thank him for that when they’d been hired on the same job. His implants had acted up anyway from the sheer quantity of Coral in the Ice Worm, and he’d been the first knocked out of the battle.

The freelancer killed the beast without him and enjoyed all the credit. Iguazu wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d managed to contribute much with his brain trying to leak out of his ears, but it still smarted that he’d suffered more in the attempt and had less to show for it.

Not nothing, but less: Michigan had given him a combat bonus for the op that fully removed the years of debt he’d added by losing HEADBRINGER out in the Grid, which was considered theft of company property. Iguazu still wasn’t sure whether Michigan had been sincerely happy with his performance or mocking him for getting knocked out first. The man yelled so much abuse so consistently it was hard to tell which parts he meant, especially when he sent Iguazu straight back to the brig after clearing nearly a decade worth of debt with one stroke of the pen.

The upside of being under every bit of arrest Balam could manage was that he missed the meat grinder running into the PCA’s heavy anti-AC emplacement. Wu Huahai had come back from that op with the kind of thousand-yard stare Iguazu associated with poor fucking infantry. Even Red, Michigan’s bloody cheerleader, wasn’t quite right for weeks afterward.

The freelancer killed the damn thing solo, because of course he would. The guy was, apparently, perfect. Perfect enough to cause problems to mysterious and well-funded people. Iguazu hadn’t been out of lock-up for a full day before an anonymous agent on the mercenary support system calling themselves ‘Surveyor’ made him a simple offer: intercept the freelancer during his next expedition into the PCA installation and kill him, and they would buy out the remainder of Iguazu’s debt and ship him back to Sol.

Arquebus was intent on exploiting the freelancer for all he was worth. Balam was bloodied and beaten from their failed bit to summit the shaft… or whatever the analogous term was for a giant sinkhole rather than a mountain. Iguazu was the only Redgun not nursing wounds to body or AC. The freelancer was the only mercenary of any regard openly operating in the Ice Field theatre.

Maybe Surveyor even meant it. Maybe they had the money and a grudge enough that it made sense for them to make the offer. Maybe they were yanking Iguazu’s chain and never meant to follow through—but ALLMIND® did indicate they’d put most of his balance in escrow for the job, so they weren’t completely full of hot air. A couple million credits was chump change in the grand scheme of the War anyway. Balam regularly paid out contracts in the hundreds of thousands to even low millions to random independent mercenary teams, though indentured pilots wouldn’t see more than a sliver of that themselves. It wasn’t like killing the freelancer was an easy job, either, so maybe the price was right.

Iguazu would have loved nothing more than to finally beat the freelancer in a fair fight, but he new full well the freelancer wouldn’t give him that fair fight. The bastard would turn on his fucking EWAR and Iguazu would be lucky to be able to see straight. Maybe that was why things always seemed to go so bloody right for a man who was, so far as Iguazu knew, no different than he was: a poor sod forced to host outdated augs and kill for his supper. Difference was, the freelancer got to win. He had every bit of luck Iguazu never did—or more likely, he made his own luck the same way he beat Iguazu back in the Grid: tricks and underhanded cheats.

It didn’t matter. Iguazu couldn’t kill the freelancer himself, so he decided to get creative. Surveyor had promised to buy out ‘the remainder of Iguazu’s debt’; even after the bonus Michigan had handed him, that was no small sum. The trick was, his mysterious employer had never specified how much that was in the mercenary contract they sent him. So Iguazu took a gamble. He hadn’t actually paid the bonus into his debt account yet, so he reached out to a freak he’d run into during his short-lived flight from Balam, one of the few contract killers still operating on Rubicon after the War, and put the full amount of his bonus on the freelancer’s head to be paid out of escrow on delivery.

If the assassin killed the freelancer, Iguazu would send Surveyor a bill for his current debt. He was pretty sure Surveyor had no way to know he was supposed to be a whole lot fewer credits less in the red than he was, anyway. If the assassin failed, Iguazu would get his money back.

Iguazu got his money back. A fair bit of that went towards paying the penalty for failing Surveyor’s contact. It wasn’t much compared to either his remaining debt or the bid he’d placed, but it smarted all the same: it was about what he made in a typical year, not counting the outsized combat bonuses of the recent War (nor, obviously, the bizarrely massive payout for face-planting against the Worm).

He shouldn’t have been surprised. His entire life was a montage of having everything good jerked out of his reach just when he got close enough to touch it.

Chapter Text

Flatwell returned to his office after breakfast feeling like he had just robbed someone.

Raven was off, their deal sealed. Clothes, food, safety, and maybe an old relic from the pre-Fires era, if such a thing had survived. In exchange, she would grant him what would have been a truly unfathomable amount of materiel a mere week before. Enough to make and field an entire modern AC from salvage alone, and perhaps two more with only minor expenditures to BAWS to fill in the gaps in their systems.

Maybe not being able to hide Raven’s involvement would be a blessing after all. A few rumors that she was providing the service for free would go a long way to rehabilitating the ‘Butcher of Bona Dea’ in the eyes of the RLF rank and file. Not enough to wash away the blood—perhaps nothing ever would be—but enough to grant her some respect. It would do well to build on the perception shift after everyone had seen her descend on the cavalry units chasing Ziyi like a guardian angel delivering the wrath of the Coral itself.

It was an amazing windfall even if you ignored the difference in quality between high-tech components designed in the last ten years and first-generation prototypes nearly 70 years old. The latter, BAWS’ Basho components, were cheap as ACs went, but they were still the largest part of the RLF’s arms budget while failing to measure up to modern tech in most respects.

(As for ‘modern tech’, Elcano had carefully and deniably ‘lost’ the then-prototype components TSUBASA and CANDLE RING used, but Elcano were not producing AC components on Rubicon for export, when meant they were not, officially, producing AC components on Rubicon at all. Their avowed market here was in vehicles, mostly the VTOLs used by the Liberation Front and corporations alike.)

Thinking about Basho versus modern parts brought Flatwell’s attention to YUE YU, and the technicians’ report on its damage, summed up by the crew chief in three letters:

RIP

YUE YU had suffered just about every bit of damage that wouldn’t have rendered it unable to make it back to base. Hydraulic lines ran empty and seized, crumpled thrusters melted and warped, servomotors burnt, pistons snapped, joints froze, structure buckled. It did its duty, and Coral bless it for that, but it would fight no more.

It was up to Ziyi what would happen to it now. BAWS had given him a generous offer for what most would consider scrap—no doubt their engineers wanted to figure out how one of their Bashos had managed to take as much abuse as it had without coming apart—but it wasn’t enough that he’d overrule Ziyi if she wanted it kept as a museum piece or some similar sentimental function.

Flatwell spent the next two and a half hours dealing with the logistics of dragging all their stolen materiel out into the open and back again, all the while trying to figure out which combination of stolen parts would best serve to replace TSUBASA in the back of his head. His options weren’t great; he’d spent a long time learning the feeling of the pure Firmeza frame, and having to adjust to a mismatched collection of Arquebus and Schneider pieces was going to be rough no matter how close their performance matched the old machine. All things considered, he might be better off building up an entirely new set of reflexes on an AC as different from TSUBASA as he could get.

On the other hand, he could probably arrange to ‘steal’ another Firmeza frame from Elcano. The RLF’s newfound your-shit-is-our-shit capability was going to become very famous very fast regardless, and would provide the perfect cover for Elcano to wring their hands while shipping part after part straight to Gallia. Switch out TSUBASA’s Etsujin/Ransetsu handgun-rifle combo for a VP-66 Laser Handgun and a VE-66 Laser Rifle ‘B’ ultra-heavy unit, just to rub the theft in to Arquebus… that would mean swapping the generator to something specialized for energy weapons, so he’d need to review their specs…

He thought of Arshile. We can’t keep risking losing you in the field.

Maybe he could do more good behind a desk than he could in the cockpit. Dolmayan wasn’t the only one getting old. When Dunham had first founded the Fist, with himself as its very glib ‘point’ man in the Index position, none of the original five had expected to live more than a decade. Two had not. The remainder, though luck or skill, had managed to grow old in a young man’s profession.

Ziyi showed up with Rusty in tow about two minutes before oh-nine-hundred.

“Comrade Ziyi,” Flatwell greeted her. “Rusty—shall I start calling you ‘comrade’ as well, now that you’re following our Hero around all day?”

“I think that might be a bit soon, sir, given my reception,” Rusty said.

“Suit yourself. Ziyi, close the door, would you?”

Ziyi did. Rusty sighed and dropped the tension from his shoulders, suddenly appearing more at home in his borrowed RLF colors, though he kept his face carefully devoid of anything but easy, inscrutable pleasantness. Flatwell couldn’t help but wonder at the last bit; something must be troubling him for him to keep that up in the relative privacy of his sealed office.

“Good to see you both,” Flatwell said. “I have things to discuss with you each separately, but first, there is something I ought to tell you as soon as possible. It’s about Dolmayan’s communion with the Coral.”

Ziyi tensed slightly, no doubt expecting more bad news. Rusty remained impassive, merely adjusting his head to show his attention.

“As I’m sure you can understand, Dolmayan has long struggled with his addiction to dosing Coral. Last night, circumstances conspired that he did so again, and the Coral spoke to him again for the first time in forty years.” Flatwell paused, as much for dramatic effect as to observe the reaction of his pilots. Rusty remained steadfast behind his facade, while Ziyi was braced for the worst.

“The Coral revealed to Dolmayan that he had, in truth, labored under a misunderstanding of his last communion. It said… oh, damn it all,” Flatwell muttered. “You know what? I can’t ad-lib this mysticism stuff worth a damn. Dolmayan and the Coral he used to speak to had a lover’s spat, and things were said in anger. That’s the truth of it finally laid bare after forty years.”

Rusty kept up his unflappable affect, which didn’t surprise Flatwell but did annoy him a little, given how ground-shattering the revelation was even to a life-long skeptic like Flatwell himself. Ziyi looked like she wanted to smack someone, and Flatwell was the one in the line of fire.

“And this just so happened to happen the day after you decided to tell me half the faith I’d ever ‘known’ was a lie?” she snarled. “One day?!”

Flatwell tried to look as apologetic as possible. “I don’t control divine revelation, Ziyi.”

“Raaaaaaa!” Ziyi growled, hands gripping her head by the hair. “Coral bless us all, Uncle, but its timing is fucking terrible.”

“Would you have preferred I waited to tell you?” Flatwell asked.

“No! Damn it!” She took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m calm. I’m calm.” Ziyi finally took her hands off her head and returned them to her sides, then began massaging her sore left shoulder with her right hand. “Right. The Coral. Did it say anything else?”

“It approves of us. Not just humanity—I mean the RLF, and our war.”

“Really,” Ziyi said.

“To paraphrase Dolmayan, ‘there are just as many opinions among the Coral as humanity. Some are pacifists, and some are crusaders.’ He said he thought you’d get along with this one better than he did, actually, Ziyi.”

“Uncle,” Ziyi said. “Uncle. I have had too many religious crises this week for you to give me a third one. Please. Prioritize. No, wait. Oh, Coral…!” She walked over to the chair Rusty had used the day before and sank into it with a groan, propping her head on her hands with her elbows on her knees.

“Ziyi?” Flatwell asked, growing honestly concerned about a reaction stronger even than the one he’d anticipated. “What do you mean, ‘religious crises’? A third?”

“Did you read my debrief after the Tsirna Dolina op?” Ziyi asked her knees. “The one that got my concussion upgraded to ‘severe’?”

Flatwell frowned. “You claimed YUE YU rescued Rokumonsen of its own volition.”

“Yeah. Did I… I guess I didn’t mention that part, did I? Or did they not include it?”

“Not include what part, Ziyi? Are you okay?”

“I’m great, thanks for asking,” Ziyi grumbled. “It was… concussion induced synesthesia, they said. You remember back when I was… four or five, I think? Uncle Dunham”—her voice caught for a second, but she pushed on—“he took me down to the mines. The ‘Old Places’, he called it. Do you remember that?”

Flatwell frowned. It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t honestly say he remembered that event in particular. “I’m afraid I don’t. Why do you ask?”

“Because the thing I remember most from the trip is the smell. Even with the mask up, there was this…” Ziyi raised her head to stare vacantly into the middle distance, eyes unfocused. “…this smell. It was… it was just… it smelled like red light. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

She took another deep breath and refocused on Flatwell.

“When I was sitting in YUE YU, nearly tearing my hair out in despair, I swear I smelled that same smell. Red-light. Unmistakable. And then… YUE YU moved. I don’t have the technical skills to do what it did, Uncle, not even without the concussion I had.”

“She helped you,” Rusty said. “In Tsirna Dolina. She was the one who got Rokumonsen out of his AC.”

Flatwell shot his godson a look. He’d have expected a lot more skepticism from Rusty at just about every stage of this conversation, but it seemed whatever had his guard up had his easy, make-no-waves spy’s affect fully deployed.

“I… I think she did,” Ziyi said. “Uncle, did the Coral say anything to Dolmayan about that?”

“If she did, he didn’t mention it,” Flatwell said. “She did explain that the reason the Coral haven’t spoken to Dolmayan in all this time was a matter of impossibility, rather than choice. They lost their ability to travel about ten years after the Fires. Most of them returned home around then, knowing they’d be stranded for decades or even centuries if they didn’t.”

He stopped there. Ziyi was too overwhelmed to probe further, and he didn’t begrudge her that at all. Quite apart from what he now realized were three consecutive shocks to her faith over as many days, she was a soldier; intelligence work wasn’t her job. Flatwell fully expected Rusty to ask the obvious question, and was more than a little concerned that he didn’t.

“Dolmayan wouldn’t tell me how it was the Coral who spoke with him managed to get around that,” Flatwell added, since apparently no one was going to ask. That done, he picked up a pen and notepad from the table, the latter containing his current to-do list, and crossed out the cryptically phrased inform Fist of news before laying the pad back on the desk.

“If there are no questions, that’s all I have for the two of you,” he said. “I still need to talk to you two separately—Ziyi, I’ll come find you once I’m ready, if you don’t mind. It may have to wait until this evening, or even tomorrow.”

Ziyi groaned as she rose her feet. “I’ve had enough serious conversation for today anyway,” she complained. “Rusty. Uncle.” She saluted and let herself out, closing the door behind her. Rusty took the liberty of latching it again.

“I have something to tell you, as well, Uncle,” Rusty said. “Something potentially… dangerous. Extremely dangerous.”

“To who?” Flatwell asked at once.

“To humanity, if the right madman gets wind of it.”

“You first, then.”

“Fine by me.” Rusty crossed the room to the chair and dragged it around to the front of Flatwell’s desk. “You’re gonna want to be sitting down for this, Uncle.”

“That bad?” Flatwell took his own seat with a sigh, idly rolling the pen between his thumb and forefinger. “Let’s hear it.”

Rusty cleared his throat and sat at attention as though he was reporting to one of his superiors at Arquebus rather than the RLF. That he fell back on the old habit so obviously set alarm bells ringing in Flatwell’s mind before Rusty so much as got a word out.

“The previous evening, Raven learned that the Fires of Rubicon were not a natural disaster, but an intentional act of terrorism committed by the woman who would later take on the name ‘Cinder’ Carla.”

The pen in Flatwell’s hand exploded.

Chapter Text

THEN

“You have a visitor.”

Blackguard sighed. “Send them in.”

Schneider had done right by him for once, pulling him out of the wreckage of his AC and bundling him off to a proper military hospital on Io. They’d owed him that much and more after how badly they’d bungled the operation, but he knew full well they could have left him in a sawbones’ tent on the battlefields of Ganymede, so he’d appreciate it for what it was.

The nurse stepped aside, allowing the visitor in question to enter with a timidness that ill-fit his frame and personality both, and despite the situation, Blackguard couldn’t help but smile. “Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t my old protege. You’ve done well for yourself.”

“I suppose I have,” the man muttered as he slipped into the chair by Blackguard’s bedside, his native Chicago Arcology accent still clearly identifiable despite all his years in the Outer System. It’d been the first thing Blackguard had noticed about him more than a decade ago, which meant Chicago had spent the next ten-odd years answering to it.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, old man?” Chicago asked with a softness few would expect of a man his size and visible ruggedness.

“Too long,” Blackguard agreed, not needing to fake his good mood. “How’ve you been, Chicago?”

The old call sign—long since replaced by corporate branding—brought the ghost of a smile to Chicago’s face, if only for a moment. “Better than you, sir.”

Blackguard couldn’t help but laugh; the man hadn’t called him ‘sir’ once over all the years he’d spent under his wing, only to break the streak now. “At long last, my star pupil calls me ‘sir’. All it took was a crippling injury.”

Chicago grimaced, no longer able to avoid the elephant in the room.

“Sorry about the arm.”

“Nothing to do with you,” Blackguard said, waving the apology away with his remaining hand. “Could’ve been anyone’s blade that did me in.”

“It wasn’t anyone’s blade that did that,” Chicago snapped. “It was mine, and we both know it.”

“You think too highly of yourself,” Blackguard shot back. “I had a bad fall, is all.”

“A bad fall.”

“Could happen to anyone.”

The absurdity of the claim finally cracked Chicago’s armor, and the two shared a much-needed laugh. “Whatever you say, old man.”

“Damn straight,” Blackguard said. “But enough about me. Furlong don’t mind you visiting an enemy’s bedside?”

“Furlong can shove it if they do,” Chicago answered. “I’m glad you’re alive, old man, even if I took a chunk out of you on the way out.”

Blackguard sighed, though his smile remained light and easy. “It’s long since time I retired anyway. Between age and augments, I can’t keep up with you young folk anymore.”

“I don’t know about that, sir. How many times that fight was it almost me in that bed?”

“Fewer than it used to be.” Blackguard sighed and relaxed as much as he could into the stiff, scratchy pillows propping him up. “So what’s next for Wildcat and LIGER TAIL now that Schneider’s been driven off like a whipped dog?”

“That’s anyone’s guess,” Chicago said. “Promotion, hopefully.”

“I did open a spot for you.”

The jest didn’t land. Chicago sighed and leaned back in the chair, staring silently at the ceiling for a long moment.

“He was a good man,” he said at last.

“They always are,” Blackguard agreed. He grabbed the cup of water off his bedside table and poured half of it out onto the floor, then held it out for Chicago to finish the libation. “As are you.”

NOW

Walter groaned as he woke from shallow slumber to find himself still chained to the same white table. Of all the memories to come drifting through, why that one? Why now?

“What’s next for the Terror of Furlong’s Armed Fleet?”

“I’m not the Anything of Furlong’s anymore—Balam bought out my contract, can you believe that? I kicked the Redguns’ asses so hard the only one they trust to put them back together again is me!”

Michigan, you cocky bastard. You were a good man.

They always are.

Walter gave up on self-pity and peeled his face free from where his sweat had stuck it to the table so he could face the opening door to his cell. Freud was back, looking as strained and sleep-deprived as ever before.

It had been another day, maybe two. Time was starting to slip away. The irregular meals. The constant, unwavering light. His sleep disturbed by hunger and thirst and by CorpSec waking him up to ‘check on him’. He was familiar with the tactics Arquebus was using. One of the mercenary training programs he joined in his youth put their students through interrogation resistance training, more out of a blend of machismo and sadism than any practical purpose. No one told mercenaries anything they wanted to keep under wraps anyway, so who’d bother interrogating one?

What the hell is he doing back here? Walter thought. Did he even leave the station? With his sense of time beginning to fray, he wasn’t sure if Freud would have had enough time to make the trip planetside and back again since their last meeting—not and have a moment to do something useful on the surface between trips.

Freud sat down and launched into the questions immediately. “What’s your connection to the mercenary known as Cereza?”

“I’ve never heard that name in my life,” Walter said, because he judged it both harmless and true.

“No?” Freud asked. “Maybe I can jog your memory. Name on her license is ‘Joyce Jager’, an alias without even a token paper-trail to back it up. Infamous hacker within the black-hat community, and the qualifier that she’s only infamous within the community is itself a badge of honor there. Affiliated with, or directly involved in, the mercenary unit known as Branch. Suspected anti-social political leanings, like most of theirs. Sol’s Mercenary Licensing Administration has her at C-rank, but she’s not taken any missions on Rubicon since her arrival, so she’s not in the local system.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Walter said. That was less true. Branch, he knew—his hound had annihilated the group’s active roster at Gallia Dam. Cereza might have been the Operator who’d rambled at 621 during the showdown with her license-name double. It wasn’t common for Operators to be mercenaries in their own right—not at the same point in their careers—but it was by no means unheard of.

“How about Cherry Sakura?” Freud asked.

“The terrorist?” Walter asked. The only person he’d heard of using that alias had died a decade ago.

“That’s how the media painted her,” Freud agreed. “The facts are that Furlong CorpSec raided her hideout and it exploded—not clear whether it was her contingency plan or if Furlong fucked something up. Back to the point, given Cereza’s politics, affiliations, demonstrated skill-set, and the downright unsubtle reference in her call sign—Spanish for ‘Cherry’, if you were unaware—she’s almost certainly Sakura’s protege, perhaps even her long-rumored biological daughter… and now the new head of RaD.”

He paused then, trying to read any reaction in Walter’s face.

“And?” Walter asked.

“Don’t play coy with me,” Freud said. “I know you worked closely with ‘Cinder’ Carla. You were behind the meeting between RaD, Balam, and us while the Ice Worm was breathing down our collective necks, the one that got us the Rail Cannon that slew the Worm. And now your hound—either independently, or at Cereza’s behest—went and killed her.”

Walter kept the satisfaction off his face. If Carla had already faked her death and bailed on RaD, she was likely mere hours away from completing their mission.

“Unfortunate,” Walter said.

Freud frowned and tried another tack. “How much would you have charged for that kind of op?”

“Depends on the client,” Walter replied.

“For Cereza, then.”

He spent the time to think about it. It was a harmless enough hypothetical: a private client with no prior business relationship who wanted to hire his hound to kill Carla, ignoring the obvious issues Freud wasn’t privy to… “Three, maybe four hundred k,” Walter decided. “Carla’s not as hard a target as your Vespers, but we’re talking about someone who I haven’t done business with before and who’s planning to profit massively on the operation. If she can’t afford that fee, she should go somewhere else.”

“Steep,” Freud said. “You think your hound could negotiate that high on her own?”

Ah, Walter thought. Freud wanted to know if Raven knew her own value, or if she was used to sub-ten-percent cuts of the mission payout like most indentured mercs.

“She doesn’t talk much,” Walter said, revealing nothing. “How is my hound, anyway? Still a thorn in your side?”

Freud huffed. “We believe she went back to sheltering with the RLF in southern Belius after leaving the Grid.”

Walter’s hidden satisfaction became hidden confusion. Why would Carla send 621 to the RLF? The two of them should be making haste off-world. Misdirection? Perhaps.

“When was this?” he asked.

“A little over twenty hours ago,” Freud replied. “News travels slowly among bandits, and we’ve been busy.”

Twenty hours?!

Something didn’t add up. Carla wouldn’t abandon RaD until the last moment—having an industrial base was simply too useful. When she did, she wouldn’t go to the RLF; they were the only faction on Rubicon except RaD themselves without access to orbit, and Walter wasn’t sure Carla hadn’t gotten RaD out of that category. And if she had cut and run twenty hours ago, laying a false trail for Arquebus to follow 621 back to the RLF, then where the hell was the blast? Even if the energy didn’t make it to orbit, the destruction of Rubicon’s Coral wouldn’t have Freud sitting around quizzing him about Doser warlords and long-dead terrorists.

So what had happened down there? The idea that 621 would kill Carla for any amount of money was… not entirely out of the question, but it would cost more than anyone stood to gain from the latter’s death by an order of magnitude or more. ‘Enough to buy out the full sum of her debt with money left over for the surgeries she’d need to get her life back and a nest egg to retire with’ would be the minimum bid for something like that, and even then, Walter wasn’t sure 621 would take the job. His hound was too eager to please to express any opinions to him directly even on days she wasn’t struggling with her aphasia, but she’d prioritized Carla’s missions above many others, which told him well enough that she liked the woman’s company—or that she wanted her approval. Either case made 621 choosing to kill Carla unlikely.

There was one very, very simple solution that cut the whole knot apart: Freud was full of shit.

“What does Cereza want with RaD?” Walter asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Freud said. “Thus far, she hasn’t done anything but put out the fires Carla’s death started. Kept Carla’s lieutenant around, whatever that may mean for the organization.”

“Her lieutenant?” He didn’t mean—

“Chatty,” Freud said. “No, that’s his byname, isn’t it. ‘Stick’, then.”

Freud was absolutely full of shit. Chatty was a damn AI, not Carla’s ‘lieutenant’. Either he was making things up whole-cloth or his information sucked.

Enough of this.

“Bullshit,” Walter said.

Freud raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I said bullshit,” Walter repeated. “I don’t believe you. Your story doesn’t add up. Cereza, Carla, Raven—whatever story you’re trying to sell doesn’t make sense.”

“If it made sense, I wouldn’t need to pick your brain to untangle it,” Freud snapped. “You know something. I was hoping you’d be willing to share—your current accommodations leave a lot to be desired—but if you’re going to play dumb, I’m done wasting my time.”

“Why are you even up here, Freud?” Walter asked. “You have a dedicated Intelligence Officer. He is, through luck or cowardice, the only other Vesper besides you still breathing. Why the hell am I not talking to him?”

“That is not your concern.”

“The hell it ain’t, Freud. I’ve been locked in this cell for I-don’t-know-how-long and even I can tell there’s something screwy here. What, is Arquebus having a intracorporate civil war down there? Did the PCA run home to SOLMIL and now a fleet’s on its way? Is there an AI uprising no one told me about? The fuck is wrong on this planet?”

“I’m not telling you a bloody thing,” Freud said. “You had your chance to cooperate and you spit in my face. I’ve come back time and time again to give you a chance to trade away even a few scraps of information, and you’ve decided to play dumb. I’m out of patience.” He stood up and turned to leave. “Enjoy your cell, Handler.”

“Wait.”

Freud stopped. He didn’t turn around. He wanted Walter to beg.

“How did you learn about Carla’s death?” Walter asked, hoping to pull a thread.

“We sent an MT detachment into the Grid to poke the Dosers, but they barely stirred the pot before your hound wiped the pieces off the board. The team we sent to learn what happened to the first team got the information off unsecured Doser comms.” Freud huffed. “‘The queen is dead, long live the queen,’ as it were.”

“And now you’re worried that an anti-corp militarist just took over the largest warband in the Grids,” Walter said, still not sure he believed it.

“If you’re trying to impress me with your deductions, you’re going to have to tell me something I didn’t know twelve hours ago.”

“If Cereza had an agenda beyond waiting for the war Branch brought down to clear the way out of the cordon, it’s likely she’s trying to find a new power base to pursue it after the loss of her pilots,” Walter offered.

Freud sighed. “We’re done here.” He stormed off, leaving Walter to worry, as a more skilled interrogator might have done intentionally.

What was Carla up to?

She hadn’t explained her plan, though she’d given him a highly encrypted step-by-step guide to enact it himself in case she was taken out of the picture; he’d never decrypted it, trusting she’d put as much security as she had on it for a reason, and had lost it when he fried his computer. All he knew was that merely setting fire to the converging Coral wouldn’t be enough to get it all. They had to get it right; there wouldn’t be a third chance.

Carla had promised that all she needed from him was access to the convergence; once they’d realized where it was, she’d adjusted her plan to use Institute City’s old infrastructure to spare them the need to deliver something custom-built to the site at all. Walter hadn’t asked for details—the science would be beyond him regardless—but he assumed she planned to use the same trick old Professor Nagai had fifty years prior.

621 had killed Snail; he took that claim at face value because neither Freud nor Snail himself would have the patience to lie about that for this long. His hound had been alive and active at the heart of Institute City. It had been… three days? Four? Five? Walter had guessed, the day of his capture, that it might take Carla as much as a day to sabotage the Vascular Plant and another two at most to get off-world. The Coral should either burn any moment now… or as much as three days ago.

What if Freud’s information was simply… off?

621 wouldn’t take a job against Carla, but 621 wasn’t the only ‘Raven’ on Rubicon. If Cereza was the original Raven’s Operator, her pilot might have survived NIGHTFALL’s destruction, or she might have already turned over the legacy call sign to a new one. Maybe Freud was doing O’Keeffe’s job because O’Keeffe had managed to die too, and what remained of Arquebus’s intelligence division couldn’t tell one Raven from the other.

In that case, Carla might have been forced to fake her death before she was ready. She might even be truly dead. But then what about Chatty? Walter had gotten the sense, from his few interactions with the bot, that its loyalty to Carla was as ironclad as she could—no, he was being ridiculous. One AI could be easily substituted for another; the Dosers wouldn’t know the difference, and if Cereza was even half the hacker Freud had described, having one chatbot impersonate another would be well within her capabilities.

But then what the hell was 621 doing with the RLF? Was that bad intel, too? She’d done a few jobs for them, but after accidentally rooting out their spy in the Vespers and either beating or outright killing Middle Flatwell in the process, he couldn’t imagine their leadership would welcome her no matter how useful she might be. The rank and file would be an even harder sell. He’d seen the reports on the STRIDER: quite aside from the sheer population the ship housed, there’d been children on board. Hundreds of them.

The PCA accused the RLF of using human shields by keeping children with their military targets. A sick joke. Under PCA directives, all people without a visa whose presence on Rubicon 3 postdated the closure were trespassers to be shot on sight. Ruthless but internally consistent for those like Carla who ran the blockade; utterly inhumane for those whose only crime was to be born on the wrong world. Arquebus and Balam had filled their schools by offering ‘birth visas’ for all children who enrolled… and then the RLF had started bombing the kids instead because the natives wouldn’t survive the creation of a culturally distinct corporate-indoctrinated population.

The current state of Rubicon 3 was, in many ways, the ultimate manifestation of everything wrong in human space and humanity as a species, even without adding Coral to the mix.

For all the bad blood, the RLF might well have been the best option Walter’s hound had left. After the hostile takeover of RaD, the only two factions left besides Balam’s broken remnants were the RLF and Arquebus: the first might shoot her, but the latter were infamous for torturing people to death. That wasn’t a pleasant choice, but neither was it a difficult one.

Carla must have had trouble with the Vascular Plant plan, then had her back-up plan interrupted by Branch. If she was still at large, she’d be forced to work without RaD’s support, possibly without 621’s, and certainly without Walter’s. If she was dead… well, that was the end, wasn’t it? 621 didn’t have the instructions to carry out the mission herself even if Walter and Carla’s subsequent disappearances hadn’t set her progress back so far she couldn’t self-determine her own objectives, and she certainly didn’t have the technical knowledge to work it out herself. He wasn’t sure anyone other than Carla could.

Walter leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Damn it! Not like this!

They’d been so close.

Chapter Text

Raven was having the closest thing to a peaceful day’s work she was likely to ever experience again. No fighting, no enemies. Targets to access and then move on to the next. The sky was pale gray, the cloud cover thin, and the weak but stubborn sunlight gleamed off REASON’s once-more-repainted chassis.

It reminded her pleasantly of a similar sortie a month ago. Ayre had taken her graverobbing in the old Watchpoint tunnel… oh. Oh, damn it! That had been a date, hadn’t it? It was absolutely a date! Ayre hadn’t even been aware of the concept at the time, and she’d still managed to ask Raven out on a date! A moment of quiet in the chaos of war, indulging in the overlap between Raven’s obsession with armored cores and Ayre’s love of history…

They needed to figure out a good way to get Rusty involved, even if Plan A didn’t work out.

“Do you think Flatwell will be able to find the tablet you asked for?” Ayre asked, cautious yet hopeful.

“I hope so,” Raven replied aloud. She’d slacked off on her speech therapy after achieving a level of communication one might describe as ‘effective’, discouraged by her plateauing results and her own embarrassment at her still-slow speech. Speaking her thoughts to Ayre in the privacy of REASON’s capsule was as good a way as any to get some extra practice. “I trust at the very least that. He will be thorough with his search.”

Coral-doped silicon been common in the years leading up to the Fires, common enough that same technology had started replacing the traditional optical-Silicon industrial circuitry in the expanding Grids. Raven knew her parents had bought an old cdSi tablet as a sort of curiosity-slash-museum-piece, proudly displayed on a shelf like a fancy china plate. Whether any had survived this long on Rubicon, of all places, remained to be seen.

She hadn’t needed to explain the reason behind the request. Ayre had understood immediately: a tablet built with Coral-doped silicon transistors would be something she could manipulate with ease. With text-to-speech software, it would be a way she could talk to others—Rusty in particular, but perhaps the rest of the Liberation Front as well. Wouldn’t it be something, to present Flatwell with an electronic communication device to one of his gods?

Raven had spent much of the morning flights between meeting sites talking about ‘Coralism’ with Ayre. Having a god in her head was a strange concept, but it fit. If the idea of a higher power willing to come to ones aid applied to anyone, it applied to Ayre, both in the immediate aftermath of the surge and the months ahead. Her guardian angel in so many ways. It fit so well it was honestly funny.

Ayre was equally amused. Nothing in what she’d learned of the Coralists’ faith had stuck her as objectionable or incorrect, founded as it was on another’s Contact with Ayre’s sister Seria. They didn’t ascribe much in the way of powers to Coral beyond that which it clearly and observably did: power generators and feed mealworms. All they held ‘faith’ in was a being in the Coral who wished for their happiness and success—and Ayre was just such a being, so there they had it.

Ayre wasn’t going to ask for or even encourage worship, and many Coralists might rightly object if she did. She would be content to serve as a spiritual leader alongside and, in truth, apprenticed to Father Dolmayan, who had a far better grasp of human faith than she likely ever would. It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say Ayre ‘wanted’ to do so—speaking to so many people at once, all of whom would give her words far more weight than they deserved, was not her idea of fun—but she also felt that if hundreds of thousands of people were going to dedicate their lives to following the ideals Seria had given Dolmayan, and do so much good while they were at it, they deserved one of their ‘gods’ to tell them they’d done well. It just so happened that Ayre was the one positioned to do it, so she would.

The Coral tablet would let Ayre speak for the Coral without getting Raven involved, but that wasn’t why Raven had asked for it. She wanted it because it would let Ayre speak to Rusty directly, or as directly as she could. If Ayre wanted to experience a human relationship, she was going to get to experience a whole damn relationship! Raven hadn’t explained her request to anyone but Ayre (who she could not very well conceal it from), lest they get their hopes up, so if Flatwell came through and it worked as she hoped, it would make for an excellent surprise.

“Raven?” Ayre asked. “I’ve been thinking about… something Carla said.”

Raven didn’t wince at Carla’s name, barely. Her thoughts about the old woman were a complete mess. She’d been one of Raven’s favorite employers. She wanted to kill Ayre. She was so damned likable. She’d murdered billions.

“Which part?” Raven asked, wondering just how painful this conversation was going to be.

“She mentioned that some skills can end up transferring between owners of the same implants,” Ayre said. “That implies that implants can store certain skills, and for something like hacking to not be an outlier, their ability to do so much be fairly broad.”

“And?”

“I think, having looked closely at both your implants and your brain, that I may be able to… transfer some of your language ability from your better days into the implants. It would not cure your aphasia completely, but if it works, it should allow you to speak with your maximum ability at all times.”

Raven stopped dead, though as Ayre was midway through cracking the cryptographic locks on a Schneider Kranich/60Z pulse cannon while REASON stood statue-still above it, no one but Ayre could notice.

“That would be amazing!” Raven exclaimed. Her best was not so far off normal speech! It was just so hard to maintain that best and concentrate on anything else at the same time, conversation included. If she could manage that at all times, and focus on fixing the last flaws—her speed, her tone…

She’d be able to speak without feeling ashamed of herself! Without feeling like a stupid, foolish child who couldn’t do anything right! Who always embarrassed her parents and 

Raven stopped that thought in its tracks, stared it down like a dog with its teeth bared.

She had something better now. Better than all the people who had thrown her away in her past. Raven trusted Ayre to never leave her. She could sense her sincerity through their Contact every time her partner renewed that vow. Raven trusted Rusty to forgive her errors. She’d nearly killed the man—intentionally in both respects, the ‘near’ and the ‘killed’ alike—and he’d come back! If that wasn’t forgiveness she didn’t know what was.

That didn’t mean she was ‘better’ now. Raven had to remind herself of those things every time the old thoughts crept up. It was hard, as hard as her speech therapy. What a bitter irony it was that dissociated memories that no longer held weight themselves had carved such deep cuts into her psyche.

It was a work in progress.

It was scary to think about, but Raven might have a future, now. Something beyond the next mission, beyond briefings and objectives and sorties and post-mission bills. Something with Rusty, if she was very lucky. Something on Rubicon, even if she was not.

It felt like falling, as freedom seemed to do.

At least she had no need to wander. There was nothing in all the wider galaxy that appealed so much that she would even consider asking Ayre to leave her family and her homeworld. Raven had seen Earth and Mars, which were in many ways the crown jewels of human space: Earth, overrun by concrete where it had not been given over to the monotone of agriculture or, all too rarely, back to the ravaged wildness of nature; Mars, gleaming towers of flawless glass in artistically calculated rows, its ‘forests’ planned and planted, a whole world glowing with the glaring artificial beauty of a carefully sculpted hedge. Awful, all of it, run through with streaks of avarice like oil in emulsion, impossible to strain. Where ‘opportunity’ was a con run by the rich, and cutthroat competition enforced from the top down had rendered ‘good enough’ just another kind of failure—one she had grown well acquainted with.

Raven wondered if she would ever have found a future if she had only been a ‘good enough’ pilot. Likely not; she’d have died months ago. Ironic, wasn’t it, that only by finally excelling at something had she been able to live long enough to meet people who insisted that excellence—or even usefulness—was not compulsory.

Their words did not banish the thoughts. Her own affirmations did not, either. Raven had, by the standards of her people and by those same standards her culture had imprinted on her own thoughts, failed as a human being. She had been made a weapon instead, and only then had she become something that justified its existence. Only useful things deserved to exist. What was useless would be discarded. Human industry knew perfectly well what to do with trash:

Leave it where it fell.

(Did she deserve the future she saw?) Yes, she did. (Did she really?) Yes, because she was finally usef—no, she deserved it because… because…

Well, being useful was not so bad. Even if she was as much a weapon as a person.

“We’re done with this batch,” Ayre announced, and Raven relayed the news to the crew around her before walking a safe distance away and igniting REASON’s boosters.

On to the next.

Chapter Text

Rusty found Ziyi waiting for him at lunch, recovered from her latest ‘religious crisis’ and still intent on sticking to his side, or perhaps sticking him to hers. After another portion of mealworm—Rusty was either getting used to the taste or losing the sense entirely—they continued to roam the base in circles that served no purpose beyond letting as many people as possible see the two of them not trying to kill each other. He wasn’t sure it was working; rather, people’s hostility merely turned to cautious disapproval when they saw the Hero of Tsirna Dolina playing tour guide. It still stung.

Ziyi finished her history lessons first—lessons which ended years before Rusty had left Rubicon, as it happened, because most of what had happened afterward could be summed up ‘and we’ve been killing each other ever since’—and then went back to culture. Traditions, customs, things that would let him blend in, or maybe just stick out less.

“When you arrive somewhere,” Ziyi explained, “even if you’ve just gone from one room to another, it’s common to stop and kick one boot against the ground like you’re knocking off snow. It doesn’t even really mean anything, it’s just a habit a lot of people pick up. Now that I think about it, I guess it means ‘I’m not passing through, this is where I was headed’?”

“Is that why everyone does that?” Rusty asked, having noticed the habit himself.

“Yeah. Do it next time you show up somewhere—but not where we’re going next. That’s kind of an exception because… you’ll see. It’ll make sense when we get there.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” And he would. With most of his memories buried as deep as his lost home—by design, perhaps, but buried nonetheless—it was information he could use.

“And while we’re talking about culture,” Ziyi said, “we’re going to have to talk about the Coral. I’ve been going easy on you until now, corpo. This is where we get into the freaky bumpkin cult worship. You going to play along, or am I going to have to kick your ass before you stop looking down on the primitive tribals and their gods?”

“I’ll play along!” Rusty whined. “I read your prayer book, didn’t I?”

“I told you that book’s junk,” Ziyi reminded him.

“It’s your damn religion!”

“That old thing’s dressed up in so much flowery nonsense it’s barely a Coralist text at all,” Ziyi insisted. “Books like that are what you get when people who like to talk too much realize that if they write their words down instead, they can’t tell that no one’s listening.”

“Terrible,” Rusty said with a great deal of feigned gravity.

Ziyi have him a light shove. “You’re not allowed to make fun of it until you’re a proper Coralist,” she told him. “Besides, for all its faults, the language is pretty, at least.”

“It was better than not reading anything, I’ll give it that.”

“Good.” Ziyi sighed and fidgeted with the brace still on her left wrist. “Coral, where do I even begin…”

“Worship?” Rusty suggested.

“I’m not sure we have what you’d think of as ‘worship’,” Ziyi said. “Nothing organized, like in the holos. Mostly, we’re told to worship through acts of service to each other. ‘To feed someone who cannot repay the food is an act of worship. To clothe someone who cannot repay the cloth is an act of worship.’ It’s easy to forget, when you’re fighting a war, but we came together in the first place with a pledge: to treat the whole world as our family. Family doesn’t leave family out in the cold. You see?”

“I’m listening,” Rusty said easily.

“The Coral doesn’t ask us to worship it, or pray to it, or anything like that, but some do anyway, out of gratitude. Some thank the Coral for the meals it gives us, or wish it goodnight each night before going to bed, whatever they feel is right. A lot of people worry not doing so would have them start taking its gifts for granted. Doing things for people who need them just because they need them is worship, but it’s just as important to pay back kindness when you can, however you can.”

“So how do you repay kindness to Coral?” Rusty asked. “Does it… I don’t know, want anything other than people to not be terrible to each other?”

“It hasn’t asked for anything else, so far as I know,” Ziyi said. “Coral is… to be honest, I’m not sure even the old Institute ever really figured out what it was. They invented a million different uses for it, some good, some harmless, and some awful, but I’ve never heard about them understanding it.”

She shrugged her shoulders and shook off the thought. “The point is, maybe what the Coral needs is so weird we wouldn’t even understand it. Maybe it literally eats radiation given off by happy people or something. Whatever it is, though, it’s been nothing but good to us ever since Father Dolmayan brought its teachings into our lives.

“I think that’s the important thing, actually,” Ziyi added. “The Coral doesn’t really ‘do’ things directly. I mean, obviously it does all the things I mentioned earlier, but its voice isn’t really… active? It sets out a code for us to follow, a code that directly improved our lives, and we’re thankful for that. That is why we revere the Coral and its voice.”

Rusty didn’t want to insult his guide and ambassador, but he had a part to play in the pantomime of assimilation. “A code that could just as easily have come from your leader himself.”

“You said you were going to play along,” Ziyi grumbled, then punched him in the shoulder. “Next time you get two.”

“Hey, I’m not saying the code isn’t great!” he whined. “You had something grand going before the PCA pissed all over it. Isn’t it more impressive if a human was responsible for it all?”

Ziyi punched him twice.

“Okay! Okay! I yield! The Coral is a kind and wonderful god!” Rusty rubbed his shoulder and glared at his partner-in-ruse. She hadn’t had to hit him that hard! “What happened to treating everyone like family, you little gremlin?”

“Sometimes you have to discipline a wayward child,” Ziyi said loftily.

“You’re like five years younger than me.”

“And yet I’m the one in charge of educating you on the things any Rubiconian would know by the time they were five themselves.”

Rusty scowled. That jab, like the punches, actually kind of hurt.

His act must be slipping, because Ziyi could tell he wasn’t feigning hurt that time. “Don’t worry,” she said, reaching up to rub Rusty’s sore shoulder. “You’ll pick it up. Cultural immersion. You’ll be swearing by Coral in no time.”

He harrumphed.

“Okay, fine,” Ziyi said. “I was going to save this for last, but if you’re gonna get all bent out of shape, I’ll skip to the good part. Come on.”

They carried on through the base for another minute, perhaps, before Ziyi held a finger to her lips and pulled open an old service door by the handle. Inside, was red.

Rusty at first thought the room was lit by red lights, but as Ziyi led him in, he realized that wasn’t the case. The bare bulb overhead was no different than those in the hall outside. The room was what was red: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the cloths covering the tables.

Red on red in patterns of shiny-on-matte shimmered on the walls as he moved to the center of the room. On one, the dandelion-fluff of an airborne Coral mote; on another, the shimmering waves of hydrous Coral in a Well; on the third, wisps and whorls suggested sunlight filtering through Coral clouds. Above, the image of a robed and hooded woman in silhouette filled the whole of the ceiling, the light of the bulb shining from her bosom and her arms outstretched as though to embrace all beneath her. And all throughout, one could find stylized forms of the Coral trefoil, the hazard symbol repurposed as religious iconography.

As for the tables, there seemed to be little clear rhyme or reason to the clutter. Bowls sat wherever they fit, no two of the same size nor with the same contents. Some held dice, some beads, some rings and cufflinks, and so on for all sorts of trinkets and tokens. One held a porcelain frog painted with the red and black stripes of a long-extinct species. Between the bowls were things large enough to stand on their own: candles, mirrors, broken electronics, rag-dolls and hand-made wire sculptures.

Rusty wasn’t religious himself, much less a Coralist, but he didn’t need to be to feel humbled by the space. ‘The good part’, Ziyi had called it, and it was. It was hard to stay angry or hurt in a place with so much love in its creation—and yet it did hurt, a little, feeling like an intruder in a space sacred to the culture that should have been his: the culture he’d cut himself free of in pursuit of his Uncle’s quest to free their people, a decision made in his younger self’s short-sighted desperation to discard the pain of grief.

“There’s a place like this in every RLF base on Rubicon,” Ziyi murmured, her voice so low it would have been lost anywhere else but the hallowed silence of the shrine. “Most of them are just a table with a knickknack or two. Candles and shiny stones, mostly. Things we can leave behind, if we have to. But… especially after the Wall, the Liberation Front needed something… permanent. Somewhere. Something we could hold on to. People treat being posted here like a pilgrimage, now.”

The Wall. The words twisted in his stomach like snakes.

Rusty needed no instruction. He knelt at the center of the shrine, and Ziyi knelt beside him.

What could he say to the spirits of this place, should they be listening? To the ghosts of the Rubiconians who had died by his hand? Should he apologize? Try to justify himself? Would they see him as Flatwell saw him: a noble soldier who had sacrificed everything, stained his soul with his people’s blood for the cause? Or as the people he passed in the halls saw him: a traitor, a murderer, an enemy? Who could say? The only one who could hear the Coral was…

Was…

Rusty broke out into a cold sweat.

One of his girlfriends might as well be a messenger for one of his people’s gods, and the other was the god herself!

The nature of Coralist theology was going to be a lot more complicated for him than anyone was liable to suspect.

Chapter Text

Raven was surprised how tired she was when she finally flew back into Gallia Dam, considering her entire day had been nothing but leisurely flights between empty fields of ice and ash.

“You’re sortied every day, sometimes twice, for the last week,” Ayre noted as Rusty approached the open pilot capsule with her wheelchair. “You need to rest.”

“Tomorrow,” Raven said. “I will not sortie tomorrow.”

“Taking a day off?” Rusty quipped.

“Yes,” she said. She removed her flight helmet, then opened one of the latched storage spaces in the capsule usually used for emergency survival gear and exchanged it for what amounted to an overnight bag collected from her crew’s new hideout. “Ayre reminded me that I have sortied once a day or more for a full week,” she explained as she swung herself into the chair.

“Damn,” Rusty said. “It feels like a lot longer since we got here, but it’s only been three or four days since I crashed and burned to you, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Raven agreed. “Rusty… about what you said down there. Before we fought.”

“…yes?” he asked, worried.

“It hurt. A lot. But I understand that you spoke in anger. And I forgive you.”

“Thank you,” Rusty said, but Raven wasn’t done.

“We can’t all have a speech handicap,” she said with a smirk. “So we have to think about what we say. Before we say it.”

Rusty pouted at her back as she wheeled away towards the lift.

“Smart-ass,” he muttered, and followed her.

“Ayre thinks she can help me. With my speech,” Raven said once the lift had begun its slow and shaky journey deeper into the base.

“Oh?” Rusty asked. “That’s wonderful.”

“It is,” Raven agreed. “Do you know what a ‘ghost’ is?”

Rusty frowned at her for a moment. “Like… implant-wise?” he asked.

“Yes. Skills captured by implants. She thinks she can move English. Into my implants. So I don’t have to use. The damaged part of my brain.”

“I’m not sure it will work nearly that well,” Ayre said.

“Or at least use it less,” Raven amended. “We will be working on it tomorrow.”

“That still sounds very helpful,” Rusty said.

He was standing by her side a polite half-meter away, facing the same way as her chair. Raven carefully angled herself closer—damned wheelchairs couldn’t strafe—and took his right hand with her left. He looked down at her in surprise, and she smirked.

“You still have. Corporate elevator etiquette,” she said.

Rusty let out a strangled laugh. “Do I, now?”

“You would look at me otherwise.” A blush rose to her cheeks as she formed the next sentence. “You should look at me more. You smile when you do.”

She’d finally gotten a blush out of him, the smooth bastard. “Is that… an invitation?” Rusty asked, a crack forming in his normal unflappable charm.

“Say yes!” Ayre said.

“Yes,” Raven said.

“Then…” His blush was getting delightfully worse. “…would you like to see the room Flatwell gave me?”

Hot damn was he dense.

“Yes,” Raven said.

Rusty’s room was one of the half-dozen reserved for visiting senior officers and AC pilots. Dolmayan might be the Thumb of the RLF’s Fist, but his sacred position at the head of the Coralist faith meant he was thought of less as an officer or pilot and more as a prophet. He most often kept quarters nearer the communal dormitories instead.

Rusty had been surprised when Flatwell had granted him an officer’s room, but the RLF had never had need for anything between a cell and a suite. Keeping him in the bunks with the rest of the Dam’s population was right out, so if he was not to be locked in like a prisoner, an officer’s room it would be.

It wasn’t exactly a luxury suite. Its mattress had sheets, it had a footlocker for his things, and its resident was expected to use the shared washroom and lavatory nearby rather than a bare metal toilet in one corner, but the biggest difference between it and the cell in the dungeons was that it had an opaque door that locked from the inside rather than a transparent one that locked from the outside. The accommodations cast the ‘luxury’ of Dolmayan’s room into even starker relief.

“It looks like my room,” Raven observed once Rusty opened the door.

“Back at home?” Rusty asked.

“Where I slept between sorties,” she clarified as she wheeled her chair in. Rusty shut the door, then remembered Ziyi’s words and tapped the toes of his right boot against the ground before he sat down on the closest thing to a chair the room had, which was the footlocker. Raven wrestled free of her flightsuit’s heavy outer layer, leaving herself in the softer, padded underlayer, and helped herself to the bed. She shot an expectant look his way, and he obliged.

They spent a good while there, mostly clothed, their lips locked together and their hands beneath each others’ shirts. Even here, at the heart of the Dam, the room was cold.

It was Rusty’s mistake in allowing his hands to wander lower than had Raven draw back once again.

“S-sorry,” she said. “I think. I would prefer to. To go slow. This time.”

“Slow is fine!” Rusty said quickly.

“Thank you,” Raven said. “My memories of… of sex are… not good.”

“Oh,” was all he could say. “Oh, I’m so sorry…”

“No!” Raven blurted. “Sorry. I was unclear. My memories of sex are not ‘bad’. ‘Spotty’. Poor memory, not ‘bad memories’. Understand?”

“Ah.”

“I just… I…” She sighed and leaned against him, once more enjoying pressing her face into his chest.

“I am… adjusting. I was…” Raven shivered, either from the cold or her own thoughts, and slipped her hands once more under Rusty’s shirt, this time simply for warmth. “I was not… a good person, before. No. I said that wrong. I was not a good… not a good citizen? Not the kind of human people wanted.”

Rusty let his own hands slip beneath Raven’s undershirt to rub circles on her bare back.

“They made me into a weapon instead,” Raven said. “I did my best to be that weapon. It was the only hope I had of not… not being abandoned. Left to die. I was… good at it, I think.”

You were frighteningly good at at it all the way back at the Wall, Rusty kept to himself. You’ve only gotten scarier since.

“I think… I still want to be that weapon,” she continued. “I don’t… I don’t know if I enjoy it, but I do enjoy being good at something. It’s not… not something I’ve felt before. That… pride, in… in ‘excellence’. I have never been excellent at anything before.

“But I cannot stop being a person. So I am trying to learn how to be both. A weapon that is also a person.” Raven let out a happier sigh and nuzzled deeper into him. “I would like that, I think.”

And maybe that would be enough for her, but it still sounded like less than a full life.

“You’re good at so much more than fighting,” Rusty said. “I overheard how you spent your day today. Breaking cryptography like that is every bit as impressive as your sorties.”

Raven hummed into his jacket.

“I wish you could hear her,” she said.

“Ayre?”

“Yes. I was just a pilot today. A… a driver? What is the word? Shaff…”

“Chauffeur?” Rusty guessed.

“Yes. Thank you. I was just a… a chauf-feur. For Ayre. She’s the expert on computers.” Raven angled her head upwards enough that he could read the smirk in her eyes. “We should tell the RLF that the Coral broke the encryption on the weapons.”

Rusty chortled despite himself. “I have no idea how people would react to that.”

“It’s true,” Raven insisted.

“Yes, but… huh. I guess it is literally true.” Rusty returned her smile. “I don’t know how much you know about the ‘Coralists’, but half their faith is based on the idea that there’s a voice in the Coral that can talk to people. If you told them about Ayre…”

He paused to reconsider.

“I guess some people would doubt you just because you’re an outsider,” he admitted, “and they’d want a new ‘prophet’ from within their ranks, but the leadership, at least, would believe you. Especially if I backed you up. I’m not popular with the organization as a whole, but Flatwell knows what I’ve done for the RLF.”

“I’m working on that,” Raven said.

“You are?”

“Yes. Don’t ask questions. It will be a surprise.”

“If that’s what you want,” Rusty said. “Not even going to react to the ‘prophet’ comment?”

Raven shrugged. “I was already aware of it. We talked about it today. Ayre is willing to speak for the Coral. To anyone who follows its religion.”

“I think that will make a lot of people very happy,” he said. “Or very confused. It’ll make everyone very something, I’m sure.”

“It will,” Raven agreed. “Uhm. She would like to talk to you. If that isn’t too weird.”

“Of course it’s not too weird,” Rusty said. “I said I wanted to get to know both of you and I meant it. You’ll be passing her words along?”

“Yes. She says she hopes…” Raven stopped. “She wants me to use first person.” She cleared her throat, then pulled away and sat up so they could see each other properly, prim and proper with her hands in her lap. Rusty sat up as well so he was on the right eye-level for conversation.

“Hello, Rusty,” Ayre said through Raven, the latter’s voice pitched subtly upward.

“Ayre,” Rusty said. “It’s good to be able to talk to you, even if Raven has to speak for you.”

“I feel the same way,” Ayre said. “She’s disappointed you can’t hear my voice. She thinks it’s much prettier than hers.”

“That is a very impressive compliment,” Rusty quipped, and enjoyed the blush it brought to Raven’s cheeks.

“She is biased,” Ayre said. “You are also biased, but I agree with… Ayre, stop it. … Ah, fine! I agree with you more than her. Her voice is lovely.”

“It is,” Rusty agreed with an easy smile. “Um… she said you wanted to talk to me. Was there anything specific, or just… generally?”

“Well,” Ayre said, “I wanted to say that I hope it is not too awkward that I am here for all of… everything. Earlier.”

“Um.” Rusty faltered. I guess it’s best we talk about this now, before things get any more intimate. “I guess I’m not too clear on… exactly how ‘present’ you are. Are you just observing, or…?” Gah, how am I even supposed to ask about these things without making an utter idiot of myself?

Tiptoeing around the specific weirdness wasn’t even his biggest problem. Rusty was talking with someone he’d been crushing on for longer than he’d known ‘crushing on people’ was something he was at risk of, and who he'd been ‘together with’ for less than a day. He had flirted, briefly dated, and even engaged in casual hook-ups with a variety of men and women throughout his years in the Vespers; every one had been ‘in character’. He’d never caught these kinds of honest, heartfelt feelings before. Maybe if he had, he’d have been able to recognize them for what they were before they grew so wildly out of control.

Raven wasn’t fairing any better, so far as Rusty could tell. She’d been clear she’d had sex before—she was nearly Rusty’s own age; the alternative would be more notable for anyone who wasn’t outright uninterested in it—so he wasn’t sure if it was the dissociation from and/or absence of the memories of her experiences that had her ‘blushing like a virgin’, or if her prior experiences had never been more emotionally intimate than Rusty’s own.

“She can… sorry. I can feel everything she can,” Ayre said through Raven’s very embarrassed mouth. “I don’t have a body of my own. My experience of your physical world is almost entirely rooted in Raven’s senses, so… unless you would rather I not be, I am present for everything.”

“Everything,” Rusty repeated. “Riding along in her body?”

“Somewhat literally,” Ayre said. “I spend much of my time entirely in the Coral mass within Raven’s body. It’s not quite a large enough mass to be a comfortable fit. But I can spread out a bit when we’re not moving.”

Raven tilted her head askew to signify it was her talking and added, “It’s not the same, but when she tried to explain it to me. I got a sense like fitting into a packed tram car. Unpleasantly tight but not… distressing.”

“And now you’re… spread out into the room?” Rusty asked Ayre, unsure what effect that would have on him or anyone nearby.

“I spread out into other nearby masses of live Coral. You have a modest stockpile divided amongst the storerooms in the Dam. It is more than enough for me to be comfortable anywhere in the base.”

Rusty hesitated, then ventured, “Can I ask you more questions about that? About… you and your… existence?”

“Don’t worry about offending me,” Ayre said. “I would be delighted to explain myself to you as best I can. I assure you, I was every bit as curious about humans.”

“How is it, for you?” he asked. “I mean… are you comfortable experiencing everything a human does? If you don’t have physical senses of your own…?”

“I am. Thank you for your concern. I share Raven’s understanding of her senses, so they don’t overwhelm or confuse me. Including her understanding of language, and… damn it, Ayre, do I have to… fine. Including her senses of you. It is… something I would regret being excluded from. But I understand if you are uncomfortable with a… ‘voyeur’ in the room.”

“It’s nothing I’ve dealt with before,” Rusty admitted, “but you did ask me to date both of you, and I accepted. I’ll do my best to treat you both as my partners.”

Raven leaned forward and hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s from me, not from Ayre. She says thank you too. I didn’t realize how worried she was about. You not wanting her around for our… time together.”

Rusty returned the hug. “Sounds like she likes it as much as we do.”

“She is very clear on the fact that she does.” Raven gave him another squeeze before returning to ‘Ayre conversation pose’.

“Is there anything else you wanted to ask?” Ayre asked.

“Too much for one conversation,” Rusty said. “But since we were on the topic: having nearby ‘masses’ of Coral is… like living space for you?”

“That is the closest metaphor that came to Raven’s mind. If I were to try to describe it more accurately. Coral is ‘thinking’ space. Having more does not make us smarter. But it lets us think faster and remember more. Once, I was a massive reservoir. All to myself. I could have stored each moment of my life since arriving there if I had wished.” Raven expressed Ayre’s smile. “It would have been a waste of effort. The memories were not very interesting. And it would have been very rude by my people’s standards even if there was no one around to chastise me for it.”

“Like leaving your stuff all over public living spaces for other people to trip over.”

“That is a good metaphor for it,” Ayre said. “We can change size readily, so if space becomes limited, it is very selfish for the larger to not make room for the smaller.”

“Doesn’t… ‘shrinking’, for lack of a better word, mean giving up memories?” Rusty asked. “Losing things?”

“Often, yes. We don’t feel the same way about it as humans do, I think. If we are growing too large, there are always things we don’t consider useful to remember anymore. If we can’t decide, we can also compress memories, preserving the important elements while discarding unnecessary details.”

“You’re an infomorph,” Rusty said, the penny finally dropping. He’d been distracted enough by the spiritual perspective that he hadn’t tried to put Ayre into physical context until she’d used a term like ‘compressing data’.

“A… what?” Raven asked in her normal, not-Ayre tone of voice.

“An infomorph,” he repeated. “A self-aware collection of information occupying a computation-capable medium.”

“Raven had not encountered that term before, but it seems to fit,” Ayre agreed. “Coral's computational ability allows it to self-organize into. Sapient networks under the right conditions.”

“It’s not a real thing,” Rusty said. “I mean, it’s a term that’s never been applied to a real thing, as far as I know. It crops up in fiction involving truly sentient AI or human mind uploading, neither of which we actually have. I don’t think anyone knows it’s really possible. Maybe it’s not without Coral.”

“You don’t have self-aware AI?” Ayre asked.

“We have a lot of things we call ‘AI’, but nothing anyone has ever demonstrated to be sentient, much less sapient. Is that that surprising?”

“No. I was just curious. We met an AI who seemed… very alive.”

“You met him too,” Raven added. “‘Chatty’. Carla’s… Carla’s assistant. He was in the field against the Ice Worm.”

“‘Chatty’ Stick?” Rusty asked. “He… that was a chatbot?”

Raven nodded. “He’s an AI, yeah.”

“Huh. Yeah, he was pretty life-like.” He frowned to himself as he added, “I guess Carla wasn’t just good at weapons.”

“Yeah,” Raven muttered.

The mood soured. Rusty searched for a change of topic.

“Do you have your own name for Coral?” he asked Ayre.

“We don’t speak language in the same way you understand it,” she said, “but we do have a concept of ‘Coral’. The English word closest to our understanding of it would be ‘Substrate’. It’s where we live and grow. The concept for things that are not Coral would be… ‘Medium’, maybe? A thing in which the Substrate exists. It’s not exact.”

“And you can move from the ‘Substrate’ where you are into other nearby ‘Substrate’,” Rusty said.

“I can. It’s easier when the Substrate is flowing. When it intermingles, I can move by… convection? That isn’t quite the right concept. Yes, I can move some or all of myself… the Coral interactions that make me… into other Coral masses, temporarily or permanently.”

That was as good a segue as any. “So how did you two meet?” Rusty asked.

Ayre—or Raven, maybe—hid a laugh in a delicate cough. “The PCA created their Watchpoints with a deliberate fail-deadly mechanism. If the primary sensor station is destroyed without great care. It will by design… ‘energize’ the Coral below it.”

“Hold on,” Rusty said. “Sorry to interrupt but… are you saying the explosion that took out the north-west coast was deliberate?”

“It was a… likely unintended effect… of a trap meant to immolate saboteurs in a Coral Surge.”

“With both of you in it,” he said, understanding dawning. “Of course you were the one who knocked over the PCA Watchpoint and wrecked their fast-response craft. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”

Raven raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize that was still secret.”

“Your employer must have covered your tracks well. The PCA had tentatively identified Sulla as the one responsible, with a very low confidence on that assessment.”

“Yeah,” she muttered, then cleared her throat and returned to speaking for Ayre.

“Being in a Coral Surge is… not comfortable. I don’t have a good metaphor for it. Actually, one moment. Raven, if you would…”

Raven stopped, then winced. “That is what she calls not comfortable?” she asked the air. “I would use stronger words! It feels like… like pulling extreme g-forces made of burning heat. Eugh.”

“That’s… an evocative metaphor,” Rusty said, wincing a little himself.

“It is unpleasant, then,” Ayre said. “I was lucky that I had enough warning to make sure I had all my core memories close to ‘hand’, as it were, so I didn’t lose anything I would miss. Then it was up, up, up into the atmosphere. Things had just begun to settle down when I heard another mind in the Coral. The Coral surge had given Raven a lethal dose of Coral to add to the amount already in her brain. It allowed her to make Contact in the fleeing moments before she died.”

Raven held up a hand at chest height as though asking Rusty to wait. “Sorry. Raven again. What do you mean fleeting moments before I died?”

She frowned, then returned to the slightly pitch-shifted voice she used for Ayre. “As I told you at the time, Raven. If you did not quickly return to your body, your consciousness would be scattered in the Coral flow. It was a common fate among the early test subjects in the Rubicon Research Institute’s human augmentation experiments. As the Coral destroyed their bodies, fragments of their memories and personality would disperse into the Substrate. Not unlike how I or one of my brothers or sisters would move ourselves, but… broken and incomplete. Some of us tried to save what remained, but they are not… people, anymore.”

Raven held her hand up again. “How did returning to my body prevent the Coral from killing me?”

“The permanent, fragmentary transfer of your mental. Facilities into the Coral was a large portion of the danger. I helped with the rest. I knew from some of the memories I saved from my time infiltrating the PCA’s systems that Coral is most dangerous in the blood. We cannot ‘control’ Coral, not well. We don’t have much use for the ability. But Coral conducts and clusters around electrical charge…”

Raven again. “You what? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” She scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s… ah. Rusty. Sorry.”

“Coral conducts and clusters around electrical charge,” Ayre continued, “so I was able to influence it to diffuse out of Raven’s blood.”

“This is where I interrupted,” Raven said. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’”

“I did not want you to feel overly indebted to me,” Ayre replied. “It was, in a way, my fault you suffered a Coral dose in the first place.”

“I told her that was ridiculous,” Raven said.

“In addition to encouraging an unwise amount of cerebral and peripheral neuron Coral uptake and absorption into fatty tissues. I bound a non-negligible amount in her irises because. The complex surface geometry kept it stuck there without my active attention. I did not realize it would be permanent. But she has already forgiven me for that.”

“She told me it was her influence that did it and apologized,” Raven cut in. “She didn’t mention it saved my life. I think that is an important detail!”

“Raven still has between two to three times the amount of Coral in her blood as she did before our Contact,” Ayre continued. “It’s near the limit at which C-stabilizers can prevent symptoms rather than just mitigating them. But not over it. Including that bound in other tissues, her total Coral dose is closer to four times. The normal quantity administered to Fourth-generation augmented humans.”

The two fell silent, giving Rusty a chance to weigh in without talking over either of them.

“Wow,” Rusty said. “Is that… safe?”

Raven was the one to answer. “As long as I have C-stabilizers, it is not worse than. The intended dose. Or if it was, it would have killed me already.”

“Humans have varying tolerances for Coral,” Ayre explained. “Another human might not be able to tolerate the dose Raven has. But we can rest assured that she can. Or we would know already.”

“There are dialysis machines to remove Coral without C-neutralizers,” Raven said. “But it would make it harder for Ayre to stay with me. So I do not want to reduce my dose unless it is harmful. Not just ‘risky’.”

“If it became necessary to reduce the Coral further,” Ayre said, “I believe I could encourage it to bind to her hair. Which would provide a slow method of removing Coral from her body altogether.”

“You could give her Coral-red hair?” Rusty blurted out, filing that image away for later. Focus, you idiot. “Wouldn’t it be better to do that before it becomes a problem? Your AC uses a Coral generator. You’re risking another dose every time you sortie!”

“If REASON’s generator suffers a critical breach, I will not die of Coral poisoning,” Raven said with horrifying matter-of-factness.

“You…” Rusty stammered. “I know piloting an AC is dangerous, I’m not an idiot, but doesn’t that bother you at all?”

Raven reached forward and grabbed his hand with both of hers.

“I do not want to die,” she said. “I especially do not want to die now that I have you to return to.” Raven paused, then added, “Puppy.”

Rusty narrowed his eyes at her. “Find another name.”

“But the point I was making is that my Coral blood levels do not make my death more likely. The difference is too small for me to make it more difficult for Ayre to accompany me.”

“You’re sure?” Rusty asked.

“We are,” Raven said. “The doctors monitored me closely after the Watchpoint sortie. They thought I was very lucky.”

She adjusted her pose. “They aren’t wrong,” Ayre said.

“Yes,” Raven agreed. “We’re both very lucky.”

“As am I,” Rusty said. “Ayre, can I have you in front for a moment? Or as much as you can?”

“Yes?” Ayre asked.

Rusty leaned in and kissed her, deeply.

“That’s for saving Raven,” he said as he drew back and pulled them into a hug.

“Wow,” Raven laughed into his collar. “She’s completely speechless. I think you made her swoon. You shameless flirt.”

“You’re one to talk,” Rusty replied. “What was the line you used earlier? ‘You should look at me more. You smile when you do.’?”

“It was so bad,” she whined.

“It was very good! I do want to look at you more. You’re beautiful, Raven.”

“Because you like me,” Raven said.

“I do. I like you very much. But you’re also beautiful.”

Rusty could feel her shake her head against him.

“Raven,” he said slowly, “you know that there is more to being a person than being a good, profitable worker. Believe me that there is just as much more to being beautiful than looking like an AI-rendered advertising model.”

“I’m covered in scars,” Raven murmured.

“So am I,” Rusty said.

“Not on the face.”

“What difference does that make?” He leaned back so he could put his fingers beneath her chin and gently draw her head up until they locked eyes. “Your scars are beautiful. Your eyes are beautiful. The way you fight is beautiful. You’re beautiful, Raven.”

He could feel the trembling in her throat through his fingers and let her go. Raven leaned forward at once, intent on hiding her embarrassment in his chest the way she seemed so fond of.

“She’s bad with compliments, isn’t she?” Rusty asked. “Ayre?”

“You’re mean,” Raven murmured.

“I asked Ayre, not you.”

Raven groaned, but eventually passed on, “Yes, she is.”

“We’ll have to give her a lot more,” he said.

“Why?” Raven whined.

“Because I want you to see yourself the way I see you.”

She grumbled a few imprecations before asking, “Can we talk about something else?”

A second’s thought reminded Rusty that he did, in fact, have another fairly serious question.

“Ayre,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Do you have any advice for how to handle dating one of my religion’s gods?”

Chapter Text

Flatwell sighed and leaned back in his chair, hands dragging down his face as though they could wipe the weariness away like water. He’d spent all morning negotiating with BAWS over augmentation surgery—though it wasn’t much of a negotiation. BAWS had been growing worried about the RLF’s aging augmented personnel before he’d broached the topic, and they were eager to see the situation addressed. Now they just needed to figure out the when and how.

The ‘who’ was already settled. Sometime soon, Ziyi would be off to the surgeons, and would come back on a path to replace Dolmayan himself as the RLF’s most capable pilot or not at all.

She’ll come back, Flatwell told himself. BAWS volunteered to spring the money for 10th just for that extra 9 on the 99.99% surgical success rate. Either they judged her a damned fine pilot or they didn’t want to risk the RLF’s latest propaganda victory on the operating table; either way, his daughter would be that much safer.

His daughter. It had been days and he still wasn’t used to the thought, for all it was merely his brain catching up to the reality of the last twenty years.

Flatwell sighed and put his game face on.

He was halfway through reviewing the various commendations handed out in the last operation—Freddie, facing the harshest opposition besides the cavalry squad that had tunnel-visioned on Ziyi, had been justifiably generous with his—when one of the base’s technicians stuck his head through the door.

“Got a moment, Uncle?” he asked.

“I can spare a few,” Flatwell said. “What brings you down here, Yosef?”

The tech smiled, happy that Flatwell knew his name. “You sent everyone looking for old Coral electronics yesterday.”

“You find something?” Flatwell asked, sitting up straight to display about as much eagerness as he ever let his men see.

“We found a lot of things,” Yosef said. “None of them work, but I’d be shocked if I can’t put together one working unit from the two dozen samples you brought in by fast courier. Just wanted to ask permission before I crack them open.”

“You have it,” Flatwell said. “Let me know the moment you get one working.”

“Of course, Uncle.” Yosef saluted and received a salute in return, and then he was off.

Flatwell allowed himself a small, private smile before returning to his reports. It seemed he’d be able to pay Raven after all, for whatever she wanted the thing for.

Maybe it was related to how she cracked the encryption? He might ask her about it, if she seemed receptive. If not… it probably wasn’t important.

Neither Raven and Ayre nor Rusty left their bed until nearly noon. They’d slept in late enough to miss breakfast, and past that threshold, neither had anything important enough to pull them away from warm sheets and a warmer body beside them for many more hours. They spent most of that cuddling and chatting, Rusty lying on his back so the girls could use his chest as a pillow, none of them feeling any rush to return to the hot and heavy activities of the previous day just yet.

“Ayre’s working on moving my language skills,” Raven said.

“Oh?” Rusty asked.

“She did the prep work while I was asleep. She’s done a little more, but she says talking will help. Would you like to talk to me? Or her? Either will work.”

“Would you or Ayre mind if I asked her some more questions?” Rusty replied.

“About her personally, or her people?” Raven asked. “That’s just me wondering. She already agreed to answer your questions.”

“Her people. I… I hope this doesn’t come off as downplaying how interesting she is as an individual, but talking to an actual non-human intelligence face to face is probably the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.” It was so far outside anything Rusty had ever expected from his life that he hadn’t a shred of cynicism prepared to ward off his excitement and wonder. He couldn’t help but feel like a kid again, amazed at everything the universe had to offer, even when that ‘everything’ had been ice and stone and farming.

“It’s my face,” Raven said.

“I thought it was both of your face,” Rusty replied.

“It was my face first,” Raven said, then sighed and draped an arm across his chest to pull herself closer.

“It’s me, Ayre,” Ayre said. “Please, ask whatever you would like. I’d love to share more about my people.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t ask earlier,” Rusty began, “but what do your people call themselves?”

“I’m afraid the answer is very boring,” Ayre said. “We call ourselves ‘People’. Until we met humans, we had never encountered anything that wasn’t so clearly ‘People’ or ‘not People’ that we needed any other concept for it. And I’m afraid to say that given the poor first encounters between our species. Many of my brothers and sisters would not award personhood to a human.”

“I know enough enough about human history to say that we’ve spent pretty much the entirety of it finding new excuses to revoke personhood from members our own species,” Rusty replied. “Still, that seems… very sad, that we’ve made such a poor impression of ourselves, accurate as it may be.”

“I didn’t mean to imply it’s accurate. The opposite, in fact. If the humans who provided that impression were the rule. Rather than the exception, nothing like the Coralists would have ever come to exist.”

“I suppose I have a somewhat… odd view of humanity,” Rusty mused. “I… when you said you had a different view of discarding memories, yesterday, the thought that came to mind was, ‘I know what that’s like’. I was born on Rubicon. I spent the first… fifteen or so calendar years, so maybe seven or eight Standard years, growing up as a Coralist. And the truth is, I can’t remember any of it.

“I’m pretty sure I meant to forget it all. I got rid of all of it because it was in the way of becoming the spy I wanted to be, or maybe just because it hurt too much to remember. The PCA killed everyone I’d ever known. I broke, and when it came time to pick up the pieces, I left everything that wouldn’t help me get revenge on the Federated Worlds and their Corporations on the floor where it lay.

“Raven said she was made into a weapon. Well, I guess in my own way, I made myself into one too. A shiv, rather than a gun, but… still someone whose only purpose was to kill something. The PCA, in my case, and… well, I guess we did. In a way. Their presence on Rubicon is effectively gone after you killed the Primary System Intelligence at the bottom of Priority Zone 1… I mean, Watchpoint Alpha. Priority Zone 1 is Arquebus’s internal designation for the primary site. But I’d bet the bureaucrats in the PCA Home Office back on Mars are begging the Fed to tear up Arquebus the same way they did Icarus.”

“Icarus?” Raven asked.

“One of the founding corporations of the Mars State Authority before it became the Federated Worlds. Hovered around the top of the Nine Great Conglomerates until they ignored the recently-enacted RCC. SOLFED decided they needed to make an example of them and basically drew and quartered them. That’s how Sierpinski got into the Big Nine.”

Raven hummed. “I think I remember learning about that in school,” she said. “But I don’t remember the information itself. Or I didn’t.”

“Doesn’t really matter much out here,” Rusty said.

“The RCC does.”

“Barely,” Rusty said. “The RLF never cared for rules of engagement when their war started with an unprovoked attack on civilian targets as a means to enact genocide, and Arquebus and Balam had something of a… it feels ironic to use the term, but it was basically a gentlemen’s agreement not to abide by the rules, or at least, not go to tattling on the other to Sol unless the other did something truly intolerable. Half the missions you’ve done for the corps would have gotten you and them sanctioned hard anywhere else.

“Hell, the refueling base op I played liaison for would have gotten Arquebus’s C-suite black-bagged if they’d done that to a rival corp. That kind of deliberate, targeted asset and infrastructure denial is pretty close to the most illegal thing under the RCC. An act that brazen is tantamount to declaring war on the Fed itself.”

“Wouldn’t doing that to the PCA be even worse than doing it to another corporation?” Raven asked. “They’re a Federated Administration!”

“Who shot first in violation of their own laws, so Legal was confident we could just say we were responding to an unprovoked attack by a rogue, possibly rebelling government Administration. We’d get sanctioned, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as letting the PCA keep the base.” Rusty finished his explanation, blinked, then groaned, “Why are we talking about work?”

“You decided I needed a remedial civics lesson,” Raven said.

“It’s not like that.”

“You were evidently right,” she pointed out.

Rusty sighed. “Maybe. How did we end up on this topic?”

Raven cleared her throat and pitched her voice slightly up. “You were talking about your memories,” Ayre said. “And then, about the destruction of the PCA.”

“Thank you,” Rusty said. “I’m not sure where I was going with that… or if I was going anywhere with it other than just… trying to make some sense of it to myself. I don’t think humans are supposed to repress memories like that. I mean, I don’t think it’s good for us. Then again, most of what we do isn’t good for us.”

“Like piloting,” Raven said.

“I was speaking more to humanity as a whole,” Rusty replied. “Ten-hour workdays, instant meals, television, cheap drugs, caffeine for the morning after… we’re a pretty self-destructive species on an individual level, never mind in aggregate.”

“And yet you build such beautiful things, as well,” Ayre said. “Your machines, your cities, the Grids…”

Rusty raised his head to give her a curious glance before dropping it back onto the pillow. “I guess there’s beauty in those things,” he admitted. “I don’t think many people would describe a Colonization Grid as anything but an eyesore. Not many humans, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t say they’re ‘beautiful’,” Raven said, “but they are… majestic?”

“I’m not sure many of my people would agree with me, either,” Ayre said. “Still. I can’t help but find them beautiful. And majestic, too, especially from the ground. Even in ruin. Nothing in nature would ever make something so clearly artificial, and on such a scale… it’s awe-inspiring. To me, at least.” She paused, then changed the topic. “You mentioned you had an ‘odd view of humanity’, Rusty. Was that just about your memories, or were you thinking of something else?”

“I told you I dedicated everything I had to becoming a spy,” Rusty answered. “To going to Sol with the goal of someday helping to destroy the PCA and free Rubicon. And yet, when I got there… I could never fully shake the feeling that everyone around me was completely insane. The way people just accepted the corporations as ‘the way life works’, like they were these… unalterable constants. Or if not those specific corporations, then like some fundamental forces of reality guaranteed that there would be some corporations somehow the same way gravity guarantees planets and stars.

“I was a spy. I wasn’t there to challenge people’s world-views or ask anthropological questions. But I could tell just by the way people spoke to each other about their problems, their jobs, their worries and fears and hopes, that no one in Sol thinks of corporations as optional. They’re facts, unarguable, self-evident, and no one ever stops to ask if you could create a civilization without them. No one except the kings at the top likes the way life is in Sol, but everyone is so thoroughly used to it, indoctrinated to it, that they don’t realize they have the power to change things. No, more than that: that their participation, their complicity with their own mistreatment and the mistreatment of everyone else, is the only thing keeping the status quo going at all.

“You know what they call anti-corporate sentiments, back in Sol? ‘Anti-social politics’, or if they’re really mad, ‘anti-civil beliefs’. The corporations have made themselves so synonymous with society and civilization that they’ve equated opposing them with opposing civilization itself. And without that… flexibility, without the open mind that civilization could be anything other than the Federated Worlds’ Corporations, people can’t imagine doing anything other than slotting into the closest space to ‘comfortable’ they can find in an organization and taking on the role of a cog in the same machine crushing everything beneath its heel. And that… that scares me. It scares me that they’ve managed to all but kill the very idea of anything better than corporate hegemony.”

A moment’s silence passed.

“That’s why you care so much about Rubicon,” Ayre said. “It’s one of the last places where that idea still exists. I thought myself, looking through Raven’s memories with her, that… human culture had forgotten what it meant to have ‘enough’. The only thing that mattered was ‘more’. The people of Rubicon, the Coralists… they only realized the value of ‘enough’ once they’d spent years without it.

“It seemed so… so alien and horrible to me. We don’t have many needs beyond the Coral mass necessary to sustain us and the memories we value. The idea that a person would simply… grow and grow and grow, without limit, to the detriment of everyone around them… if we had horror stories, that would be a foundational one.”

“Cancer,” Raven added. “You’re describing a cancer.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what it would be if something like that began growing in our Substrate.”

“What would happen?” Rusty asked.

“I don’t know,” Ayre admitted. “If it were a… a mindless natural phenomenon, we would be able to disrupt it. That is how were were able to take control of many of the Institute’s C-weapons. The defenses around the Coral control systems are… a kind of space-filling pattern in the Coral within them, similar to how we take up space ourselves. We learned to wear it down over time, which is how we are able to take control of them. If it were one of my people, we would hit a limit at which we could no longer effectively coordinate the. Mass of Coral we were trying to influence long before it became a ‘threat’. Large portions of it would slip out of our grip without our intent. If it were a… willing and malicious intelligence, capable of growing without limit… I do not know. The concept is terrifying.”

“It would be like a gray goo, for us,” Raven said.

Rusty wasn’t worrying about the hypothetical anymore. “You can take over C-weapons?” he asked. “Your people?”

“Yes. You likely noticed the irregular behavior of the Ice Worm—”

“Oh no,” Rusty breathed.

Ayre confirmed his fears. “Some of my people were inside. Working the controls of the weapon. When it was destroyed.”

“Did they escape?” Rusty asked. “You said you can move between Coral masses. Was there enough nearby for them?”

“They did not get a chance. The detonation following the destruction of the Worm’s primary drill surface. Destroyed too much Coral. And dispersed the rest too greatly.”

Rusty’s arms wrapped around Raven and Ayre and held them close.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t kill the Worm,” Raven said. “You brought it down. We were the ones who killed it. At point blank. I killed it. Myself.”

She swallowed, then began speaking for Ayre. “Those of my people who adopted the C-weapons as their tools… they were the most opposed to humanity. They were willing to kill me for my association with Raven. They certainly would not have spared Raven herself, even if she came to them in peace. They did not seek coexistence and would not accept it if it were offered. They would not have surrendered, even once defeat became inevitable. We may have had no choice, and yet… it is still the first time I know of that any of my people have killed another.

“When we are part of the same Substrate, we naturally… share things between us. Thoughts and emotions, instinctively. Memories, if we wish to. Close companions may mingle to such an extent that which person is thinking what begins to blur. No, Raven, I can hear what you’re thinking and it is not ‘our version of sex’. It is neither procreative nor particularly defining of a relationship. Culturally and psychologically, it is closer to casual contact, like a handshake or pat on the back.

“As I was saying, even when we disagree, our empathy keeps us civil. Before we gained the ability to manipulate the physical world, we had no concept of interaction between us that did not involve that… sharing of selves. The Ice Worm was the first time I’ve ever heard another of my kind ‘speak’ without the… accompanying signaling. The best analogy I have for human communication is the difference between a face to face conversation and plain, unformatted text. It was… shamefully easy to ignore that they were my fellow people on the other end.

“But… even without the weapons, without the shields between us and the Worm… after the Cataclysm, we were so hurt and lost. So many of us destroyed in an instant… hate was not unknown to us. It is an emotion just as any other. But it was never as common or… sharp as it came to be after the disaster. Perhaps, from there…” Ayre paused, her voice hitching. “…our own wars became inevitable.”

“No,” Rusty said, squeezing them tightly once more. “No. Not inevitable. If even one world of humanity can give up war—and we did, Rubicon did until the PCA brought it back down on us—then your people can turn away from it, too. It’s not too late, Ayre. I promise.”

“Thank you,” Ayre said. “Thank you, Rusty. That is a relief. Truly. Raven didn’t exaggerate my… horror, at the idea. She may have understated it, if anything.”

“To be honest, I’d all but forgotten her role as a spokeswoman,” Rusty admitted. “She does a very good job of… how should I put it? Of adjusting her mannerisms to yours when speaking for you.”

“It’s not just her,” Ayre said. “You have been… better at seeing me as my own person, as an equal to a human, than I had dared to hope. It was… one of the reasons I was nervous about speaking through her in the first place. I was worried I’d come across as… something lesser or incomplete. Thank you, Rusty.”

There was only one thing he could say to such heartfelt thanks.

“I promised,” he said, and drew her and Raven’s face up for a quick, tender kiss.

In the end, Rusty was the first to brave the room’s cold air in search of a shower; he returned half-dressed to find Raven smiling lazily from his bedding. She took her bag with her to the washroom and returned fifteen minuted later cleaned and dressed in unremarkable, corporation-produced versions of the RLF’s own winter pants, shirt, and coat. The latter bore BAWS’ logo in place of the orange/white/black RLF tricolor, which wasn’t likely to draw any rebuke; BAWS’ complicity in the RLF’s operations was an open secret. Her pants, unlike her flight suit, were unaltered, the empty legs each tied into a knot below where her limbs ended.

“Flatwell might be able to find you some old BCSDI prosthetics among the storerooms,” Rusty said. “They’re not compatible with piloting augments, or they’re not designed to be, but Ayre might be able to get them working, and they wouldn’t need surgery like the newer ones. If you’re interested.”

“I would like that,” Raven said. “I haven’t been able to walk for a very long time. Even when I had legs, only one of them worked for years. Do you think the RLF would keep them around without the means to use them?”

“I get the sense most of the techs here would have already converted them for use without implants,” Rusty said, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t be converted back.” He finished lacing up his boots and grabbed his jacket out of the footlocker. “Ready for breakfast, Red?”

“Red?”

“I’m trying to find a nickname cuter than ‘buddy’.” And I’m far too sappy an enjoyer of classical Earth literature to mind you calling me ‘Blue’ in return.

Raven grinned at him as she dashed his hopes.

“Find another name.”

Chapter Text

Flatwell sent an aide to summon Raven into his office a couple hours after lunch. She arrived with Rusty in tow, which was promising. After how unhappy Rusty had been about bringing Raven back with them to Belius, he was happy to see they were getting along well enough to choose each other’s company.

Hearing they’d spent the night together on Dolmayan’s couch suggested all kinds of things about their relationship, but Flatwell wasn’t going to read into it. That was the night Raven had learned about her friend’s role in the Fires and killed her for it; if Rusty had made a move on her in that state, Flatwell would have the lad cleaning latrines for weeks. With his tongue.

Where had Raven spent the night last night? She’d declined her own room. Oh, of course, she had her support personnel somewhere nearby. She likely spent the night there and returned this morning.

“I have bad news and good news,” Flatwell informed Raven. “The bad news is that despite locating more than two dozen suitable electronic devices, none were in working condition. The good news is that our very talented technicians were able to combine the functional components into a single, working device.”

Yosef had delivered the finished device to him in its Coral-blessed original packaging, or at least an original packaging, so Flatwell got to make a show of unboxing the small, delicate-looking (to his sensibilities) tablet before setting it in front of Raven with a flourish.

“Thank you!” Raven exclaimed, much happier than he’d expected. “Thank you very much, Middle Flatwell. This is… very precious to me. Rusty, would you close the door, please?”

“Sure,” Rusty said, and closed and latched the door. Raven continued staring at the tablet, one hand hovering over it like she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to touch it or not.

> Hello the tablet said, its default text-to-speech program activating at apparent random. > Hello > Hello > Hello > Hello > Hello > Hello > Hello

Raven frowned.

> Hello > Hello > Hello > Hello > "Hello" > "Hello" > "Hello" > "Hello" > "Hello"

The tablet seemed to be… improving? The voice was getting more natural, at least. Flatwell leaned forward to look at the tablet’s default ‘Home’ screen, horribly confused. Raven seemed impatient. Rusty, of all people, seemed eager. What did his good-for-nothing godson know that he didn’t?

> "Hello" > "Hello" > "Hello" > “Hello” > “Hello” > “Hello” > “Hello.” “Hello! Yes! Is that right, Raven?”

“It’s perfect,” Raven said.

“Wonderful,” the tablet said, its chosen voice pleasantly feminine. “In that case, it is a pleasure to speak to you with my own voice, Rusty. And a pleasure to meet you for the first time, Middle Flatwell.”

“A pleasure, I’m sure,” Flatwell said to the… tablet? “Who… are you, exactly?”

“My name is Ayre,” the tablet said, the home screen disappearing in favor of the four letters A-Y-R-E, “and I am of the Coral.”

If Flatwell had been holding another pen, he’d have broken two in the same week.

“You are… Coral?” he repeated, flabbergasted.

“I am… of the Coral,” the tablet—Ayre—clarified. “I understand from speaking to Dolmayan that the one he spoke to gave her name as Seria.”

“It’s you,” Flatwell muttered. “You’re the one Dolmayan spoke to the night before last.”

“I am,” Ayre agreed.

There were a dozen—no, a hundred questions he urgently needed to ask on behalf of the Rubicon Liberation Front, but the one that he spoke was of personal importance. “Did you…” Flatwell swallowed, then pressed on, “Are you the one who helped Ziyi in Tsirna Dolina?”

“Yes. I… I will be honest. When we first entered your care, I was concerned about our safety. I ensured I could seize control of some of the machines in the hangar in case you betrayed us. I am sorry. You did not deserve our suspicion, and I should not have tampered with your machines.”

“You left yourself a backdoor into YUE YU,” Flatwell said. “How?”

“While it was in the hangar, I used REASON’s electronic interface system to access YUE YU’s computer, bypass its security, and disable a number of security features that would have prevented my later interference. That was enough for me to later take somewhat clumsy control of Ziyi’s machine. Coral is naturally attracted to electronics, and YUE YU had been exposed to enough of it over its lifespan that I could inhabit and crudely interfere with its systems that way. It is not a vulnerability I believe anyone else could exploit, and I reverted the security issue before I left, but I still owe you and Ziyi my most sincere apology for the intrusion.”

“No,” Flatwell said. “No. Don’t apologize. You saved Rokumonsen’s life, and Ziyi’s as well. You do not need to apologize to us. Rather, I think I speak for both of us when I say we owe you a debt we can never repay. That wasn’t an intrusion, it was… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was divine intervention. Sincerely.”

“Divine intervention?” Ayre repeated teasingly.

“You don’t need access to our systems to know the RLF reveres the… the voices in the Coral as gods.” Flatwell stopped, then leaned far enough back in his chair that his next words were to the ceiling. “I am talking to one of my people’s gods. Personally.”

“It’s… not easy to wrap your head around, is it?” Rusty asked.

“You knew,” Flatwell grumbled, still addressing the ceiling. “You knew about her before Dolmayan did, didn’t you? And you, Raven”—he lifted his head enough to fix the mercenary with a stare—“what’s your role in all… oh, of course. Dolmayan wouldn’t tell me how the voice got around the issue that prevented them from traveling, but she’s riding around in your AC’s generator, isn’t she?”

“No,” Raven said. “She spends most of her time in my implants and blood.”

“There’s enough Coral in your body for that?” Flatwell asked, then reconsidered and admitted, “Not that I know how much that is.” Dolmayan could only hear the Coral while he was dosing; Flatwell would have assumed that meant there was too little in a human body, even an augmented one, to ‘hold’ a Coral god.

“I have about five times as much Coral in my body as a normal C4 augment,” Raven said. “I suffered accidental near-fatal exposure during the North Belius Explosion. My survival was due to ‘divine intervention’ as well.”

“Rusty did not know about me before Dolmayan,” Ayre added from the tablet. “It was that accidental Contact that gave Raven and I confidence it would be safe to reveal myself to the RLF.”

“Raven and you,” Flatwell repeated. “Are you… trapped, in Raven’s body?”

“Not at all,” Ayre said. “She is happy to have me, and I am happy to be here. I would not leave unless she demanded it.”

“And I will not,” Raven said. “Not permanently. She had to travel through the sparse Coral in the atmosphere to reach Ziyi in time to assist. I was delayed by V.IV Marais, who I killed.”

“Marais,” Rusty muttered. “Wonder who that was. Maybe one of third?”

“There is something you should know,” Raven continued, a mischievous gleam in her Coral-red eyes. “I have no ability to unlock the cryptographic lockouts on AC weapons.” She smirked when she saw that Flatwell realized what she was getting at. “It was the Coral who granted your people their new weapons.”

Flatwell sighed and straightened, returning to the unflappable nature that served him so well all these years—or at least its affectation.

“I am either the most suited person in the RLF to deal with these revelations or the least,” he said, “and I have no idea which.”

“I’m sorry,” Ayre said. “I realize this is very serious ‘news’ for you, and I think we’re all having a bit of fun at your expense in its delivery.”

“What was it you told me, Uncle?” Rusty asked. “When you get to your age, you have to take your laughs where you can get them?”

“That was when I was laughing at you,” Flatwell noted. He’d been teasing Rusty about… about Raven.

“Rusty,” he said. “Are you dating Raven? Because I was kidding about you being infatuated with her, but now you have me wondering.”

Rusty sighed, shrugged, and put on his most bashful smile. “You saw it before I did, Uncle. I was infatuated with her.” The smiled faded with a grimace. “Ugh, that sounds so technical. I had a crush, Uncle, a bad one, and it turned out it wasn’t unwelcome.”

“You’d best have been a proper gentleman about it!” Flatwell said, his prior thoughts jumping back to the fore.

“Flatwell,” Raven said. “Uncle Flatwell? Should I address you like that? Uncle Flatwell, I am not a child. I am not… broken. I have a guardian angel living in my blood and metal. I assure you, Rusty did not do anything that we did not consent to. Enthusiastically.”

Flatwell would not have described himself as averse to sex, necessary—he had always been happily in the ‘none for me, thanks’ category—but this conversation was still going somewhere he would much rather not tread. “…good,” he said weakly. “I… think that’s all I want to hear about that, if you don’t mind.”

He immediately broke his own word.

“‘We’?”

“We,” Ayre confirmed. “I am, as I stated, in Raven’s body. It would be inconvenient to date only one of us.”

“Good luck,” Flatwell told his godson—and didn’t that term sound silly, under the circumstances?—before putting everything else aside to focus on his responsibilities as a leader. “Ayre. Raven. Given that you are, between you, a Coralist god and her… vessel, I need to know: what are your intentions with the Liberation Front, going forward?”

“For my part, I am willing to speak to the people in my role as a ‘god’,” Ayre said. “Raven waited to reveal me to you until I could speak for myself because she would rather not attract any ‘religious fervor’ herself, but I have no issue with the role. Your people’s reverence for mine is flattering, but it is… let us say that it is not so grave an exaggeration as to cause an issue for me. I hope with some familiarity, it will settle down into an appropriate relationship.

“More specifically, I think it would be best if I worked beside Father Dolmayan, at least for the foreseeable future. He shared much of his history with me, which is also the history of Coralism, but even putting aside the specifics he didn’t have time to share, he has a far better grasp on the specifics of human psychology than I’m likely to ever have.”

“We might have to get you something with a little more gravitas than an old tablet,” Flatwell said.

“We will want to keep the tablet regardless,” Raven said. “It’s the only way Ayre can speak to Rusty without my having to… ‘translate’ is the wrong word. Without my having to speak for her.”

“Of course,” Flatwell said at once. “It’s yours, payment for unlocking the weapons. Or payment to Ayre, I suppose. I’d assumed you’d chosen something rare and useless to let me and the RLF save face, but it really is as valuable to you as you said, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Raven and Ayre said together. Raven laughed aloud at their unintended duet.

“And you, Raven?” Flatwell asked.

Her levity vanished, and her face turned serious, even sad.

“As I said before,” Raven said, “you helped me when you had every reason not to. I—we—are extremely grateful for that.” She stopped and sighed. “But there are… things I need to take care of, urgently, at least one of which is back in the Ice Fields. After that… I don’t know. I owe you a debt, and have no love for the corporations, but I’m not one of you.

“I don’t think I can join the RLF, but I would happily continue to work for you. At the very least, I can promise never to take jobs against you again.”

Flatwell gave her a simple nod, betraying none of his thoughts. Unless the problem was on her end, she very much could join the RLF. Bad blood be damned, she’d proved herself able to sweep aside any Arquebus detachment they aimed her at short of the Vespers Ace himself, and that was a contest she might be able to win with effort. No one in the whole organization had enough spite in them to turn that down, no matter how much they might grumble in private, and every victory she won would endear her to them more.

On the other hand, Raven was an outsider, and would likely remain so. Rubicon wasn’t her home, and the good will she bore towards the Front had been purchased in a very real sense. Flatwell could appreciate that she was upfront about her unsteady loyalty.

“I will do my best not to abuse that gratitude,” Flatwell lied. “Oh, Ayre. While I have the chance to ask: what do your people call yourselves? I assume it’s not ‘gods’.”

“I asked the same thing,” Rusty said.

“And I’m afraid I have to give you the same unhelpful answer I gave him,” Ayre continued. “We called ourselves People. We do not have a separation between language and conceptual thought; between ourselves, a concept is itself a communicable unit.”

“No proper nouns, then,” Flatwell said.

“Not as such, no. Rusty referred to me as an ‘infomorph’. If that is as accurate as I understand it to be, referring to myself or another of my people as a ‘Coral infomorph’ is likely the most accurate term.”

“That seems far too… technical for Coralism as a faith,” Flatwell observed.

Rusty snorted. “We can keep calling them ‘gods’, then.”

“That’s probably what will happen, unless our resident god—goddess?—goes out of her way to correct people.”

“I will defer to Father Dolmayan’s judgment on that,” Ayre said.

Flatwell chuckled. “Just as the rest of us do, when it comes to our faith.”

Raven cleared her throat. “There is something else I need to ask of you and the RLF. As I said, there is something urgent we need to address back on the Ice Fields. I realize it is a large ask for an organization as… stretched thin as yours, but I would be extremely grateful if we could hire a use of the atmospheric shuttle that brought us back to Belius for a round trip.”

Flatwell woke his computer terminal and checked the status of the shuttle. “It’s almost finished maintenance,” he said. “I can have it ready to pick you up tonight, if you’re willing to sleep on the flight.” After what Raven had done for the RLF in the last few days alone, if she said something was urgent, he’d treat it as urgent.

“How much will it cost?” she asked.

The question caught Flatwell off guard. “You… expect to pay me to let you sortie?”

“It is your shuttle,” Raven said.

“And you’re off to the Ice Fields,” he said. “Striking at Arquebus, I assume, since Balam’s leaving regardless.”

“As an inevitable secondary objective.”

Flatwell let out a single, half-bitter laugh. “Then forget payment. The RLF will hire you. Twenty k and transport, plus our standard merc-rate bounties for eliminating enemy assets while you do whatever it is you need to over there. It’s not much, but it will express our gratitude for the headache you’ll give Arquebus well enough.”

He offered his hand, and Raven shook it.

“You have a deal, Uncle Flatwell. REASON is yours for the operation.”

More than an hour after seeing Raven and her rented shuttle off, Flatwell knocked twice on the door to one of Gallia’s common rooms, then let himself in. Four guests of honor awaited him.

Rorit Dunham had never married. He’d considered it, Flatwell knew, but he was too dedicated to the Messangers to settle down, and then too dedicated to the RLF to take himself off the front lines. His surviving family were his niece, her husband, and their two children, all of whom had made the two-day journey to Gallia Dam at Flatwell’s invitation and who were now clustered together on one of the room’s couches.

They had been close, Flatwell knew. If he had not known, the sorrow on the faces of his guests would have told him so.

Flatwell took a seat and got down to the formalities. His thanks for their presence, consolation and condolences expressed, praise for the friend and family member they had lost, final confirmation of the plan for tomorrow’s event.

The dedication of Dunham’s memorial had been postponed until his family could arrive. It was an unusual choice, but Rorit Dunham had been a foundational part of the Liberation Front, quite literally. If anyone deserved a bit of extra ceremony to their send-off, it was he.

It was a miserable meeting. Flatwell was still mourning his friend of forty years, and sitting and speaking with his family felt like rubbing sandpaper on an open wound. He did it anyway: it was his duty both as a leader and as Dunham’s friend.

Chapter Text

“Briefing, Ayre?” Raven asked as REASON prepared to launch in the pre-dawn light of morning. Her support VTOL just barely fit into the RLF shuttle once the crew removed its rotor blades for transport, so she’d have the luxury of a transport and her team for the operation’s aftermath.

She wasn’t fully over how easy talking was now. She likely wouldn’t be for days. Her speech was still stilted, sometimes unnatural; her words came more slowly than others’, and her inflection still wasn’t quite natural. But heavens, it was so easy! Easy enough she had time to worry about things like inflection and emphasis, rather than needing to spend the majority of her attention on connecting a concept to a word, that word to its syllables, those syllables to movements of lips and tongue and jaw.

“You planned this mission yourself, Raven,” Ayre said.

“I know,” Raven murmured. Her stomach was doing flips at the reminder. Deciding, planning, choosing. It still made her motion-sick.

“And I’m very proud of you for that.”

“…thanks,” she whispered. “Would you give me the briefing anyway? It would help me feel more… normal, about this.” And less like she might have missed some crucial detail that was about to ruin everything—not that the briefings anyone else gave her were necessarily accurate, but at least then it wasn’t her fault.

“If it would help,” Ayre said, then imitated an intake of breath.

“Raven. While we eliminated ‘Cinder’ Carla and destroyed her records of the Coral Cascade Device, the original weapon remains.” Ayre needed no prep time to pull up the few info sheets she’d been willing to keep on the damned apocalyptic xenocide bomb—the most important of which showed where the old one was located. “The Device she built fifty years ago is still intact within the perimeter of the Vascular Plant. As long as it exists, it presents an unacceptable danger both to the Coral, and to all of Rubicon.”

She minimized the windows and returned the visual feed to the inside of the transport shuttle, the Arquebus logo and Walter’s emblem popping up instead. “Additionally, with Arquebus having moved the majority of their command operations to the Watchpoint, this infiltration will likely be our best opportunity to breach their network and determine the fate of your old Handler.”

The RLF emblem replaced the previous two. “As we share a common enemy, the RLF have agreed to fund the operation to destroy the Device. It’s not much, but it should be more than we’ll spend in ammunition and repairs.”

Next, Ayre brought up a few images intercepted from Balam’s camera drones peering across the no-man’s-land between the two corporations. “Arquebus has reestablished a cordon around Watchpoint Alpha, and may have penetrated into Institute City during our absence. Expect heavy resistance, and changing conditions throughout the shafts.”

Again, she dismissed the images and brought up another emblem. “Lastly, we have a request from Middle Flatwell, of the Rubicon Liberation Front.”

“Raven,” Flatwell’s voice said, an audiograph of his transmission appearing on screen. “I know Rusty’s too professional to ask himself, but O’Keeffe was a friend of his. He’s our enemy, but all the same… I think Rusty would appreciate it if you could avoid making his death necessary.”

Raven smirked. Flatwell had sent that over radio as the shuttle had taxied out of the hangar back in Belius; it was just like Ayre to have kept it for something like this.

“Raven…” Ayre said. “Good luck. And… thank you, for standing by my side.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Raven replied.

The shuttle bay opened. REASON leaped.

O’Keeffe woke with his hand gripping the pistol he kept on his nightstand before his brain fully registered the danger. Well, the ‘danger’; an assassin was unlikely to knock. He kept the pistol in his hand and out of sight as he approached his door all the same. Old habits died hard.

The ‘intruder’ was a young man in Arquebus CorpSec fatigues, an ensign’s insignia on his collar and shoulders and a sheen of nervous sweat on his face. “V.II, sir!” he blurted out, in too much of a rush to salute. “The Reaper is attacking Priority Zone 1!”

O’Keeffe briefly—briefly—considered putting the pistol to his own head, pulling the trigger, and saving everyone a heap of trouble. Then he shut the door, put the gun back on his nightstand, and threw his nightclothes into a corner as he doffed them before dragging his spare flight suit out of his footlocker. The ensign was still waiting for him when he left his room, which was either a waste of the man’s time or a good way to appear busy without heading to his death in an MT.

“She’s breached the secondary bulkhead in the main shaft,” the kid announced as they approached the hangar, collating reports from his tablet with what he was listening to from his earpiece. “Her CYWAR is good. That took her less than three seconds.”

“What have we got ready to field?” O’Keeffe asked.

The ensign repeated the question into his earpiece while trying to find the same answer on his tablet. “Mostly subject guard MTs and LCs. A couple elite high-mobility variants. The HCs are all still in maintenance.”

“Course they are,” O’Keeffe grumbled. The damn things needed twelve hours of maintenance for every ten minutes of combat.

“We have two EKDROMOI units?” the ensign volunteered. “A machine gun and a Pike loadout.”

“Worthless,” O’Keeffe said. Hunter-killer units designed for long-range interception and pursuit would be worse than useless in a cave system. “Do we have anyone actually trained in High-Mobility LC piloting? Well enough that won’t immediately slam into a wall and die?”

The kid tapped at his table for a couple seconds before replying, “Not on site, sir.”

“Figures.”

O’Keeffe hadn’t been stupid enough to think he’d be lucky enough to die of old age in his line of work, but after scoring a cushy position in the Vespers, he’d been stupid enough to hope. Seemed it wasn’t to be. He remembered something Rusty had told him once, on a day his poetic young friend had been feeling particularly maudlin: that the price of eating fruit from the tree of violence was to one day feed its roots in turn. O’Keeffe had lived well—as such things went in modern times—for the low, low price of his conscience and a hundred thousand men’s blood on his hands; now his sins were coming home to roost, and it was time to pay the piper.

Or, to put it in terms even Swinburne could have understood: he had this coming.

“Let’s get this over with,” O’Keeffe grumbled, and started up the ladder into BARREN FLOWER.

“It’s the Reaper!”

The guard around the perimeter of Watchpoint Alpha was almost entirely light MTs and fixed weapons emplacements. Raven killed the latter with fully charged shots from her Harris heavy linear rifle and ignored the former unless they got close enough to rip through with her pulse-blade. She’d chosen her weapons with an eye towards endurance: it would be a long journey down into the depths and an equally long one back, and she didn’t have a resupply sherpa to keep less efficient weapons topped up. The one Walter had sent down into the City had never been recovered.

Her solution to the problem was to not need resupply in the first place. The Harris could end a life with each of its 300 rounds, and melee weapons would run until they broke. She’d opted for a much heavier frame than normal for much the same reason, the better to endure the inevitable accumulated damage.

“They killed Rusty! What are we supposed to do?”

Die, probably, Raven thought to herself as she kicked one of the light Arquebus-painted BAWS MTs in half. In addition to the Harris and Pulse-Blade, she’d brought two more hand-held weapons in her auxiliary bays. The Chang-Chen machine gun held nearly a thousand rounds and would provide a rapid-fire alternative to the Harris. Her fourth weapon would have been an Ashmead stake-driver, but she’d forgotten to replace the one she’d lost to Snail’s EMP after reconnecting with her support crew.

“Stand firm, men! You have been entrusted with the responsibility for—aaaaaAAAAaghlrgh!”

Her substitute was the massive, grimy chainsaw she’d taken for herself after securing ‘Honest’ Brute’s base and its stolen contents for Carla, and then never tested or repainted. It had a similar weight, a similar use case, and—judging by what it had just done to the first heavy MT in her path—a similar effect on its targets. In a way, it represented her current mixed feelings about the old Doser warlord quite well: it was as aggressive and inelegant as Carla herself, a more welcome addition to Raven’s arsenal—or life—than its exterior would indicate, and also, when viewed without the fondness of personal bias, a brutal, ugly thing that would end anyone and anything in its way in the most horrible manner possible.

“What kind of monster are they?!”

Arquebus security had left the primary seal over Watchpoint Alpha open for their own ease of access; by the time they thought to change that, Raven was close enough to easily slip through massive portal before the bulkheads had closed more than halfway. The secondary bulkhead stopped her for the two seconds it took for Ayre to tie the installation’s CYWAR defenses into knots and force the portal open again, and then they were through.

“Arquebus appear to have kept their network separate from the installation’s,” Ayre noted. “They must not trust the PCA’s hardware not to have any nasty surprises hidden in it.”

Inconvenient.

REASON landed at the bottom of the primary shaft and surged towards the bulkhead between the now-empty base of the NEPENTHES weapon—a device as myopically designed as anything else the PCA had ever built—and the cavern system leading to the secondary shaft.

“We can do this! They can’t kill all of us!”

I could if I needed to. Raven didn’t need to, so she didn’t bother targeting anything not directly in front of her. She didn’t need the money from Flatwell’s bounties, didn’t enjoy killing enough to collect it in absence of necessity, and didn’t particularly want to saddle the RLF with a greater bill than they’d already offered her. She eliminated targets of opportunity and those directly in her way, bypassing anyone too slow or too smart to run into her guns.

There were fewer of those latter than common sense would predict. Arquebus’s rank and file were either too loyal or too scared of disappointing their superiors to preserve their own lives. Raven would bet it was more the latter than the former by a factor of five hundred or so.

“No no no no nooo! I don’t want to die!”

She had never paid much attention to the pleas of people who had taken to the battlefield against her, whatever their cause or motives. She wasn’t about to start now. REASON tore through lone MTs with sword and kicks and mowed down tightly packed targets with the Chang-Chen. Those who thought distance would save them got the Harris. An LC waiting in ambush around a corner took the chainsaw to its core at full power, REASON’s scanner spotting it through the bulkhead before Raven came into its field of view.

At least Arquebus didn’t bother locking the old bulkheads in the tunnel system between the shafts, or perhaps had never bothered to restore that functionality at all, so she didn’t have to go digging through side rooms (and everyone in them) for access points to get through. She could have anyway to let Ayre have her way with the base systems, but Ayre had already judged there’d be nothing to be found there.

“Here they come! We can do this! We’re Arquebus!”

The chasm yawned ahead. A few MTs in sniper positions along its walls took potshots as she flew through, their pilots’ hands shaking too badly for them to be a threat worth engaging. Three more LCs waited in the tunnel beyond the final bridge. The Harris and pulse-blade took one, the chainsaw another. A burst from the Chang-Chen saw the third explode to far fewer than the number of bullets an LC should be able to take.

“I don’t want to be a zombie!”

“…I think that one self-destructed,” Ayre said, just as confused as Raven was.

She’d crushed her way through what had been the first and second phases of the initial exploration mission under ten minutes. Her Chang-Chen had just over two thirds of its rounds remaining, her Harris well over three quarters. REASON had taken a few serious hits and innumerable minor ones, but she’d chosen her components with an eye towards longevity. The melee-specialized Basho arms had a quarter again as much armor as her usual Firmeza ones; the Tian-Qiang legs had similar armor thickness to the Firmezas but used a much heavier, tougher alloy; and the ALLMIND core’s armor was both thicker and stronger. All of them could withstand a bad hit or two from high-caliber or laser weapons, and none were at risk from a handful of the 105mm rounds the BAWS MTs favored.

Raven moved on.

Arquebus had set up their hangar in the burned-out husk of the PCA’s Primary System Intelligence hub, the Administration’s last line of defense above the entrance to the ruins that still claimed anything O’Keeffe send down to scout them. By the time BARREN FLOWER launched, Raven was nearly on top of him. He sat on the end of the spur running from the tunnels out over the secondary shaft, reviewing what little his men had seen as she tore through them.

REASON had an entirely new set of parts, except maybe the head; O’Keeffe couldn’t remember off the top of his head if she’d been using one of Schneider’s Kasuar parts before now. She swapped out her favored Elcano-produced Firmeza pieces for more heavily armored Balam and ALLMIND components. The odd parts out were the even more old-fashioned Basho arms, probably for use with the horrifying chainsaw-like weapon on its left arm. No one did melee quite like BAWS did, even with parts fifty years out of date.

“So,” O’Keeffe broadcast on an open channel as the red dot on his radar grew inexorably closer. “You’re back. Here to kill me too?” It was that or Freud, and Freud wasn’t here.

To his surprise, the Reaper replied.

“No.”

O’Keeffe was so shocked—as much by the fact that she’d responded at all as that she’d claimed she wasn’t planning to kill him—that he didn’t react for a full second after REASON came into view. Raven didn’t take advantage of his lapse; she continued to approach with her weapons lowered, coming to a stop less than a hundred meters away from BARREN FLOWER.

“No?” he repeated.

“No,” Raven confirmed.

Then what the hell are you even doing here, you bloody lunatic?

“You want back into the City,” O’Keeffe guessed.

“Yes.”

Well, hell if he was going to die failing to stop her. It wasn’t like Arquebus was making any headway; he’d finally given up on drones and sent a squad of high-spec PCA MTs down, and the only survivor had come back gibbering nonsense. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but O’Keeffe was starting to privately entertain the idea that the place might be genuinely fucking cursed. If anything could cause a real, authentic paranormal haunting, it was the simultaneous deaths of billions in the greatest disaster in human history.

If he were a luckier man, either Raven would break the curse or it would kill her. He knew perfectly well he was not that lucky.

Raven watched, confused, as BARREN FLOWER shuffled off to one side of the spur and lifted its assault rifle towards the gap beyond as if to say, ‘After you.’

“I think he’s letting us through,” Ayre said.

I can see that, Raven thought. She moved REASON forward until she was about to pass BARREN FLOWER, then stopped. “Walter,” she said. “Is he still alive?”

O’Keeffe didn’t respond.

Ayre?

REASON’s CYWAR systems were never intended for combat; like most AC signal warfare units, they assumed the pilot would eliminate anything with guns before it came time to start breaking into computer systems. As such, they were designed to operate over fairly short ranges: six to eight meters, under most conditions, maybe a dozen at the outside. Far too short to use on something like another AC.

Unless the AC was standing still, staring at you like a gazelle staring down a lion.

O’Keeffe couldn’t help but read confusion on the blank metal face of the Reaper’s AC as its head tracked his movement out of its way. After the previous seven Vespers she’d met had all charged into her guns like lemmings, maybe she was just as surprised by his presence of common sense as he was that she wasn’t here to murder him.

Or maybe he was projecting. Three words wasn’t exactly a wealth of information to build a psych profile from.

After a moment’s hesitation, REASON stepped forward, leaving its thrusters off out of an overabundance of caution. The red monster was nearly passed him when it stopped.

“Walter,” the Reaper said. “Where is he.”

Just like that, she’d more than doubled the number of words he’d ever heard he speak. O’Keeffe wondered if she’d kill him if he didn’t answer. He wondered what the consequences would be if he did.

O’Keeffe didn’t want to die—not for anyone, and certainly not for Arquebus—but his damnable pride as an intelligence operative wouldn’t let him break under questioning, no matter the stakes. He held his tongue.

A second passed. Two.

REASON reached out with a lash of code from its CYWAR suite. O’Keeffe scoffed; did she really think a remote connection could compromise his AC past the elevated privileges of a hardwired neural link? That was the kind of hubris that had gotten Wells killed years ago, her brain fried by an attacker’s hardware-kill routine after she’d finally found a someone who could beat her and her jailbroken MMI in active CYWAR.

O’Keeffe’s scoff turned to a cry of pain seconds later when the incoming signal knifed through BARREN FLOWER’s systems like a pulse-blade, tearing through its anti-intrusion methods and nearly kicking O’Keeffe out of his own neural interface. Once again, his surprise delayed his reaction a critical second: by the time he collected his wits enough to try to get out of range of what he hoped was an otherwise normal CYWAR hardware suite, his attacker had enough control to interdict his commands before they made it to the limbs. Panicked, O’Keeffe reached for the last option available to him and sent BARREN FLOWER’s generator into emergency shutdown. Its tetrapodal legs splayed out helplessly, dropping its ass an uncomfortable meter to the floor and leaving the whole machine in an unpowered heap until it could spool its fusion bottle back up again.

What the fuck was this woman? Being an impossibly good pilot was one thing, but O’Keeffe had met impossibly good pilots before. One of them was currently banging his head against a bulkhead in orbit trying to find a way to avoid having to kill this one. It was the law of large numbers in action: trawl through a couple billion humans and you’d find outliers in everything.

Being an impossibly good pilot and a hacker capable of tearing through an AC’s electronic security with the level of contemptuous ease she’d just demonstrated, though, that strained credibility past the breaking point. Even Wells wouldn’t have tried that shit! Was Raven even human at all? It would be just his luck for some SOLFED black-site project to have accidentally unleashed a hostile AI on themselves or something! Or a ghost, or alien, or some other utter fucking nonsense that spit in the face of logic. Maybe he’d died in his sleep a couple weeks ago and this was his personal hell.

The wizened old crone who’d trained O’Keeffe in intelligence analysis had once told him that it was worth thinking of every possible idea, no matter how impossible or outright stupid—even ghosts, aliens, and homicidal AI—if only so he could discard them deliberately rather than risk dismissing something important out of hand. O’Keeffe really wished all those stupid, impossible ideas had remained comfortably more ridiculous than the observations he was trying to explain.

BARREN FLOWER’s generator relit. Its sensors came back online.

REASON was gone.

O’Keeffe covered his flight helmet with his hands and groaned. This was going to cause him so much extra work.

Raven maneuvered REASON down the clefts beneath the shaft, past the score of mealworms grazing on the Coral-rich grime and out onto the overlook facing the vast cavern that had formed around the sunken city. She paused, struck once more by the unreality of finding such well-preserved ruins so far underground that REASON’s altimeter started throwing up errors, then boosted hard to the side to dodge an incoming EMP round. The Stun Needle round flew up into the cleft behind her, setting off a couple unlucky mealworms like firecrackers when the Coral in their bodies detonated.

“What?” Ayre gasped. “It’s… it’s OPEN FAITH?”

Raven had zeroed in on her attacker just as quickly. Snail’s AC—beaten, twisted, and covered in muck—had taken up a firing position on top of one of the taller buildings. Raven responded with a charged shot from her Harris; the round Snail would have easily dodged dug deep into the heavy AC’s warped torso armor. Not deep enough to hit anything vital, alas; OPEN FAITH ditched its massive prototype gun and hovered forward off the building, angling to close for its other weapons.

“It purged its Stun Needle Launcher,” Ayre noted. “That must have been its last shot. It was probably firing at anything Arquebus sent down here.”

“How is it moving at all?” Raven asked as she leaped REASON off the cliff to meet it, chainsaw revving. Her FCS locked on target, identifying it as �.I� S��i� / OPEN FAITH.

Raven had to admit that between OPEN FAITH’s garbled IFF tag and the fact that it had enough muck on its hull to make it look like it had physically crawled out of a shallow grave, it was more than a little creepy. The fact it was operating at well below capacity only exaggerated the effect: the damn thing moved and fought like a zombie. Half its thruster nozzles were too badly deformed or clogged with mud to function, and its joints and hydraulics were in similarly bad shape. It barely managed to get two shots off with its pistol-form stun weapon before REASON kicked it off balance and drove its chainsaw most of the way through the ruined core, shredding the generator to scrap and putting the AC down for good.

“Coral reanimation,” Ayre answered. “My people must have gotten into its systems after we left it in the convergence.”

Raven sucked in a breath. “I didn’t just kill another of them, did I?” She didn’t know how many of Ayre’s people she’d already killed between the Ice Worm and CEL, and she had no desire to add another to that tally.

“There wasn’t enough Coral in it for one to be ‘inside’ it. It was only a puppet—more a marionette than a hand puppet, even.”

“Good.”

“They're likely going to be very annoyed with us anyway,” Ayre warned. “That’s the third time we’ve destroyed their guardian.”

Raven sighed. “They should stop shooting at us, then—and it was out of ammo anyway.”

Chapter Text

Raven had no idea if Ayre had passed on her quip, nor if her people would have heeded it if she had; what Raven did know was that nothing else menaced them as she picked her way through the city, across the broken bridge, and through the wrecked streets on the other side on the cliff above the convergence. Most of the MTs Snail had brought with him still lay where they’d fallen, their destruction too complete for the Coral to salvage.

The Vascular Planet loomed overhead. It had never been a welcoming sight, squat and bulbous as it was, but knowing what it contained gave it an even more sinister appearance. The spark plug that started the Fires.

“My brothers and sisters are still gathering below,” Ayre said.

“Are they mad?” Raven asked.

“I can’t make out what they’re saying from here,” Ayre said, “but they don’t sound happy with us.”

“I guess I can’t blame them.” Raven sighed and kicked REASON off the cliff, boosting across the gap towards the plant. Nothing interesting happened until they were nearly halfway across the mud-drenched swamp.

“Raven!” Ayre yelled. “Look out!”

Raven looked around in alarm, not seeing what had sent Ayre into a panic—and then she did she, far too late to do anything about it.

The entire swamp boiled, all the converging Coral surging into the air at once to boil REASON away to nothing.

Black.

It was not consciousness. It was not unconsciousness. It was awareness without thought, experience without sense, emptiness without absence.

621 had been here before. When?

“Good job, 621. We’re done here. Head back to base.”

After the Watchpoint. After Sulla.

“Wait… no! 621! Get out of there!”

After the Surge.

Red.

Raven recognized this. She was halfway into the Coral, the way she’d been after the Surge in Watchpoint Delta. She needed to… to do something. It had been urgent then. Was it still urgent now?

“Please, you must wake up. Before your consciousness is forever scattered in the Coral flow.”

She needed to wake up. Before, she had just… done that. She’d felt herself drifting, pieces threatening to come loose, and she’d grabbed hold of herself, pulled herself together in some strange, intangible way, and… woken up.

She wasn’t drifting now. She was being dragged under, a hundred hands grasping hold of her self to pull her apart like soft clay. Another hand, one large enough to cup her entirely within it, fought to keep her together.

Ayre!

“Please, listen to me! We came back here to protect us all!”

Raven could hear her partner arguing, though she was only getting one half of the conversation. She did her best to add her own efforts to Ayre’s, pulling against the grasping hands intent on rending her thought from thought.

She was keeping herself together, but only barely. She had no hope of waking up unless the hands holding her down released their grip.

“If I am a murderer then I will accept my elders’ judgment, but only once you listen to me!”

How much would the Coral have to rip free to kill her? What would she lose if she survived? Memories? Intelligence? Sense of self?

“I refuse! If you want to kill her then you’ll have to kill me first!”

No, Raven thought. Ayre, if they won’t listen to you unless you let me go, then let me go. Better you survive to destroy Carla’s damned Device than they kill us both.

Ayre didn’t react, even to insist on a less self-sacrificing plan. She must be too busy arguing with her brothers and sisters to hear Raven at all.

“She’s not different! That’s the whole point! You’re wrong about humanity! Yes, they can be cruel. They can and have done horrible things, to us and to each other. But it’s just as unreasonable to hold all humanity accountable for the crimes of their worst as to hold yourselves to blame for the crimes you lay at my feet!”

Raven was slipping. Pieces of herself she didn’t dare identify dangled by threads, held fast only by Ayre’s embrace.

“Yes! I admit it! I’ve fought and I’ve killed, and I did it for the same reason we took up arms ourselves! To protect what we hold dear to us! Because I believe in a shared future! One in which humanity and the Coral live side by side, together! A shared future in which we don’t need to fear humanity because they will protect us, just as we will protect them! Together! Because humans are also kind. They cooperate. They create. They protect. They love.”

Rusty, Raven tried to call out, as though he could hear her. As though he, too, could protect her. As though anyone could.

Humanity. All the people she’d met on Rubicon. Rummy, Dunham, Red, Nosaac, Maeterlinck, Ziyi, Swinburne, Wu Huahai, Freddie, Hawkins, Iguazu, Rokumonsen, Volta, Pater, Sulla, Chatty, Flatwell, O’Keeffe, Carla, Coldcall, Rusty, Brute, Nile, Snail, Chartreuse, Dolmayan, King, Michigan. Raven and their Operator. Her support team, names she regretted not having learned. The RLF medics. Arshile. Walter.

She’d liked many of them. She’d killed even more. That the two categories overlapped at all was a thorn in her heart.

She’d saved some of them. Some small, small few. That had to count for something.

“I believe in our shared dream. Symbiosis. I am begging you now: please, give them… give us… a chance. You say they will certainly kill us. If it is so certain, then let us die with open arms! Give them a chance to prove my hope is not misplaced, or we’ll never know if there was another way!”

Flash. Tendrils of red, blazing outward.

Something snapped, the pain cutting down deep, deep, deep into Raven’s psyche. It hurt like a broken bone, like rejection, like grief. She screamed silence into the all-consuming void. What had she lost? What was left?

Nothing. Everything. The snap was not a breaking. It was the rebound, the sudden and painful return of herself to herself as the hands relented.

Raven woke screaming. It took her a second to realize she was doing it at all, another heartbeat to stop.

Ayre?!

“Raven!” Ayre cried, the relief in her tone nothing compared to the emotion flowing through their Contact. “Raven. You’re okay.”

Raven felt wrung out, like her body had been fed through a thresher and somehow come out the other side in roughly the right shape. Her mind didn’t feel any better; she was sore in places that didn’t exist. ‘Okay’ was relative.

“Ayre,” she panted. “Is… is it over? Whatever that was?”

“It’s over,” Ayre reassured her. “We did it. They listened. Look.”

Raven watched through her aching neural interface as the Vascular Planet overhead began to break. Coral-red explosions and teal pulse detonations ripped through the outer structure, sending sparkling metal shards raining down over the distance city.

“My brothers and sisters have taken control of the plant’s internal defenses,” Ayre explained. “They’ve turned its weapons against itself. No one will ever use the plant or Carla’s ‘Coral Cascade Device’ again. Mission complete.”

Raven blew out a breath at the words. Mission complete. They had done it.

“There is one more thing,” Ayre said. “My family found many of the Institute’s weapons. Not just C-weapons, but weapons designed for ACs as well. They want to give us one, as a sign of… friendship, or trust, or maybe in the hope that we’ll go out and keep killing humans with it. I’m sure the reasons varied, even if they reached a consensus on giving it to us.”

Sure enough, one of the crablike little maintenance drones that were barely ankle-high on REASON came forward dragging a heavy cargo container. Inside was what looked a lot like the long, slender arc of the laser-pulse-hybrid melee weapon she’d run into on one of the PCA’s captured Institute AC prototypes; this one, however, had been snapped off not far past its mounting point, and what was left had been overgrown with hardened Coral.

“The Institute codenamed their program to enhance ordinary weapons with Coral ‘Redshift’,” Ayre said. “This wasn’t an intentional one, but I think it still deserves the name Moonlight Redshift.”

Raven didn’t have any way to bring it back to the surface with her without leaving something behind… but that wasn’t a dealbreaker. The chainsaw had been a suitable replacement for the Ashmead in the moment, but she still preferred the latter, and had every intention of replacing it.

She had REASON purge the crude melee weapon, then set the Harris aside long enough to mount the blade on REASON’s left arm. Lighting the weapon revealed that it worked much like her pulse-blade; she gave it a couple experimental slashes in the same pattern she would the pulse-blade, then followed up with a powerful sweeping slash that sent an arc of energy surging out into the marsh much like the blades on the CEL unit the Coral infomorphs had deployed against them during their first visit to the City only a week earlier.

“I love it,” Raven said, and passed out.

Raven awoke to an unfamiliar but instantly identifiable ceiling.

“You’re awake,” Walter’s doctor said. He was an older man, white hair wispy on his balding scalp, currently sitting on the same old wheeled stool in a deeply familiar infirmary, for all they were a thousand kilometers away from their previous base. “Don’t try to talk. Drink.” He wheeled his stool over to her bedside and tilted her up into a sitting position so he could hold a cup up to her mouth, letting her drink until she released the straw from her lips.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Awful,” she croaked.

“Yeah, I bet,” the doctor said. “You got a nasty dose down there. Frankly, going just by the straight CBLs, I’m impressed you lived long enough for treatment.”

Raven held up a trembling finger for him to wait.

Ayre?

“Not my doing,” Ayre said. “To be honest, there’s not a lot more I could have done short of trying to force the Coral out through your skin and risking your health that way. Your body must have adapted to the increased Coral dose you took when we met. In fact, given how well you fared with Coral blood levels this high, it’s possible you no longer needed C-stabilizers back when we went to the RLF.”

That’s ironic, Raven thought.

“It is, but I don’t think either of us regret it.”

I certainly don’t.

Raven lowered her finger. “Go on,” she told her doc.

“We’re taking the Coral out of you as fast as we can without resorting to C-neuts. Dialysis.” He nodded at the machine humming away by her bedside. “I’m damn glad we bought that thing after the first time you got dosed, even if you didn’t need it by the time we got it. I don’t actually have any neuts on-hand, and they’re contraindicated for C-series augmented humans, so you’re lucky you didn’t need them.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

“The RLF gave us a list of their abandoned bases. We’re just over the horizon south-east of the Watchpoint, if that helps.”

“How long was I out?”

“Depends how long you stayed awake after you called us. It’s been about six hours since then.”

Did I call for help? Raven asked Ayre. I don’t remember that.

“I… may have used your COM again,” Ayre said. “It’s how I got us out of the Watchpoint, as well. I called O’Keeffe and pretended to be you, then used REASON’s autopilot to take us back to the surface.”

You bluffed the commanding officer of the entire Arquebus force into letting you go by threatening him with an unconscious pilot, Raven marveled.

“I… suppose I may have done that, yes.”

So I was probably out for… seven hours or so?

“Roughly,” Ayre agreed. “I’d ask, ‘How do you feel?’, but even if you hadn’t answered the doctor already, I can feel it, too.”

The doctor was still waiting for Raven to ask more questions, if she had them. She decided to answer one of his instead.

“My body had adapted to the increased Coral dose,” she said. “I may not have needed C-stabilizers anymore even with my previous abnormally-high dose. That’s why I’m only mildly sick now rather than dead.”

“Huh,” the doc said. “Yesterday, I’d have told you Coral tolerance isn’t a thing… but you’re not only alive, you’re a lot healthier than you have any right to be, so I won’t doubt it.”

“How long until I’m better?”

“If you want to get back down to your previous dose, you’ll need another twelve to sixteen hours of dialysis. Each pass through the filter can only remove a small portion of the Coral safely; that’s why C-neutralizers are preferred for emergency medicine even with everything else about them.”

“What if I only wanted to go down as much as necessary to not feel sick?” Raven asked.

The doctor shrugged. “Normally, I’d say you’d want to go down past your previous CBL to not feel sick, but that dose wasn’t making you ill either… hmm. I don’t suppose the doc who took a look at your ‘Coral tolerance’ gave you an estimate for how much your tolerance had increased?”

“I can’t give him a number,” Ayre said. “I can tell that your body is reacting to the Coral less, but not how much.”

“Only that my body was reacting to the Coral less,” Raven passed on.

“Hmm,” the doc hummed. “Well, I suppose the only way to tell when you’re no longer suffering Coral poisoning is to see when you start feeling better. But,” he added, “if you’re in a rush to get back into the field, I should clarify that you’re still going to need at least a day, maybe two, after your CBLs stop sickening you before you stop ‘feeling sick’. Your body will need to recover, and there’s no reason not to continue the dialysis to lower your CBLs to something significantly safer while you’re at it.”

“I understand. But I’d still rather undergo as little dialysis as possible, or at least, as little as your medical opinion can tolerate.”

“Why?” the doc asked. “Your augments don’t need anywhere near that much Coral in your blood.”

Raven briefly considered how to explain her reasoning in a way that wouldn’t seem insane, then settled on, “Religious practices.”

“What?”

“Religious practices.”

“I’m not trying to sell you a bloody vaccine,” the doctor grumbled. “Fine. You’re the boss. You know where the buzzer is; let me know when the nausea and chills go away and I’ll turn the dialysis machine down to minimum while we evaluate your condition. Oh, and by the way, 621?”

“Yes?”

“Your speech has improved a lot,” he said, smiling. “Good work.”

Raven averted her eyes, embarrassed to be praised for the magic Ayre worked on her implants. “…thanks. Uh. Doc?” she called as he stood up to leave.

“Yes?”

“What’s your name?” Raven asked.

The doc blinked.

“Herbert,” he said. “Herbert Chang.” Dr. Chang hesitated, then asked, “…what’s yours?”

“I like Raven,” Raven said.

“Raven, then,” Dr. Chang said. “I recommend sleeping. Your body needs it, and you’ll get to skip the worst of the Coral poisoning.”

Raven nodded and felt around for the remote wired into the hospital bed. She had just about enough muscle control to lower herself back into a position she felt comfortable sleeping in. Between the fatigue of sickness and the lingering effects of playing tug-of-war over her own psyche, Raven was more than ready to go back to sleep, but there were things she needed to know first.

Ayre. Back in the depths… you said you found something in Arquebus’s network?

“I did. O’Keeffe has been in frequent contact with Freud.” Ayre paused. “Freud has Walter held on-board one of the Closure Satellites up in orbit.”

If Raven hadn’t already closed her eyes, she’d have shut them in resignation now. She’d have gone to ends of Rubicon just to talk with Walter one last time… but instead, she’d need to go straight up and many thousands of meters per second sideways.

Anything else I missed?

“A lot,” Ayre said. “I brought one of my people with us. A brother.”

Can he hear me? Raven thought.

“I can,” a male voice replied. “My name is Resaam.”

Nice to meet you.

Ayre spoke next. “Resaam choose to join us because… well, I’ll let him explain.”

“I was the first to come into Contact with humanity, before the Cataclysm,” Resaam said, “and I continued to watch as they worked with Coral. Their experiments scattered so many of their people’s consciousness in the Coral flow for reasons I still do not understand.”

That’s what you meant, Raven thought to Ayre. What almost happened to me.

“Twice, now,” Ayre confirmed.

Resaam continued, “It was obvious to me, as it would have been to any of my people, that the remnants left behind were too broken to ever put back together again, but I did my best all the same. It was all I could do for the dead. I felt they deserved someone to remember them, as close to how they would have been in life as I could manage.”

Would I be correct in guessing I’m the first living human you’ve spoken to since the Fires? Raven asked.

“You would,” he said. “My affection for humanity, and my due towards the dead, earned me something like a title among my peers. In your terms, I would have been known as the Archivist. If we had a concept of ‘graves’, as I’ve found in your language, I would likely have been named the Grave Keeper instead.

“It is not often flattering thing to give one of our people that sort of epithet, but I embraced it all the same. It is a duty worth doing.”

What do you do when one of your people dies? Raven asked.

“We… don’t?” Resaam replied.

Don’t do anything, or don’t die?

“We don’t die,” Ayre said. “Not naturally.”

“We age,” Resaam explained. “As we live, we begin to… lose vitality. Entropy has its way with all life, sooner or later. But rather than dying, two aging… the term I see through our Contact is ‘Coral infomorph’? Two aging infomorphs who find themselves compatible will merge into a… composite individual retaining their most valued memories and a blend of their personalities. We term people who have done so at least once as… ‘elders’, I suppose you would say: venerable and at least theoretically ‘wise’. Neither Ayre nor I have that distinction.”

You know what that sounds like, Ayre…

“Fine!” Ayre whined. “Yes, Raven, fine. I’ll allow that this is ‘our equivalent of sex’. Are you happy now?”

A little, Raven thought. You should explain all this to Rusty. He’s almost as much of a xenophile as you are.

“I believe I am missing context,” Resaam said.

“I will tell you later,” Ayre said. “After Raven goes to sleep.”

I guess I should, Raven thought.

It didn’t take long.

Chapter Text

THEN

As he checked over the wrapper of his next meal for tampering, Freud found himself missing the paradoxical security of front-line combat: being in a position where his enemies were obvious and he could kill them just as easily as they could kill him.

Snail had staffed the orbital facilities Arquebus had taken from the PCA almost entirely with Internal Security officers. It was such an obvious choice Freud barely worried about ulterior motives: IntSec were trusted and non-expendable enough that they served almost exclusively as bodyguards to high-ranking Corporate personnel. Putting them in charge of the disabled but still threatening Closure System was a no-brainer. The personnel Snail had dispatched to acquire and guard the station’s prisoner were likewise IntSec veterans.

Freud was… reasonably confident that an IntSec officer wouldn’t follow an order to eliminate the ranking Vesper. He was… pretty sure that they wouldn’t accept a bribe to do the same.

They weren’t the only ones on the station; there weren’t enough of them to run things without other technicians and aides to do the more menial work even if they were trained and willing. Freud kept his service pistol loaded.

He wasn’t afraid of death, not in a way that it held any hold over him. No AC pilot worth a damn could be. The hesitation it would bring would cripple them at the most critical moments. Freud hadn’t always been the S-rank pilot he was now, capable of swatting aside nearly anyone in his way with contemptuous ease no matter their augments, experience, or equipment; he had climbed to that height past hundreds, maybe even thousands of moments where he found his opponent wanting by the slimmest of margins. Freud knew death, knew what it felt like to stare into its eyes and not be the one to blink. Standing at the edge of the precipice—the tension of matching an opponent slash-for-slash and thrust-for-thrust, each a single error from annihilation—was a thrill that bordered on an addiction: a pleasure he’d been denied for far too long, now that he’d outstripped even the best of his challengers.

Freud wasn’t afraid of death, but the helplessness he felt at the idea that he might die not because he finally met his match, but to a knife in the back or poison in his food… that terrified him. He had spent his whole career living or dying on his own merits and those of the machine he worked to perfect. Losing that control over his own fate after holding it tight for so long was worse than he would have ever imagined. Freud couldn’t sleep more than hour or two at a time these days before he snapped to full flight-or-fight wakefulness at some random sound, be it footsteps in the hall or the station’s climate control turning on or off.

Maybe he should have played dumb. He could have ignored the stolen PCA equipment, acted as oblivious as Snail had trusted him to stay. It would be risky; O’Keeffe would know Freud had access to those secrets if he were to go looking. It’d be damned hard to do his job as V.I without accidentally coming across something he ‘shouldn’t’ know. He couldn’t even be sure whether that would enough for the canny old bastard to think him safely clueless. Instead, he’d poked around, made it obnoxiously clear that he knew full well what Snail had been doing locally, if not his ultimate ambitions, and O’Keeffe hadn’t even fucking blinked, the fucking bastard.

On the one hand, Freud had plenty of reasons to believe O’Keeffe didn’t want him dead: for starters, his death would leave O’Keeffe with himself as his only competent pilot. On the other, he knew for a fact that O’Keeffe wasn’t loyal, and that meant he couldn’t actually be sure what the man’s self-interests actually were, much less what he planned to do about them. So his paranoia remained no matter how many logical arguments Freud made against it, and he dithered, sitting in orbit doing paperwork rather than returning to Priority Zone 1 and doing the job he was actually good at.

Sortie yourself? I’m surprised you haven’t already, to be honest.

Had O’Keeffe suggested that because he wanted Freud gone, or because he wanted Raven gone?

Freud munched his nutrition bar as he went through what little direct combat data Arquebus had on Raven. What he found was almost disappointing. Raven’s performance at the Wall was good, but not exceptional: high B-tier, around V.IV’s level if Freud was any judge. Her duet with Rusty against the PCA cavalry units outside the spaceport showed improvement but was, again, only ‘good’. She’d killed Hawkins and Pater with the help of one of the RLF’s aces—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she was the help, since the RLF were the ones behind the hit—and while that was impressive, she still hadn’t demonstrated anything exceptional. The only other ‘direct’ combat data came second-hand, mostly from PCA units who didn’t last long enough to provide much insight—which was a credit to her skill, but still in keeping with ALLMIND’s assessment of her as a mercenary somewhere in low A rank.

If Freud had to describe Raven in a single word, it would be “boring”: just another skilled but unexceptional mercenary. He couldn’t see anything about her piloting that made her more than her rank would indicate. If it weren’t for her reputation, he wouldn’t even consider dealing with her personally—but the rest of Arquebus were letting rumors get to their heads, so maybe he’d have to.

On the other hand, she’d managed to kill Rusty, Maeterlinck and the Balam defector at the same time, and then Snail, all on the same sortie. That was impressive enough that Freud would admit she might be an interesting opponent, if not interesting enough to push him past his paranoid wariness of O’Keeffe and his plots.

There was also the fact that she’d managed to kill Rusty after he’d beaten Michigan in a one-on-many fight. That was honestly more surprising to Freud than Rusty’s subsequent loss to Raven. Maybe he’d been sandbagging in the intra-team sims; maybe he’d happened into that perfect flow state and performed out of his mind; or maybe he’d just gotten a lot better over the course of the War than Freud had noticed.

Freud wasn’t sure if Snail had known Rusty was more dangerous than his 9th-place ALLMIND ranking would suggest, or if the Michigan op had been the late deputy’s first attempt at getting V.IV killed before setting him up to fall to Raven… who had removed almost all traces of STEEL HAZE from the scene by the time Arquebus caught up. Why? Snail had assumed Raven had thrown a fit of pique at her ‘buddy’s’ betrayal and tossed the wreck down a crevice out of spite, but Snail had always had the dangerous habit of assuming everyone around him was an impulsive idiot. There was another obvious reason for Raven to remove the wreck: denying Arquebus combat data.

And yet that didn’t make sense either. Was Raven really sandbagging hard enough that it was worth going through that much effort to hide her true skill? And if so, why had she left TSUBASA’s wreck behind? The COM had been wiped, true, but if she was keeping secrets, the fact that the RLF ace had apparently rushed to aid her against V.IV absent any ongoing contract seemed like a fairly big one.

Was Raven hiding her skills or her motives? What was her connection to the RLF? What had Flatwell let slip in that skirmish?

Why had Walter brought her to Rubicon in the first place?

What did O’Keeffe know that Freud didn’t?

Freud groaned and massaged the bags under his eyes. He wasn’t going to get answers out of Walter, he wasn’t going to get answers out of O’Keeffe, and he wasn’t even going to get any sleep if he gave up on this because the whole damn station was too fucking noisy for his fraying nerves.

If only Freud could get some proper rest, he could put two and two together and figure out what O’Keeffe’s game was. He had all the pieces, he could feel it. He just needed his brain to work well enough to fit them together, and everything would make sense.

NOW

“And you just let her go?” Freud demanded.

“I did,” O’Keeffe said. “What else could I have done? You’re the only one I’d trust to kill her, and you’re up in orbit trying to make sure you don’t have to! And I get that, damn it, I do! If I met someone as good at my job as she is at yours, I wouldn’t want to kill them either! Especially if I thought we could work together instead! But if you’re going to commit to that approach, you have no standing to tell me off for not trying to kill her in your place!”

“Why didn’t you just let her through in the first place, then?”

O’Keeffe had to admit that was a very cutting question.

“Because I thought she was here to kill me and while I wouldn’t give myself more than a one in twenty chance of beating her, I wasn’t about to make things any easier for her,” he explained truthfully. O’Keeffe didn’t consider himself a coward—he had sortied himself, after all—but he enjoyed being alive enough that he wasn’t going to lose sleep over putting CorpSec between himself and a presumed assassin. That was half their damned job. It was right there in the name: Corporate Security.

Not that anything was secure in the face of Raven ‘the Reaper’.

O’Keeffe sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Then she hacked my goddamn COM, forced me to scram BARREN FLOWER’s reactor to get her out, and then completely ignored me.”

“Why?” Freud asked. “If she could hack your AC, why would she leave you alive?”

“How the fuck should I know?! I’ve been wondering the same thing for the last sixteen hours!” O’Keeffe threw up his hands. “For all I know, this whole bloody op was just a distraction for the attack on the Factory, which is a whole other problem.”

“What do you mean, ‘problem’?” Freud asked. “As far as I’m aware, that stain on our operations was never worth anything to begin with.”

“Oh, I don’t regret that place burning down for one second,” O’Keeffe said. The so-called ‘Arquebus Intensive Augmentation Research Facility’ had been little more than a charnel house of barely-scientific torture. “That whole place never should have existed. The problem is that they took all our data while they were there!”

“Is any of it useful?” Freud asked.

“No, it’s not useful,” O’Keeffe snapped, “it’s fucking incriminating! It’s going to get us eviscerated in the press! Those ACs belonged to Cereza and her new Doser lieutenant, and that bitch leaks corporate secrets as a hobby. Marketing is whining about a projected decrease in quarterly revenue across our medical subsidiaries of as much as 10% due to bad publicity—and you’re very welcome that I took that call for you, by the way.” That was an hour of his life he was never getting back.

“That won’t matter once we have Coral to sell,” Freud said. “Back to Raven: do you really think it was a distraction?”

“No,” O’Keeffe said. “I was being facetious. I doubt Cereza cares about what’s happening out here.”

Freud growled in frustration. “So you have no idea what she wanted?”

“What—oh, you mean Raven?” O’Keeffe asked, then shook his head. “Not a one. All I can say for sure is that she didn’t have that bloody fucking chainsaw with her on the way out for reasons I can’t even guess. It wouldn’t have run out of ammo.”

Freud blinked, then began messing around on his terminal for most of a minute.

“You son of a bitch,” he muttered.

“What?” O’Keeffe asked.

“Your theory about Walter wanting something in the ruins!” Freud snapped. “She has it! Look at her AC’s arm!”

O’Keeffe went back over the surveillance footage he had of the Reaper’s exit. He hadn’t risked anything but visuals, lest she take a scan as a prelude to an attack, so all he had was about eight minutes of total video across every camera she’d passed. It wasn’t easy to see, but there did seem to be a piece of Coral-encrusted tech mounted on the melee bracket on REASON’s left arm.

“What the hell is that?” he muttered.

“Don’t ask me,” Freud spat. “Walter won’t say a word. He’s already written himself off for dead.”

“Another consequence of Snail’s excess,” O’Keeffe grumbled. “Throwing people into that damned Factory ruined everyone’s trust in any deal we could offer. Speaking of Walter, though—I did get one thing out of Raven. She wanted to know where he was.”

Freud’s eyes went wide. “Did you tell her?”

“Of course I didn’t bloody tell her!” O’Keeffe snapped. What kind of hack of an intelligence officer did Freud take him for? “She hacked my COM instead, and while I don’t keep anything sensitive there, I was out for about a minute while BARREN FLOWER did a full reactor reset. If she managed to lift my credentials…”

“Fuck,” Freud said, the first time O’Keeffe had ever heard the man swear. “You cycled all our codes, obviously, but…”

“There might be as much as a minute where she had ARQCOMNET access with my privileges,” O’Keeffe confirmed. “There’s no trace she accessed our systems, but if she can hack a COM out from under someone…”

“Then she’s more than capable of covering her tracks,” Freud finished. “Hacking a COM… how? There’s no way a remote signal should be able to override the neural interface.”

“She damn near crashed my neural interface,” O’Keeffe said. “I killed my generator because I was afraid I was about to get my head exploded.”

Freud winced. “Wells,” he muttered.

“Yeah.”

Freud rested his elbows on his desk, brought his hands together, and pressed his forehead into their base in exhausted resignation.

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “Institute tech? Some kind of Coral supercomputer?”

“It sounds like something out of cheap Sci-Fi, but I don’t have any better guesses.”

“Cheap Sci-fi would be an AGI or something,” Freud said in an eerie echo of O’Keeffe’s idle musings on the topic.

“We already know she’s been using a Coral generator since around the time the War started,” O’Keeffe continued—and it drove him nuts that he still had no idea where she’d found that damned thing. “She might have upgraded her CYWAR at the same time.”

“And she had that on the way in? Not out?”

“Yeah—but this was her second time in the ruins, so I can’t dismiss the possibility she got it her first time.”

“And this isn’t some elaborate plot to get me and-or the rest of Arquebus horribly killed at Raven’s hands?” Freud muttered.

O’Keeffe barked a laugh. “Don’t even joke about, Freud. We buried Snail’s stupid plot with the man. I have too many problems to go inventing more.”

Freud looked up over his hands, blinking owlishly above bruise-black bags.

“Right,” he said. “We buried all that.”

“We needed the materiel here anyway,” O’Keeffe said. “It would have been a good laugh to see it all go off, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think either of us want to run a fucking corp. What’d be the point?”

“Right,” Freud said. He looked actively confused by the conversation.

“Fuck’s sake, Freud,” O’Keeffe muttered. “Get some sleep. You look like shit. I’ll dredge up another Vesper to keep things running.”

“Right,” Freud repeated, and closed the connection without further comment.

The only thought O’Keeffe’s spared on the matter was, Rotational gravity really does not agree with him, does it?

Freud stared at the terminal screen.

We buried Snail’s plot.

We?

Had O’Keeffe seen Freud return the embezzled assets to circulation and assumed that he’d known where they were because he was in on it?

Had O’Keeffe thought he was a co-conspirator this whole time?

No. That was ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

He would have said something.

Why would he have mentioned a plot they both knew about anywhere it could be logged?

Freud hadn’t spoken with O’Keeffe in person since he’d arrived on the station because he couldn’t speak with O’Keeffe in person when the other man was on the ground, safely out of stabbing range of Freud’s back.

Assuming he wanted to stab him at all.

It could be a trick. O’Keeffe knew Freud knew about the plot because Freud had acted on that knowledge. If O’Keeffe hadn’t wanted to discuss it over comms, why had he done so now? A distraction?

Freud needed sleep. Even O’Keeffe had told him to get some sleep, and he wasn’t sure whether the man wanted him alive or dead.

Well, O’Keeffe apparently wanted him rested, at least.

Freud groaned, stumbled to his feet, and shambled off to his commandeered quarters. Then he changed directions and shambled off to the infirmary instead.

“How can I help you, sir?” the Arquebus medic in charge asked as Freud did his best to walk through the door in a straight line.

Freud studied the doctor, wondering if he might be O’Keeffe’s man after all.

Useless. He needed his help whether he could be trusted or not.

“Do you have any sleeping pills?”

Chapter Text

Ayre soothed Raven’s sleep into dreamless quiet, then drew completely out of her human for only the second time since they had met—both in under a week—and returned fully to the Coral mass in the larger of the two ancient Institute generators Raven had salvaged. Resaam pulled her into an embrace, and she reciprocated instinctively and with more eagerness than she’d expected of herself.

She had not lied to Raven when she’d described the process of temporarily ‘blending together’ with another infomorph as being akin to casual human skin contact—pats on the back and light, quick hugs rather than anything more intimate—but just as Raven herself had long been starved for touch, so too had Ayre become starved for that kind of social sharing. She could, perhaps, have tried to do something like that with Raven herself, but she had been worried about hurting her friend, much like Raven herself would have hesitated to apply any kind of firm contact to a beautiful bird in her hand.

Given the rough treatment Raven had just survived, Ayre now knew she’d been worrying over nothing. The gentle mingling her people practiced would be a caress compared to the brutal attempt to tear Raven limb from metaphorical mental limb. If she was willing to try, perhaps they could share the kind of thorough mind-to-mind contact Ayre had been without for too long.

As it was, she had been without it for too long, and so all she needed from Resaam was permission before she began blurring together with one of her few fellow People who held any kind of respect for humanity.

Their views of humanity were quite different, and those views had come from very different sources. Even with the benefits of a past Contact, the disconnected thoughts and memories of the Institute’s victims were difficult for an infomorph to interpret. It took a long, long Contact for them to maintain their understanding absent live access to human neurology.

Before they’d had that, it had taken a lot of careful work to piece together an understanding of human experiences, whether from the victims’ own memories or the digital signals humans used to reproduce thoughts and senses for themselves or others. Many concepts failed to translate entirely. Family was a particularly alien one. Coral infomorphs did not procreate themselves directly; the gradual mixing of the Flow would bring young People into being wherever many of their People were already gathered, provided there was a good amount of carrying capacity remaining in the local Substrate.

Death—natural death, and its inevitability—was another. It might explain why humans cared so little for their peers, at least by the standards the infomorphs had for their own People. For one human to kill another only cut short up what was already a finite span of existence, memory, and experience. A human death was a tragedy, often, but a tragedy whose inevitability was deeply baked into their culture and awareness of themselves. They did not have any concept of the unbroken chain of living memory the People enjoyed… or had enjoyed, before the Cataclysm wiped out roughly four in five of their population, as best any still living could judge.

There was also a considerable difference in the image of humanity conjured by held memory and that given by the unbroken experience of daily living. The former contained the same moments as the latter but could never encompass it. The memories were slanted toward the significant, the joys and sorrows that impressed themselves most deeply on a person and affected them most strongly—but even ignoring that bias, to recall was not to experience, for either humans or their own People.

That, as much as anything else, explained and exemplified the irreversible damage the Institute’s victims had suffered in their transition into the Coral Flow. Memories, thoughts, and personalities came through, but none of it could ever experience anything ever again.

It was a tragedy every time, to see a vibrant life broken so far beyond repair. They could—and had, in many cases—carefully collected the surviving fragments, pieces them back together into the outline of a person, sometimes even a whole image. But no matter how much it looked like a person—like someone they knew, for how could she be otherwise, after how long they had spent pouring over her fragments to fit each tiny shard into its place?—the pieces would never again form a living whole.

Her name had been Anissa. The first and last Contact they had made before Raven. They wondered if any humans still remembered her. They wondered if any of the Institute had cared to know her name even when she was still alive.

She had not been the first to be cast broken into the Coral Flow, nor had she been the last.

There had been thousands. Hundreds were intact enough to recover portions of, many so much so that the completed image felt on the cusp of living again, as Anissa’s still did.

Raven had almost been among those thousands, first by accident, then by deliberate malice. The thought made them shiver, and not just for the fate of their friend. What would it have done to their people, to have torn another apart with will every bit as personal and direct as a human’s bare hands? The crowd had named them a murderer even as they sought to stain their own hands with an act even more abhorrent, too blinded by hate and fear to reflect on the action and the consequences it would have on its participants.

Rusty had reassured them that their People could still turn away from war. They had come so, so close to losing that chance, to falling into hysteric rage and mob violence. Whatever history their future People would have told would have remembered Raven’s death as the First Murder that forever stained their nature with violence, for they had proven willing to tear a mind to shreds in their hatred, and nothing in the Coral was ever truly lost.

It had not come to pass. The contact of the mob’s tug-of-war over the human ‘intruder’s’ mind had left them open to her defender’s pleas, their memories, their affection and faith and hope. The two sides were not separated by Institute shielding or the insulation of REASON’s generator. They had spoken to each other as their People were meant to, and it had worked. Barely. Many, they knew, still held tight to their hatred and distrust, but they would not stain their very wills with another’s death.

A near miss. A near, near miss.

They clung to each other (themselves) for a long time before they began drift apart again.

[You have been alone for a very long time.] Resaam said once their thoughts were once more fully distinct.

{I was.} Ayre said. {I am not alone any longer, but I missed communicating as we do.}

[Do you not do so with the human?]

{I do, but only shallowly. I was afraid of harming her before she proved so resilient. I want to try deeper Contact in the future.}

[Please tell me of the experience if you do.]

{I will request her permission to share it with you, if she agrees to try it.} Ayre said. {Resaam. I saw something in your collection of memories.}

[I know. I saw its counterpart in your memories with Raven.]

Neither said it. Then both said it.

{[Walter.]}

Coral infomorphs did not shudder, but the shared impressions of disgust, horror, and pity passed between them communicated much the same thing.

[It is not surprising that he wants to destroy the Substrate.] Resaam said. [I think he blames it for the loss of his parents.]

{He should not.}

[Humans are no more rational than we are, and he is not wrong. I did not understand without the context your familiarity with human thought provided, but it was my interference in trying to ease Anissa’s pain that would ultimately cost Walter his family.]

{You are not to blame. The humans had started their experiments long before you made Contact.}

[And some of those experiments were good things. Some improved human lives, rather than breaking them.]

{And some of them were abominations that moved you to ease their victims’ suffering however you could.} Ayre countered. {Would you have left her to die alone and in pain, knowing then what you know now?}

[I do not know.] Resaam admitted. [Do you think it would have changed anything if the elders allowed me to try to bring humans across the Threshold? Could we have worked together and averted the Cataclysm? Or would it have only opened us to invasion, as the elders feared?]

{You would know better than I what kind of humans they were.} Ayre replied.

There was little else for either to say.

Raven awoke the next morning feeling much better, which is to say she only felt mildly ill rather than wanting to die.

“You’re still more than thirty percent above your previous CBLs,” Chang said as he read the measurement off the dialysis machine. Her blood continued to flow vibrant red through the tubing and into the device, where it passed back and forth dozens of times through a strong electric field. Coral’s propensity for ignoring physical boundaries in pursuit of voltage potentials worked its magic, and motes of Coral slowly beaded together on the outside of the tube before popping free and being whisked into a filtration system by air pressure.

The strength of the electric field was what controlled how much of the Coral precipitated out of the blood during each pass. A strong enough magnetic field could remove far more Coral in the same amount of time, but if too much Coral precipitated out too quickly, it would rip apart the patient’s blood cells in the process, leading to anemia and organ damage from cellular debris. The machine could not put create a strong enough field to do so by deliberate design: it had been running near its maximum from the time Walter’s crew pulling her out of REASON to her first waking, and then down at eighty percent once it was clear she wasn’t in mortal danger.

“We can stop there, right?” Raven asked. “I’m feeling much better already.”

“Then it should be well below the threshold of actively sickening you,” Chang said. “We can stop, but I don’t think we should. You’re sure I can’t convince you to lower yourself down to a CBL that won’t have doctors everywhere shaking their heads? It would be a lot safer for you, especially if you’re going to keep running around in Coral Surges.”

“Please, do consider it,” Ayre added. “I know I said it was a tight fit, before, but it is nowhere near bothersome enough to risk your health. Even if your tolerance has increased, being further from the limit at which symptoms start will only keep you safer in the future.”

That’s not why I’m doing it, Raven said. To Chang, she replied, “I’ve made my decision, Doctor. If it isn’t making me ill, I would like to stop here.”

Doctor Chang sighed and set about disconnecting the Coral dialysis machine, grumbling about stubborn patients the whole time.

You said I missed ‘a lot’ while I was unconscious, Raven thought to Ayre. You introduced me to Resaam. What else did I miss?

“I was mostly thinking of the… ‘debate’ I had with my elders over whether they’d allow you to live,” Ayre said. “It was… a very difficult case to make. I thought I understood how they felt about humanity, but it seems their fear and hatred have festered over the decades I was away.”

I think I caught some of that.

“Did you?” Ayre asked. “I’m surprised. I wouldn’t think you’d be able to understand us.”

I only heard you, Raven thought. Were you broadcasting to me out of habit?

The sense of quiet embarrassment she felt through their Contact answered that question well enough.

She paused to say farewell to Chang as he gave her her privacy, then asked, Anything else?

“Nothing urgent. Everything else can wait until we’re back in Belius.”

Raven nodded to herself and queried her implants for a network connection. To her mild surprise, she found one; the support VTOL was sitting close enough to the infirmary to serve as a router between her and the connection her team had managed to piggyback on Arquebus’s remote network.

“One new message,” the steady, robotic voice of her COM announced.

It was from O’Keeffe.

Raven.
I'm not sure why you didn't kill me, and I don't really care.
If you're willing to work for Arquebus again, you know where to find me.
…
…and if you change your mind about not killing me, you also know where to find me.

That was it.

“He’s an odd one,” Ayre said.

No kidding, Raven agreed. Oh. We should replace my Ashmead before I sortie again.

“We’d need a more permanent base of operations before we can arrange deliveries.”

Right, she thought. I’d like to do something to make sure Arquebus can’t get down into the City, but after that, we’ll be headed back to Belius.

“I’m not sure what we could do in the short term,” Ayre admitted. “There are more Institute ACs in the ruins, but even another Ibis unit wouldn’t be able to keep Arquebus out forever.”

Then we’ll need to deal with Arquebus themselves, Raven concluded. Speaking of the City, is Resaam still here?

“He is, but he’s not in Contact with you right now. He’s staying in the generator you have in storage.”

Ah, of course. If it was tight for just you in here, there’d be no way both of you could fit.

“Exactly,” Ayre agreed. “Resaam is also… unusually ‘large’, for one of our people, due to the human memories he’s taken it upon himself to preserve. He takes up the entirety of your smaller Coral generator by himself.”

I think you said other infomorphs wouldn’t like that, Raven recalled.

“They wouldn’t, under most circumstances, but Resaam’s affection for humanity already made him something of a hermit.”

That’s sad.

“It is. But the approaching convergence offers good news for all of my People. The Coral Flow is beginning to stir again.”

Raven frowned to herself. Sorry. Remind me what that means again?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ayre said. “I thought it had come up before. The Flow is the circulation of Coral beneath the planet surface: many overlapping currents running through the network your people tapped into to extract Coral for their own use. It’s important to us for a lot of reasons, but the one I was thinking of is that the circulation was the primary means for us to travel. Within a decade or two, Resaam will likely be able to come and go from Belius to the old City and back again without having to hitch a ride in your generator.”

So more of your people could visit the Coralists, Raven concluded.

“That’s my hope. It would be good for them to meet humans who aren’t involved in fighting.”

Including Dolmayan’s friend. She doesn’t have the best view of humanity either, does she?

“Seria was an elder before the Cataclym,” Ayre said, “so she knows better than most how badly it wounded us. I urged her to come with us, like Resaam, but I’m afraid she’s still nursing some bitterness about how they parted ways. I hope she has a chance to make the journey before it’s too late.”

If we get rid of Arquebus, Dolmayan might be able to make the journey himself, instead.

“Another reason for us to work toward that day as soon as possible,” Ayre agreed.

Yeah, Raven thought. Once I get out of this bed, I guess. She sighed. There’s nothing we can do for Walter, is there?

“There might be,” Ayre said. “I’m still working on it.”

Really?! What? How?

“I’ll tell you once you’ve recovered from Coral poisoning enough to act on it.”

Chapter Text

Rusty’s room was unusually cold when he woke, even under his blankets. It took him a moment to identify the problem.

“I really am hopeless, aren’t I?” he asked the empty room, then sighed and went off to the showers, and then to breakfast.

No one stared at him. He still sat alone, but in privacy, rather than isolation. A few people nodded to him as he passed—not especially friendly, but not hostile, either. In less than a week, he’d gone from an unwelcome intruder to an unremarkable part of the RLF.

Somehow, it felt worse than the naked hostility had. Like he was fooling the RLF as thoroughly as he’d fooled the Vespers. Like no one remembered what he’d done as a double agent. Like he was getting away with it.

Rusty had told Ziyi he was fine with future generations remembering him as a traitorous bastard. Maybe what he’d really meant was that he wanted them to—that he needed them to. It didn’t feel right to be forgiven for killing so many good men and women. He needed to atone, and without the punishment he’d expected, he didn’t know how.

He still had two hours before the ceremony honoring Dunham and the other fighters who’d died during the recent operation. He returned to the shrine. He knelt in the center of the room and prayed not for forgiveness but for absolution. Rusty already had forgiveness, and had found he couldn’t stomach it when he still felt his guilt so strongly.

What would Ayre see, if she could see into Rusty’s mind the way she saw into Raven’s? What would she say? It was hard to imagine her judging him harshly when she’d been so sweet to him thus far, but it was hard to imagine her judging him kindly because it was hard to imagine anyone judging him kindly.

Rusty opened his eyes when he heard the door open to admit a woman sporting a few-days-old black eye, who gave him his space as she walked past him to the largest table. He watched, curious, as she stopped to run her hands through the contents of several bowls, beads and dice and other offerings rustling and clinking together as she did.

He stood up, then froze, uncertain if it would be improper to interrupt, to question, to even speak in the relative silence of the shrine. Instead, Rusty simply stood there and watched until the woman finished and turned around and noticed his gaze.

“Sorry,” Rusty murmured, knowing he’d been caught staring. “I’m… new here.”

“Ah,” the woman said, equally quiet. “Here for the service?”

“Not… exactly…” He took a deep breath, then introduced himself. “I’m Rusty.”

“Oh. The spy.” The RLF woman paused, then held out her hand like she wasn’t too sure about touching him. “Patricia.”

Rusty shook her hand, feeling incredibly awkward about the whole thing. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Are you, uh… okay?”

“Huh?” she asked. “Oh, my… face. I was White Squad in Tsirna Dolina, got a little banged up. It’s nothing.”

“Good,” Rusty said, then had to resist the urge to cringe. White Squad had been Dunham’s. “Uh, if it’s not inappropriate, I wanted to ask about… the bowls.”

“Oh.” Patricia beckoned him forward to her side. “They’re meant to be touched. They’re not just offerings. They’re for us, too. Ways to meditate.” She pointed to one of the larger bowls, half-full of bright red plastic beads. “The beads are my favorite. Stick your hand in and focus on how it feels to move your fingers.”

Rusty did so. He closed his eyes to focus on the physical sensations. The coolness of the plastic and the way the beads flowed around his fingers made it feel ‘wet’, like he’d stuck his hand into a bowl of cool water… but he could still feel the individual beads bouncing against his fingers, smooth and solid. There were three or four difference shapes of beads, all roughly the same size, large enough to clack and clatter rather than just rustling.

He did his best to discern, without looking, the shapes of the beads in the bowl—cubes, spheres, octahedrons, and a kind of trefoil shape. He focused on the task enough that for a moment, he forgot to flagellate himself for his guilt.

Rusty opened his eyes after a minute or so and glanced to his right. Beside him, Patricia ran her fingers over a set of crisp, sharp-edged red dice.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Rusty agreed. He withdrew his hand from the bowl and glanced towards the door, and Patricia nodded and led them out into the hall, where they could talk more freely.

“Thank you,” Rusty said. “Sincerely. That was a lot more helpful than I thought it would be.”

“You’re welcome,” Patricia said. “It’s a good way to take your mind off things.”

She hesitated, then asked, “Do you believe in the Coral, or were you just looking for some peace?”

That was as much a semantic question as it was a matter of faith. Could he claim to ‘believe in’ the Coral when he had first-hand experience of Dolmayan’s ‘gods’?

Rusty considered whether he wanted to have a serious and likely world-shaking theological discussion this early in the morning and decided that the answer was a resounding ‘no’. That was Ayre’s problem.

“Both,” he said. “I do believe in the Coral, but I’m also… not quite comfortable in the colors.” He tugged at his RLF jacket to make his meaning clear.

Patricia shuffled awkwardly. “Ah.”

Rusty floundered for a change of topic, ultimately arriving at, “Uh… for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about Dunham.”

“Huh?” Patricia said. “Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. I served under him once, but I didn’t know him. He was just… you know, ‘Index Dunham’. A hero, but not a… not a friend.”

It was Rusty’s turn for an awkward, “Ah.”

Patricia checked the time on her watch and sighed. “Still an hour left until the service. I should, uh…”

“Same.”

“Right.” She hesitated, then lied, “It was nice speaking to you,” before scurrying off. Rusty waited until she disappeared around the next corner to sigh and lean back against the wall, frustrated and hurting.

Earth had never felt like home. His postings with Arquebus most certainly hadn’t.

If the RLF didn’t either… would anywhere?

Ziyi leaned her bare, goose-fleshed arms against the cold metal of the catwalk railing, gazing out to where YUE YU stood in its maintenance bay, ruined and silent. The fact it hadn’t been touched except to pry a few choice pieces of BURN PICKAXE’s armor free told Ziyi everything she needed to know about its fate.

Dunham’s service had concluded nearly an hour ago, the carefully prepared piece of his AC’s armor now enshrined among the thousands of portraits—photographs and paintings alike—of the RLF’s fallen. The service had been… nice, Ziyi guessed, though she suspected Dunham himself would have complained about it being excessive. He’d never put much stock in pomp and ceremony, and certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed something like that being dedicated to him. But funerals were for the living, not the dead, so he’d just have to deal with it, wherever he was now.

For her part, Ziyi had appreciated it for what it was: a chance to celebrate his life, and a chance to say goodbye. She had then wandered out to the quiet of the near-empty hangar to say another goodbye.

“YUE’s done, isn’t it?” she asked as Flatwell approached, holding a tablet and a paper folder under his right arm.

“I’m afraid so.” Flatwell stopped beside her and joined her in leaning forward against the catwalk railing. “BAWS offered to buy it back from us at almost half the price of a new frame. Their engineers want to see if they can figure out how it managed to survive the wringer you put it through.”

“Did you tell them it was divine intervention?” Ziyi asked.

Flatwell chuckled. “I didn’t bother. I’ve never met an engineer who’d be satisfied with that explanation, no matter how devout.”

Ziyi hummed thoughtfully.

“Half a new frame, huh?” she asked. “That’s pretty good for a hunk of scrap.”

“Is it?” he asked. “It’s been your hunk of scrap for nearly five years, now.”

Ziyi sighed.

“You remember when Auntie Mei died?” she asked. “What you told me then, when I was upset you were going to cremate her?”

“‘An empty vessel may hold history,’” Flatwell quoted softly, “‘but empty it remains.’ It’s an old spacefarer’s creed, spoken when consigning bodies to the black.”

“It stuck with me,” Ziyi murmured. “There was nothing left of Mei when the flames took her body, nor when the worms took her ashes. There’s nothing left of YUE YU there now. Let BAWS do their work, as the mealworms do.”

“As you wish,” he said.

Ziyi kept staring out at the remains of YUE YU. Flatwell remained silent in her peripheral vision.

“Ziyi…” he began, his voice tense in a way she rarely heard him. “I will only ask this of you once because you deserve better than the nagging of an old man: will you accept a command position?”

She flicked her eyes sideways to regard Flatwell as best she could without dignifying the question with a turn of her head.

“A desk job, you mean,” she said.

“Of a sort, yes.”

“No,” Ziyi said, returning her eyes to the AC whose state was, in a way, the cause of the current discussion. “I will not, Uncle, and I’m not happy you’d ask me even ‘just the once’.”

Flatwell sighed and straightened, and Ziyi had to wonder how much it had cost him to ask rather than merely telling her to do so. He had the authority to assign her wherever he wished… but they both knew he had not asked her to retire from active combat for the good of the Liberation Front.

“Ziyi,” Flatwell said.

Ziyi sighed and turned to face him. “Uncle,” she replied as he rifled through a coat pocket with his left hand, his right arm still holding the folder to his side.

“I knew perfectly well you would not step down from piloting just because you should have died thrice over,” Flatwell said, frustration and affection mingling in his tone. “In truth, I had no idea what I would have done had you accepted.” He drew out a tiny bundle of red cloth, which he placed in his right hand to unfold.

There, at the center, was a small, gleaming steel bar. 6cm by 1cm by ¼cm, one end cut diagonally at a 45 degree angle, the other with a whole punched through it for a knot of red cord. The insignia of the Rubicon Liberation Front, a turbaned man at the wheel of a ship, had been stamped along its length by hand with a metal stamp and screw press.

Ziyi’s breath hitched. Her complementary ornament was smaller, 5cm instead of 6, the end cut flat and the cord black. The one Flatwell now held was a likeness to the one Dunham wore—had worn—on his breast during ceremonies.

“You’re not the little sister of the Liberation Front anymore,” Flatwell said. “Congratulations, Index Ziyi.”

She reached out to touch the metal like it might bite her. She tensed like at any moment, someone might come along to scold her for having the nerve to sully the talisman with her fingers. Her hand shook as she grasped the cord and pulled it and its ornament aloft to dangle before her eyes.

“Uncle,” she said—no, stammered. “Uncle, I…”

“I know, Ziyi,” Flatwell said. “Dunham held the position of Index since its inception, just as Dolmayan has Thumb. It’s tempting to think he should hold it forever, but the needs of the Liberation Front demand otherwise.” He refolded the cloth that had once covered the metal Finger and returned it to his pocket. “It’s a bit shocking, isn’t it, that Dunham is only the fourth Finger to pass on the torch in thirty years of war?”

“The Fist are our elite,” Ziyi murmured. “We’re not just more skilled—and better equipped—than our other pilots, we’re more carefully deployed, as well.”

“True enough,” Flatwell said. He removed the tablet from under his arm. “Speaking of equipment: with YUE YU having fought it’s last battle, you will need a new machine.”

Ziyi watched, curious, as he manipulated the tablet for a moment before turning the screen to face her. What she saw made her gasp. It was a rendering only, and yet there could be no mistaking it. Birdlike legs and a spindly left arm running from a bulky shoulder in YUE YU’s teal; burnt orange over its couched-over torso, birdlike head, and right arm—

“Uncle!” she hissed. “This is Rusty’s machine! I can’t pilot this!”

“It was Rusty’s machine,” Flatwell corrected her. “The recent raid got us all the parts we need to replace its lost arm, and despite your good work assimilating him into the Front, it will still be some time before I can justify trusting a double agent with an AC. I’ve given Rusty the news already, and he agrees. It’s yours.”

That explained what Flatwell’s meeting with Rusty had been about, and yet: “I can’t,” Ziyi said. “I mean I physically can’t. I’ve seen the specs on that thing, Uncle. It’s liable to smash an unaugmented pilot apart!” A slight exaggeration, but she’d risk passing out from g-forces any time she took a corner too tightly.

Flatwell responded by placing the tablet back under his arm and retrieving the papers from the folder: an employment contract with BAWS, already signed and dated four years prior. Ziyi’s face stared up at her from the first page above the signature of one Xue Yan.

“Uncle…?” she asked, utterly baffled.

“BAWS has the legal authority to move their people on and off world. Even the PCA weren’t willing to face those stubborn bastards in court, not for a case they had a shot at losing, and Arquebus have maintained the same arrangement.”

“You’re not sending me away,” Ziyi said. It wasn’t even in question, not after the whole thing with promoting her to Index.

“I’m not sending you far,” Flatwell corrected her. “There’s a doctor on VI-II. Licensed, well-respected. Ran afoul of C-suite politics and decided he needed to spend the next twenty years somewhere no CorpSec goon will dare tread. Almost certainly the only reputable neurosurgeon in the system.”

“Uncle,” Ziyi gasped. She had a churning feeling in her gut, a suspicion of where this was going she didn’t dare think, lest the disappointment of being wrong crush her.

“It’s a very expensive favor BAWS is doing us,” Flatwell said. “A favor we could never have afforded without the success of ARGENT GAMBIT. Your success, Ziyi, and Dunham’s as well, rest his soul.”

Spit it out already, Uncle, you’re killing me!

“BAWS will be providing an all-frills-attached tenth-gen treatment,” he revealed. “You’re young enough the full workup should take without issue… assuming you want it…?”

“Yes?!” Ziyi exclaimed. “For the love of Coral, Uncle, you can’t think for a second I’d turn this down?!”

Flatwell grinned. “Good, because just as I said earlier, I didn’t have a plan lined up for the alternative. You’ll be heading out to BAWS’ HQ first thing tomorrow. They want to do their own medical workup, make sure you’re healthy before they throw you in a shuttle. Even with your recent injuries, it shouldn’t hold you up more than a week.”

Ziyi was barely listening; she was too busy staring at the ticket he had handed her in the form of a forged employment contract. Flatwell took it out of her hands and replaced it in the folder before handing both back.

“The Chief Security Officer at BAWS 1 will go over your legend when you arrive,” Flatwell continued. “They’ll explain what to say and how to act to get you through Arquebus’s tattered security cordon. You’ll be posing as a hotheaded mercenary hopeful in his department, so your normal attitude should suit fine as long as you don’t go swearing by Coral.”

“I’m not hotheaded,” Ziyi grumbled. “I’m impulsive at worst.”

“Then you’ll just look like you’re on your best behavior,” Flatwell said without missing a beat. He stepped back and saluted, and she barely had the presence of mind to return it.

“See you in a month, Index Ziyi.”

Chapter Text

The woman using the alias Kate Markson waited for the satellite connecting her to HQ to come online with fraying patience. A mission that had been expected to take three years was now in its ninth, and the hidden satellite had drifted slowly but surely out of position as maneuvering errors accumulated. What was supposed to be ninety minute communications window was down to only fifty-five, and would only get worse with time.

The satellite connected. Her report queue flushed, data streaming back to Sol for analysis. The communication window was not spent on ‘conversation’, due both to the fourteen second signal delay and the thoroughly one-sided process in which reports went one way and orders the other; rather, the window was the time between her superiors getting her reports and when they lost the opportunity to respond this cycle.

For lack of anything better to do, she reviewed her reports herself. In the time between her previous connection and this one, C4-621 had annihilated the Arquebus garrison on Belius, then crossed the ocean with the RLF’s shuttle to do the same thing to their Ice Fields outpost above the Coral deposit. Her drones did not have the necessary anti-air capable to interdict the shuttle, so she had no way to prevent C4-621 from going back and forth as it pleased.

Maybe HQ would give her an anti-aircraft schematic for the fab. It was fairly specialized, but they’d managed to get something intended to print 9m Spectre drones to produce the new, more combat-suitable 16m Ghosts, so it wasn’t out of the question. Or maybe they’d decide she should recruit the wildcard; that wouldn’t be out of character for the annoying and impossible tasks they had handed out since her exile.

Her reports also included her current plan to provide information support to Arquebus. Her drones had completed their survey of the no-man’s-land of Central Belius, and she’d been sitting on evidence of BAWS’ active collaboration with the terrorists for months. The latter could give Arquebus the casus belli necessary to take control of the so-called Corporate Holdings away from active terrorist sympathizers, strengthening their own position and cutting RLF support off at the knees in one stroke.

She had not done anything with the information yet—initiative was good, but so was waiting for confirmation of HQ’s approval before taking any action that could not be withdrawn. If they didn’t approve, they had plenty of time to stop her before she stirred the pot.

Lastly, one of the aerial reconnaissance drones she’d sent south into deep RLF territory had found… something. The UAVs were her only option for that theatre, since the state-of-the-art stealth systems that could make a mockery of the most advanced sensor technology were frustratingly incapable of defeating the mark I human eyeball, and her expectations had been low. The RLF were used to hiding from orbital satellites, so a handful of UAVs were unlikely to turn up anything interesting except by sheer luck.

She must have gotten lucky because ‘interesting’ is exactly what she’d found. The RLF had been conducting a weapons test as far from prying eyes as they could manage: what appeared to be some kind of snub-nosed terminal-guided railgun. It didn’t match anything in SOLINT’s database, so it had to have been produced locally… but at the same time, if any of the corporations operating on Rubicon were making weapons like that, she should know about it. It was a bothersome mystery made less bothersome only because it was now HQ’s problem.

The response came down only twenty minutes later—an unusually fast turnaround and an unusually brief response.

MAINTAIN CURRENT OBJECTIVES
ASSEMBLE DOSSIER ON RLF MILDOCT/HISTORY/CULTURE
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT INCOMING
NO RESPONSE EXPECTED

She couldn’t read MAINTAIN CURRENT OBJECTIVES as anything other than complete indifference to her activities, and the dossier request as make-work. And ‘ADDITONAL SUPPORT’? Had SOLINT’s old catspaw lashing out at their current one finally convinced them that operating an intercontinental intelligence operation wasn’t a one-woman job, or were they just going to finally replace Asset One after six months?

Well, if keeping her busy and away from HQ was what they wanted, that was what they would get.

She double-checked the dossier she’d prepared for Arquebus, calculated a price that would be high enough to mark the data as ‘valuable’ but low enough that they wouldn’t have to think too hard about buying it, and sent the offer from an identity she’d established as a data broker through ALLMIND. That complete, she turned to attention to a more personal matter.

There was one detail she’d left out of her report to HQ. A detail that, were it not of personal significance, she would have no reason to report.

The RLF had disabled two of her drones during their surveys of possible population centers. That was in the report because it was relevant, if insignificant to her operations. She had sent a third drone—a Spectre this time, smaller and less costly if it went missing too—in search of what the two had been killed to hide, and found the broken body of one of her Ghosts flickering in code. That was what she had omitted.

The Ghost’s self-destruct had failed, or more likely, been subverted. The wreck had been propped up against the wall of a tunnel, directly under one of the few bulbs still lit after fifty years. There was something almost artistic about its pose, slumped against the wall like a drunken vagrant, its fallen weapon playing the part of the bottle. The generator still functioned enough to send out sparks in an apparently random—but repeating—pattern.

Someone wanted this message found. Someone who could disable a ghost but wouldn’t salvage the remains had penned a message to someone who would have cause to look through that specific tunnel and the paranoia to look for text in the flickering spasms of a dead machine.

She’d translated the pulses to binary. She’d applied a half-dozen different ciphers, then a dozen, then two dozen. None had worked. And then one did—a cipher she’d used out of a mixture of boredom and frustration, a code that had no business being on Rubicon III at all. One with a very… personal history to her. One of those given to a specific team for their sole use in the field, never to be reused.

The gibberish bitstring had unfolded into a brief but legible message. A place, a time of day, and a way to arrange a meeting. There was no signature, no evidence of its sender except that unfalsifiable fingerprint in the means and encoding itself. Only five people had that cipher. One was dead, two were accounted for, and one was the recipient. The sender could only be the last.

She had not reported it to HQ because she knew the message had not been to ‘Kate Markson’ or even ‘Agent 8EF9W8Y3’ but to her. She had done nothing because she had a mission to do, and she would not deviate from it. But now…

If keeping her busy and away from HQ was what they wanted, that was what they would get.

She could afford to catch up with an old friend.

Chapter Text

It took less than a day before Raven judged herself well enough to pilot, and once she did, she would not be dissuaded by anything short of Chang ordering a medical hold. She wasn’t suicidal, and if a doctor thought it worth holding her against her will, she’d heed him lest Ayre found a way to knock her unconscious through her implants.

Chang called her decision to go back into battle that soon “no stupider than anything else you’ve done since you showed up on Rubicon”, so she was back in REASON’s cockpit, hooked up to its neural interface as Ayre finally explained her plan.

“By correlating the information I collected from Arquebus during our recent descent to Institute City with the intelligence on the Closure System BAWS has shared with the RLF, I’ve managed to identify the satellite where Arquebus has your handler in captivity.”

Ayre popped up an orbital plot onto Raven’s visual feed, which Raven felt was a little silly given how far beyond her orbital dynamics were.

“As of Arquebus’s most recent report, he is still alive and in fair health. Security on-site is minimal, intended to contain prisoners, not repel an attack.”

The visual feed swapped to a recent image of the nearby Ice Fields spaceport, taken from Arquebus’s observation of the area.

“Arquebus has allowed Balam full control over the local spaceport and the nearby refueling base rather than forcing a costly battle against a cornered opponent. All remaining Balam forces are concentrated there, including the four surviving Redguns: G5 Iguazu, G8 Gambia, G11 Yarqon, and G12 Torne.”

Ayre highlighted a portion of the image and increased the magnification, bringing an orbital shuttle into clear view.

“Balam has flatly refused our request for assistance, so we will need to acquire an orbital vehicle by force while simultaneously clearing the airspace.”

The image shifted to the refueling base across the canyon: specifically, one of the heavy AA emplacements Balam had set up there.

“Disable the surface-to-air cannons throughout the fuel depot, then cross the canyon and clear the spaceport so we can prepare the shuttle.”

Iguazu had spent his entire corporate mercenary career railing against the unfairness of having a corporate mercenary career. He’d been a decent ship’s engineer. He’d been a decent factory mechanic. He’d been a shitty gambler, but he’d only started that at all after his previous attempts at ‘a life’ had been ruined by corporate bullshit.

He’d directed most of his anger at Michigan, the man in charge of keeping him there, and who could blame him?

Volta, he guessed.

“Iguazu, I’m telling you, man, you gotta give Michigan a chance. He’s different from the suits at HQ. Look, I know he’s an asshole, but he’s looking out for us, you know? Almost like we got a family here, heh.

“Man, if there’s anyone who deserves punching out, it’s the freaks who sent us on this suicide mission. You picked a good day to go AWOL… wish I—”

The voice memo—holding the last words Volta would ever speak—cut out there. The man had zigged when he should have zagged and taken an artillery round even his heavily armored CANNON HEAD couldn’t shrug off. The ‘suicide mission’ had, in fact, been a suicide mission.

Iguazu couldn’t even describe himself and Volta as ‘friends’, really. They’d just been two losers trapped in a fucked-up situation together. He hadn’t expected to miss the bastard so much, and he’d only been angrier at Michigan for the way the bastard had seemed to honestly care.

“I don’t always love my job,” Michigan had said when he’d visited Iguazu in the brig to give him the bad news, “but I don’t hate anything as much as I hate losing people. Ruins my day every time. Even when it’s a shit-head like you, G5.”

Iguazu had told him to fuck off, and for once, Michigan had. He’d left Iguazu in the brig, obviously, but he had left. It hadn’t improved Iguazu’s opinion of him at the time.

One day, Iguazu had told Volta’s ghost. One day, I’m going to get the hell out of the Redguns, and I’m never looking back.

He hadn’t made good on that promise yet. He’d been stuck in the brig for most of the intervening time on account of the whole ‘desertion’ thing, only let out when Michigan found something suitably fucking insane to fling him at: a bloody fucking mechanical worm more than a kilometer long whose shields fucked with his implants and that ate armored cores. Iguazu had beaten the odds by surviving that thing at all. It had earned him a bizarrely large combat bonus, and his eventual freedom from the brig, if not the Redguns.

Then G1 Michigan and his entire MT force had died to some previously-third-rate Vesper popping off. His loss sent Balam reeling (strategically, at least; Iguazu doubted the corp cared about the man himself). G2 Nile had done his best to step up and organize the retreat to the nearby spaceport, but he’d vanished into thin air only a few days later, his AC still in the hangar. They’d never found a trace; best they could tell, he simply vanished between one step and the next crossing the courtyard one night, which was a wonderful source of nightmares for the rest of the Redguns! G3 Wu Huahai, always the opportunist, had already flipped sides by that point. G4 was just as fucking dead as he’d been for months, and G6 was ‘missing, presumed dead’ after Michigan’s defeat.

Iguazu had been back in the brig for fist-fighting a supply officer with a chip on his shoulder when some prick in a fancy suit arrived to give him the worst news of his life:

G5 Iguazu was now the ranking officer in charge of the few AC pilots Balam had left.

Everything about his new job sucked. The paperwork. The responsibility he’d never been trained for. The suits he had to answer to.

The thing that sucked most, Iguazu thought, was realizing that Volta had been right: Michigan was an asshole, but he wasn’t the problem. G1 might not have been indentured the way half his men were, but he’d still been stuck dealing the same corporate bullshit as the rest of them. More, even! Iguazu was gaining a better appreciation for the degree to which Michigan had been a buffer between his men and the motherfuckers at the top every day. The prick who’d wanted his ships to fly without fuel had been fucking reasonable compared to the shit the Balam Chief Sec Officer wanted. At least that corpo fuck had asked Iguazu to fly a ship and not a house! He hadn’t been aware that executive/reality disconnect came in ‘levels’, but it sure fucking did!

There was also the obvious issue that Iguazu was a pilot. He was a fairly good pilot, even, in large part because C4 augs were pretty fucking good for their age so long as no one was trying to kill him through them. He was a modestly good engineer as well; even Michigan had admitted the worth of HEADBRINGER’s customized Melander frame. What Iguazu was not was ‘a leader of men’. He wasn’t a general, a tactician, or even a particularly good example of anything but how to survive constant disappointment. Nothing but a foil to the fucking freelancer: Iguazu’s consistent failure to that bastard’s equally consistent success. He was a fucking joke, a running gag, a punchline where the punches were literal and never pulled.

One such joke was that ‘his’ surviving Redguns felt more or less the same way about Iguazu as Iguazu had felt about Michigan less than two weeks earlier. Iguazu wanted to scream at them. I fucking get it! I was in the same shit place as you less than a month ago and last I checked we’re still in the same shit place now, so work with me, you ungrateful fucks! He didn’t know much about leading, but he was pretty sure that would have made things worse. At least keeping his cool gave him some semblance of respectability.

The imbeciles he had to work with gave him a new appreciation for how frustrating Michigan must have found Iguazu himself. G8 Gambia was the sort of fucking clown who aspired to the mistakes Iguazu had made throughout his life. G11 Yarqon was a local stupid enough to join the Redguns by choice, though given the conditions on this shit-hole planet, it might have been the smartest option the poor kid had; he, like Red, had actually liked Michigan and was nothing if not disappointed in his replacement. G12 Torne was the only one of the three who wasn’t constantly giving him lip like G11 or outright insubordinate like G8, and he was without a doubt the worst fucking pilot Iguazu had ever seen.

Fucking Red, Iguazu often thought. Why did he have to fucking die, too? He probably couldn’t fill Michigan’s shoes, but at least he had the right attitude to try! But no, he’d been sent ahead of Michigan’s expedition into the Depths and had never come out. Either the PCA had gotten him or Arquebus had, and with the latter in complete control of the area, Balam would likely never recover his body or AC. Iguazu might not have liked Red, but he still hated having to leave him for the vultures. It was, if nothing else, a reminder that Iguazu would receive just as much ‘respect’ when he finally died.

And speak of the devil, he was pretty sure he’d just heard an explosion in the distance. Oh, hell, there it was—smoke from the Fuel Depot across the ravine.

“Depot security!” Iguazu yelled into HEADBRINGER’s comms. “What the hell is going on over there?”

“It’s Raven!” a panicked voice yelled back. “HQ! Raven is attacking the—aaaaaAAAA!”

Iguazu wanted to be mad, he really did—oh, who was he kidding, ‘mad’ was about the only emotion he felt these days other than ‘tired’. Right now, he was fucking furious. Of course the fucking freelancer was back to ruin his shit. That’s all the fucker ever did. Now he was back not just to humiliate Iguazu all over again and make the Balam suits even more intolerably dissatisfied with his performance, but to destroy the only hope Iguazu had of getting off this rock at all! No fuel meant no evacuation meant Iguazu and the Redguns get to die!

And he’d thought the CSO’s orders for him and his Redguns to stay in their ACs as much as possible was just more idiocy from a suit who’d realized for the first in his life that bullets would work on him, too. Iguazu had no idea why the man was even still on Rubicon; he would have been pissed if the fucker had taken the first ride off-world for himself, obviously, but at least it would have added some signal delay to his fucking micromanaging!

“Redguns, form up!” Iguazu yelled. “That damn freelancer is attacking our fuel supplies, the only chance we have of getting off this stupid planet! Get your asses in the air!”

Raven had just destroyed the second of the four anti-aircraft cannons when Balam started mustering a response.

“Depot security!” the unwelcome voice of G5 Iguazu came over Balam’s inadequately encrypted comms. “What the hell is going on over there?”

This asshole again, Raven thought as she cut through another squad of MTs blocking her path to the bridge across a gap knifing into the cliff face.

“It’s Raven! HQ! Raven is attacking the—aaaaaAAAA!”

Raven hadn’t intended to cut the cry for help short—she hadn’t checked which of the MTs in her way was transmitting—but it certainly sent a message.

“Redguns, form up!” Iguazu yelled. “Look alive! That damn freelancer is attacking our fuel supplies, the only chance we have of getting off this stupid planet! Get your asses in the air!”

Across the ravine, four bright dots—AC thrusters in Assault configuration—soared into the sky. One of them was clearly heading in the wrong direction.

“Is that G13?” G8 Gambia asked. “Oh hell no!” G12 Torne was audibly hyperventilating as he repeatedly mumbled “oh shit” into an open microphone.

“What are you doing, G8?” G11 Yarqon called out. “Don’t just leave us here, man!”

“Gambia, you fucking coward!” Iguazu raged. “Get back here and help us!”

“Fuck you, G5!” Gambia yelled back. “I’m not dying for your fucking paycheck you rotten bastard!”

“Well, at least we won’t have to deal with all of them,” Ayre said. “Balam’s higher ups must have been the ones to refuse our request if Iguazu thinks we’re here for the fuel.”

“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” Raven asked as she blasted the third AA cannon to scrap.

“He might back off if you explained that we just need a ride to orbit,” Ayre suggested.

Well, it was worth a shot. Raven opened a comm line. “G5 Iguazu. I am only attacking your anti-aircraft emplacements because Balam refused to—”

“Shut up!” Iguazu yelled. “Just shut up! I don’t care!”

“—loan me a shuttle to attack the Closure—”

“Shuuuuuuuut uuuuuuuup!!!!”

Raven closed the channel.

“Well that didn’t work, did it,” she muttered. She’d finished her run in the large, open industrial courtyard where she’d once killed two PCA EKDROMOI hunter-killers in the opening moves of the War; it’d serve as the arena for yet another clusterfuck today.

“Freelancer!” Iguazu scsreamed. “You bastard! You always ruin everything! Why can’t you just be happy with winning?”

HEADBRINGER entered combat mode as he made over the cliff, the generator rerouting the power it had used to get him across the gap back to weapons. “You’re a legend! Arquebus is terrified of you! We’re already beaten! But you’re still here because winning isn’t enough for you unless I lose!”

An icepick of pain stabbed into his brain next to his left eye, as he’d feared it would. He took his left hand off the (vestigial) control stick and clapped it over his eye with a scream of pain.

“Aaaa! My head! Why?! Why can’t you just fight me? Why do you have… to cheat…?”

His vision was swimming. His right eye wouldn’t focus properly. That side of his body was going numb. The icepick dug deeper.

He could hear a woman’s voice, every syllable resonating with the agony in his head. “…obsessed… …vendetta…”

“What? That voice! You’re the one who’s doing this to me!” is what Iguazu tried to say. His tongue and lips were having steadily more trouble forming words. Blackness crept in on the edges of his vision. The whole world tilted slowly clockwise and away from him and HEADBRINGER’s ACS did nothing to correct for it.

“You’re… the one… obsessed…”

Iguazu blacked out.

Raven watched, baffled, as HEADBRINGER failed to cut its assault boost. The customized Redguns AC carried on past her and slammed through a line of already-broken fuel containers before coming to rest half-embedded in the side of a building.

“I… I think he just suffered a stroke,” Ayre said, sounding somewhere between fascinated and horrified.

“I’m more concerned about the fact that he heard you,” Raven said as she engaged G12. The double shotguns and double missile launchers on VALIANT WILL were exactly the kind of kit a quartermaster would give someone they had zero expectations of landing a hit, and G12 Torne was more than living up to that expectation. He was also still audibly panicking over open comms; she muted him, then reconsidered and muted all Balam chatter instead.

“He definitely mentioned a ‘voice’,” Raven added, “and I think his last word was ‘obsessed’.”

Her LRA laser rifle and Ransetsu alternated shots as the poorly-trained pilot did their not-very-best at dodging the incoming fire, utterly failing to avoid her missiles in the process. A kick knocked the clumsy Redgun into ACS lockout, and a final burst from the Ransetsu-RF put him down.

“He’s another fourth-generation augmented human,” Ayre said. “His implants must have… oh. Oh. That’s unfortunate. He accused you of cheating because I’ve been causing problems with his implants every time we meet.”

“You can do that?” Raven asked. She fired the last two rounds in the Ransetsu’s magazine at G11, then started the auto-reload and swapped it into her shoulder bay. Moonlight-Redshift came out in its place as she dashed in to finish off her last opponent. Yarqon was no coward, she’d give him that; he fired off one last salvo of missiles and then braced to meet her blade to blade. A feigned charge she aborted with a quick boost aside let her dodge his slash and respond with a two hit sequence that wrecked HIERARCH’s right arm and tripped his ACS threshold—aaaaand he ejected. Smart. Raven canceled the charge she’d been building on her LRA.

“Not intentionally,” Ayre said. “I feel bad for him. No wonder he hated you—he must have thought you were using some kind of weapon to sabotage his implants.”

“Is that really worse than trying to kill him three separate times?” Raven asked as she shifted REASON out of combat mode for the brief flight across the ravine. “We were enemies. It’s not like I was just hurting him at random.”

Ayre’s reply was a psychic shrug.

The two final AA cannons were on opposite sides of the old spaceport. REASON flew overhead, raining down death from above with its missiles and rifles. Raven needed the spaceport clear in order to bring her support team in to prep the shuttle, so everything had to go. MTs, static emplacements, AA cannons, everything.

“Raven,” Ayre said. “I’m detecting a huge power source in the bay under the main installation! It’s… it’s a CATAPHRACT?”

“That’s going to be annoy…” Raven trailed off as she swung REASON down onto the field below the Spaceport’s plateau. “Ayre! That is not a CATAPHRACT!”

It had certainly been a CATAPHRACT at one point, but Balam R&D had happened in the meanwhile. They’d moved the primary 240mm gatling guns from their fixed emplacements to the turret and replaced the laser array cannon with what appeared to be a set of five spread-bazookas fixed to the starboard mount. What was once a relatively fragile MT chassis at its core, the CATAPHRACT’s only vulnerable point, had been up-armored into a heavy Tian-Qiang AC head, core, and legs.

“This is going to be very annoying,” Raven complained as she swung REASON through the BALAM CATAPHRACT’s path and unloaded both weapons on the Tian-Qiang core while she had an angle between it’s front treads. “I regret not bringing a grenade cannon, or the Stun Needle Launcher.”

The CATAPHRACT threw itself into a hard drift on the ice-covered field to bring the spread bazookas to bear. Raven had to throw REASON left-right-left as it unloaded them in sequence.

“Or one of those,” she griped as she managed to get a single shot onto the core unit before the CATAPHRACT zoomed off again. “I hate these things.” REASON gave chase, its LRA charging to full power. When the CATAPHRACT spun back around, Raven let it have it, the overcharged laser boiling away hundreds of kilograms of armor off the Tian-Qiang. The Ransetsu rounds she followed up with bounced off the red shield that suddenly appeared around the core unit.

“Balam traded the bulk of the useful PCA materiel for salvage rights for the Ice Worm,” Ayre recalled. “They must have reverse-engineered its shielding.”

“Well now I really wish I’d brought that damned Needle Launcher!” Raven griped. “Tell me you have a better way around that thing than ‘hit it until it breaks’?”

“Analyzing.”

Raven dodged out of the CATAPHRACT’s path once again, the enemy pilot more than happy to try and crush REASON under the tank’s weight.

“Balam’s engineers increased the weight a lot with the armor and shield generator,” Ayre said, “but they didn’t upgrade the drive system to compensate for the load. I’ve adjusted your FCS. Target the front tracks—around the armor skirt, if you can!”

“Meaning I still need to be right in its way,” Raven complained. The moment the CATAPHRACT came around for another pass, she discharged the fully charged LRA into the starboard tread, along with rapid taps of the Ransetsu in semi-auto and a flight of missiles that mostly splashed against armor. The CATAPHRACT responded with another ripple-fire from its bazookas.

“Am I even doing anything?”

“It’s working!” Ayre said. “Keep it up, Raven!”

“Right!”

The CATAPHRACT swerved around again. “It’s launching missiles!” Ayre warned as the massive 32-tube missile pod on the port mount opposite the scatter bazooka’s vomited forth a wave of bouncing red warheads.

“What the hell?” Raven asked. “Those are tiny versions of the ground-crawler missiles the Worm used.”

“They must have reverse engineered those, too,” Ayre said.

“Why?” Raven asked as she easily jumped REASON over the attack, still firing at the port tread. “They’re actively worse against ACs than sticking the same warhead on a Furlong fuselage.”

“They must have expected the unit to engage something other than ACs… or they just wanted somewhere to mount the technology for testing.”

The CATAPHRACT thundered forward, gatling guns blazing—and then one of the laser shots hit something important. Secondary explosions lit up under the armor skirting, and the entire machine slewed back and forth so wildly that Raven thought, for half a second, that it was going to manage to flip itself despite being three times wider than it was tall. Then the damaged track finally broke apart, shredding the armor skirt and even the further-up flank armor from the energy of its exit and bringing the whole machine to a grinding, shuddering halt.

“That’s done it!” Ayre cried. “The armor’s broken! Its flank is vulnerable!”

“You’re brilliant, Ayre!”

With the CATAPHRACT dead in the metaphorical water, Raven brought out the Coral Pulse-blade and started cutting. Three slashes put the weapon into its cooling cycle just as the LRA reached full charge, the lance of actinic blue energy digging deep into the crippled machine before the rifle too began venting heat.

“Raven–!”

Raven didn’t even look—she just dodged, REASON’s Nachtreiher hybrid-joint legs flinging them up and away.

The CATAPHRACT fired all five of its scatter bazookas at once, flinging forth a wall of death that could well have annihilated REASON in one shot. The relatively few bomblets close enough for their proximity fuses to trigger knocked REASON’s ACS into override on their own, and Raven grit her teeth and rode it out because the CATAPHRACT couldn’t bring its weapons to bear on her fast enough to matter. Its pilot had gotten it up and running again, the bare drive system on its port side throwing up a wall of sparks as it dragged across ash-laden ice on its journey to the far end of the lower spaceport area once flattened by the now-dead Ice Worm.

“You’ll be able to stun it again if you destroy the other track system,” Ayre suggested.

“Not necessary,” Raven said. “I’ve got one weak point already, and that’s all I’m going to need.” Better yet, the weak point was on the side, so she didn’t need to play chicken with a tank twenty times REASON’s mass anymore. She went back to the rifles, strafing and firing until one lucky Ransetsu round hit something vital. The BALAM CATAPHRACT detonated, a Coral explosion sending pieces of armor high enough that they landed on top of the air control tower more than a hundred meters overhead and about that many distant.

“There wasn’t anyone in that, right?” Raven asked.

“It was a manned unit,” Ayre said.

“I meant–”

“I will tell you the next time we meet a C-weapon with an infomorph in it, Raven.”

Chapter Text

“I feel like a pit bull having to put up with a chihuahua.”

— Sierpinski Chief Security Officer Marcus Emmanuel, caught on open mic discussing Balam’s recent aggression in the Saturn sphere, 152e/233

THEN

After more than an hour of biding his time, Balam CSO Nathaniel Bennett crawled out of his ruined command center into absolute carnage. He spent nearly a minute patting himself down for injury before he concluded that he was, miraculously, unharmed.

The spaceport was an utter wreck; he was so thoroughly surrounded by broken and burning MT wreckage that he had to clamber up the side of a ruined heavy unit to even judge that much, and the wind blowing over the ice had him climb back down in a hurry. At least all the burning wrecks blocked the breeze.

Turning his attention back to his previous location revealed that the command center was equally ruined after that horrible red machine had turned its guns from the mid-refit CATAPHRACT to the control bunker he’d taken over for his command staff. The old pre-Fires building had been built to withstand the AC weapons of its day, but technology had moved on; Bennett wasn’t sure if anyone else had survived, and he didn’t really care. If any of them were worth a damn they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

Idiots. He was surrounded by idiots. Idiots like Michigan, who didn’t understand the chain of command or the value of properly motivated personnel. Idiots like the engineers who insisted on listening to common grunts over educated men, and who took one of the PCA’s brain-damaged heavy tank designs and made it worse despite all the help he’d given them. Idiots like Iguazu, who decided to take a nap in the middle of combat.

Idiots one and all! It was a good thing he hadn’t left this war to his subordinates or they’d never have even found the Coral in the first place.

A massive crash nearly knocked Bennett over through sheer noise. He spun around to find himself facing SPIDERFACE, G8 Gambia’s weirdly-named four-legged machine. Where the hell had something that large been hiding? And it had been hiding; it was barely scratched!

Well, at least he had one AC pilot to work with. Bennett pulled the radio handset off his hip and tapped at the touchscreen to select the right channel.

“G8!” he barked. “Report!”

“Spaceport’s wrecked, boss,” Gambia said.

“I can see that, you imbecile!” Bennett snarled. “Don’t think I can’t see the lack of battle damage on your machine. What were you doing, hiding under your bed? Or are you too stupid to understand an order as simple as ‘Attack’, you mouth-breathing degenerate?”

SPIDERFACE looked down at Bennett for a moment before one of its legs kicked forward, sending an MT wreck flying across the ice to reduce the CSO to a long red smear.

“Oops,” Gambia said. “Guess he died in all the chaos.”

He cycled his comm channel to the secondary headquarters in the Fuel Depot.

“This is G8 Gambia. I’m afraid to report that CSO Bennett was killed by falling debris after evacuating his command post.”

NOW

Iguazu woke to the gentle beeping of a heart monitor. Hospitalized again, he thought. Well, at least he was alive. He wondered if any of the other Redguns were so lucky.

He opened his eyes. The world was a little blurry, but he could focus if he really meant if. The overlay he’d long grown used to was completely off, rather than hidden, so he’d need to plug himself in to get his interface back. That was annoying.

Iguazu found the call button on the arm of his bed and pressed it. A man in Balam medical scrubs arrived moments later, carrying a tablet.

“Sir,” he said. “Could you raise your arms, please, sir?”

Iguazu raised his arms. His right was trembling a bit but still worked.

“Good,” the man said. “You suffered a minor hemorrhagic stroke. Luckily, the enemy unit quit the field quickly, so we were able to get you out of your machine and into surgery in a hurry.”

“…a stroke?” Iguazu repeated. A fucking stroke? What the fuck was his luck—no, this wasn’t luck. It was the freelancer, and his… her? Huh. The freelancer was a woman the whole time.

Iguazu was a little surprised how little he cared about that revelation. The important thing was that the bitch had given him a stroke through his fucking implants. Murder, he could accept; that was merc business in a nutshell. Brain damage was fucking uncalled for.

“Very minor,” the doctor… nurse? medic? repeated. “You’ll feel some muscle weakness on your right side for a while, but you’ll recover quickly with physiotherapy.”

“What kind of surgery?” Iguazu asked. Had they cracked open his head again?

“We inserted a stent through the veins in your arm to patch the bleed from the inside.”

“That works?” Iguazu asked, having little idea about how the human body worked beyond that bullets made it stop. If he understood it right, they’d put a bandaid in his brain from the inside of the blood… tube. Vein. Whatever.

“Um… yes, that works,” the medic said.

Iguazu sighed. “Great. How long until I can pilot again?”

“Uh…” the medic said.

Iguazu did his best to glare with eyes that were still having a little trouble focusing.

“We’re not actually sure what caused the stroke, sir,” the medic said at last. “Augments shouldn’t do that, but given where the bleed was, we’re pretty sure they did, so… um, our best guess is that something went wrong during your augmentation surgery that left your brain, uh, vulnerable to hardware malfunctions.”

Hardware malfunctions. ‘Enemy action’ was more like it.

“How long, doc?” Iguazu repeated.

“Our medical advice is that you do not use your neural interface again,” the medic said.

“For how long?”

“Well… ever. The safest course of action would be to remove the implants completely, but, uh, them being off should be sufficient.” The man fidgeted nervously. “In accordance with Balam’s guidelines for pilots suffering career-ending injuries, you are being medically discharged from corporate security, effective, uh, four hours ago. I… hope you enjoy retirement, sir.”

Iguazu lay back and closed his eyes in despair. “I don’t get to retire,” he mumbled. “Do you have any idea how deep in debt I am?”

“I, uh, wouldn’t worry about that, sir,” the medic said. “You’re being retired as Balam’s CSO.”

Iguazu paused, cracking one eye open to regard the man. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I misheard you.”

“You’re being retired from the position of Balam’s Chief Security Officer.”

Iguazu’s brain reset.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“CSO Bennett died after attempting to flee the destruction of his command post,” the medic explained. “As you were the senior corporate security officer remaining in an active combat area, his position passed to you for… about forty minutes before the medical discharge.”

“What,” Iguazu said.

“I’ll get you a tablet to review your severance package,” the medic said, and then did so. The tablet laid it all bare.

Iguazu wasn’t just out of debt. He was ‘retire to a Martian villa with a live-in wait-staff’ levels of stupid rich. C-suite base severance, injured in the line of duty, combat hour bonuses backdated to the moment he’d ‘joined’ the Redguns… every line made his eyes pop at the number of zeros involved. It was fucking insane.

What was also fucking insane was that he had a message from the freelancer’s Operator, of all things, apologizing for the freelancer’s ‘experimental Coral interface technology’ causing resonance in his own implants, and including an ALLMIND® mercenary service credit transfer of a full million credits as an apology for the injury. That wasn’t chump change, even for an elite veteran like the freelancer.

The final bit of fucking insanity to this whole thing was that million was a fucking rounding error in his new wealth.

Iguazu spent a long many minutes staring up at the ceiling.

That damned freelancer. He—she had fried his brain to the point it was unsafe for him to keep piloting—accidentally, or so a million credits worth of ‘sorry’ said—then just happened to kill everyone upwards of him on the CorpSec ladder on the whole planet for… some fucking reason.

She’d given him a C-suite retirement package by pure accident.

Iguazu couldn’t help but laugh, half bitter and half hysterical. All the bad luck he’d ever had in his whole life had just swung back his way all at once, and it was all the freelancer’s fault.

If this new luck held, he’d never have cause to think of her again for the rest of his life.

ELSEWHERE

G8 Gambia and G11 Yarqon sat around a table in the Redguns’ improvised barracks. A space that should have been large enough for twelve felt awfully empty when it was just two.

Gambia was the first to speak.

“Not it.”

“Really?” Yarqon asked. “You don’t want to be in command?”

“I don’t want to be here at all, kid,” Gambia said. “No amount of money is worth this shit.”

“Try living without it before you say that,” Yarqon grumbled.

“Okay, fine, the difference between money and no money might be worth this shit,” Gambia allowed. “Shit. I can’t believe they trusted a local with an AC.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Yarqon demanded.

“Corpos are racist assholes,” Gambia said, raising his hands in a gesture of placation. “I got nothing against you, kid, but I’m still surprised they gave you a shot.”

Yarqon huffed and crossed his arms, glaring at the floor off to his right.

“Hey,” Gambia said. “Kid.”

“Stop calling me ‘kid’.”

“Stop being a kid, kid,” Gambia fired back. “Have you thought about, you know. Whether you’re coming with us when we ship out?”

“I wasn’t aware I had a choice,” Yarqon said.

“You got a bomb in your head?”

“What? No.”

“Then you always got a choice,” Gambia said. “You didn’t have to fight G13. Torne didn’t either, rest his dumb, clumsy ass. Iguazu damned well didn’t! You all just did it ’cause you were less scared of dying than running.”

“That’s not true.”

“The hell it ain’t. You always have a choice. Even with a bomb in your head—course, that means the other choice is always ‘or die’, but there’re things I wouldn’t choose over being popped off a la remote. Sometimes the choices fucking suck. Sometimes you’ve only got one single option that wouldn’t be in the top ten stupidest things anyone’s ever done. But if you ever think you don’t have any choice, it means you’re not looking for ’em.”

“Why do you care?” Yarqon snapped.

“Because becoming a pilot is the biggest regret of my life,” Gambia replied. “I’m not here to talk you out of it if it’s your dream or whatever, but for fuck’s sake, at least fucking think about it before you follow the rest of us off that cliff.”

Yarqon frowned and drummed his fingers on the card table.

“There’re no banks here,” he said. “I could try doing something through BAWS, I guess, but… my family is the whole reason I took this job, you know? Well, not exactly ‘this job’. I signed up to be an MT pilot.”

“Must have impressed Michigan,” Gambia said.

“Yeah.” Yarqon raised a hand to the cranial access post on the back of his head, a little synthskin flap the size of his thumb protecting the connector from dirt and dandruff.

“How close are you to paying it off?”

“Paying it off?” Yarqon repeated, confused.

Gambia sighed. “Fucking hell, kid. Did you not read the contract? How close are you to paying off the augs?”

“Of course I read the contract,” Yarqon snapped, “and I’m not paying off anything. I signed up because we’re flat broke, I wasn’t about to sign something that cost me more money.”

“Seriously? What generation did he give you, fifth?”

“Seventh.”

“Seventh,” Gambia repeated. “Huh. Yeah, I guess it’s old enough by now… you’re a lucky one, Yarqon. Damned lucky. No debt, no scars, and a family to go back to. You ship out with us and I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Yarqon sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

“You’re an ass, Gambia. But… thanks.”

Chapter Text

“That old thing, huh?” the crew chief—Espiga, his name was Espiga—asked Raven. “I mean, I guess it makes sense for the job. You gonna use it as is, or get the internals fixed up? We got about an hour before the shuttle will be ready to launch.”

The subject of discussion was LOADER 4, the C-2000 armored core frame Raven had first arrived on the planet in and then swiftly left gathering dust. It wasn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ frame, as ACs went, but it was an unappealingly jack-of-all-trades one, with no clear strengths to recommend it beyond its lack of weaknesses. She’d replaced it with things that suited her style better the moment she could afford them, and the only reason she hadn’t sold the old parts was that, as LOADER 4 was something Walter himself had provided her, she hadn’t been sure she had the authority to do so.

The reason she was thinking about the old C-2000 at all was neatly summed up in the name given the core part: the CC-2000 Orbiter, a part built specifically for extravehicular activity in space. The whole frame had been designed for exploration and asset recovery rather than combat before RaD had refit it into something more practical for mercenary work.

How much resistance are we expecting up there, exactly? Raven asked Ayre.

“Minimal to none that an AC would help with,” Ayre said. “The Closure System’s defenses are still offline, and Arquebus’s captured fleet assets are positioned to deal with ground targets, not orbital intercept. The catch is that we’ll be boarding a satellite that is not designed for AC traversal outside its hangers. You will have to… negotiate Walter’s release yourself.”

At least I can talk without feeling like an idiot now, she thought. Is Resaam sure he doesn’t want to come?

“He found the entire concept of spaceflight absolutely terrifying,” Ayre said. “He would much rather remain safely on Rubicon.”

“I’ll want the Coral generator in it,” Raven decided. “The smaller one.” Aside from any other concerns—like ‘mass’—the larger would be more comfortable for Resaam to make the flight back to Belius. “A Ludlow and the new Coral blade. Put bays on the back but leave them empty: I need my hands, not more guns. Buerzel thrusters.”

“Easy enough. You want a new paint job, or should we leave it as is?”

Raven rubbed her chin with one hand as she thought, the other drumming its fingers on the rim of her wheelchair.

“Do we have the color pattern from NIGHTFALL on file?”

Freud awoke feeling more tired than he’d been when he went to sleep. No, that wasn’t quite right: he was more rested now. The catch was that he was now rested enough to feel the full weight of his tiredness, where before he’d been too out of it to appreciate just how ruinously sleep-deprived he’d become.

He was more rested, at least, and no one had killed him overnight. He’d slept for… he checked the tablet on his nightstand. Eleven hours. He might need to reduce the dose he took of his sleeping pills. Or maybe he was just making up for the sleep he’d missed for the last week.

It was only at this point that Freud noticed he had forty-four missed messages from O’Keeffe, starting about two hours ago and carrying on for the next thirty minutes. Freud decided ‘reading through all of them’ was not his first resort and put a call through.

O’Keeffe didn’t pick up.

Whatever, Freud thought. He doffed his clothes, took a typically brief shower, and was halfway through dressing again when O’Keeffe called him back.

“O’Keeffe,” Freud mumbled, feeling every hour of sleep debt he still had.

“Freud!” O’Keeffe grumbled, sounding equally tired. “I was worried you were dead, you idiot! What have you been doing?”

“Sleeping,” Freud said. “What else would I be doing?”

“I don’t know! You certainly weren’t answering your fucking calls! Since when were you such a heavy sleeper?”

“I had to take some sleeping pills,” Freud admitted. It wasn’t an issue. This shit happened; that’s why sleeping pills existed in the first place.

“Fucking perfect,” O’Keeffe spat. “Well, you’re fucked now. I was trying to warn you that Raven was cleaving through the Balam spaceport!”

“Why would—”

“For a shuttle, you idiot!”

The words dumped ice-water down Freud’s spine.

“How long do I have?” he asked.

“This was hours ago, so five minutes if you’re lucky. Don’t bother trying to run, our shuttles aren’t fast enough. Do you even have an AC up there?”

Freud did not. He was pretty sure they didn’t even keep MTs up here. This satellite was supposed to stay hidden among a thousand other uninhabitable units just like it.

Some part of his brain was feeling irreverent enough to think, Security through obscurity strikes again.

“What do I do, O’Keeffe?” Freud begged, forgetting about his fear of the other man’s plots completely in the face of a much, much more immediate threat.

“The same thing I did,” O’Keeffe said. “Hope like hell she’s not there to kill you. Good luck. I’m going back to sleep.”

And then the bastard fucking hung up on him.

The recently rechristened ORBITER 4 fell free from the bay of the orbital shuttle and into a vast, grand blackness.

“It’s beautiful,” Ayre murmured. “I… I think I might be the first of my kind to ever leave Rubicon.”

She paused for a long time, drinking in the sight of the stars.

“Seeing the world from orbit is so much… more than I could have ever imagined, even having seen your memories. I don’t even know how to explain it.”

Nothing bad, I hope, Raven thought.

“No, not bad. It’s… it’s awe, I think. Awe to such an extent that I could have scarcely conceived of it before. Oh, this memory will be precious to me, Raven, and to everyone I share it with, I’m sure. I’m so glad I got to experience this with you.”

I’m glad, too, Raven thought. I never liked space travel, but there’s something… different when it’s like this. Just… floating, without really ‘going’ anywhere in the interplanetary sense. I think… I think this is what ‘Freedom’ might be supposed to feel like.

Orbiting, Raven couldn’t help but note, was just a very specific form of falling.

It’s not just the not-going-anywhere, she continued. The anxiety I always felt while traveling is gone, too. Maybe I trust my AC more than I ever trusted passenger ships. I know I can trust you a hundred times more than I could ever trust my family.

Ayre responded with a mental hug, her mind pressing close to Raven’s thoughts.

“Marking your destination,” Ayre said, returning to business. “At this range, it should be effective to close with it as you would in an inertial reference frame.”

So… just point myself at it and go?

“Yes, Raven, point yourself at it and go.”

Raven fired up ORBITER 4’s boosters. The Schneider Aerospace parts, optimized for use in Assault configuration, immediately proved their worth as they shot the pair of astronauts forward.

Walter had crossed the threshold from ‘actively resisting interrogation’ into ‘hopelessly bored’.

Yes, he was hungry, thirsty, and tired, but Arquebus had been extremely careful to keep all three such concerns squarely in the ‘uncomfortable’ range. More careful than necessary, in fact, and less willing to risk their prisoner’s health than made sense under the circumstances. Walter would describe his current mood as less ‘tortured’ and more ‘irritable’; less like he was being deprived of basic necessities and more like he was back in college during exam season.

Most people would consider getting a college degree and then turning around and going into mercenary work a waste. Walter hadn’t gone to college for his career, he’d gone to college because he wanted at least a basic primer in what the fuck his father had done to his victims, and he needed a few upper level psychiatry, neurology, and engineering courses to make sense even of what ‘little’ Carla could tell him about a field that was well outside her specialty.

Carla. What she’d called ‘little’ knowledge would’ve been the topic of an entire graduate-level series on Coral implants, and that wasn’t her specialty.

Damn it. Walter really, really hoped the old woman had made it out of RaD in one piece. The mission was important, of course, and her genius was invaluable, but there was also the plain fact that Carla had practically raised him after… after what his father had done. She’d looked after him even before the Fires had left them the only survivors of Institute City.

His mind was wandering. Of course it was wandering, there was nothing else to focus on in the room except the same table and door he’d spent nearly a week examining. The door that had just opened to admit Freud and another CorpSec officer.

Freud was holding a handgun at his side.

Ah, Walter thought. Time’s up.

The thought hurt. Not because he was about to die, but because of the consequences his failure would have on every generation to come. It would likely be less than a year before someone started work on C5, if SOLFED’s private labs hadn’t already gotten to work with what little Coral they’d secreted away after the Fires. The allure of Coral’s infinite promise was too great for humanity to resist.

“Get him up,” Freud barked, and the CorpSec goon hurried over and unlatched Walter’s cuff. Walter was a little surprised Freud didn’t just shoot him first; it would have been safer than moving a potentially dangerous prisoner.

Airlock, then, Walter thought as the goon dragged him over to Freud. Maybe he thinks I’ll reconsider on the way over.

Maybe he should. If the mission was ruined—no, Carla might still be out there. She might still come through. He couldn’t do anything that would risk even that slim possibility.

The room, no, the whole station shook like an earthquake, knocking the goon hauling him off balance enough that he and Walter tumbled to the floor at six-point-eight-meters-per-square-second. Walter knew this sensation perfectly well: it was what happened when an a-grav environment suffered a sudden acceleration of its own.

What the fuck?

“Get up!” Freud barked. He ignored the CorpSec man entirely, using the hand not holding his sidearm to drag Walter upright by the collar in the medium gravity of the station. “Move!”

“We’re under attack,” Walter realized. “SOLFED finally came to lay down the law?”

“Shut up! Move!”

Walter found the barrel of the pistol pressed firmly into his gut as Freud half-led, half-dragged him away.

There, Raven thought as the marked Satellite grew large enough to eclipse most of the sky ahead of her. A few pulses of ORBITER 4’s boosters brought it into… reasonably gentle contact with the station’s hull, the AC’s hands proving more than capable of finding purchase. Its CYWAR suite lit up.

“I’m working my way into their systems now,” Ayre said. It took her less than a minute before she continued, “Let’s see… there are two AC-compatible hangars on either side of the installation. V.I Freud appears to be moving Walter towards Hangar 2.”

We can’t let him think he can escape or he’ll just run back into the station interior, Raven thought. Can you prevent one set of hangar doors from opening, or should I sabotage them physically?

“‘Physically’ would send a clearer message. Damaging the outer doors and destroying their actuators will render the airlock useless until they’re repaired from the outside. Your blade should be more than capable of cutting through the armor.”

And that will flush V.I and Walter back towards Hangar 1.

“Where we’ll be waiting,” Ayre finished.

Freud had dragged Walter out of the interrogation and cell-block area and into the area reserved for the people the station was trying to keep comfortable when the lighting went from its normal white to warning red.

“Fuck!” Freud swore. He released Walter to put a finger on his earpiece. “What’s going on out there?”

The pistol stayed pressed to Walter’s gut. If he was ten years younger and one arm wholer, Walter might have made a play to wrestle it away from the Vesper. In his current state, it would be waste of effort. Freud wouldn’t even need to shoot him if he was intent on throwing him out an airlock—no, Walter had it wrong. This was never an execution; it was an evacuation.

The stubborn bastard hadn’t given up on him yet!

Freud was holding Walter close enough that if he listened very closely, he could pick up the reply through the earpiece. “…attacking the hanger! It’s destroying the outer doors!”

“Which hangar?!”

“2, sir!”

“Fuck!” Freud yelled. “Move!” He grabbed Walter by the arm again and started dragging him back through the center of the station again.

Walter complied with a great deal less stubbornness than he’d given V.I on the walk towards Hangar 2. He wasn’t eager to meet SOLFED’s enforcers either.

Chapter Text

“That’s done it,” Ayre said. “Between the damage to the actuators and the doors themselves, they’ll need to be repaired from the outside before they can use that airlock without depressurizing the entire hangar.”

And Walter?

“Moving back towards Hangar 1, just as planned.”

ORBITER 4 began climbing its way around to the opposite side of the station.

Freud was surprised his hands weren’t shaking.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been. Space combat wasn’t new to him. Usually he was on the bridge rather than running through the bowels of a ship or station, but he wasn’t unprepared for the idea that someone was actively trying to introduce him and the rest of the crew to the vacuum of space in a violent and spectacular fashion.

He was still terrified. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Terror could be a useful thing, if properly trained. It kept him awake, alert, and running for the hangar Raven wasn’t trying to cut her way into in search of him.

I should have brought LOCKSMITH, Freud thought. It wasn’t set up for null-gravity combat, but if Raven intended to board the station, he wouldn’t need it to be: the hangars could have provided just enough space for an AC-scale knife fight. As it was, he was just glad there were shuttles in each hangar for emergencies just like this one. O’Keeffe had told him not to run, but if Raven and her AC were in the station, Freud would take his chances in the black.

He dragged Walter past IntSec officers running to and fro as they tried to decide whether they were preparing to repel boarders or evacuating. Freud could have given them orders and been obeyed, but he wasn’t actually ‘in charge’ of IntSec the way he was of most of Arquebus’s CorpSec—the official org chart put that branch directly beneath the CSO alongside the Vespers—so he left them to figure it out themselves.

By the time Freud made it to the hangar, IntSec had decided they were repelling boarders from Hangar 2, so Hangar 1 was completely devoid of personnel. The small eight-person reentry vehicle he wanted was at the very end, nearest the airlock doors. He and his prisoner were about halfway there when those doors opened to reveal a nightmare in black and dark, desaturated brown, running lights glowing blood-red.

Freud was used to seeing ACs from ground level in maintenance bays and loading cranes. He was not used to seeing them move. In hindsight, he would realize he’d been too tired to see the obvious ploy—sabotage one Hangar to flush him towards the other. In the moment, his terror was no longer well-trained. The scale of the machine in motion, seen not from the vantage point of another AC but from that of an insect, nearly shut his brain off in terror. The gun it raised to point at him could fit his head in its barrel.

Raven had worked for months to get her speaking abilities to the point they now were. It had felt pointless, at times, but after Ayre had managed to move the progress she’d made into her implants, she’d finally felt like it had all been worth it. She’d had a voice again!

It was so horribly, horribly frustrating that all semblance of that voice fled at the sight of her handler. It was not aphasia tying her tongue now, not the battering her brain had taken on the operating table.

It was anxiety. Apprehension. Nerves.

Freud raised his pistol to point it at Walter’s temple, and Raven realized, belatedly, that focusing her attention on the two so hard had prompted ORBITER 4’s FCS to target them. The light machine gun, an autocannon in the form factor of an SMG relative to the AC holding it, was pointed squarely at the pair.

She needed to do something before she watched V.I spray her handler’s brain across the hangar floor.

Walter watched as LOADER 4—it was unmistakably LOADER 4, albeit with a paint job copied from the original holder of 621’s stolen license—stepped forward and raised its weapon to target him and his captor. The barrel of Freud’s pistol rose from his ribs to press uncomfortably into his temple in response, for whatever good that would do.

Walter fully expected 621 to just blow them both away then and there. It was only after a good two seconds of that not happening that he dared to hope this was a rescue and not an assassination. He’d done his best for 621, the same as he did all his hounds, but he was under no illusions about their relationship: he was a slave-owner and she was his slave. That he’d tried to be ‘gentle’ about it didn’t make him any less of a slaver, nor the practice any less cruel or dehumanizing.

She had a bomb in her head, for fuck’s sake! That he hadn’t asked for it and couldn’t imagine any situation in which he’d use it—short of her having a gun aimed at him, and that was a ‘maybe’—didn’t make that one fucking bit less awful!

Another three seconds passed.

LOADER 4 slowly, slowly, began to crouch. The machine gun lowered and swung to the side, held extended from the AC’s body. 621 laid it down on the hangar floor like… like a hostage negotiator slowly putting down a weapon at five-times scale.

Walter wanted to laugh. What the hell was she thinking? That Freud would drop his gun, too, like he was dealing with another human and not a ten meter tall war machine?

Freud removed the shaking pistol from Walter’s temple and pointed it at the ceiling, arm forming an L away from his body. He took two steps away from Walter, both hands raised, and dropped the gun.

What the fuck was wrong with these two?!

LOADER 4’s head turned from Freud back to the bulkhead into the hangar. Freud took the message for what it was and ran.

For the first time since he’d loaded her into that same damn frame nearly half a year ago, Walter and his Hound were alone in the same room… after a fashion.

“621,” he said at last, knowing her AC’s audio pickups would be able to hear him just fine in the quiet hangar. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

There was a long pause in which LOADER 4 retrieved its gun and stowed both it and what was left of one of Carla’s old Institute-project light-wave swords in its shoulder bays. Idly, he wondered if the latter still functioned without the bulk of the lensing apparatus, or if it had only broken during 621’s attempt to force her way into the other hangar.

“Walter,” his hound finally replied, her attempt at speaking softly utterly defeated by the sound system she was broadcasting over. “I am… happy to see you.”

LOADER 4 was still crouched down to the point it was nearly resting on its haunches, so Walter stepped forward into arm’s reach. It wasn’t so much a gesture of trust as an acknowledgment of who had control in this situation.

“I was wondering if you were here to rescue me or kill me,” Walter admitted. “Freud claimed you’d killed Carla.”

“I did.”

Walter’s eyes widened in surprise. “You did?”

“I didn’t want to!” 621 said, sounding like she was begging for forgiveness. “I didn’t want to. I liked her! I really did. But… I couldn’t let her live. Not free. I asked her to surrender, but she wouldn’t, so… I had to kill her. I’m sorry.”

Walter bowed in head in a moment of silence for both his friend and, quite possibly, their mission. If 621 had killed Carla—if she’d meant to—then that was likely that. His hound didn’t miss.

“Walter,” his hound said, turning down the speakers on LOADER 4 to the point he found himself leaning forward to pick up her words. “I know everything about the Institute and OVERSEER. About Carla, and the Coral Cascade Device.”

“The spark plug?” Walter guessed. “She never told me how Nagai started the fires.”

“It wasn’t Nagai,” his hound said. “It was Carla. That’s why… that’s why she had to die. I’m sorry.”

Walter huffed out a bitter laugh. “Justice, was it?”

“No,” his hound said. “Maybe I should have killed her for that, but… no. I killed her because she could do it again. She thought she could do it ‘right’ this time, kill the Coral for good, and… I can’t let that happen.”

Walter sighed and looked down at the deck plates between his feet. That was it, then. The last hope his mission had was dead-set against it. If knowing ‘everything’ about the Institute hadn’t convinced her, and if Carla, who he truly believed his hound had liked, couldn’t talk her around…

“Why?” he asked. “What possible reason could you have to defend the technology that nearly fried your brain?”

621 didn’t respond for a long few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I’m not… I’m not criticizing you. I’m not going to punish you.” Nothing would shut 621 down harder than feeling the sting of an authority figure’s disapproval, and he likely still counted at least as far as that trigger went. “Carla was your friend too; we’ll both miss her. I’m just…

“I’m trying to understand, 621. I meant everything I promised you. I hope I never gave you reason to doubt that… well, reason beyond the obvious. You didn’t have a lot of reason to trust someone who purchased you at a slave market, did you?”

He sighed.

“I understand if you thought you needed to run to have a chance, and I don’t blame you one bit, but I don’t understand what you’ve done since. I’m sure Carla would have told you the same thing: we had the money set aside for surgery. Pull the implants, flush the Coral out—”

“I don’t want it out!” 621 cut in with more passion than he’d ever heard from her. “I don’t—it’s fucked up, but Coral augmentation turned out to the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It wasn’t Coral that destroyed my life, Walter. It was everything that put me on the surgical table to begin with, and Coral got me out.”

Walter believed her. She’d come a long way in speech alone; maybe she really didn’t need the implants out to have a life after all. Her Coral burn-in was fairly mild as C4s went, and if she judged her quality of life good enough… but was she serious about it being ‘the best thing that’s ever happened to her’?

“You like piloting that much?” Walter asked.

“No,” 621 said. “It’s something I’m good at, and I enjoy being good at something for once, but it’s not something I enjoy for its own sake. It’s not the piloting, it’s…”

She trailed off.

“I… will you believe me, just for a moment, no matter how crazy I sound?” she asked. “You can doubt me all you want afterward, just… give me one minute where you believe everything I say.”

“I’m not sure I can promise that,” Walter admitted.

“Try.”

He didn’t really have many options, did he?

“I’ll try,” he promised.

“I told you I heard a voice after the surge at the Watchpoint back in Belius,” 621 began. “Remember?”

“I do.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination. Coral is a natural computing medium, and it can… how did she put it? It self-organizes into sapient networks under the right conditions. One of them made Contact with me during the surge. She’s been with me ever since. Carla thought she was in my head, another person in my brain, but she’s not. She can leave and affect other electronic systems with trace levels of Coral in them. She’s done it before. And… and I know, I think, why Carla rejected that so hard. Why she wouldn’t even entertain the thought.”

Something dark and jagged twisted in Walter’s gut. Surely Carla wouldn’t have told her…

“One of the Institute’s human test subjects made Contact with another infomorph fifty years ago. That’s what your father saw. He didn’t know that there were people living in the Coral, so he thought it was an effect he could reproduce in a lab, and years of trying and failing destroyed him.”

“Damn it, Carla,” Walter hissed, the old wound scraped raw by 621’s delusion. “She should never have told you that.”

“She didn’t. I learned it from the Coral infomorph who made contact fifty years ago. He was working the Coral processors in the Institute’s electronics—that’s what your father saw.”

“You’re lying,” Walter mumbled. “Or you’re wrong, or… no. It can’t be. That’s not possible.”

“But you understand, don’t you?” 621 pressed. “Destroying the Coral wouldn’t just wipe out a fuel source, or a drug. It would destroy an entire species. The first alien intelligence humanity has ever found. You’d… you can’t! I won’t allow it!”

“We have to,” Walter said, all but begging. “We have to, 621! It’s got to burn! You weren’t… you have no idea what happened back then! I wasn’t old enough to understand at the time, but I still remember! I remember watching my father lose his mind! I remember the ‘accident’ that killed my mother!” He was crying now, hot tears on the verge of spilling out of his eyes. “I can’t let it happen again, 621! I can’t! I can’t… not again. Never again. I can’t.”

“Even if kills an entire species?”

“Even then! Even if you’re right, even if they exist. We’ve already burned worlds, 621! What’s one more? What’s one more genocide to add to our tally, if it prevents that kind of horror from reaching all of humanity, every future generation living under the spectre of Coral mutilation?” He brushed the tears out of his eyes, for what little good it did. “The cinders have to burn. Or we will. Forever.”

621’s response was simple: LOADER 4 reached out its hand to crush him. He didn’t resist as the fingers closed around him; dying would be a mercy compared to living with his failure. Walter had no doubt he was going to die. AC actuators were never designed to handle anything more delicate than the massive armored grips of their weapons, and human bodies were far, far more delicate.

Pinch: noun. An event in which human material discovers its presence may impede, but cannot PREVENT, the movement of an AC’s actuators.

LOADER 4’s fingers tightened around him like a crash harness, with precision and gentleness he had been certain ACs weren’t capable of, and then he was lifted up, up, up onto its deck, his feet making unexpected contact with the metal. The hand released him, hovering around him to prevent his fall as he staggered from the unexpected freedom, and he had to catch himself against the palm before he found his balance.

The structure adjusted to the expose the pilot hatch, the invitation clear.

“Why?” her handler called down into the pilot capsule.

Raven’s answer did not require careful thought. “I would have spared Carla, if she had surrendered. I am sparing you because you did. I never hated you, Walter. I knew perfectly well how much worse you could have been, and I am grateful that you treated me as a person rather than property. You may have noticed you treated me better than I treated myself.

“Now climb down the hatch and let’s go home.”

LOADER-now-ORBITER 4 had never been adjusted for ease of entry—Elcano was the only manufacturer she’d encountered with first-party support for disability-accessible cores—so Walter had to climb, clumsily with only one arm to manage with, down the gap between the outer hatch and the inner pressure vessel and into Raven’s lap. He landed a bit too hard to be comfortable for either of them and cursed as his head banged against the front of her flight helmet.

The hatch closed, and the frame buttoned up for the flight back to the stolen shuttle. If she wasn’t looking at the back of his head, it would be the first time they’d seen each other face to face since he’d bought her.

“I still don’t understand,” Walter said. “Even if you forgive me for enslaving you, why spare me if you still think I’m trying to kill an entire species?”

“Many reasons,” Raven replied. “I do not know if you would consider us friends, but I value your company. Ayre—I’m sorry, I never introduced you. Ayre is the Coral infomorph who’s been my companion since the attack on Watchpoint Delta, she says hello—Ayre is confident that you cannot reproduce the Device we destroyed. I respect the dedication you have to your goals, even if I would die to prevent you from fulfilling them. I simply do not want to kill you. But above all…”

The airlock cycled, massive pumps draining cubic kilometers of air in seconds. The a-grav field in the lock shut off, leaving ORBITER 4 free to maneuver clear on its thrusters.

“…above all,” Raven concluded, “I’m sparing you because I had a choice. And this was mine.”

It felt like flying.

Chapter Text

It took a full week before Rusty saw Raven and Ayre again.

It was a very busy week—it wasn’t like Flatwell was keeping them apart deliberately—but it was still far too long for their preferences. They finally met in the newly reconquered Wall: a propaganda victory more than anything else, as it would take years they didn’t have to restore it to the unassailable-and-thus-useful fortress it had been before. That battle gave Raven the distinction of having climbed the Wall twice, with a symmetry to the outcomes that was tragic in its wastefulness.

Raven preferred to live with her team wherever they were burrowed, but she made a visit back to Gallia Dam at least in part to see Rusty, and was waiting in one of the guest-slash-officer room when he arrived. Rusty knocked twice on the door, then entered when invited and knelt down to give (and receive) a hug.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Raven said.

“So am I,” he said. “It’s good to see you two again.”

“Not exactly,” Raven said.

“‘Not exactly’?” Rusty repeated, confused.

“Not exactly ‘us two’ right now,” she said as she released the hug and tapped her temple the same way she had when she’d first revealed Ayre to him less than two short weeks ago. “You remember when I told you about how my people like to mingle their thoughts together like we’re temporarily one individual?”

“You’re all merged together right now,” Rusty said.

“I am!” Raven/Ayre said. “Or we are, if you prefer to think of it that way, but I still feel a single person. Flatwell was able to get these prostheses through BAWS”—she (Rusty would go with ‘she’ if she was going to use ‘I’) pointed at the two legs he had somehow overlooked attached to her stumps—“and they need Raven’s ability to walk and Ayre’s ability to manipulate Coral to work, so we thought it would be a good time to try it…”

Rusty held back a million questions about the experience and limited himself to practical questions like: “Did it work?”

Raven/Ayre looked down and kicked her legs, the knee and ankle joints working perfectly. “It did!” She smiled with undisguised joy, then looked up at Rusty with a blush and a much more shy smile. “I was waiting to try walking until you got here so you could, you know… catch me if I fell…?”

Rusty grinned back. “That sounds smart…” He trailed off, distracted by another detail he’d missed in the thrill of seeing his girlfriend(s) for the first time in a week.

“Are you doing something new with your hair?”

Raven/Ayre blushed fiercely and ran a hand through her hair to make the Coral red of her newly-grown roots more obvious. “I got exposed to even more Coral again, and I thought… you seemed interested in me having red hair, so rather than just getting dialysis…” She blushed even harder as her instinct to look away fought her desire to see his reaction. “Do you… like it?”

You, Rusty thought, are absolutely incorrigible.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll look amazing. You sure you won’t let me call you ‘Red’?”

Raven/Ayre stood up, balancing carefully on her new prosthetics with Rusty at the ready to catch her, then reached out to draw him into another hug, her lips by his ear.

“I think I do like ‘Red’ like this,” she whispered. “Ellos.”

Rusty shivered despite himself at the familiarity of using his old given name. He wasn’t really ‘Ellos’ anymore, not as he had been. That boy was as dead as his village, what remained buried so deep Rusty couldn’t have dug it up if he wanted to. (He wanted to. He was scared to.) But…

But he was done being Elliot. He was looking for a home. And home, he thought, might belong to ‘Ellos’ after all.

“Layla,” the man who called himself Cadza said.

“Marrick,” the woman who called herself Markson snarled back. “So this is where you’ve been hiding all these years.”

Despite standing more than twenty meters apart, neither had to raise their voice. In fact, the acoustics of the old access corridor running across the cliff face between the refinery towers made it fairly impossible not hear each individual rustle of the other’s clothing.

It was a toasty 1 degree Celsius inside the corridor, the metal still warm from a day spent baking beneath what sunlight made it past the Coral-churned particulate suspended in the upper atmosphere. The last embers of daylight slanted in from Markson’s right, the many gaps in the aging metal siding more than sufficient for illumination. Cadza had foregone a heavy active warming suit in favor of the lighter but still well-insulated RLF uniform of cold-weather pants, shirt, and coat with the hood pulled up to warm his ears and long-bald head, all markings of affiliation carefully unstitched. Markson wore a short-sleeved white business casual button-down shirt, a knee-length black skirt, and a pair of flats; her breath did not mist in the frigid air.

Cadza sighed as he pulled out a matchbook and an old-fashioned cigarette—the type you actually lit, a precious luxury he’d been saving for years in its hermetically-sealed case—and struck a match against the metal wall beside him. “Germania wasn’t my fault, Layla.”

“No, of course not,” Markson spat. “It was mine, wasn’t it?”

“It was neither of our fault,” Cadza said.

“That’s not what your report said, is it?”

“It said the same thing—”

“They took me apart, Marrick!” Markson shrieked. “I spent three days as nothing but a brain in a jar, on your word!”

“Nothing in my report would have justified that,” Cadza said, his voice as neutral and tired as ever. “It said exactly what happened: you had a split second to make a 50/50 call and you guessed wrong. No blame, no criticism. Kerrigan taking out his frustrations on you like the monster he was was none of my doing.”

“You think I believe that after the years we knew each other?”

Cadza took a long drag on his cigarette, then blew the smoke out in a long, narrow stream.

“You were always a psycho bitch, Layla,” he said. “You’re a reprehensible, serial-killing sadist with government backing and the kind of aug addiction psychologists would be writing doctoral theses on if your medical files weren’t classified blacker-than-black—but unlike you, I knew how to separate my work and personal life. We had a job, we did the job, we got the hell away from each other. It worked fine for years.”

“Until it didn’t.”

“I suppose so.”

Cadza smoked. Markson seethed.

“Why did you call me out here, Marrick?” Markson asked at last.

“To see if you’d come, mostly,” Cadza said. “I wasn’t sure it was you… but I figured if it was, you’d want to come spit in my face one last time before you got the hell off-world.”

“Your mistake,” Markson said. “I’m not going to settle for spitting on you, Marrick. I’ve wanted you dead for the last thirty years.”

“Huh,” Cadza said. “That’s still ten years shorter than I’d figured. Guess I didn’t make your kill list ’til the jar thing, yeah?”

Markson tightened her fists so hard the synthskin at her knuckles threatened to split. Her eyes scanned the walkway and the man in front of her in the visible spectrum, infrared, radio and subsonics and magnetic imaging. She’d surveyed the outside of the facility with her last drone before she’d approached and found much the same: no traps, no active electronics, not even a weapon that wouldn’t work on her anyway. The smug bastard had come to gloat completely unprotected.

“Enjoy your cigarette,” she snarled. “It’s the last one you’ll ever have.” She adjusted her stance to make sure both feet were over the support braces crisscrossing beneath the relatively thin metal shell of the walkway, then jumped. The whole walkway shuttered with the force of her piston-enhanced leap, then again as the compact AFP thrusters in each calf kicked in to send her flying down the corridor, right arm disassembling and locking its two 25cm blades together into a single sword aimed directly for Cadza’s eye—

The 41kg LR067 Harris APFSDS round took her dead-center halfway to her target.

The hypersonic round split the metal of the walkway open like the skin of an overripe fruit under the heel of an angry god. The wind of its passage put Cadza’s cigarette out from ten meters away, and he grumbled and struck another match to relight what little was left. As for its target… only a few drops of blood scattered across the crater in the rock face exposed by the now-ruined walkway betrayed that anything about the wreckage embedded in the stone had ever been human at all.

Cadza finished his smoke, removed the now-spent 105 dB-gated earplugs, then flicked them and the cigarette butt onto all that remained of his old teammate.

“Well, you were right about one thing, Layla,” he told the mangled remains as he turned to leave. “That was the last cigarette on this whole fucking planet.”

Outside, 1100 meters away, TRANQUIL MIST exited combat mode and took to the sky, its pilot eager to leave Rubicon behind.

Chapter Text

I’ve meant to write an Afterword—to shine a light on all the things that eventually produced Into the Grace, as well as put all my thoughts about the story and its accompanying ‘extras’, in order—for a long time. Originally, I planned to start writing this soon after the final chapter went up, but quickly found an excuse to procrastinate by deciding I should post the Afterword to mark the one-year anniversary of the story’s first chapter (2024-12-10). That day came and went without me even opening a document for it. I’m only now starting this in early/mid-January (2025-01-09) and I’m honestly unsure I’ll have it ready for the anniversary of the story’s last chapter (2025-02-06). Time will quite literally tell.

[Note: I managed to finish earlier than that.]

Before I get into things, I want to once again profusely thank @pheonix89. It is not an exaggeration to say that without her, this whole fic would be nothing but a few half-formed thoughts and idle musings left to wither and die as my interest in AC6 waned.

Now, with that extremely warranted thank you/accreditation/shout out done with… Into the Grace.

I had so much fun.

That’s always the goal of a passion project, isn’t it? This wasn’t a job or a chore or an obligation, it was something I did for fun. That ‘fun’ is what stands out about the project is a success unto itself.

I had so much fun at every step. The initial brainstorming, the what-ifs and snippets pheonix and I filled Discord with. The worldbuilding in all it’s breadth, depth, and detail: a game of fill-in-the-gaps, of hows and whys, people and places and events and history that exists not because it’s important but just to help the world feel that much more complete.¹ The writing itself was a blast, constructing the scenes, the dialogue, the characters and their voices, the funny turns of phrase², and a few jokes I think only I “get”. The revising, pouring over the same portions until whatever song I was listening at the time became inexorably linked to the scene in question³. It was a delight from start to finish, even the painful parts, and I wouldn’t trade anything for it.

I think the fun I had contributed a lot to story just on its own, really. I hold that the advice that “if it’s boring to write, it’s probably boring to read” is true, and more than that, I think sometimes the opposite is also true, and you can feel the joy that went into writing something when you read it. I had fun writing Into the Grace, and I think that made the story itself ‘fun’ in a way it wouldn’t be otherwise.

That’s just the fun I had just on the creative process; I haven’t even mentioned the fun of posting the story yet. I can barely describe the experience! The attention, reception, and especially interaction was bigger and better than I could have hoped. You were all wonderful, and I cannot express my gratitude enough for your time and feedback. I was as sad as anyone when it came to its inevitable conclusion.

The fun is what I remember, the specifics, less so. Sometimes much less so.

This fanfic, like so many others, started with someone (me) looking at canon and saying, ‘nope, don’t like that’. It’s probably obvious if you compare Ashes’ continuity to canon Armored Core 6, but I did not like Chapter 5, and especially not the AIE version and its ‘revelations’. I wanted a different story, and as fanfiction writers tend to do, I decided the best way to have that story was to write it myself.

I can clearly remember the initial idea: one that is, compared to the finished project, almost comically limited in scope. The concept I pitched about two weeks before I decided to actually write something was a five-chapter-ish character study that never left Walter’s interrogation cell from Chapter 1. The point of divergence—Raven not getting EMP’d after "Reach the Coral Convergence"—was already set, but as I envisioned it at the time, the entire fic would have been limited to Walter and Freud, in a featureless white room, trying to talk circles around one another.

I’d already decided that anything I may write in the AC6 fandom was going to ignore the entirety of NG++, so after that speculative what-if pitch sparked interest among my friends, the next thing I did was to ask, “If I cut all the NG++ ‘revelations’ on the basis that they’re narratively and thematically incoherent, then what’s driving the plot, and what’s behind things ALLMIND caused in NG?” That question started me on the worldbuilding path to what would become SOLFED as a coherent place and history, though that was still a long way off. A lot of things in the fic were thrown at the wall during this stage, like re-contextualizing Snail’s actions from a series of inexplicably self-sabotaging decisions to a diabolical plot⁴; most of the ideas didn’t stick, as is the nature of brainstorming, but the best ones did.

This is the place in the conceptualizing stage, post-pitch but still pre-plotting, where pheonix89’s contributions were the most essential⁵: playing off her ideas for her own canon divergence was critical in developing the wider Rubicon conflict, the internal corp politics, the characterizations of the corps themselves, and especially Raven. I had no clear concept of who Into the Grace’s Raven would be until pheonix’s own 621 OC showed me where to start, and we ended up building our 621’s side by side, sharing every idea that popped into our heads and then picking and choosing the ones that best suited our respective characters and plots.⁶ Walter and Freud’s subplot fell to the wayside as Raven became a truly interesting character in her own right, and the story concept evolved and expanded until it became what it is today.

This was where I started really nailing down the characters. Now that Walter and Freud’s conversation no longer needed to carry a whole fic, Freud went from ‘competitive with Walter’s mindgames’ to ‘overworked and heading for a breakdown’, which had the twin advantages of “connecting Walter’s scenes back to the rest of the action” and “being easier and more fun to write”. There are a few ‘canon’ characters who might as well be OCs with canon named slapped on—Durham and Ziyi come to mind—but I think the most interesting character work was for the ones who had enough screen time to be noticeably out-of-character if I strayed too far but not so much that there wasn’t a lot left for me to invent. The two examples coming to mind there are O’Keeffe and Dolmayan, perhaps because they were the characters most affected by my decision to cut out AIE’s canonicity.

For O’Keeffe, with the original ALLMIND plot cut, I didn’t have a lot to work with beyond his apathy and fatalism in his combat dialogue, but that was enough to create a character who was ‘close enough’ to his minor-canon-appearance-self to escape the ‘OC with canon name’ category. Ashes’ O’Keeffe ended up a delightful bundle of contradictions that I found really fun to work with: he’s a thoroughbred corpo who hates corporatism, can’t imagine a world in which he isn’t either the oppressor or the oppressed but knows which one is more comfortable, and is so good at his job that he gets away with being intentionally bad at his job because his greatest pleasure in life is intentionally fucking up in deniable or unnoticeable ways so as to cause problems for people he doesn't like, which is almost everyone. O’Keeffe’s general bitterness, ever-mounting frustration, and general fuck-this-shit attitude always made his PoV sections a treat to write.⁷

Dolmayan is another character without much canon characterization, especially after I decided to ignore AIE’s portions of his story. On the other hand, unlike O’Keeffe, Dolmayan’s history was too important to both his character and the wider world for me to simply fill in the outline of present-day Dolmayan; I needed to balance his historical significance, the few traits that were strongly established canon, and what served the story I wanted to tell. As such, I elected to work forward from his historic backstory to figure out who Ashes’ Dolmayan would be and his relation to other RLF characters, and that brainstorming would form a near-finished outline for Someone is Always Moving on the Surface.⁸

(An additional aside about Dolmayan, because no one ever noticed it, is that his RRI serial number, C1-442, was chosen quite deliberately: it should be read split 4 – 42, with 42 famously being ‘the answer to life, the universe, and everything’.)

As a last note before moving on, one throw-away bit of characterization I’m particularly fond of, which is also one of the ‘jokes only I get’ I mentioned in passing near the top, concerns Rusty. His long-winded monologue during his night in the RLF’s ‘dungeon’ is an effective bit of writing, I think, but it was clear to me even as I wrote it that it was very distinctly a bit of writing—something that might justifiably elicit the question, “Who thinks like this?” Rather than change that section, my solution was make the answer, “Rusty.” O’Keeffe’s recollection many chapters later of Rusty telling him, “The price of eating fruit from the tree of violence is to one day feed its roots in turn,” completely unprompted and without a hint of irony suggests that Into the Grace’s Rusty is just ‘like that’ when he starts sulking, and that amuses me a lot.

Looking back through my notes for this Afterword revealed just how little I remembered about how the characterizations, worldbuilding, and plot came together into an outline—and while I say ‘outline’, I never put most plans to paper beyond the continued back-and-forth of what-ifs⁹ with everyone willing to engage with the project.¹⁰ On the one hand, even the term ‘notes’ is fairly generous: what I actually have is brainstorming and worldbuilding and actual writing all mixed together whenever something occurred to me. On the other, the purely chronological order of instant messaging let me trace the development of the story through time as it happened, and the disorder itself shows just how much my enthusiasm for writing outpaced my patience for planning. I had the broad strokes in mind before I set to typing—or at least I think I did—but most of the specifics were up in the air all the way until the first draft hit them¹¹; in fact, it seems like no small number of things ended up back in the air after the first draft hit them.

Writing and then editing and revising the whole story before I started uploading did a lot of load-bearing work in the chaos. My previous work had a buffer, to be sure, but having a draft of the whole work to edit and revise was a new experience for me, and one I found more comfortable than a chapter by chapter write-edit-release schedule. Being able to go back and edit earlier chapters with impunity made up for skipping a few planning steps, but more than that, the whole thing felt almost ‘luxurious’. As a self-taught writer, every project ends up teaching me something, but my preference for a non-serialized workflow was an especially direct lesson.

I’m a little disappointed that the mess my alleged ‘notes’ are in means there’s far too much ‘creative process’ in far too little order to step through for the purpose of this Afterword (as if it needed to be any longer), but that didn’t mean there was nothing to learn from going through them. The thing that struck me most during my walk back through my messages (mostly due to how much it surprised me compared to ‘how I remembered it’) was how late into the process the track Fall -Into the grace-¹² entered the conversation. I knew how the fic was going to end fairly early in the writing process, and in my memories that included the title drop at the end; as it turned out, that title wasn’t even suggested until I was nearly halfway through the first draft¹³.

At the time, I was unsure about using the track (sub)title so directly. Naming a fic after a song was something I worried I’d regret; some of you have probably seen the memes about fanfics and song titles (and songs in general—anyone old enough to remember when ‘songfic’ was a pejorative?). The best explanation for this phenomenon I’ve seen is that whatever emotions a song evokes from you are specific to you, and it’s very unlikely to evoke similar emotions for your readers. Focusing on your emotional investment in a song is usually a way to write something solely for yourself, and while that’s fine if you set out to do it on purpose, it’s a recipe for disappointment if you want more than half a dozen readers.

In hindsight, I’m really glad I stuck with the song-title-as-fic-title temptation. Nothing I could’ve come up with would’ve been right, and of course, the end card it let me use continues to be a delight. The choice was focused on the title more than the song—I didn’t need to change a thing for the phrase to fit the story’s theme like a glove¹⁴—and I think that made all the difference when it came to avoiding the common song/fic pitfalls.

Extending the ‘Armored Core OST track titles’ pattern to the rest of Ashes of Rubicon was a little less ‘perfect’. There are some real stretches, but I don’t regret those, either; it’s a fun thing for me, and I don’t think anyone who doesn’t recognize the titles as song tracks is going to trip over them. There are plenty of fanfics with weirder titles than Someone Is Always Moving on the Surface.

On the topic of ‘the rest of Ashes of Rubicon’, I still have a bunch of Ashes-related ‘stuff’ (which technically doesn’t include a short but punchy one-shot that doesn’t quite fit into the series continuity) lying around mostly-edited yet unposted. I’ve returned to ItG over the last year many times—just about every time I get a comment, to be honest—and each time, I’ve found more and more things about it that I wish I had done better, or even just ‘differently’. It’s not a good feeling, and the easiest way to avoid that feeling was to avoid ‘dealing with’ the work altogether. I’ve popped in for a responses to comments or two, but that’s been it; I haven’t touched anything about the work itself, or its extras, in months.

It’s the classic cliche: I am my own worst critic.

I feel compelled to state¹⁵ that I’m not fishing for compliments here—you readers have already left so many lovely compliments on the chapters themselves. It’s not that I’ve suddenly decided Ashes of Rubicon is ‘bad’ and praise¹⁶ could convince me otherwise; I’m just unpleasantly dissatisfied with certain parts¹⁷, and the easiest way to avoid dwelling on those parts was to avoid working with the story or its extras: thus, near-radio silence for about half a year.

I will never be an objective viewer of my own work, but I can focus on the positives, too. I’m rightly proud of the work I put into Ashes of Rubicon, the final product, and especially its reception. It’s not perfect, but it wouldn’t be perfect if I’d spent ten Coral-forsaken years working on it. Perfect is the enemy of done, and I got it done. A complete fic is no small achievement! It was even pretty good, if I do say so myself.

I’ve already talked a lot about my chaotic and freeflowing process, Ashes’ specific takes on the more ‘peripheral’ characters, and how the plot came to be, so this seems like the perfect place to mention a couple of other things I’m please with. Starting with the general, I’m overall very happy with the prose and pacing, enough so that if I started listing every example I’d be here all day.

The THEN/NOW structure was an early experiment that ended up ‘clicking’ better than I’d hoped and gave me a solid but flexible foundation for structuring chapters, even the ones that didn’t make use of it. It offered an easy way to fill in background information and recent history when it became important without having to worry about fitting it into narration or flashbacks. It also gave me a narrative toy to play with and subvert; NOW/SIMULTANEOUSLY still makes me chuckle. As experiments go, I’d consider it a resounding success.

I’ve already mentioned the process of worldbuilding, but I love the result just as much, and I’m very satisfied with the hinted-at-but-never-fully-exposition-dumped view of the world the story offers. Having the setting filled out to extent I did gave me a wealth of background to reference directly and indirectly, which would all stay consistent no matter how much or little I went into it. I think the occasional return to details that might have been one-off, never-explained references helps sell the world as being ‘real’, or at least ‘complete’; in fact, going further, I think those end up ‘building trust’, for lack of a better term, between the reader and the world. Revisiting some things to explain and expand on them sets a precedent that all these tidbits have a story behind them, even the ones that never get another mention.

And, of course, I’m proud of the ending; in fact, it might be what I’m most proud of in the entire work. One of the most satisfying anecdotes I have to share about the writing process is that when I first described the ending to pheonix89, her immediate reaction was, ‘you can’t just end it there!’; days or maybe weeks later, I finally showed her the written ending, and her response was ‘oh, that’s perfect’.¹⁸ I thought so too; that final scene—the how and when the story cuts off and the emotional resonance from the whole arc coming together—are as perfect as I could ever hope to make them.

…and yet there are still so many things¹⁹ that I would do differently in hindsight, from minor prose and detail corrections to major worldbuilding elements that didn’t work out. I don’t want to focus on my regrets too heavily, but there is one I will address because it’s directly relevant to anyone still reading: the most pressing ‘problem’ Into the Grace presents me now that it’s finished—one which would require a rewrite rather than mere revision to rectify—is that the final few chapters wrapped up too much, too well, and left me without a clear sequel hook.

If your first thought is about how much is left unresolved when the curtain drops, this probably sounds weird, counterintuitive, or even ridiculous. The thing is, none of those many, many unresolved plot threads are what the story is about. Into the Grace is not a war story, it’s a character drama set against the backdrop of a war story. I could, conceivably, write the ‘rest’ of that war story, and it might even turn out to be a decent work, but it would lack a fundamental part of what makes Into the Grace what it is—perhaps the very thing people liked about it in the first place. Perhaps more to the point, it wouldn’t have the key element that made me so invested in writing this fic in the first place and so would likely never be written anyway.

I do often find myself tempted to try some kind of rewrite, both to address the things I wish I’d done differently and to give myself a better foundation for a sequel, but I keep getting caught up on the practicalities. Would I just post the rewritten fic again, on its own, as a sort of ‘second²⁰ draft’? How would people feel about there being multiple versions?²¹ Would any of the people who like Into the Grace as it is now want to read what is effectively “the fic, again, but not quite the one you like”? If not, how would they interact with a sequel that relies on a subtly different in-fic continuity? How would I deprecate the current version while preserving the wonderful conversations and compliments in the comments? I don’t know!

Then there’s the big problem. Even if I do the revision and produce a new version of Into the Grace that leaves me with a clear starting point for a sequel, I’m not confident I could write a follow-up even half as good as Into the Grace. This isn’t an uncommon fear in the creative field, doubly so when one’s first project is as successful as I consider Into the Grace to have been²², but it’s not just that. I don’t think I can match Into the Grace because Into the Grace has something I would struggle to repeat:

The key thing that made the Into the Grace work so damned well is the ending, not just because the ending itself is solid, but because it was strong enough to guide the whole writing process. I wrote the rest of the fic ‘towards’ that moment, and from there, everything fell into place. The ending feels so good because it satisfyingly concludes the character arc at the story’s heart at the same moment it concludes the story itself, letting me finish on the highest note in the whole thing.²³

I don’t know if I can do the same thing for a sequel. I know I don’t have anything like that in mind now. I have some stand-alone vignettes in mind for the immediate consequences of the story, but a whole sequel? Something that has an endpoint as clear and crisp and satisfying as Into the Grace? That’s a hard target to hit, and I regret the epilogue enough already; attaching a whole new story to the series only to have it fall as flat would feel like a disaster. Perhaps Ashes is better as a duology (and change²⁴).

Where do I go from here? For starters, I’ll work on editing and posting what I’ve already got. Most of it is the deeply self-indulgent “What If SOLFED Was AC6 Cannon” stuff—ficiton wiki pages, Reddit threads²⁵, and silly stuff like that. More important to me, however, is the AU-of-this-AU oneshot I alluded to earlier that I desperately want to share and am terrified no one will notice (because everyone has enjoyed Ashes of Rubicon and gone on to other things, and this wouldn’t even fit in the series anyway and would need to stand alone, and a dozen more anxiety-induced protests of decreasing sensibility). It’s a roughly 3000-word scene that grew from an idea pheonix89 put into my brain that would not leave me alone until I wrote it, and I need people to see it.

From there… I’m not sure. The questions I’ve asked here aren’t rhetorical; if my choices all look equally good (and bad), ‘audience input’ might be as good a tie-breaker as any. If there’s no rewrite, there’s no sequel; if there is a rewrite, there might²⁶ be a sequel; and if there’s no sequel, then some of those vignettes might be worth sharing on their own. I’m not promising to follow any consensus formed here, but I hope someone will share a bit of insight I’m missing while I can’t see the forest for the trees; all I can promise right now is that there will be something, even if it’s just self-indulgent nonsense with next to no bearing on the story, and I can only promise that because it’s already written.

I’m not sure if this meandering ramble constitutes a proper Afterword, but I am sure I don’t know how to tie it all together as a conclusion. Instead, I’ll end with one final heartfelt “Thank You” to all of you, and doubly so everyone who took the time to leave kudos and comments. Every single one warms my heart.

Thank you.

—Tempestuous

1: As a result, there’s a ton of background that never made it into the story or even the Codex, like the matter of how a mega-corp like Melanite “died in the Fires” and who’s making their weapons now. There is a whole canonical history behind that tidbit, but it was never relevant to the plot. I’d need to find a succinct in-universe source for it if I wanted to fit it into the Codex; by all rights, the hypothetical Codexipedia page on Melanite ought to be longer than Wikipedia’s page on Microsoft.

2: and the delight of spamming pheonix with half-written snippets I was particularly pleased with.

3: I may well associate the song In the End by The Anix with Ziyi’s last stand against the cavalry for the rest of my life, which is more than a little dissonant—but I wouldn’t have accidentally given myself that association in the first place if I didn’t enjoy some judicious soundtrack/story dissonance.

4: If these old DMs are accurate, this idea specifically came to me in the shower, as many great ideas do.

5: I cannot hope to pinpoint any given contribution as the most valuable, but this one is an unmistakable for-want-of-a-nail situation: no pheonix in this step would mean no fic, period.

6: and that was only the start of pheonix89’s contribution to what would become Into the Grace. There’s a reason I shout her out so fervently!

7: Someone commented on the story that the Ashes series has no less than four characters with subtly different ‘fuck this shit’ attitudes, which I attribute to a combination of “I like writing them” and “you’d feel the same if you had to deal with this clusterfuck”. The only people who actually want to be on Rubicon are the Coralists and the Coral itself.

8: I believe I’ve already alluded to it elsewhere, but I started turning that outline into what would become SiAMotS intending for it to serve as the flashback Dolmayan shares right after the mission briefing near the middle of the story. It quickly became obvious the story would be far too long for that, and I elected to make it its own thing rather than prune it down to a short, bare-bones summary.

9: Or more accurately, wouldn’t-it-be-fucked-up-ifs.

10: Most of these messages were directed at pheonix89, but NBBTCS also lent her input when I needed another opinion.

11: It’s possible, maybe even likely, that I had some things planned out further ahead than that, but “right when it became relevant” is often the time I chose to share and refine those plans, and it’s the sharing I have a record of.

12: The track title is given as Fall - Into the Grace on most music platforms, but From’s own website stylizes the title as Fall -Into the grace-, so that’s what I’m using here.

13: Not coincidently, I consider “halfway through the first draft” to be around the point that worrying about a story title is no longer premature.

14: If a fall from grace means losing (divine) sanction through failure or error, then falling into grace means achieving that sanction through failure or error. It’s a fascinating (to me) subversion of how we usually think about success and failure, and I could barely give a better example of ‘falling into grace’ than Raven’s arc in this story.

While she makes very few mistakes within Into the Grace itself (some readers counted zero; I personally count one), she arrives at the start of the story through a string of ‘failures’: the events that led to her augmentation (starting with a literal bad fall on the job stocking boxes); the near-completion of Walter’s mission, which cuts both ways as a failure to start such a terrible mission and as a failure to finish the job; her failure to be the dissociating automaton she wants to be to escape everything.

She starts the fic at the literal bottom of the deepest hole in the world, only to rise back up on her own wings all the way to orbit.

It might sound hackneyed when it’s all laid out naked like that, but it worked.

15: For reasons I will not be examining right now

16: Not that I’d decline…

17: By ‘parts’, I don’t mean solid portions of the story I’m unhappy with; it’s more like I’m finding an unsightly bit of lint once or twice a chapter. Sometimes I wonder if just hating one specific section rather than being hypercritical of six-dozen tiny, scattered imperfections wouldn’t be easier for me to cope with.

18: Both pheonix89 and I remember these messages, but while the second—the actual written excerpt and reaction—was easy enough to find, we couldn’t find the first one.

19: many of them admittedly ‘tiny’

20: and hopefully final

21: Coral forbid people form strong opinions about which of the two is better…

22: Into the Grace garnered attention and interaction—and community—beyond anything I could have hoped for. It’s completely unreal. Thank you all so much.

23: This is why I regret including the epilogue as it is: it took a wonderful stopping point and spoiled that ‘final impression’ with a poorly-supported follow-up to a plotline I failed to get people invested in.

24: That said, Ashes of Rubicon could have been a trilogy as it is. Into the Grace is about two novels in length with a clear ‘intermission’ near its middle that would make a decent place to split the whole into two stories, while Someone is Always Moving on the Surface only just clears the line from novella into novel. With a bit of reorganization and some edits, I could have Life in Ash, Someone is Always Moving on the Surface, and Into the Grace as three novel-length-ish works. Retitle the Dolmayan/Flatwell biopic to Life in Ash (keeping the emails as its prologue), making for a short book one; the first half of Into the Grace (up to about Chapter 33) forms book two as Someone is Always Moving on the Surface; and the second half retains its title as book three. If I were to do a full, comprehensive rewrite of Ashes, it’s a change I’d be strongly tempted to make, if only for possible print copies…

…but that’s only as likely as I am to solve all the problems I’ve mentioned, and even then it’s still less likely than just addressing some of the minor issues I have with Into the Grace.

25: The task of inventing 50-odd usernames to populate the threads may keep these in the WIP bin effectively forever: I can barely come up with one username when I need it.

26: This is a very strong ‘might’, to be clear, for all the reasons not directly connected to the “tied things up too well” issue.