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Compared to the previous two chapters, this one is rather short.
Sort of embarassing that it took me so long to come up with it.
Oh well.
---
'Throw me to the wolves,
Because theres order in the pack,
Throw me to the sky,
Because I know Im coming back,'
- 'Easily', Red Hot Chilli Peppers
He woke up falling ... or that was the closest he could come to describing how the odd 'not there' sensation that had suffused him until just a moment ago disappeared.
Wind whistled past, pressing against his front, even as the ground came closer and closer, cool against the slightly uncomfortable warmth of his skin, and its allotted aches and pains.
He twisted, shifting his center of mass to control the fall better, getting ready for the impact that would undoubtedly come. Oddly enough, he wasn't afraid, just mildly concerned. In fact, that was, confusion aside, the only emotion he was feeling. In and of itself, this was odd.
With a conviction bordering on certainty he knew that he needed to do something to actually slow his descent, or breaking his fall would be all too literal a description of the events that followed. Along with the breaking of several limbs, if he got lucky. If he didn't ... well, the less said about that, the better.
The realization was immediately followed up by a jolt, as if he'd fallen against some sort of invisible safety net that held firm, but still had a lot of give. It was surprisingly non-disconcerting.
For some reason, he landed on all fours, arms and legs bending to arrest the momentum of the already slowed fall, muscles flexing as they absorbed kinetic energy with a whoosh of assist servos ...
... waitaminute, servos?
Griever had the oddest feeling of ... well, it sort of felt as if his mind had hiccupped, before it settled back into place again.
'Oh, that's right. I'm a machine, aren't I?'
Metal rained down from the sky, twisted scraps and chunks of plating, flaming streams of fuel, even as the aftershocks of the explosions faded.
'What in the Nine Hells ...?'
The Battlemover raised its head, its currently quadruped stance shifting to allow for more elevation, and let its occupant intelligence look, with a kind of numb detachment that came with an inaudible sort of screaming, at where the two combat choppers had been hanging in the sky moments ago.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
Three->Pack Instinct
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
She took a deep drag, letting the synth-tobacco smoke of the cheap cancer stick fill her lungs, then exhaled - or rather, snorted out of sheer frustration. It had the effect of forcing the smoke out of her nostrils.
"Now _this_," she said, rubbing one temple, "is the sort of clusterfuck I haven't seen in years."
Let it be said that, in the course of her long and colorful career, Jeena Malso had seen many a clusterfuck. Initially when she'd been working for the early days' AD Police, then later as an independent contractor slash security consultant. One of those early ones cost her her arm, another claimed a person close to her ... and now it looked like her former partner was getting involved in something so far beyond dangerous it wasn't even funny.
She could feel it in the twinges of her cybernetic arm - whatever it was that was going on, there was going to be on hell of a fireworks display to top it off. It looked like her job would be to make sure the city was still standing afterwards.
All in all, not too much of a change from her ADP days.
Well, aside from the fact that the pay was better.
The ground around her, at the bottom of the drop into the Canyons, was littered with twisted metal and related debris. Remnants of two USSD attack choppers that had been dispatched last night to deal with ...
... well, it was looking less and less like a 'rogue' Battlemover. Jeena was more than smart enough to put two and two together. Smart enough that she sometimes managed to get more than four from that obvious an equation. Having worked for the ADP as long as she had, and then trying her hand at being a mercenary for a while, she was accustomed to being fed incomplete, or even entirely false information. She was also well aware that bad intelligence was the most common reason for getting killed in the field, so relying blindly on data supplied by her employers was not amongst the things she tended to do.
So she'd researched, and the picture being painted was as far from one to be described as pretty as she'd ever seen. The fact that the only place in the hospital which the Battlemover had 'visited' last night had been a blood bank only backed up her theory.
Though she had no solid information, she could imagine why Genaros had 33-S class boomers on board. Genom and its relations liked their fringe benefits, it looked like. The D.D. was just as easy to explain, scarily enough. Genom dealt in arms pretty much openly, and there was no way that a megacorp as large and power hungry as it was had no dealings in the black markets.
Still, there was definitely more going on here than that. Not that there was any information to implicate this, but she could read between the lines well enough. That, and she had a ... feeling.
With a sigh she broke from her reverie and went off to see what, if anything, the forensics team had found.
***
Cold.
Dispassionate.
Strange how she'd not noticed the undercurrent hadn't been there before. It had been another reason why she hadn't dismissed the ramblings of the intelligence possessing the Battlemover as just that - ramblings. Somehow, her empathic subroutines were analyzing data flowing directly from the superweapon linkage - most definitely not something either had been designed for.
What she felt from it now, though, only made her uneasy.
They'd not gone back to their previous hiding place, since it was more than likely that the Canyons, especially their edges, were likely still being scrutinized. Still, the Battlemover did remarkably well where ubran camouflage was concerned - something which had aided her own blood hunting expeditions in the past - for something of its size and bulk. It could be surprisingly quiet when the need arose.
Griever hadn't said almost anything in the interim, simple yes or no answers to her questions aside, and when they found suitable cover in the vicinity of a power conduit the Battlemover shifted back to bipedal, hunched down, and killed almost all of its systems.
Not that Sylvie was in a particularly talkative mood either. The discovery of Anri's absence at their shared apartment weighed heavily on her mind. The place hadn't been hastily abandoned either, from what she could see when she'd gone back there the night before. It had been cleaned out. In fact, it had been cleaned out so well that there was not even a trace hinting that they'd been living there for the past several weeks.
The silence stretched on, interrupted only by the deluge that fell from the sky as the clouds left over from the rainfall that had broken a few nights prior let loose the last of their load.
"I should be feeling something," Sylvie heard, the voice coming from the cockpit speakers seemingly thoughtful.
"What?" the 33-S startled, her own reverie interrupted by the words. "What do you mean, you should be feeling something?"
"I mean that I'd always thought I'd feel _something_ ..." the intelligence calling it/himself? Griever spoke. "Instead, I just feel vaguely disappointed."
"Disappointed?" the cyberoid tried to puzzle out his meaning.
"Yes," the head of the D.D. nodded, jerkily. "Disappointed my reserves are nearly down to just the batteries, disappointed that nothing productive came from your excursion, disappointed about a lot of things ..."
"It's alright to feel that way, I guess," hazarded Sylvie, her voice hesitant. "I know I'm more than disappointed that Anri was ... missing ... but then, you didn't know her ..."
***
NON-CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERRIDE: DISENGAGING
TERITIARY CLUSTERS 0015-6656 RECONNECTING TO NETWORK CORE
TERITIARY FEEDBACK SUBROUTINES: OFFLINE
RE-ENGAGE: y/n?
Y
***
"Blood and ashes!" the giant mechanoid body reared up, making Sylvie clutch at the controls in an effort not to be dislodged from within the still open cockpit. "I could care less about that! I killed people today! And I feel _nothing_, save for a vague sense of regret about the wasted _resources_! I should be upset! Angry!"
The crash of concrete breaking when it met with the Battlemover's armored fist was loud enough to sound like a thunderclap in the confined space of the chamber.
"Sort of like you are now?" a wild-eyed Sylvie asked after the mech had frozen in mid swing, its other fist raised to put a matching second hole in the wall. The displays within the cockpit flickered, went dark for a moment, then flashed back on.
***
"I thought I was the one supposed to look like hell warmed over, Daley," Leon McNichol quipped from the hospital bed as the redhead knocked once, a sharp rap of the knuckles against the frame of the open door, and entered.
And immediately dropped into the armchair that somebody had put in the room ... well, it must have been sometime during the morning, when Leon was sleeping. It had been hard enough for the wounded ADP detective to actually fall asleep but when he did he slept like a log. Not without the occasional nightmare, but one got used to those after a while ...
'And how sad is that?', Leon thought with a mental wince.
"Yeah, well, you try dealing with the circus out there and see how you feel afterwards, Leon-chan," Daley groaned.
"What the hell is going on out there, anyway?" the bedridden ADP officer asked. It wasn't that he didn't have ideas - and he wasn't about the believe that this had been a normal boomer rampage either, like the news was stating - it was simply that Daley had actual information, which was preferable.
"You dance partner from a few nights ago has everybody and their pet dog riled up," there was a shadow of a wry grin on the tired face of Daley Wong for a moment. "Add to that some hotshot USSD freelance showing up and pulling 'rank' on us ... I haven't seen that sort of hardcase since, well, the last time I came to visit you."
"Great, just what we need. This mystery freelancer have a name?"
"Oh, of course she does," Daley grimaced, which looked really strange on his usually cheerful face. "I just doubt it's the one she gave."
***
"Kusanagi," she leaned back in the ratty recliner that looked like a relic of pre-Kanto Tokyo, judging by the wear on the leather ... what little was left of it. "Talk to me."
"You're on," the voice on the other end of the line was tinny ... much like she knew hers sounded on that end. The voice scramblers both sides used were as much there for security as they were for anonymity. "The higher ups are giving this a go and authorization. Especially with a tactical nuclear weapon loose inside the city. This could be the push we've been wanting for the past few years, Captain."
"Pfft, shyeah," she hissed, exhaling tobacco smoke in the process. It drifted through several beams of light penetrating through the not entirely drawn blinds in the small room's window. "You know as well as I do that they'll yank it as soon as they have an excuse to have people stop sniffing about here. Too many fingers in this pie to be entirely comfortable."
"... unfortunately," her contact officer confirmed. "Unless you move fast enough to steamroll past the bureaucracy."
"Don't know if that's doable," was the reply. "It'd be about as sane as tap-dancing through a minefield, blindfolded and in the rain. This isn't exactly the sort of situation you can rush, you know."
"This is different from your other OPs how, exactly? You didn't get chosen for this one just because you've got home field advantage," the voice huffed, still detached and impersonal. "Since when did you get this cautious."
"Oh, I don't know, maybe since the time I lost my other fucking arm," she growled into the receiver. "Kusanagi, out."
She slipped the scrambler from the mouthpiece and slammed the phone back into its cradle, the cheap plastic cracking with the force of impact. Not that it was that important a fact. Contact was never from the same place twice, unless there really was no other option. Right now, the line was being quietly and unobtrusively disconnected from the network, likely never to be used again.
Jeena Malso was left sitting in the darkness of a slowly passing dusk, brooding.
***
"Better?"
"No, not really. But it's going. It's going."
Normally, his mind would have thrown at least one Blade Runner comparison regarding the nightlife of the Canyons in general and the region known as Timex City in particular, but he was still too wrung out to even contemplate such.
Which, when he'd have time enough to think about it, proved that even if it turned out that he wasn't what he remembered being, the simulation thereof was close enough for government work.
Then and there, though, he and Sylvie were both dealing with the aftermath, and the accrued stress of the past days and nights in the only way that seemed even remotely practical.
Keeping busy in order to not think about it.
It helped, somewhat.
The blowup was the better part of three weeks in the past, and relations were still ... strained. Both remained driven, they could feel that much ... it was a quiet, grim sort of drive, though.
Perched atop a decrepit ... well, it looked like it had once been a high-rise. Post quake, it had lost around half its height, and the lower parts had become a haven for squatters. The currently quadruped Battlemover could have been compared to some sort of giant spider, lying in wait.
Tracking a cyberdoc down in Timex and the outlying area wasn't a problem. You could barely walk ten meters without tripping on one, or so it seemed.
Most of those were hacks. Cheap hacks. Cheap and unskilled hacks. Good enough to handle some basic hardware, sometimes a bit more ...
... and not people either of them were willing to let take a stab at modifying any cyberoid, much less a 33-S, and much less Sylvie.
And you could bet that every single one of those considered themselves to be the best in the business in the district, regardless of fact.
It's amazing what some mild persuasion in the right place can make people admit, though. And Sylive was pretty good at that. The simple fact that she was, as it turned out, also very good at scaring the crap out of people was an advantage here.
Two days into the search, they had an address.
Three days in, they had a lead.
Four days in ... they had a job.
"#Stop daydreaming, you two. Movement.#"
The crackling voice wasn't a result of shoddy transmission hardware. Not exactly. It was pretty much unrecognizable, though, other than to those who'd heard it before and _knew_ the reason ...
"I see them," Sylvie nodded. She was perched atop the top of the D.D., sitting on top of the thruster assembly and observing the area beyond and below the wrecked walls that obscured the mecha from sight of the general populace by means of a pair of high powered spotters' binocs.
A cable trailing from their side and into the Battlemover's cockpit relayed that image ...
It was a question of funds, really. Or rather, it usually would have been. Closer to being an 'exchange of services' now, though.
Kiba, though it was sure as rain that it wasn't a real name, had something they wanted. They had something to offer that made such an exchange feasible.
You could consider the Canyons a city in its own right. A world right beyond the looking glass. Timex and its surroundings were relatively civilized, but there were more gangs out in what you'd call the Badlands than a person could usually be bothered to count. Not to mention ...
... there was nothing distinguishing about the rubble beyond and below. Not at first glance. Not until you got a glimpse of some shipping schedules, put up some surveillance. And know that some banks are paranoid enough to really build to last. Not that there was anything of the original contents still left. The underground vault had survived, though. That was valuable, in and of itself.
Never let it be said that scavengers don't take advantage of every inch they get.
Down below, three vans, all of them looking off-road certified and armored, drove into a cleverly concealed garage.
Sylvie disconnected the binocs and slid from the armored carpace of the Battlemover.
The mech rose up, shifting to bipedal mode and opening the cockpit.
"Is it them?" the machine spoke. Or rather, the speakers inside the cockpit relayed the transmission that went out on tightbeam, bounced from a relay hidden on an old and crooked radio tower in the distance, and continued onwards to ...
"#You doubt me? I'm shocked.#" Kiba's voice came, sounding amused. Or at least both the D.D. and the 33-S thought so. It was always hard to tell.
"Better safe than sorry?" Sylvie replied with a shrug.
"#Funny. Yes, it is them. Right on schedule, too.#"
"I suppose we'd best get to work, then," Griever 'said'. "Sylvie?"
"Hai," she responded after a moment. The cockpit was momentarily filled with a series of mechanical hisses as servo motors and myomer synchronization sleeves were fit into position. "Uplink. Connection."
From the outside, it looked as if the Battlemover had tensed, waiting for something ...
... it didn't wait long.
***
"How'd it work?"
Kiba was her street name. Griever wondered whether the arms dealer ever used whatever she'd been born with.
Certainly, he'd had his doubts about that. There wasn't one thing about the woman that wasn't ambiguous, in one way or another. White hair, features a mix of those found throughout Eastern Asia ... and about as much chrome as an old Harley Davidson. The street name came from the simple fact that she'd had, at some point in time, her lower jaw replaced with cybernetics.
She was also one of the premier arms dealers of the Canyons, though her selections edged more towards tied and true ones than cutting edge tech ... still, that only meant that she had a pretty steady cash flow going, with a nominal guarantee that it wouldn't just cut off one day.
She also subcontracted. Which was how the D.D. and its 'pilot' had found their way to her. The nominally best cyberdoc in the area owed her.
An exchange of services had been arranged. Then another.
And the results of the second one ...
"It worked," the D.D.'s PA relayed the reply. "No real opposition to run it through its paces on, though."
And apparently, the idea of a self-aware Battlemover and its partner wasn't one that had as much as fazed her. She was one of 'those' people.
She'd also managed to get the Battlemover to as close to being ready for combat operation as it had been when first rolling from the assembly line, though with some concessions.
The 25mm Gattling the D.D. had been initially equipped with had been discarded. The damaged barrels hadn't been good for accuracy. Instead, the arms dealer had somehow come up with a decades old Russian 30mm chaingun, adapting and mounting that on the hardpoint without any considerable difficulty. The old Shipunov wasn't on par where rate of fire was concerned, but made up for it with the added mass of the projectiles ...
Fuel cells, some replacement armor plates, RPG ammunition, a cyberdoc ... it added up.
Him and Sylvie both acknowledged that they owed her. Hence the recent excursion ... or should that be sortie.
"Could you spool the rpm down a little, though? It felt like it was about to jam once or twice out there."
"Right," the woman frowned. "Where's your little Okami-chan gone, anyway?"
"She had something to do," Griever 'said', in a tone that served as a shrug. "Shouldn't be getting into too much trouble."
***
The smell of cigarette smoke intermingling with sweat and a tinge of alcohol. The pounding beat that seemed to penetrate deep down to the very bone.
Faster.
Always faster.
Chasing that ever elusive chord, the perfect pitch, drifting around metaphorical corners on the wings of a melody.
It was what made her such a good biker, and what ultimately carried her past mediocre and into the 'pretty damn good' category of singers and songwriters ...
Priscilla S. Asagiri had been born for the chase, no matter what form it took.
She had the singular ability to concentrate and bring more than one hundred percent of performance when she had a set goal.
Tonight, the goal had been forgetting.
It hadn't quite worked, the singer realized as she stuck her head under a faucet in what had become her dressing room in the 'Hot Legs' and started the cold water.
But, she completed the thought as she shut the water off and toweled her brown hair off into a shaggy but dry mess, the chase that night had been damn good nonetheless.
The rest of the night, she could relax to the afterglow.
Or so she'd assumed as she walked back into the front of the club, intending to get a drink and maybe have a little laugh at whoever was up performing. Luckily, the proprietor actually had some standards with regards as to who got to try their mettle on stage ...
"The usual," she slumped onto a bar chair, though the slump was a relaxed one rather than a drop-dead-exhausted one. Hmm, it sounded like an old tune was up, from the way the guitar opener sounded. Could be interesting if done well.
"Oh, hey, Priss. Your friend from a while ago showed up and decided to try out her voice," the bartender mentioned, inclining his head to where the stage was.
The drink was presented to her, she picked it up, brought it up to her lips ...
... and froze.
'Out of winter came a warhorse of steel
I've never killed a woman before
But I know how it feels
I know you'd have gone insane
If you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for
Sanctuary from the law
I met up with a stranger last night
To keep me alive
He spends all his time on gambling
And guns to survive
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
So give me Sanctuary from the law
And I'll be alright
Just give me Sanctuary from the law
And love me tonight...tonight
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
I can laugh at the wind
I can howl at the rain
Down in the canyon or out on the plains
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
So give me Sanctuary from the law
And I'll be alright
Just me Sanctuary from the law
And love me tonight ... tonight'
Priss spun around on the barstool, drink still frozen at her lips, eyes wide in ... disbelief?
She stood, head bowed, in the center of the stage. Biking leathers, wildish looking grey hair, and amber eyes looking right back at Priss.
"Sylvie?"
***
An eminently bad day was being had by all. All AD Police officers on site, that is.
Two in particular, though.
"Jeez, what went through here, Godzilla?" Daley asked, rubbing the back of his head in exasperation.
The place was a mess, both topside and the unofficial area below ... scrap metal, debris, bodies ... not a pretty sight at all. AD Police officers, their CSI unit included, milled around.
Or very much the contrary, if you changed your perspective around a little.
"I think I know," Leon answered him, frowning at a particular set of indentations. What looked like giant footprints in the more brittle, old concrete.
"Oh? Oh. Oh!" his partner realized. "Oh, damn. That means ..."
"... that we'll be taking over, gentlemen," a voice from behind the two said.
Amazingly, to Daley anyway, Leon just groaned and rubbed his forehead.
"Been a while," the senior ADP officer commented after a moment.
"Not as long as you'd think, rookie."
"In my defense, I thought I was hallucinating. Didn't catch you joining up, Jeena."
"Well, it pays well. The hours are crap, though. The ADP still doesn't fill the first of that pair, it looks like."
Daley blinked.
"Wait, you're _that_ Jeena Malso?"
Leon groaned again, just knowing that ...
"Does that mean you have some embarrassing stories to tell about Leon-chan here?"
***
END Pack Instinct
---
Now if the next part doesn't take the better part of ... was that two years now? ... to write, I'll be bloody exstatic.
Ja ne,
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
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