Title: Transhuman Aliens
Series Title: Mass Effect/ Eclipse Phase (MEEP)
Author: curiousyellow
COPYLEFT:
I don't own any IP involved in this work of fiction. Everything here should qualify as a parody. If you don't get the joke, then you're probably a lawyer. It is very dry humor. Also, I disavow the legitimacy of IP as a legitimate form of property. Do with this as you like. For more information, please read "Against Intellectual Monopoly" available for free at: (CENSORED BY SITE?).
METADATA:
This is a piece of fiction derived from the Eclipse Phase game I used to run. It's core theme: "What would happen if Transhumans from Eclipse Phase had their First Contact with the Space Opera Mass Effect setting during the Relay 314 Incident?" Continuity ends pretty much immediately, but people seem to think it's interesting anyway. If you hate this genre or kittens, you should leave immediately and go reread your Spock/Voldemort slash fics you love so much.
Eclipse Phase is amazing, check out their website: (CENSORED BY SITE?)
It is also CC-licensed, so PDF redistribution is permitted. Go google "eclipse phase pdf" and you can get a legal free copy for yourself.
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Chapter 5:
Approaching the landing pads at the top of the apartment building where the safe-house was contained were six squad-cars bearing the Republic of Illium Civil Authority logo on the side. They flew in small tense formations of three, as though expecting to have to maneuver to avoid some kind attack from the surface below them at any moment. Joining them were another six squad-cars at the "ground level" where the building could be accessed on foot from the current arcology deck level. All of these sky-cars approached with shields up, and both lights and sirens turned off. They weren't here on official business. No, they were here because a known criminal just killed four of their fellow officers in cold blood, and they knew that he was beyond the reach of their criminal codes. They were going to hunt down the Inkfish. Not that he knew this. If he had known that these cops just wanted vengeance, maybe things would have turned out differently, but they kept their activities off the official police band chatter, and Surt's surveillance of that band would have caught it. Without context, the bloodbath that followed seemed unavoidable. Protect the girl, that's all that matters...
Since no one bothered to talk to each other, the violence began with a frantic beeping.
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In the middle of trying vainly to explain The Fall of mankind in slightly more concrete terms than numbers and death-rates could convey, Surt had the rather surreal experience of having the room begin to beep around him, followed almost immediately by a security bulletin from the local mesh. While it wasn't necessary for him to scowl, seeing as he lacked a physical head, he took abstract satisfaction in the reaction that his scowling avatar got from those assembled in the room. While Rotu was gawking in confusion at the blinking lights that accompanied the incessant beeping of the security alarm, Metsani had already drawn her side-arm, and Inkfish had left the room to either barricade the door or start the memory-hole protocols.
"Ladies, it looks like...!" Surt's voice barely carried in the racket.
"What?!" cried Rotu, holding her hands to her temporal audio membranes.
"Ladies! It looks like...!" Surt again yelled through his speakers.
"I can't...!"
"Hold on," he said before cutting the alarms, "I was trying to say that we need to make a Tacnet connection so we can talk over these alarms, but it would seem a moot point now."
"A what?" replied Rotu, with a genuine look of confusion on her face. In response, Surt made a gesture as if to throw her a ball, and a pop-up appeared on her HUD. It said 'you have been invited to participate in a Tacnet Tactical Awareness Network by [SURT] would you like to join?'. With only a thought to the affirmative, the invite had been confirmed, and her world was suddenly abuzz with information. In addition to being able to see the exact layout of the room and everyone's locations within it, she was receiving vast amounts of info from Surt and Inkfish. From Surt, she could see a seemingly endless array of camera feeds, viewing almost every nook and cranny in the apartment complex in overwhelming detail. From Inkfish, she found strange sensory feeds which were constantly updating the Tacnet maps with everything from heat, smell, and sound to more exotic things like electrical layouts and what looked like x-rays of the walls and floor. The structural members of the building were laid bare under her gaze, and she could just make out a faint radioactive trail that followed Inkfish around the apartment.
Just as she began to get overwhelmed, her muse dimmed the info overlays, and brought just a few pieces of information forward. First, a small map of their floor of the building with gray markers representing people all tucked into their apartments, and her and the others highlighted green. Secondly, a small array of windows on the side of her vision showing the points of view of everyone on the team. Each person was busy with something, so their screens were hard to interpret aside from small bars next to each representing their health and ammo capacity. Looking at Metsani, she saw a small read-out listing a modified Carnifex pistol with a regenerating ammo block and some grenades. She and Surt were both empty-handed-her because she had yet to pick up a gun in her life, and Surt because he had no body, and had neglected to rent something for the occasion. Inkfish showed up as heavily armed, though it was a little confusing, if she read it right, most of the morph's arms contained on-board weapons of some kind, and he had a 'Gorgon Defense Systems Medusa Neutron Beam Rifle' strapped to his back. To her that sounded almost like some kind of energy weapon, like from the science-fiction vids. The last highlighted windows showed police arriving at the top and bottom of the building.
Everything moved and cluttered around her, and Rotu felt that she had done nothing but take up space. It had been only a few minutes between the alarms going off, but it felt like hours of inactivity to her. With a thought her muse located the nearest weapon cache inside one of the more innocent looking cabinets. Digging through the various partially assembled objects in the cabinet, it became apparent that the majority of the 'weapons' were either inoperable or ID-code locked. All except for one: something labeled 'Hullbreach-gun' which looked an awful lot like a Krogan shotgun. It was not only unlocked, but sat next to an ammo pouch. Grabbing both, she affixed them to her belt and made her way to the doorway to look out at the living room. On her Tacnet feed, she could see Metsani preparing some kind of box in the hallway closet and Inkfish seemed to be removing part of the wall-panel frame in the storage room next to where she had slept.
The voice of Surt came on the Tacnet, "Alright everyone, here's the situation: the cops are here, but running silent. No one in the building knows whats going on except the floors that they're sweeping. One team's coming down from the roof, and the other is going up from deck-level. As we are in the bottom portion of the building, below the arcology road-deck, we have some time before they reach us. I've hacked the fire alarms so we can trigger an evacuation as a distraction. Inkfish, you're on asset evac. Do you have a plan?"
Two different comm channels activated from Inkfish, with the first, labeled 'Red' saying: "Affirmative. Will take Asset to Red Gulch on foot via the ghettos under Deck-C." The other channel, labeled 'Green' continued: "It won't be fun, but we can stay quiet through the Blood Pack holdings."
"Good, Metsani can evac by pretending to be one of the residents when the alarm going off. I'll work the com-traffic as needed then withdraw. Who's on clean-up?"
Metsani's channel showed her still fiddling with the small box in the hall closet, "I've almost got the Disassembler swarm ready. I need another 5 minutes tops."
"The MULE has been repaired," said Inkfish on his Green channel. "I will configure it to wait for evac before it detonates the fusion plant."
"Yeah," said Inkfish on his Red channel. "I'll give you two a dead-man switch, okay?"
Metsani and Surt nodded on their channels.
"Good" Surt said. "Rotu, you're going with Inkfish on this one, understand?"
"Alright, but are you two going to be okay?"
"Of course," pipped up Metsani, "I'm a big girl Rotu, I can take care of myself."
"But how?"
"Oh yeah, I forgot you didn't get to see the auto-doc yet. Hold on." Rotu saw Metsani's com feed switch to show her face instead of the box she was adjusting. With a look of passing concentration, Rotu's face readjusted itself before her eyes. Where Metsani had been moments ago she only saw an unknown asari face with wide broad features and coloration that reminded her of turian facial coloring. After maybe thirty seconds, Metsani's voice came over the comm channel again. "Isn't that fucking cool? One of my favorite accessories."
Rotu was at a loss for words.
"Would you two quit gabbing, we're in the middle of a raid!" shouted an angry Inkfish over the Green channel. "Get over here, I need to take this first part slow, or else you'll get blown away by the updrafts."
Rotu didn't know what he was talking about, but didn't like the implications.
"We'll be fine," said Metsani, as she quickly walked around the corner and wrapped Rotu in a fast hug. "But thanks for caring. You stay safe, okay? Can't help your family out if you fall to your death now." Rotu tensed. Fall to your death? How in the name of the Goddess was she going to fall to her death?
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As it so happens, the answer to her question followed shortly.
"Hey Rotu, how strong of a biotic would you say you are?" asked Inkfish on the Green channel.
"I'm not much of one. Why?" she asked, with her eyes narrowing.
"Can you climb a rope unassisted?"
"No... I haven't had to do that since I was a little girl..."
"So you have been rock-climbing before?"
"No. I climbed a rope in elementary school. Why are you asking all these inane questions all of a sudden?"
"Are they inane?" asked Inkfish on his Green channel.
"They are not inane." came a response on the Red Inkfish channel. "Their relevance should have been obvious from our previous conversation about traveling on foot."
"I thought you meant that as a figure of speech." replied Rotu. As she walked into the storage area, she felt wind whipping her face. Following the howl of the wind, she saw Inkfish standing next to where she had been sleeping, with a wall-panel open and propped up against a shelf, showing a doorway to the sky. Her eyes went wide, "Oh hell no!"
"On foot means on foot," said the Green channel. "The cops always scan for vehicles, but they only check pedestrians on deck-level. Where we're going, no sane person would ever set foot. Hence my questions. No biotics, so we can't take the fast way down. Can't climb a rope, so we can't do that either. No free-climbing, so I have to carry you. Gonna take time; grab that cloak before you leave." He pointed at an unremarkable rain-coat.
"Why does it rain in the floof?"[1]
"No, that's smart cloth camo; it will keep you from standing out like a big blue tick on the side of the building."
"I am not a big blue tick!" she replied, as her translator software helpfully replaced the word "tick" for another more asari relevant parasite.
"Did I say you were? Put it on." he stuck his head out the door, and looked up and down. "Just let it auto-camouflage you based on my camera feed."
"I'm not going out there."
"You'd rather go out the front?"
"You literally just handed me an invisibility cloak!" she waved the rain-coat in her hand around.
"Correction." chimed in the red channel. "That is self-adjusting active camouflage. It changes color, brightness, reflectivity, and texture in real time, and is reasonably good concealment against viewers greater than 10 meters away. It is not an invisibility cloak."
"I left that back at the office," claimed the Green channel. "I didn't think I'd need it today, since all I had to do was guard you till the trunk came to pick you up. No extra infiltration gear needed."
"So if I tried to sneak past the police, they'd see me walking around like an idiot in a colorful rain-coat, and shoot me. Great."
"Glad to hear it, so do you want back or front?" asked the Green channel.
"Excuse me?"
"I've got adhesive pads on my arms and legs," he said, holding up an otherwise smooth left lower arm for her to see. "When I apply a control signal to them, like this," he continued, as the pale skin on the exposed arm suddenly seemed to grow a very fine fluffy fur coat. "They stick to pretty much anything; thats why its so nice to be able to turn them on and off. Normally I just need a couple limbs to hold me up, but with you I need to be careful. There are two ways to carry you without losing traction: either you ride on my back like a backpack and hope that you don't lose your grip, or ride in the front where my beer-gut would be. Front is the least likely to fall from, but you're pretty much guaranteed to whack your head into the glass while I move. Thus: front or back?"
"Back, I guess."
"Good, then you'll need to carry my gun so you've got somewhere to sit."
He handed her the compacted gun, which was folded up into the form-factor of a briefcase. While she was putting it on her utility belt, she noticed several faded warning labels on the back.
"Is this thing radioactive?"
"Sure is, but the fusion plant is sealed. It's a Neutral-Particle Beam Cannon, so you could say that it kills things with radiation. I wouldn't fire it if I was you though, it tends to irradiate the air and backscatter."
"In the name of the Goddess, why would you need something like that?"
"Because its more dangerous to my enemies than it is to me? I'm made of metalo-ceramics and plastics, I don't get radiation poisoning. Not anymore, since I replaced all of my meat parts. But, you shoot that thing at an armored Mako or a Mantis Gunship, and the neutrons it fires pass through shields, armor plates, and meat like they weren't even there. Usually it kills whatever it hits and bakes the rest in their suits. Works out in space too, if you want to pick the pilot off a Frigate. Too bad about the over-penetration; aim wrong in a city and you'll hit everyone in the office building behind your target too."
"As horrifying as that answer is, you didn't explain why you needed it. Its not like you need to kill tanks and office buildings."
"..." said the Green channel.
"Clarification. Damage to structures is to be avoided, and only occurs during extended concentrated fire. During normal use the neutron beam is calibrated such that meat and sensitive electronics are damaged quickly while structures receive minimal damage." said the red channel.
"That's horrible!"
"I like that gun." stated the Green channel.
"Would you prefer the use of heavy ordinance instead?" asked the red channel.
Rotu had a snappy comeback, but realized the question wasn't rhetorical. She felt a little heave in her stomach at the thought of needing to just carry something like that around during day-to-day life. She was just an engineering student a few days ago. Her biggest worries were about memorizing equations and planning out schematics for designing a boat made of concrete. She pulled the rain-coat on tightly, and wrapped herself within it as though it could shut out all of the craziness in the room like it kept out rain. After a few moments like this, she caught her breath again, and looked down at herself. Covered with this strange rain-coat, she could see it shift and move as the surface reformed itself to dynamically reproduce the appearance of being on an outside window during sunset. It was beautiful and weird, and she momentarily lost any sense of fear or trepidation in the simple joy of playing with her coat. As she moved and spun, it flowed and moved; miraculously capturing the false reflection of a sunset and the reflections of the other buildings which weren't there. A sudden gust of wind blew in from the updraft outside, and her sunset reflections got caught on the edges of the beam cannon and hullbreach-gun she had attached to her belt.
She took a deep breath and said, "It's time to go."
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From the Tacnet feed, Rotu could see the police officers in their riot gear systematically sweeping the top and deck-level floors of the apartment building. She could see this even with her eyes closed, since the contact lenses made the light on their own. Right now, she was hanging on the back of some kind of alien robot man who was currently climbing the glass outer walls of the apartment building with what must be the worlds stickiest arm and leg hair. Two of his four arms were twisted 180-degrees behind his back, and wrapped around her like a weird seat-belt as she clung to his back like a child getting a piggy-back ride. Oh, and she apparently had a miniature fusion reactor strapped to her ass. Great.
With her eyes shut, the Tacnet was surprisingly helpful and informative. The Floof was currently 200 meters above her head, while the actual ground was 1.4km below her. There were several closer objects she could fall to her death on, depending on where she looked, but the nearest was at least 300 meters straight down. Among other Tacnet updates her own weapon, the 'Hullbreach-gun' was helpfully trying to explain its features to its new owner. Vaguely curious about the name, she asked her muse Milli for a summary. When she heard the answer, she rather wished she hadn't. Her muse helpfully explained that the gun was a shotgun which fired synth-diamond-tipped flechettes which were packed with piezo-electric crystals and liquid-thermite. Any sufficient impact triggered the thermite to ignite while buried deep inside whatever it hit, perhaps leaving a wall or a torso filled with tiny metal slivers which burned for several minutes hot enough to melt most common metals. The 'Hullbreach' name came from the issues surrounding space-born deployment of anti-structural ammunitions; a few clips and some patience was all that was needed to breach most habitat hulls. Despairing at the need for engineers to craft such a thing, she buried her face into the back in front of her. She just could not conceive of a situation where she'd need to use such a thing, but obviously someone did.
With her head jammed into the alien robot man's back, she found it was surprisingly warm and fleshy. If he didn't act so alien, she could entertain the idea that he was simply a strange turian. Feeling with her senses, she could just barely make out the complex circuits that he had in place of nerves and muscles. A slight buzzing sensation told her that he had an active mass-effect field on, but a small one. Perhaps an anti-grav belt or shield would fit, but it was hard to tell with him moving around so much.
"You might want to open your eyes at some point, this sunset's going to get interrupted by the fire alarm in a minute or two." said the Green comm channel. She felt rather childish sitting as she was with her eyes shut, and she just knew that her sister would never let her hear the end of it if she could see her now. Cautiously, she peeked out of her left eye, and saw that she appeared to be floating in the air next to the side of the building's windows. The glare from the reflected sunset made it a little hard to make out the details, but from her position it appeared that the skin Inkfish wasn't just for showy effects, but was instead the same kind of camouflage that she was wearing on her rain-coat. Together with her coat, the reflection she saw in the windows showed her to be a floating blue disc of a head suspended against all odds in the air next to the building.
With another bump from Inkfish, she turned to the right, and opened her eyes fully in wonder. Here, improbably, was a small section of the arcology where the rays of the setting sun reached deep under the floof, and reflected endlessly in the canyon of glass. The roots of the buildings, normally unseen and ignored even by those residing in them cast deep shadows among the glaring oranges and reds of the sunset. The floof itself was illuminated, and seemed to be a tangled jungle of shadows overhead, which was mirrored by similar visions from the depths of the urban canyon. In a small way, she felt fortunate to see such a sight. Certainly there were more beautiful places on Illium, but they tended to be the product of artistic designs and deliberation rather than the strange urban reflection of nature that lay before her. A jungle thick with the vines of power and industry, surmounted by the mountainous ant-hills, termite-mounds, and beaver-dams. No artist planned the vista before her, just the desires and needs of the creatures of the urban jungle.
"Surt to away team, do you copy?" piped Surt from the comm link.
"Inkfish to Surt, we hear you loud and clear, over."
"Good, I was worried their jammers were stronger where you're at. Listen, evac will start in about a minute; I've ordered the MULE not to detonate till you and the residents are clear. If you hear a boom, its not us; officers are carrying grenades. Expect a bumpy ride. Over and out."
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Outside of the apartment complex, on the landing-pad up on the roof of the building, there were three parked squad-cars. Most of the officers had already moved on to conduct the raid, but two remained at the squad-car. This first, bearing the Republic of Illium Civil Authority (RICA) rank marking analogous to Sergeant, was a turian named Secundus Marus, and he was the closest thing to someone who was "in charge" of the extra-legal vendetta that the police were conducting. Next to him, a salarian whose rank markings merely showed him to be a "senior investigator", named Quuset.
Marus had been unlucky in his estimate, as he had complained repeatedly to his assistant Quuset, to have attracted too much attention with their extra-legal raid. He wasn't sure who let the cat out of the bag on this one, but he had attracted the interest from one of the few parts of the Illium Republic hierarchy which sort-of outranked all of them: the Republic of Illium Intelligence Service (RIIS). The rivalry between the two groups had been well emplaced long before the fall of the Citadel, all the way back to the initial charter of the governing body of Illium. It normally played out like this: RICA was active in their pursuit of a case, until stopped by RIIS cock-blocking them and claiming it for themselves after all the work was done. From the point of view of the RIIS however, the case was reversed: RIIS spent every last iota of funds and effort working behind the scenes, gathering intel, and prepping resources only to have RICA blunder into the middle of things and decide entirely on its own to flex its over-funded muscles and ruin everything. In their own view, RIIS only managed to salvage such blunders when the stars aligned, and some bureaucratic leverage swung their way.
While Quuset was sympathetic to Marus, he was rather sick of hearing the same sad song all the time. That's why, when his superior pulled him from the raid, when he had been the one to successfully track the lead here, Quuset was inwardly pleased when Marus got a priority phone call from RIIS. It had been quite an undertaking to track the terrorist Inkfish here to boot: normally the transhuman was as slippery as the delicious glass-eels that Quuset had enjoyed so much as a child, but this time Inkfish had made a mistake. It might have been overlooked by anyone else, but Quuset had discovered that Inkfish had been leaving radioactive traces behind wherever he spent time. Quuset was not an expert on Transhuman tech, being just a salarian detective gave him no special training in it. However, he was aware of the fact that the transhumans seemed to like using various kinds of radioactive batteries. Normally they were too well shielded to be traceable, but if they were damaged it was possible to leak radiation. He'd seen it at least once after a gun-fight had damaged a fusion-cell, and led to the capture of a well know pirate. The mere fact that Quuset had tracked Inkfish across town using the same technique was a testament to his persistence; not that Marus cared.
For his part, Marus was too preoccupied with his phone call from the RIIS to bother giving Quuset a gold-star for doing his damn job. On the other side of the line was one "Archivist Berena" from the Intelligence Service's HQ across town. The bureaucratic dick-waving contest told him that while she had no official control over an extra-legal raid, she did have the capacity to bring the whole lot of them up on official inquiries involving the use of Republic resources for the pursuit of personal vendettas. As it stood, they had arrived at a singular conclusion: Marus would pretend to listen to the Archivist, and the Archivist would pretend that she didn't "officially" know what they were doing. This had taken nearly half an hour, and as such, the the raid had progressed through 4 floors without incident. Marus, for his part, was still a little hazy on what a "Archivist" did, as it didn't translate well into RICA ranks like "Captain" or "Officer".
On the other end of the line, Berena began to read off a set of instructions: "Sergeant Marus, the official protocol for dealing with potential dangerous transhumans in the same category as Inkfish is to evacuate the building of any civilians, form a quarantine perimeter at least 100 meters from any portion of the building, and to call in a specialist team to conduct a detailed sweep for explosives, contaminants, and cloud-weapons before any non-specialists are permitted within the quarantine area."
"Like I said the last time you read the RIIS manual to me," began Marus. "The RICA does not follow any such protocols. Transhumans are to be dealt with the same way as any other species. While its true that they're dangerous, it just means that we can assumed that they are armed rather than having to wait to confirm it."
"Marus, this really isn't the time or the place to be arguing policy. My office has a proven track-record of placing saftey at a premium."
"I know that, but I also know that there's a time and a place for such concerns. We are in the middle of our raid, and it would cause nothing but chaos to change the plan now, Archivist."
"Would you at least listen to our concerns then? RIIS policies are based on intel that we're not allowed to share with you unless you have an established need-to-know."
"Are you going to tell me what the fuck has your department so paranoid?"
"You're not on an official RICA mission, so if I told you, I'd be brought up on charges."
"Even though I need to know?"
"That determination is not yours to make, Sergeant."
"Well then, I'll take your, ahem, policy recommendations into advisement Archivist. Have a nice day."
"Wait! Don't you hang up on ...!"
Marus got a nice feeling under his quills when he hung up on Berena. The same feeling he got when he impounded gang property by sticking an evidence tag on it. It was a feeling that was a little short lived when his reflection was interrupted by a phone call. He promptly hung up on that one, and the one that followed. Next to him, Quuset looked contemplative.
"Sergeant, far be it from me to question orders, but is there a reason you're stone-walling the intel lady?" asked Quuset.
"Quuset, you know how gung-ho the guys are when there's a cop-killer on the loose, right?"
"Yeah, I'm with them on it."
"If it weren't for the fact that this cop-killer is a transhuman, we wouldn't be able to go after him at all, without a warrant."
"Wait, you didn't get a warrant?"
"Normally, it'd take at least two days to clear a warrant. By then, this Inkfish guy would be long gone again. Every time he kills a cop and gets off scot-free, another one of our boys turns over in his grave. But, you don't need a warrant to fuck up a transhuman if you're off duty."
"Is that how the Captain spun this? He gave everyone the day off?"
"Yeah. Since transhumans don't have civil-protection on Illium, whatever we do to them is without consequence. No laws apply."
"So why aren't we evacuating the building?"
"Most of the people in that building are Illium citizens. Can't do dick to them without a warrant. As it is, having armed men roaming the halls and systematically knocking on doors is bad enough. Not technically illegal, even if its scary as fuck."
"Sergeant, wouldn't they be safer if we evacuated them anyway? It wouldn't take more than an hour tops."
"Citizens got rights Quuset, you know that. We'd be held liable for anything that happened, if we stuck our necks out like that. We're professionals though, so we'll do our best to minimize the risks given that we can't evacuate the building."
As Sergeant Marus had just gotten done explaining why they couldn't afford to evacuate the building, Quuset heard alarms go off. First he heard the shrieking sirens of the building's fire alarm go off several meters away near the roof elevators, then he heard the official emergency-channel report that a fire-alarm had been set off somewhere in the building. Stare as he might at the building, he could see no obvious signs of a fire, aside from the alarm itself.
"Well that's convenient." stated Quuset.
"Looks like Berena is getting what she wanted after all." said Marus, as the first of the residents filed out of the building down at deck-level.
"Did one of our guys do it?" asked the salarian.
"I don't know..." Marus said, before talking into his radio. "Alfa-Actual to all units. Report. Over."
"Bravo-actual to Alfa. Deck-entrances are over capacity, too many to check manually. Scanning with geiger-counter. Over."
"Charlie to Alfa. Top floors have just emptied out. Sweep progressing faster than anticipated. Over."
"Delta-actual to Alfa. Bottom floors are a mess, can't make progress till all the civies are out. Over."
Marus replied, "Alfa-actual to all units. Check with your units, confirm that none of them pulled the alarm. Over." When they all replied in the positive, Marus considered the situation while nervously biting his lip.
Quuset piped up, "Sir, I don't like it."
"Can't hold the civilians at the deck without cause. Can't open their doors without their permission. Can't check them all because there's only four men on those exits. There's not a lot to like." Marus's distaste for the situation was clear as his mandibles snapped.
"No, I meant the evac is suspicious, sir."
"Huh?"
"Well, why would the transhumans evacuate a building?"
"Aside from trying to cover their escape?"
"I don't think they really needed to cover their escape like this. Transhumans are slippery enough as it is without involving a building full of civilians..."
Marus looked at the investigator for a moment, before realizing why they'd hired him. "What if you're right, Quuset?"
"If I'm right, then maybe they evac'ed the building to keep civilian casualties to a minimum."
"I'm calling back Berena." said Marus, with the closest expression to a frown he could make with mandibles.
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In her office in the bowels of the RIIS HQ, Berena was in the middle of trying to calm herself down enough that she wouldn't accidentally break any office furniture. When angered, she found biotic control to be a little more difficult than usual. Most of her office was relatively robust, if unattractive, plastics, but a few things were flimsy particle-board or foam. Deep breaths, recite the third verse of the Sunrise Sutra... deep breaths... focus on raising the pen into the air... up... down... deep breaths... up... down... RING!
"Republic of Illium Information Service, Department of Records, Archivist Berena speaking..." she said from rote memory, while staring at the pen that was now embedded cap-first into the door to her office at roughly head-level. "Oh, Sergeant Marus..." she took an audible deep breath. "I'm... I wasn't expecting to hear back from you..."
On the other end of the line, Quuset watched, literally watched, as his superior officer swallowed any pride he might have once had. As he spoke, his mandibles and jaws moved as though he was trying to bite and tear literal chunks from his pride while he was on the phone.
"Berena, we... have a situation here at the complex." said Marus guardedly.
"How many dead?" asked Berena quietly, pinching the bridge of her nose in the office and shutting her eyes at the coming stress headache.
"None, Archivist. The building has been evacuated. Our teams are sweeping for any lingering civilians before we continue to target."
She suddenly opened her eyes, honestly surprised that he had listened to her advice. "Oh good, then I'll arrange for our specialists to swing by. I'm glad you're acting so professionally," she said, while sight-unseen Marus fumed. "Given our last conversation, I didn't think you'd follow my advice."
"See," Marus began, cautiously. "We didn't order the evacuation."
"Hmm? What now?"
"The evacuation: we didn't have anything to do with it. Our best guess is that the transhumans evacuated the building for their own purposes."
"Archivist?"
"That's not good."
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Chapter notes:
1. "Floof": sci-fi terminology used for similar structures in at least three different titles. I first heard this from Deus-Ex: Human Revolution however, so I'll explain it in that context. Traveling to Hengsha, the main character in DX:HR needs to go to the top level of the arcology, and so must pass through a structural element which is both the floor of the top deck of the arcology, and the roof of the bottom deck of the arcology. Hence "Floor" + "Roof" = "Floof". Related term: "Arcology", is not actually a sci-fi term, but one from architecture and the study of ecological planning. Google it and have fun.
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Author Notes:
Sorry for the delay, life calls. Now, I'll be cleaning up old chapters soon (this site's formatting is a pain), and have more planned before the end of January. Your feedback is always welcome. FYI, if you see a bunch of 8's being used as dividing lines, its because this site doesn't like hyphens or other punctuation that could more naturally serve as dividers between sections.