"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care."
- Liu Cixin
"So anyway, I started blasting; Pow! Pow!"
-Frank Reynolds
A splash of water to the face didn't wake her up. But considering that she hadn't slept in God only knows how long, the pandemonium of the last two days, and whatever the fuck was currently putting gas into her car, maybe insane was an option. She stared at herself, seeing dark bags under dark eyes, chapped lips, and dull black hair that hadn't been washed in half a week. She looked like a fucking trainwreck.
"Is this a dream?" she asked. Her reflection matched her movements, twitch for twitch. "Fuck I wish this were a dream."
She turned from the mirror, not willing to look at herself anymore, and instead picked at the sutures holding a few wounds on her arms closed. A couple of grazes by bullets. That was yet another reason why the last few days had such a dream-like quality to them. Ordinarily, when a blindly-furious woman storms into a police-chief's office and guns down everybody inside, she is immediately shot dead by the rest of the department. She managed to get out with only these. She idly ran her fingertips along the longest of them, reaching most of the way from her wrist to her elbow, cutting an inflamed weal in her dark brown skin. It probably damaged the muscle, from the fact that her left hand felt... weaker right now. But the other graze, on her chest just under her armpit, had clearly pinged the bone. The bandage was red, but at least it stopped bleeding. It hurt like damnation, now that she wasn't so adrenalized that she was numb to it.
Delilah Patel was fucked. Unconditionally, omnidirectionally, multinationally. There were few things more hated in the Western World than a cop-killer. And there was no sympathy given for people had been cops themselves. It didn't matter to the world that they'd tried to kill her first, and that barring outside intervention, they would have succeeded. Twice.
Oh, and by the way, Hell was real, and Demons fucked like champions.
Maybe insane was the best option, Delilah reckoned. That maybe she'd just had a psychotic break while doing her beat in Halifax and was now safely ensconced in a very tight jacket within a very padded cell.
What a life she had, where she was hoping that she'd just gone nuts.
There was a knock at the door, and Delilah turned to it. "Gimme a minute!" she more or less croaked.
"You've been in there a long time, ma'am. Your friend's getting worried," a woman's voice came through the door. Young. Maybe teenager. What was the attendant? Fuck, she was really losing her knack if she didn't even remember the face of the gas station attendant that she'd passed. Cops had to notice things.
Of course, she wasn't a cop anymore.
Well, there was no point putting this off anymore. Empty bladder and trainwreck face in tow, she hooked the paper mask over her face again and pushed the door open. The attendant was already on the way back to the register, and Hare was paying for gas. He looked like he could have been her brother, about the same height, the same hair, the same dark skin tone. But that was a lie. She had no brother, just sisters. It was a fiction that she'd watched him put into place. She didn't know what the fuck Hare was.
But he had her by her metaphorical balls.
She tried not to give him – it? – too much of a stink eye as she went to her car. Only she couldn't. Because parked at the pump she'd left behind was a different car. A different color. If there hadn't been a cat-carrier in the back seat carrying a very clearly annoyed Smudge, she would have thought Hare had parked it somewhere. No. This was the car she'd driven. And when she tested the door, sticking her head in, she found her keys, with her home-made key-fob dangling from the ignition. What? Seriously what?
"How about I drive the next leg, Delilah?" Hare asked as he approached from the gas station.
"What happened to my car?" She asked, going to the back and pulling Smudge out of his carrier. Pretty much the moment he put his paws on the concrete, he squatted down and started pissing.
"Well, the car of the wanted fugitive Delilah Patel was a bit... conspicuous. I changed a few things."
"How?"
"Let's not rush into 302 when you haven't taken 101 yet," Hare said, gently pushing her aside and getting behind the wheel. She glared at him. So Hare was going to be literally as well as figuratively in the drivers seat, right now? She had half a mind to get her gun from the nook she'd hidden it and shoot him, only she knew from personal experience just how ineffective that was against him. She continued to glare until she heard Smudge rasping his claws on the car door, wanting back inside where it was cooler than here. Summer just didn't want to let go, it seemed. The cat got his way, as he usually did, and was let to lounge in the back seat rather than be stuffed back into the carrier.
At least one of them would have a measure of freedom today, Delilah reckoned.
When she got into the passenger seat, she made sure that the can of pepper spray she'd left in the seat-well was still there. It was. Not that she'd expect it to do much. Hare looked at her, then looked down at her hip. "Seatbelt, come on now."
"You've got to be joking," she said.
"Completely serious. There's no point getting into a car wreck if we can avoid it, and you are much more vulnerable to harm if you go flying through a windshield than I am. Buckle up," Hare said. Delilah stared at him, but did exactly that. "Alright. Let's say goodbye to Amherst and hello to New Brunswick."
As the car pulled out, she continued staring at him, looking for some sort of hole in his facade, an imperfection in the seemings of his flesh and the skin of his face. But he looked as utterly normal as it was possible to be, faintly darker moles marking a few places and pocks worrying the surface of his cheeks. He looked so... ordinary. If she hadn't seen what she'd seen, she would have even believed it.
"Alright. I've humored you. So explain. What the fuck are you, and what the fuck is this job you want me for?" she demanded.
"I'm exactly what I said I was, Miss Patel. I am a human being. More or less." Hare answered, navigating the streets, and giving a significant glance at a section of the highway visible from here that was blockaded by squad-cars, lights flaring, that stopped everybody who was trying to bypass Amherst on their way across the provincial border.
"I'm guessing a lot less," she said.
"Bit of a rude presumption," Hare said. "If you cut me, I'll bleed just as red as you. It's just that the blood that comes out won't be designed by the idiot watchmaker of natural selection."
"You have special blood?" she asked. "Are you a vampire?"
"Tell me something: is that or is that not the sun yonder in the sky?" Hare said, pointing upward.
...Well, that made Delilah feel like an idiot.
"To answer your question less glibly," Hare said, "it's not just my blood that's 'special', although admittedly yes it very much is. It's that 'special' is a broad term. A more narrow and accurate one would be 'engineered'."
"Artificial blood? And... what does that make you? Some sort of Cyborg?" she asked, trying to get a grasp of this.
"Oh, far from it. You'd know a Cyborg from a mile away. They tend to be rather obvious with their cybernetic augmentations. No. I and those like me proscribe to a more subtle form of personal augmentations," he said. "I am not from this universe, Delilah. I was not being hyperbolic when I said I am a stranger in a strange land here. And this place obviously still has baselines aplenty. Where I come from... not so much."
"I'm taking a 'baseline' is just a person, whereas you are... not," she hazarded.
Hare sighed, rubbing at his forehead for a moment as he drove, leaving the police blockade behind them as they got onto the highway past their influence. "Alright. Let's start with Transhuman 101," Hare said. "I am an Oedipean Changeling. Don't worry if that makes no sense to you, it shouldn't. I came to this place with a team of other Oedipeans hunting for Storm Kings. Don't worry if that makes no sense to you. Worry greatly if that does. We didn't find the Storm King infestation we expected, but we were stranded by the fact that this reality is about as solid as a colander. And there are worse things than Storm Kings living here."
"I have context for none of that," Delilah said.
"Good. That's a relief, actually. If you knew anything I'd just mentioned by name it would have meant things were far worse than I feared," Hare said with a laugh. "To put it idiotically simply; I am the result of a paranoid wreck trying to get their house back. And that result now kicks down doors to gun down the assholes who murder other families to squat in their houses."
Delilah stared at him. "And you conceptualize the entire world as 'your house'. I think it's a bit bigger than that," she said.
"Oh, when you've seen The Stack, you'll realize just how infinitesimally small we all are, and how important our job is," Hare said rather emphatically. "And we need people like you to help solve these infestations before the realm rots from the inside. They almost got my home. I saw how bad it got through the '40s and '50s. I wasn't there for the Eradication Engine, but I lived through the Collapse and That Which Withers. I'm not going to let that happen here. You people deserve better than that."
"You were around in the '40s? How goddamned old are you?"
Hare stared off into the distance for a moment. "You know, I haven't thought about that in a while. I know I was one of the second round of Swarmborn. Shit when was I even born?" Hare laughed. "I know it was the in the Ugly Tens."
Okay, that twigged Delilah as a very particular and grapplable sort of strange. She wasn't a professional at the science of history, but she knew enough to know that the Gay Nineties of the 19th century gave way to the Roaring Twenties with the only ugly thing in the middle being World War One. And the nomenclature of decades didn't even give 1910-1919 a name, possibly because the war loomed that large.
However, it was a very reasonable thing to look at the 2010s and call them ugly.
"Are you a time-traveler?" she asked.
"We're all time-travelers, Delilah. We all travel forward together into the future one second at a time," Hare said. He turned a glance to her. "But to answer the actual question. No. Not exactly. It's complicated and there's math that requires three dimensions to write out to explain why. I come from another universe. Why should wait a second I'm getting a call."
"I don't see a phone," she said.
"Please. Carry my phone around like a troglodyte?" Hare chuckled. "You got Hare, what's going on in Moncton?"
She didn't see a headset, and she couldn't hear the other side of the conversation, so there was more fodder for her time-traveler theory, whether he denied it or not.
"How many?" Hare asked. His good humor melted away. "Fuck me that's a problem. They haven't found you yet? Of course they haven't. If you were found you wouldn't be this calm."
"Who is that?"
"Louis, your soon-to-be coworker," Hare said. "Yes I've got her in the car. And she was pretty much exactly where you said she'd be. I'll make you a cheesecake when we extract."
"And is Louis like you?" Delilah asked, crossing her arms before her chest, while Hare started to go faster, to monopolize the passing lane.
"Louis is like you, in about two months, unless fate smiles on you," Hare said. "Yeah, there's obvious insomnia there. And she needs a shower."
"I've been on the run!" Delilah complained.
"Not very well if you couldn't leave a space the size of Nova Scotia in two days," Hare pointed. "Once, I managed to cross four Central American borders in that much time. Well, they used to be borders. I'm pretty sure those nations don't exist anymore. What?"
"I still don't know why I have to be here in particular. There have to be other people like me out there!"
"One second, Delilah," he raised a finger at her. Hare's expression grew very dark. "Say that again. On top of the Cogs? Fuck me!"
Hare punched the steering wheel in frustration, then the car began to growl louder as he started driving ever faster. "Look, we're on our way. We're about a half hour out of Moncton. Can you stay hidden that long?"
"What's going on with Louis?" Delilah asked.
"We're coming, I promise you that. I don't have so many of you that I can afford to lose any of them at this point," Hare said. Then he turned to Delilah. "Sorry, instruction is going to have to be back-seated for the time being. There's a developing situation in Moncton and if I want to get my guy out in one piece, I'm going to have to concentrate on unsafe driving."
"What is even going on?" she asked.
"We're going into a nest of crimes against reality to extract your coworker and a critical VIP. Are you up to help with that?" Hare asked.
"Do I have a choice?" she asked.
"Maybe. But if we die, you'll be on your own against the whole world," Hare admitted.
"...I am so fucked," Delilah muttered.
"That's the spirit!" Hare exclaimed, and then her car raced to speeds that she'd never known it could ever reach, rocketing down the Trans-Canada Highway leaving rubber and terrified motorists in their wake.
Helldiver I
Extraction: One
As far as cities in Maritime Canada go, Moncton was certainly one of them. It was so forgettable that though Delilah had been to the city numerous times, both on police business and for other more casual events, she couldn't remember a single venue, vista, or building. Actually, say a lie; there was one visually distinct thing about Moncton as compared to Halifax or the other cities of Eastern Canada, and that was the preponderance of red brick. To the point where the paths, houses, and buildings all stared glaringly burnt-sienna red back at her with soulless glass eyes.
It was a miracle that they hadn't been pulled over by at least two dozen squad cars already. And when she tried to ask him why they weren't currently being chased the only pursuit helicopter in New Brunswick, Hare shushed her very emphatically before weaving through the increasing traffic of the nearing city center.
"Alright," he said, only now descending from the fairly irresponsible 180 kilometers per hour he was doing while driving on city highways to something which was merely a ticketable offence rather than a fuse-popping felony. "The hard part is over. I'd say we made good time, wouldn't you?"
"Good time? Christ, Hare, I'd be shocked if there's a millimeter of rubber left on my fucking tires!" Delilah countered.
"It'll be fine," he said. He gave her a shrug. "You'll soon come to realize that the only useful resource to people like me – and you, too, as it will turn out – is time. Everything else is infinitely replaceable."
"You're obviously past shushing, so could you explain how we didn't get tagged a hundred times during that blatant bit of driving back there?"
"I could, but that's 402 level classwork, and you've still not even read the synopsis for 101," Hare said.
"You could have explained something on the drive," she pressed.
"No, I really couldn't have. But we're getting close to the den, so let's give you the bullet points to surviving the Noumenon," Hare said as they took an off-ramp and descended down away from the guts of Moncton and headed toward a massive train-station that dominated one end of the city.
"What the fuck is a Noumenon?" she asked.
"Old definition? A thing which can exist outside of our concept for it," Hare said. "Don't give me that look, blame Kant. The more relevant definition is a hostile invader from outside reality that seeks our resources, people, and clay for reasons which are at best terrifying and at worst utterly inscrutable. They range from what we're going to face today, which are meat-suits piloted by mechanical components animated by an exterior elemental mind, to undead plague-carriers from a land where life is definitely not 'as we know it', to living fractures to the oblivion itself, wrapped up in feathers and nihilistic ideology."
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, and they just get weirder from there. Those freaks from Geman-Heiron for example. Nasty business. So nasty that they took the Nuclear Man to slap back into their box," he said. He then tutted as he picked a side street to start down. The sun was just starting to set, washing the streets in a similar red to the omnipresent and uninspiring red brick of the buildings behind them, and the more drab concrete structures they were approaching here on the outskirts of the city. "Louis is up to his tits in Recruiters and something else down there. Recruiters are bad enough, but it's that something else that has me worried."
"What are they recruiting for?" she asked.
"You're going to have to learn how to hear when I drop a capital-letter-word, Delilah. It'll make this easier," he said. "Recruiters are the most basic form of foot-soldier that the Cognoscenti whip up. Just steal somebody's skin, cram a bunch of gears and shit in there, and have it start walking around to steal more skins and stuff more gears. They're not very smart, not very sophisticated, and not very perceptive. But they hit like a fucking truck, and trying to knock them out without the right weaponry is an exercise in exhaustion."
"I'm guessing we don't have the right weaponry," she asked.
"Let me see your gun again?" he said. She scowled at him. "Please. Do you really want to go into that fight with a pea-shooter?"
"Nine millimeters of problem solving tends to make a lot of things go away," she said.
Hare laughed at that. "That shit-box in the door-well? Nine millimeters of that? What a joke. Come on, hand it over," he beckoned with his hand again. She felt mildly impugned for a reason which she had a hard time quantifying. Maybe because she'd killed her way out of an impossible situation with that gun. Maybe she felt like she owed it something. Still, she picked it up and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand, sparing it only a passing glance as he pulled into a self-storage lot and parked in an unobtrusive corner. "Y'see? That's that I thought. Glock 17's are a sad relic of a bygone age. Let me see if I can get something better whipped up."
"What do you mean?" she demanded. He didn't answer, instead getting out and heading to the trunk of the car. She threw open her door and stormed out after him, ignoring Smudge's querulous meow at her when she did. He opened the trunk, to reveal not a spare tire and an embarrasing amount of body-rust, but instead a pool of what looked like scintillating, flowing grey. It almost hurt her eyes to look at the teeming substance that now seethed in her car's trunk. "What the fuck…"
"This," he said, holding up her gun, "was useless when the Noumenon first arrived, and a lot of people got killed trying to use its like against them," he said. Then without ceremony, he chucked the gun into the grey substance. And to Delilah's shock and dismay, the gun quickly started to dissolve. She let out an inarticulate noise of alarm, half trying to grab for it before recognizing that any substance that could dissolve a handgun that quickly would likely do far, far worse to flesh. "So let's take what we've got and try something a little more elegant."
"What did you do with my gun?" Delilah asked.
"Defab'd it," he said. He plunged a hand into the swirling substance and then pulled up. Dangling from between two fingers was a gun-barrel, but not like she'd seen before. It was striated, with bright gold between bands of darker metals. As he held that barrel, she watched as before her very eyes the rest of a handgun outright materialized around the barrel, forming a grip and magazine well – which then spontaneously filled itself with a magazine, and all the accouterments of a proper gun. "Aaaand there we go. We call this one the Rising Sun Holdout, fresh from the gunsmiths at Birmingham Arcology."
"Wha...what is that?" she asked. It was obviously a handgun, but it was both noticeably smaller than her old Glock had been, and had a very strange barrel profile.
"This is a fourteen centimeter recoil-compensated magnetic holdout pistol," he said, flipping the gun so that its grip was pointed toward her. She held it, and felt as the grip reshaped itself actively to fit her hand. "Hold it for a second so the gunlock will engage. There's no point handing you a gun that somebody else can shoot you with."
"Well. Whatever universe you're from must truly be alien to have enacted that kind of brain-dead-simple gun-control law," she said flatly as the gun stopped squirming in her hand, now feeling as natural in her grip as her Glock ever had. When she held the thing up, a portion of the top rail flipped up, activating a holographic sight hosed as part of the frame. "This is…"
"An ultra-miniaturized coilgun," he said. "Ordinarily, not very useful against the Noumenon, since it's got terrible accuracy-over-distance but this thing's good against armor up close, and Recruiters do have their share of armor. And it's easily concealable, compared to most AP weaponry. Considering by Louis' word they don't know we're onto them yet, we might be able to get all the way in before we have to blast our way out."
"I don't like those kind of maybes in my life," she said. She pointed at the swirling whatever-the-fuck in her trunk and then to her new gun. "So tell me, right now, what the fuck is that, and how the fuck did you build this gun out of it?"
"Delilah, I appreciate that you're frustrated and you want answers, but both of those are essay questions that you've given me a true-false blank to answer," he said. He then touched her jacket, tugging at it. "You'll need something better than that, too."
"What?"
"Armor, Miss Patel; body armor!" he said. He looked at his swirling whatever-the-fuck and then to her. He was weighing something in his mind. And he didn't seem to like what the balance of that equation ended up being. "...Good news, I guess. I can give you something good, and something concealable. But there's bad news attached to it."
"Which is?" she asked, done with it all.
"If I make it for you, I'm gonna Unwind, and I'm going to depend on you to do the fighting for me in that case," Hare said. She must have given him a look, because he sighed, and rubbed his hand down the face. "It will be bad. For me. But we're running out of time. And however it awful to go through, hitting them while I'm Unwound might save the guy we're after and Louis both."
"While you're what?" she asked.
"Look, I'm already about a stiff breeze from Unwinding already. And once I'm Unwound there's not much worse I can get. I'd might as well give you something useful before it hits," Hare said. He then turned to the pool of viscous shit in the car and plunged his hand in again. When he pulled up, this time, it was to extract something that looked like a skin-tight catsuit of dull grey, which looked to have ended at the hips. And as he did, his skin began to shudder and shift, his limbs quaking as though he'd been hit by different electric volts at different points of him. There was a weird shudder, as she could have sworn for just a moment the sun shone through him slightly, he offered a sad laugh. "Sorry, guess we've run out."
"Run out of what? And what's happening to your body?" she asked.
"Gimme… gimme a second," he said, leaning against the trunk of the car which was now empty of that swirling grey shit. He breathed as though with difficulty. And when she watched his face, she could see his eyes changing color, shifting their locations subtly on his face as though wandering amongst the meat of his face. Not quite Picasso-esque, but definitely early amateur painter-ly. When he stood, he handed the catsuit to her. "I would have preferred full coverage, but this will have to do."
"What the fuck is going on with your face?" she asked.
"My face? Hold on, I've got to wrangle that," he said, falling to a squat, eyes pressed shut. Though his skin still writhed as though worms crawled under it and shifted from being akin to her own to bleaching to a much more Caucasian hue, his facial features did stop migrating. He then raised a finger, leaned to one side, and wretched thin yellow bile onto the parking lot.
"Jesus Christ!" she muttered, still holding the catsuit.
"Yeah. Not fun, I assure you. When things get dicey, I'm going to be depending on you to keep me safe," he said, slowly and unsteadily rising to his feet.
"Safe from what, those metal men?"
"Metal encased in meat, but yes," he said. He coughed, this time disgorging blood that looked very weird, a strange shade of scarlet and not acting at all like blood should when relieved of the body. Hare wiped his lip. "I'll try talking our way in. There are likely some baselines still in the complex, either unwitting or complicit. From the looks of your arms you're adept at punching people. Try to keep the human body count to a minimum, and the Noumenon body count to a maximum."
"You know what? Fine," she muttered, stripping off her jacket and shirt to pull this thing on. When it snagged against her bra, she growled, turning away to unfasten it and then chuck it into the back seat onto Smudge's head. The grey-and-white ball of fluff and sass did not look best amused by that. When she finally got the suit into place, she stopped being able to feel it. She could still see it, gloving her hands and pulled tight against her flesh, but her skin told her that it wasn't there at all. Weird. "What is this?"
"Swindler's Underweave, straight out of Cornerstone," Hare said, puffing his breath heavily staring at the ground between his feet, leaned forward with his hands on his hips. And as she watched, his long shadow faded away for a moment before returning, the sunlight of the dying day passing clear through him. "Minor electrical protection, minor ballistic rating. And you can wear it under other armor. Inconspicuous. Ugh. I now recall why I don't let myself Unwind. This is really bad."
"I'm sure. So where exactly are we going?" she asked, as she put her other clothes back on over the catsuit.
"Unit 102," he gave his head a shake up the line of self-storage units. For a moment as he moved, there was a shudder that ran through him, rippling as though he were pudding shot by a bullet, but he kept moving. "Louis said… oh wow I shouldn't have had eggs. Ooooh shouldn't have had eggs."
"Louis said what?" she asked as they traversed the rows of warehouse-based storage lots, until they reached one near the back of the complex, in the central of the three rows of buildings. The same burnt-sienna color that had mocked her the entire time she spent in Moncton faced her again, this time a garage door that was held in place with a robust looking combination lock. "Okay. Do we have bolt-cutters?"
"Fuck bolt cutters," he said. He reached down, touching the thing. And as she watched, the lock fairly quickly dissolved as though it were made of chocolate and he'd taken a blow-torch to it. "We're not going to be big on subtlety today."
"So what did Louis say?" Delilah asked as she lifted the door. Within was a frame of an old car right up against the door, and at the back was a vast wall of automotive detritus and tools.
"Louis said that," he pointed at the pile of refuse at the back of the unit. When he pointed, his finger briefly hung limp like a noodle, before snapping straight again, "is a hidden elevator."
"Pretty well hidden," she said. She rounded the car and started to push rolling tool-boxes aside. "I don't see any waaaaait," she paused. She looked at the floor. There was a grind wound in the concrete near a deconstructed engine block. The grind described a partial arc. Something swung open here. Hare nodded.
"Thank you. I… I'm having trouble remembering the specifics right now for obvious reasons. Just let me get that for you," he said. He laid his hand on the engine block, and then there came a loud electric buzz. The entire pile shifted, swinging out slightly before retracting away as though navigating a tricky door-well. The pile had been split so cleverly that she could scarcely believe now seeing inside of it that it had looked like just a pile of trash before. And inside was an industrial lift with a control panel sporting a plastic cover locked over it. "Amateur hour. I swear to god."
"Beyond the obvious answer of 'down', where does this thing go?" she asked.
"Into a Lair," Hair said, bypassing going for the control panel for the lift and pressing his fingers to the wires that came out of it. "These are the dens of things that should-not-be, where they do whatever it is they value. My worry is why they're so close to the railroad."
"Why is that a problem?" she asked.
"Rail means resources," he said. "Resources in monumental quantities. And resources in the hands of monsters is never a good thing."
His entire attitude had changed ever since he started glitching out. She honestly preferred this. Less glib and more forthright suited her. If only he would stay like this forever.
There was what sounded like it was supposed to be a loud, electric buzz that died within an instant of starting, a destabilizing noise that made Delilah glance for its source, then smoothly the floor of the storage unit began to rise and the elevator descend, bearing them down. "Should I…?" she began, raising her gun up and facing the direction that they'd walked in. Hare, though, shook his head and gently pushed the gun down.
"Keep it hidden 'till you need it. Like I said. Talk our way in, shoot our way out," he said.
"I'm not exactly the best at lying," she said, tucking the strange pistol into one of her coat's voluminous pockets.
"A shitty liar in the early 21st Century police? No wonder they wanted to kill you," Hare said. She glared at him. "Too soon?"
"I was a good cop," she said.
"The institution of policing in North America was so systemically ethically bankrupt that with the Collapse they one-and-all turned to banditry, and we had an entire war against them," Hare said. "You being a 'good cop' is the same as saying you're a less-lethal concoction of cyanide. A distinction without a meaningful difference."
"They tried to kill me!" she snapped.
"Evil people kill other evil people all the time," Hare said, as his entire body shook for a moment and his skin almost changed parchment-hued before he seemed to grit his teeth and settle on the visage of a pale, red-haired man in his late middle age, and his clothes shifted until he wore a green blazer over his clothing. "Now hush. We'll be opening up any second now. Walk stiffly, say nothing."
Considering how far above the red-bathed trash-heap that hid this elevator now appeared to be, this was a not insignificant descent. And when the lift finished its drop, it did so as three walls facing the way they came from, and to the left and right of that, opened up to pale concrete and harshly buzzing fluorescent lighting. Facing them was a kiosk that was manned by a middle aged woman in a bright blue blazer, identical in all ways to Hare's except its color. She tilted her head slightly at them. "Identify?"
"Prospective recruit for Exurgence, XR code 10120," Hare rattled off.
"Soul bleed intensity?" the woman answered, face impassive.
"Minor," Hare said. He took her somewhat gently though sternly by her arm and started walking down the barren concrete halls "Borderline. Other tests are needed for viability."
"That is not the way," she said.
"Other tests are required for viability," Hare responded, speaking exactly the same as he had before.
"I will inform the augmentation labs as to your arrival, 10120," the woman said. And then they were walking.
"Was… that one of them?" she asked.
"Yup," Hare said.
"And you fast-talked a computer?" she pressed.
"Joke's on her; I've got 10120's transponder right here," he said, pulling out a stained piece of metal and silicon from the breast pocket of his green blazer, "so they think I'm an Enforcer. If you see any weirdos dressed like me, you run. You run the fuck away. Clear?"
"Should I run away from you?" she asked, as they reached a branching path and turned off. And down this path, she could see a recessed 'break' area with water-coolers and snack machines that had their coin-slots taped over. Plastered onto the glass was a notice that said, "Don't be greedy'.
"You still have that option, but I promise it will only get worse for you if you do," Hare said. She gave a glance at the people, who looked like a slice of what one could expect of the demographics of Maritime Canada sitting around tables, eating lunch and talking. "More baselines than I thought."
"If these things are as bad as you say, why would anybody join them?" she asked at a whisper.
"People join the police all the time," He said.
At that she actually punched him in the ribs. Not hard enough to floor him, but enough to hurt. "Stop making fun of my profession!" she hissed at him.
"Never," he answered. "But to be less glib, they think that 'getting in on the ground floor' will prevent the worst from happening to them. And for some of them it even will. It's a lot better for the individual to be made a Noumenon Exurgent than it is to be made a Vessel. Exurgents still get to be themselves, to some degree. Vessels…" he gave a passing glance at a pair of blue jacketed Recruiters who walked past them in the opposite direction in silence until they were well past them. "Vessels, not so much."
"Wow. This is a shitty system," she said.
"You're proselytizing to the clergy, Recruit," Hare said. Then he shuddered, his flesh fluttering as he had to stop in his progress for a moment. She gave a furtive glance around. There didn't seem to be any cameras around here, but that didn't mean that somebody hadn't seen that. "Note to self, don't do this twice in one day ever again."
"Where are we going?" she asked at a whisper.
"Mainframe room," he said, flicking a glance up at the cables that ran along the corner where the wall met the ceiling.
"Is that where Louis is?"
"Louis is in carcass storage. I don't know where carcass storage is. But the mainframe will," Hare answered her.
He paused as they turned another corner, following the wires through the spartan concrete. "Something wrong?" she asked.
"I forgot my Skeleton Key in the car," he said. He turned to her. "Give me your key-ring."
"What?" she asked.
"Car or apartment, I don't care which," he said. She dug into her pocket and handed over the keys to an apartment which was now a pile of rubble due to an 'unfortunate accident' which somehow involved high-explosives that nobody was questioning. He took the key and held it briefly to his forehead, as though concentrating, then nodded. "Okay. Should work. If it doesn't, it was nice knowing you."
"Work for what?" she asked. He didn't answer, just walking with the cables leading his way, until they came to a rather resilient looking door with a card lock. And Hare held her house-key to the card-reader, only to have the thing let out a happy beep and flash a green light, and the door to open. He gave a chuckle.
"Better to be lucky than to be good," he muttered. From within rolled a wave of heat, and lines of computer servers, but they looked different than the ones that were buried in her old precinct building. Almost as though they were… breathing. And when they walked in, Hare immediately touched the door and had it close behind them, before putting his palm onto the bundle of wires that ascended a wall to reach the ceiling. "I'll start rummaging. You…"
"Excuse me, what the fuck are you doing in here?" a large man with tattoos peeking out of his rolled-up sleeves demanded, glaring at the two of them while holding a screwdriver like a knife.
"Delilah, silence him," Hare said, not even glancing up.
"Fuck me; intruders! Intruders!" the big guy shouted, running through the stacks.
"Quickly, please, I have to focus on this!" Hare said. And with a growl against the miserable state of the universe in general, Delilah took off at a run down the stacks of these strange, warm, wet computers. She saw him slip on a puddle on the floor past where he'd intended to go, which gave her enough time to root her feet and charge after him. He saw her coming, so when she reached him he was already lashing forward with that screwdriver to stab her with it. And she, having been no slouch in the realm of 'not getting stabbed', caught his arm and dragged it past so that the driver slammed into the metal frame instead of any part of her flesh. She then drove a hard left hook into the side of his head.
He immediately snapped back, driving his fist up and into her bullet-grazed side, which hurt like an absolute bastard. She tried to drive a short-punch into his head, but he quickly fouled it by getting his arm up grappling her neck. She wasn't about to go down that easily. So instead of just pounding him, she grabbed him by the scuff of his shirt and the back of his belt, sending an explosive pulse of force up through her core and lifting him briefly off of his feet, before slamming him hard to the floor, managing to get his head to hit first.
Whoever this guy was, he obviously was no stranger to blows to the head. So instead of being stunned or knocked out, he tried stabbing her in the gut with his screwdriver. And though it hurt a bit, she didn't actually feel stabbed. A glance down showed that his tool hadn't penetrated her catsuit. She let out a string of profanity both English and Urdu as she mounted over his flailing legs until she had his rib-cage vised between her knees, whence she started to rain down her fists until he stopped flailing and trying to stop her. She panted a few times at the man who's face was already swelling grotesquely from the injuries she'd given him. He was still breathing, though. And he still moved groggily, as though trying to summon some coherence. This fucker would have been a fantastic boxer, with an iron jaw like that.
"He won't stay down," she said to Hare, who was still holding the wires that plunged into the living-server closest to their entry point.
"Well, there's a simple way to deal with that," Hare said.
She glared at him for a moment, not liking his implication. But that moment passed and she looked at the guy. Though built every inch of him the welterweight fighter, he had the accouterments of a back-end IT tech. And that meant he had zip-ties aplenty. She hog-tied him with plastic ties, and gagged him with his own sock, while Hare was now at the stacks staring at the machine in his hands. "What are you even doing back there?"
"Rummaging," he said, eyes glazed as he stood before the server.
"No, I want an actual explanation of what the fuck you're doing," she said.
Hare sighed, and then lifted one hand off of the server. And she recoiled when she saw strange, pale fibers raised from almost every pore of his skin where it had been in contact, fibers that twisted and writhed like parasitic worms. "Brain-machine interface. Mine is pretty basic, but it allows me to bypass actually having to using a keyboard."
"That is coming out of you," she said. "What are they?"
"A tertiary nervous network, outside of the sensory-muscular circuit. Now give me a second. There's somebody watching this and I need to be careful," Hare said, putting both hands on the server once more. Then he started to smile. "There you are you beauty. Delilah? Your phone please?"
"I thought you didn't do 'phone's," she said, extracting her crack-screened old smart-phone. He sighed at the thing and ran his finger along the thing, and then tapped it again sternly. When he handed it back, the screen was intact and her screen was displaying a three dimensional map of… something. The upper levels, where she was, they looked like standard building complex stuff. The lower levels were more naturalistic, as though a cave system.
"Just because I don't carry one doesn't me I don't use them," he said. He pointed at the marker a not insignificant distance away. "That is carcass storage, where whatever the fuck it is that built this place deposit their cast-offs."
"So we get to Louis, and then what?" she asked.
"Lou didn't tell me where the VIP was, and the Tunnel closed faster than usual so I can't raise him again. He'll let us know where to go from there," he said. She nodded, and took a step toward the door but Hare caught her before she even got close to the door out of here. "Now listen carefully to me when I tell you this: I know plenty about the Cognoscenti and the bio-tech amalgams that they use. I've fought them before. It's never fun but they're a known quantity. I know how to kill them. Lou said that there's something else down here. Something that I've never seen before."
"And I'm taking it that's a very rare occurrence?" she asked.
"Very," he said. "So take a breath, wipe that sweat off, and remember; let me talk, walk stiffly, say nothing, be ready to kill anybody who gets in our way."
"I don't think I like this job very much," Delilah said.
"Nobody does at first. The perks make up for it," Hare said. "We'll discuss those later when lives aren't on the line."
The exit from the server room reminded Delilah that the air wasn't supposed to smell like warm meat. And the walk brought them past other groups of humans who were engaged in cubicle-hell work. Most of them wore the blue blazer that Hare identified out as a Recruiter. A few didn't. That confused Delilah just as much as anything else. Who would take an office-job literally underground doing the same old bullshit? "What are they doing?" she whispered to Hare.
"Sh!" he hissed back at her from the corner of his mouth, continuing to stare directly forward and walk with an almost robotic regularity. The next few passages were just naked concrete, devoid of either people or people-shaped robots. But as the air began to grow cold, and they entered a section of the complex that felt inexplicably wet in the air, a section of the wall folded in and slid aside, revealing a very tall, dark haired woman wearing a trim black suit and mirrored, wrap-around shades. At her dark red lapel was a pin that was marked with a silver D. The way she moved made Delilah viscerally uncomfortable, but she couldn't exactly say why. Only that there was something very, very wrong with it.
"Hold on," the woman's mirror shades snapped to Hare, staring him down. "What are you doing this far from the Malleary?"
"I am taking this one for Exurgence conversion," he said.
"Really?" the woman stepped forward in a way that seemed to evoke greased gliding, standing way too close to both of them. Delilah was about the same height as this woman, which marked both of them as tall indeed, though Delilah was much more solid with muscle. "I wasn't aware I had an Enforcer with that face. Who are you, then?"
"XR code 10120," he said without feeling.
"A ten-thousand. Good to see that your people are actually getting production numbers up. I was worried they would huddle in a corner forever if we hadn't come to snap the whip."
"I am not a person," Hare said.
"Sure you're not," the uncanny woman said with a smile that looked wrong. She turned to Delilah, and Delilah literally could not keep herself from flinching away from her. "She's probably going to be more trouble than she's worth. You need a stronger stomach to be an Exurgent."
"We will replace her stomach," Hare said.
The black-suited woman (?) gave a chuckle at that. "10120, one day I'm going to get all up in there and learn how to give your kind a sense of humor."
Hare was silent.
"The exit lift is that way," the woman (?) said, gesturing back whence they came.
"I am using a secondary exit to ensure delivery to the local Kutoba Branch Office," Hare said.
"There is no exit down this path," though her expression was hidden behind the eye-concealing glasses and her skin looked sallow, she did not seem especially amused by saying that.
"I am using a secondary exit to ensure delivery to the local Kutoba Branch Office," Hare said a second time, with exactly the same intonations.
"...Great. I get an Enforcer and it's fucking broken," the strange human-thing said. She then turned her head uncomfortably far to the left and tilted it impossibly far, as though trying to get more of a look at Delilah. "Wow. You're opened right up aren't you. How would you like to be part of something bigger, girl?"
"We have claimed this one," Hare said, his fist closing more tightly on Delilah's arm. Not quite hard enough to hurt, but it was getting there. "You have no shortage of potential Exurgencies."
"Would that that were true, tin-man. Would that that were true," she then rotated her head a full two-hundred seventy degrees in the same direction, bringing back upright having gone a biologically impossible distance to do so. And when she walked past them, she did so by somehow passing between the two of them, despite the fact that Hare was holding Delilah by the arm when she did. Delilah gave a glance back, trying to rationalize how the sweet fuck that thing just did that. But the debatably human thing was gliding away; there was no way to call it walking, because steps onto concrete made a little thing called noise.
Though Hare started walking long before that strange, disturbing thing rounded a corner and vanished from sight, neither of them had the gumption to actually talk. Not in the face of that. When it was finally gone, Hare's body once more did a pudding-quiver. "What the fuck was that?" he asked.
"Why are you asking me? I barely understand any of this!" Delilah hissed back at him.
"I've seen dozens of different uglies from all places on the Stack and the Realms Outside. But I've never had one that felt like that," Hare said, a worried look in his eye. And that in turn bred worry in Delilah. If the inscrutable sage came afoul of something he didn't understand, what chance had the naive novice that was Delilah? He gestured ahead, and they entered into a room that had a door identical to the server room's except that it wasn't locked. He pushed it open and Delilah immediately felt her fear-sweat evaporate and her eyes start to sting as the unspeakably dry air within began to pull the water away from her. There were corpses piled like logs, most of them desiccated and mummy like. But there were still some, a rare few which had pride of place on mortuary slabs, which were still plump and life-like.
Hare let her go and moved over to one in particular, a mostly naked white man with black hair. "Rise and shine, sweet prince, we've got work to do."
"It took you long enough," the corpse said back to him, sitting up and glancing at Delilah. He flinched at seeing her, moving as though to cover himself. "Really, Hare?"
"I saw that thing you mentioned. Do you have any insight onto it?" Hare asked, pulling the clothes which had been stacked in the mortuary slab's drawers and handing them to the man who must have been Louis.
"Creatures of impossible biology and incredible relativity," Lou said, as he put on pants. "It's a match made in heaven between them and the Cognoscenti. What these things leave behind when they screw up making a Vessel is exactly what the gear-guts need to make their own."
"And you're sure they're not Empyrean like the Cogs?" Hare asked.
Lou just stared at Hare flatly.
"Okay, wishful thinking," Hare muttered. He glanced over at a pile of personal effects, then back to Lou. "Do you have the VIP's location?"
"Of course. They have in the infusion room. They're taking their time on him. Word from 'the top', or so I'm told, is that they are not allowed to fuck up bringing him into the fold."
"The Noumenon caring about the wellbeing of an individual. Wonders never cease," Hare said. "Did you get eyes on him?"
"Hare…" Lou said, with a chiding tone.
"Of course you did," Hare said.
"When we get him out he'll be perfect. His Soul Bleed is almost as bad as hers," Lou gestured in Delilah's direction.
"Excuse me?" Delilah asked.
"Then lead the way," Hare said. "Once more into the jaws of peril…"
"I'm going to have to see that movie at some point. You're obnoxious about quoting it," Lou said.
"I will not contain my enthusiasm for the cinematic Magnum Opus of my time," Hare snipped.
"Literally. Everything about you is leaking out right now. Didn't every one of your fellows die because they did something stupid like this?" Lou asked gesturing around them the door to the complex, and likely meaning the entire situation they were in.
"Too soon, Lou. Too soon," Hare said. Louis sighed, and rubbed his head. And slowly but visibly, Delilah watched as his body grew an extra three inches of height, became rail thin, and his clean-shaven face was replaced by a different one, this one with a close beard. Delilah pointed between the two of them.
"Is that something you can all do?"
"To a greater or lesser degree," Hare said. Louis, in his new visage, gave a nod, then opened the door and moved out. Louis didn't travel as Delilah and Hare had, taking the open paths to wherever they needed to go. Louis seemed to unerringly locate the hidden passages and shortcuts, those cleverly hidden sliding panels and the ways to activate them. Though Delilah had only the vaguest idea of where she actually was – the 3d map was starting to become more trouble than it was worth in her eyes – she had a distinct feeling that by Louis' direction, they were cleaving through the vast snarl of this place in the shortest conceivable path. And more pleasing to Delilah's paranoia, they did so without seeing another soul.
Or whatever these things had in place of a soul, as the case may be.
"Can we talk about this VIP now?" Delilah asked as they made that transit.
"He's a former Noumenon hunter from a pre-existing NGO," Lou said, voice tipped low to not carry far. "They were idiots, trying to hunt down some justification for the money they were siphoning from the American government. But they did find something. And that something infested the entire NGO. Why he didn't just get gobbled up with the rest of the Org is a mystery."
"A mystery we'll be in the right place to solve when we get him," Hare said.
"Do these 'Noumenon' often show sentimental attachments to people?" Delilah asked, trying to come to grips with the terms she was being bombarded with.
"Almost never. It's essentially unheard of," Hare said.
"Exurgents," Lou said, as he opened a secret passage inside a secret passage, at least squaring their hidden-ness. Hare scoffed.
"They don't count. They're practically us," Hare chuckled.
"So he must have something material, something unique to him that they can't afford to lose," Delilah verified.
"That's the theory," Hare said.
"He's just a guy with a Soul Bleed," Lou said.
"You might have the X-ray eyes, Lou, but you're not all-knowing. I think Delilah's is the way of things," Hare said.
"I know what I saw," Lou said. And then he made a shushing motion, opening a panel into a section of the complex that Delilah could have sworn was breathing. All three of them, emerging from the over-sized duct, were taken aback at that, so Delilah didn't feel like the busted wheel yet again. She focused on the point where wall met floor. And exactly as she had intuited, there was a subtle shifting, in and out, as though the entire hallway were an artery pulsing with the beat of an alien heart. It would have been more horrible but more sane if it was also warm and wet. That it was neither made it all the stranger. All three of them were struck still by it.
"...I hate this place," Hare said quietly.
"So it's not just me?" Delilah asked.
It was Lou who got his shit together fastest, and dragged the rest of them along behind him. "Come on. That's the 'infusion room'. Where those weird things do their weird business."
"I hope they're still subject to a silver tongue. Otherwise this will end messily," Hare said as he paused before the doors. There wasn't even a lock on them. After a moment, perhaps to calm his wits, he pushed open one of the double doors and stepped inside.
If the corridor outside was an artery, then this room was the inside of a squelching, pulsating organ. There were no truly flat surfaces to be found here, everything curves and bumps and blisters. Though it looked like it was made of concrete, the shape of the room was more cave than anything made by a man-like hand. A faintly yellow fluid dribbled down some of the walls, and a grey-brown mist mounted on the floor up to about ankle depth. The room seemed to form a sort of viewing gallery above, and a theatre below. There were three other people down there, two men and a woman, one of which was stripped to his waist and the other two in the same black-and-red suits that the one from before had been wearing. These ones did not bear the silver D pin. One of them was holding the shirtless man down, and the shirtless man was practically awash with sweat.
"That's him," Louis whispered, closing the door behind them.
"Drugging him?" Hare asked as he skulked low, and Delilah joined likewise.
"...no," Louis whispered. He pointed at what looked like a flexing and gasping medical locker. Delilah saw rows of vials and bottles, but it was too far to see what was in them. "That's all stimulants. He must be just this side of a heart attack or a stroke."
"Why?" Hare asked. He gave his head a shake. "Whatever. Delilah, you get the man, we'll get the woman."
So they gave her the bigger one? Well, considering the 'state' of Hare, and the complete lack of any sort of dangerousness that she sensed from Louis, maybe two against one smaller target was all they were good for. And despite her aches, Delilah was still good to go. The floor didn't squelch with her footfalls as she approached. Take what mercies life gives you, she supposed.
Upon passing the edge of the half-wall which turned the scene of the shirtless, slender man covered in sweat and nearly red-fleshed from exertion and his two handlers, she gave a thought to reach for that gun. But she didn't know if they were meant to go loud yet. And a 'coilgun' didn't sound like the kind of thing that operated silently. The man on the table was shouting incoherently, trying to flail his way free, but the black-suited man was able to keep him locked in place, while the black-suited woman prepared another syringe for injection. But the sweaty, half-naked man's head rose from the table, and his eye caught Delilah. No. Don't you dare.
"HELP ME! KILL DEEZ FUCKIN' TRAITAH'S!" he screamed. And the black-suited man turned to follow the victim's gaze, and saw Delilah there. Well fuck it. She let out a roar of her own and launched herself at him, a tackle that dragged him off of the shirtless man and tried to slam him into the wall. But as she squeezed, she felt the bones, those parts of him that should have been solid, sliding inside her grasp, so that by the time she approached the wall she was holding nothing, and she felt a boot driving into the small of her back, causing her to only prevent braining herself on the squirming, fetid 'concrete' by blocking her face with her hands.
She instantly lost track of the rest of the room, because with insane speed came the black suit, who launched into a Superman punch trying to drive her head through the concrete or else batter it flat. She ducked the punch, not even rejoicing how it sounded like he broke his fist against the wall before she turned and drove an uppercut into his liver. He quivered briefly at the impact, then back-handed her across her jaw with his broken hand.
The impact of the blow was greater by far than the pugilist IT guy. She didn't even see his eyes, concealed behind wrap-around shades, but his fluffy beard made him seem a hungry bear, and she a hapless salmon. She took as long as she dared to get her feet properly under her then ducked his fiendishly fast jab, weaving in to drive a heavy straight into his face. He snapped back his head, but in response flicked his foot up, and she had exactly enough time to see that there was a spur of sharp metal extending from the toe of his wingtip shoe before it drove into her side. The impact lifted her from her feet and nearly dumped her to the floor, but she managed to keep her balance. And she even caught his leg. Though her side hurt like he'd just pulped her appendix, he didn't seem to have actually gotten through that fucking catsuit.
She diverted what would have been a hook to his head into a hammer blow into the side of his knee. It didn't crunch like knees were supposed to when you fucked with them. It simply rotated a full circuit, before tensing down as though she'd done no harm to it all, which she'd obviously not. He grabbed for her hair, causing her to flinch back, grateful at least that she kept most of it braided and out of the way. The few strands he did catch hurt when they were ripped by the root, but he didn't gain control of her head, and the upward driving knee that he was likely intending to drive directly into her face was warded by her elbows before she caught his airborne, unrooted body with a hand and with all of the strength she could summon, twisted him down to slam his face into the floor. But his arms reversed in their sockets, grabbing and twisting so that Delilah had to front-roll or have her own arms dislocated.
That left both of them on the floor, and he looked utterly unfazed. She glanced around, and spotted a piece of metal that wasn't squirming like most of the room around it. It was just a rod of structural steel. But when she crawled to grab it, she barely managed to close her fist around it when she felt a slithering, horrifying grasp of her ankle. She hefted it around, anticipating another blow intended for the back of her head. Instead, that incoming stomp was warded by honest iron, which she twisted and swung with all that her limited leverage could allow into the supposedly damaged knee. It did something, if not what she expected; his upper-leg seemed to collapse through the shin, dropping him to nearly floor level, and when she smashed him again across the jaw, she at least saw a tooth fly out along with something red-brown which clearly was not blood.
The grizzly man turned to her as she pushed herself up, and with a squelch noise, lifted himself up so that his leg restored itself to normal form. He didn't try saying anything, offer any expression. Just a moment of pause, then aggression once more. And this time, Delilah had an iron truncheon. His sweeping arms to grapple her were waylaid when she slammed it down in a sledge-hammer blow onto the crown of his head, a sound very much what she imagined the noise of a skull popping sounding in the room. She even managed to swing again and drive a golf-like swing up into his now exposed jaw, to the sound of shattering teeth and crunching bone, as he was pushed back.
"Not so tough now, are you?" she asked.
The grizzly man stared at her with floppy jaw, not looking at all pained or dismayed. And then there was a shuddering, as another arm, naked and wet erupted through the seam of his suit. Then another, not even symmetrical to it. Oh fuck all of this.
Fortunately she wasn't alone any longer. As the new born limb flexed and sorted itself, a machete-blow severed it from the grizzly man. The shirtless guy was up, holding what looked like a fucking ninja sword, his eyes so bloodshot that they were essentially pink around his irises and his flesh nearly the color of blood. "JUST! FUCKIN'! DIE!" he screamed, punctuating each word with an actually workable slash with that remarkably stupid weapon, depriving the grizzly man of an arm each time. The grizzly man was left standing there as a stump on legs, for the first time showing something approaching emotion on its face. That emotion was 'bafflement'.
Then all of the people in the room flinched as the chamber became an oven, and a bright flare of light came from its far side, and an inhuman wail began there. The disarmed grizzly man snapped to look over there, as did Delilah and the nearly mad VIP. The woman who both Louis and Hare had gone after was now flailing about on fire, burning away. Hare turned over to the melee on the other side of the chamber and held up his fingers as though describing two inches at arm's length. She was about to ask for what he'd just done, when the air between he and they first wavered, then let out a loud bang, flaring to incredible heat that seared Delilah's skin and light that blinded her eyes.
She recoiled away, unable to see, and her skin feeling like it was already raising up in blisters. When she gave a glance there were only a pair of legs left of the grizzly man, standing upright with his entire body north of the pelvis reduced to ash. The wall burned like the concrete was made of wood.
"Okay," Hare said, pausing to cough up more of that strange blood, "good news. Fire actually works for once."
"What the fuck was that?" Delilah asked.
"You," Hare ignored her. "You are the former XD of the DHORKS, yes?"
"You ain't one'a mine. Who the fuck are you?" he asked, sounding the very prodigal son of New Jersey.
"Your exit strategy," Hare said. "Delilah, this is Brian Sears, codename 'One'."
"Hey, how the fuck did you find my old name?" Sears asked.
"He's going to die soon if we don't get him out of here," Louis said.
"What?" he asked.
"We're all going to die if we don't get us out of here," Hare countered. Delilah, who'd taken this whole argument sucking wind, gave him a confused shrug. "Not all alarms are audible."
"Fuck me," Delilah said. She ran to the doors to this fucking disgusting room and shoved them open, revealing that the passage beyond was now lit by a deeply unpleasant blue-brown color, with flashes of crimson red. Though there were not alarm klaxons, she knew that the oh-shit lighting had been ignited. "Do we have a way out of here?" she called over her shoulder. Louis just slipped past and started to run his eyes along the walls, before finally pointing at a different spot than the one they'd entered from.
"Well see us out!" Hare ordered, pushing Sears ahead of himself as he did.
"Hey, watch'it, you! I can walk on my own!" Sears complained.
"Your body temperature is currently cooking your brain. It's a miracle you're even conscious," Hare said. But before they reached the point of the hall that Louis was now manipulating, there was a crash behind them. Delilah turned back, and saw the middle aged woman in the blue blazer that had confronted them at the elevator, who was reflecting off of the wall having hit it so hard to shatter a crater into it. She locked eyes on the lot at the corridor's far end, and then she started sprinting.
"Faster. Faster would be better!" Hare prompted.
The ground seemed to shudder even harder with that 'Recruiter's every footfall, and it was obvious during the flashing of the light that she was tearing up concrete with every launch forward. Delilah pulled the weird gun she'd kept in her jacket, taking a stance and having the holographic sight pop up and frame the incoming cyborg. The sights even calculated the likelihood of a clean shot. She ignored the other things that the sight was doing, just lining up a shot as best as she could, and then firing when the cyborg was four meters away.
The coilgun in her hand jerked forward, not back, and the sound that erupted was akin to having a bullet fired from a .50 BMG launch from two miles away and zip directly beside your ear; there was no bang, only a crack of a hypersonic projectile. And that projectile impacted just to the left of the Recruiter's nose, shredding through the cyborg's lower eyelid, and twisting her head aside. But though there was a spray of blood and bone fragments, there was also a scattering of shredded metal that came out. And though the cyborg now had a palm-sized rent going straight through the entire length of her head, she closed the distance and with a sound of shrieking metal smashed Delilah's hand's aside; she felt that her right arm outright shattered under the blow, and she was sent spinning with a scream of pain erupting from her throat.
Hare tried to rush in, a long spike manifesting from his hands which he tried to stab the Recruiter, but the Recruiter deflected the spike away from her chest with one hand, sacrificing the flesh covering it to reveal the metal underneath. It then grabbed Hare by his face, slamming him so hard against the wall that the concrete there cracked. There was a rising electric whine, and arcs of power began to jump along all the exposed metal of the meat-covered automaton. Finally, a massive electric snap, the stink of ozone rising into the air as Hare was violently electrocuted.
Louis finally got the panel open, and made as though half wanting to flee. Not all of them were suicidally brave, it seemed. Delilah looked along the floor, and found the coil-gun lying a short distance away. But as she rushed for it, the Recruiter dropped Hare and turned its attention to her. It drove a straight-kick into Delilah's chest which sent her rocketing across the hallway, rolling to a halt with new and brilliant pain radiating through her obviously broken ribs, and she was pretty sure that she'd taken a bad blow to the head from the wall she'd hit.
She wasn't going to die like this. She already survived shooting her way out of Halifax. She wasn't going to die in fucking Moncton. She saw the head-pulping straight-kick being jack-hammered at her face, and was able to jerk her head out of the way so that the foot buried itself into the concrete instead of her flesh. And with that leg momentarily nailed into place, Delilah hurled herself toward her gun. She only made it half way there, and had to crawl, reaching out with her still useable left hand, only to have herself yanked back. The Recruiter had already extracted itself from the wall, and was holding her back by her ankle. Delilah started pulling things from her pockets and throwing them at the Recruiter. The Recruiter was not fazed by half of a gas-station sandwich, a dead pen, or her old police badge deflecting off of its face. It simply took a step in so that one foot was staked down beside her knee. Then with both arms, it ripped and torqued.
She saw her own leg being ripped off, but the pain didn't hit her immediately. No. What hit her first, an instinct of fight over flight, was that it no longer had her by the ankle. So with one massive haul, she got her fingers onto the grip of the gun. She was yanked back again, but this time there was a rattle accompanying her as the coilgun got dragged with her. She glanced back, and saw that Sears had tried launching himself at the thing, but was caught by his throat for his trouble. The hand began to squeeze. Though it wasn't immediately clear since he was already red in the face, it was likely that the Recruiter was sick of his bullshit and was just going to kill him.
She tried to pull away, but the Recruiter, who had her other foot in its grasp, stomped onto her shin and ground sideways, so that the bottom of her right leg now took a ninety-degree turn to the right via the middle of the shin. That she did feel.
The other thing she felt was the gun finally in her palm. She brought it up in front of her with the one useful arm she had left, pointed it center-of-mass, and pulled the trigger.
Crack, and a crash of metal sprayed out the back of the Recruiter. Oh, but she did not stop with one shot. She fired again. And again. And again. Each one tore a corridor of ruin through the bio-machine, tearing away part of its superstructure. By the ninth shot, it fell to one knee, its hand falling away from Sears' neck. By the fifteenth, its other arm had fallen off, because so much of its bodily frame had been blasted apart. The gun gave a harsh buzz after the seventeenth shot. Out of ammo.
The Recruiter let out an electric pop, jerking to one side, as black smoke puffed out of the machines under its skin.
And as it did, the pain started to reach Delilah, whose hand went weak and world began to waver. She felt cold. She felt exhausted.
"Delilah! Fuck she's dying…" Hare said, his face burned but not seeming to care.
"You! Sears! Pick her up! We need to go!" Louis shouted.
"She's a goner! We've got a better chance…" Sears began, only for a slap to sound. Delilah couldn't see anything. Her vision was hemmed by dark, only a tiny spot in the center of her vision allowing in the blue-brown light.
"WE ARE NOT LEAVING ANYBODY!" Louis shouted.
Hare's face appeared in her fading vision one last time. "We've got you, Delilah. Just stay alive a little longer. It's going to be alright."
Well, that was on them, now. Delilah, bleeding to death, barely able to breathe, and in a fairly severe state of shock, slipped out of consciousness.
She dreamed of distorted laughter, and walls that breathed.
The Integrated
When the Noumenon infiltrated the Prime Reality, they were a force of nature which man with its restrictive laws of physics could not resist. What hope did a man with gunpowder and lead have when confronted with something which exists virtually, or if confronted by hostile action can simply choose to not have that action affect it? In the earliest days of the Arrival, every encounter with the Noumenon ended with a massacre, or worse. But then came the Founders, who were given the secrets of how to steal the power of the Noumenon for themselves.
The result of this theft are the Integrated. When a human, damaged by their contact by the Noumenon, is put through these specialized processes, the damage that was done (called Soul Bleed) instead becomes an anchor from the Prime Reality to the higher Hyperreal Realms which the individual shares synergy with. This process changes the person from a slave of causality to a universal fact. They are more real than the rest of their race, and can use Numen, the power of Outside, to fuel their health, their otherworldly abilities, or even their bespoke technologies. Some of them stop aging. Others are so imprinted into What Is that they cast Echos into the higher realities, divorced from the need of a body in the strictest sense. And the Integrated are humanity's best weapon against the Noumenon.
Most Integrated were created at the behest of Foundations, the vast, world-spanning organizations that the Founders put into motion. Some much fewer number managed to Integrate themselves, to lesser or (far more rarely) greater effect. To be a member of the Foundation is to be known as the bulwark of humanity. And to be Integrated now is to be a survivor of the massive war for the Prime Reality which spanned eighty years and claimed the lives of all but one of the Founders. All look in awe at Nathan Adams, the Last Founder, who is more commonly called the Nuclear Man for his insane and overwhelming power. He is seen as the high-water mark for what the Integrated are capable of, as the one hope in the darkness.
The darkness has hope, too. And unseen by most, there was another Founder who survived the Hyperreal War. A paranoid and careful Founder adrift from their home reality. One who created not a beacon of hope and stability in a dying world... but a shadowy cabal of infiltrators and assassins. Nobody knows of the Downfall of Oedipus. They would have it no other way.
- preface to 'Why You're Safe' by Eugene Verne, Kolkatta Press circa 2098