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by Kahlil Johnson

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7. Hh

I know it's been a thing for a while, but I miss things sometimes. I only recently discovered the existence of the writing experiment known as the Celestial Forge (v3), previously used in such fics as "Brockton's Celestial Forge" and "Doomsday Prevention Toolkit". So, I've decided to take a crack at it.

The character sheet will be at the bottom of this post.

But before we go any further, I would like to make a few things plain so that we hopefully don't have the same problems in this thread that happened in several of my prior story threads.

Your Attention Please

All fanfiction uses fanon, for about the same reason that all oceans contain water. Canon is a guideline and not a rule.

This means that nobody will award you a medal for lore nitpicks. If something is not 100.00% lore-compliant to Rifts canon, then the world will not come to an end. Yes, even if it was an honest mistake and something not deliberately intended. The game is decades old and wasn't exactly a model of tight worldbuilding even at the time it came out. So in order to turn it into an actual living breathing world that the MC and the rest of the cast will live, love, laugh, and die in, I am gonna have to make shit up to fill in the blanks. I might even have to straight up retcon punch shit that's excessively interfering with the plot that I would most enjoy writing. So, just getting that out on the table first thing.

Chekhov's Gun is a valid writing tool. I will use that tool at its proper pace. That proper pace is not 'instantly'.

If something happens that isn't immediately explained, just wait a little while. Because it's probably something that's being held back for a dramatically appropriate reveal later. There is a word for a story that deliberately eliminates all possible elements of mystery and surprise by fully explaining everything immediately after it first appears. That word is "boring".

Yes, I am aware that SB readers have been burned by other authors before who have promised to explain things in due time and never did. No, that still doesn't make me any more patient with being nagged to update faster or spoil my own plot before I want to. I am not every other author, and anybody familiar with my stuff knows that I actually do remember to fire Chekhov's Gun most of the time. The rest of you who are new to my stuff... well, I just told you, right here and now, so you still shouldn't be surprised.

If I say "no", that doesn't mean "keep asking me". It means NO. Full stop.

Discussion is one thing, and commentary is one thing, but once an author says 'No, I understand your objection but I'm still not going to rewrite my story because you don't like that one plot element', at this point commentary should stop. Over the past few months I've seen several good stories die or languish in long hiatus because readers got so stuck on demanding what they wanted that the author went 'Well, thanks for the buzzkill!' and lost all urge to write. So yeah, I will discuss things if I feel like it, but once I make a firm decision and say 'Nope, and stop asking', then stop asking. I request that anyone unclear on this point go look at the CrW specific rules post sticked in CrW.

Creative writing is difficult, complicated, and very sensitive to the emotional state of the author. If it was easy to do, there would never be any unfinished or mediocre fanfics ever posted on SB. And I'm sure we can all agree, we don't live in that world.

So yeah. This shit is hard enough, don't make it harder. Or else nobody ends up happy. Least of all yourself.

I will not be able to plan too far ahead.

The random-roll nature of Celestial Forge as well as the wide diversity of powers available means that not only can an author not plan ahead except in very broad outline, but their plans will be subject to change without notice. This may affect update speed. If it does, well, I'm doing the best I can.

If you even try saying 'But I didn't know you were upset about any of this!', I won't believe you.

This is the thread OP. It's labelled "Introduction" in the threadmarks. You are expected to have read this post before trying to read the story.

Especially since this is also the post that the MC's character sheet will be in, so it's not like you could follow along with what's going on in the story if you weren't regularly checking here anyway.

Right. Enough with the depressing stuff. Now it's time for the actual rules mechanics.

Celestial Forge Rules

100cp per 2000 words. The MC's very first purchase may be made on credit.

(revised) Powers will be random-rolled. However, the author may freely choose to veto the power rolled in favor of anything less powerful/broken than that was just rolled, in case something comes up that was excessively story-breaking. Because my dice are trolls. So I will fudge, but only in the less munchkiny direction. Note that this is the author getting a veto. As far as the MC's point of view is concerned, he's drawing blind bag picks.

The MC may enter the Celestial Forge interface at any time he has enough CP to pick something new.

The MC will be figuring out the exact nature and limits of the Celestial Forge as he goes, because he's not getting an instruction manual for it. And given that the Rifts setting is already a land of funky ass magic and psi powers, he's not guaranteed to guess right the first time. So if you see him making a mistake or a jumping to a conclusion about how he does what he does, he's very likely intended to.

Character Sheet

Jonathan Cooper/"John Stilwell"

Words: 144.6k

Total CP: 7200

Unspent CP: 1000

Spoiler: Chapters 1 through 10

Spoiler: Chapters 11

Last edited: Aug 8, 2021

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May 11, 2021

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cliffc999

May 11, 2021

#7

Prologue

Even now, I can't say exactly when it started.

I'd known for years that I had to be careful. Only the very oldest people in town could remember a time before the Coalition had come to town nigh on forty years ago. And normally they didn't talk about it much. But very old people sometimes let things slip and so as I grew up I'd picked up a few tidbits here and there of what life had been like in Waverly before the Coalition States had "incorporated" us into their system. When there'd actually been D-Bees still living in town and not just humans. When we didn't have to worry about the patrols who'd come through looking for any signs of magic or unregistered psi-powers. When the town council made our own laws instead of having the military district commander make them for us, and we didn't have to pay Coalition taxes or let them draft people for the Coalition army or all the rest of it.

Even a barely literate farm boy like me knew the basic history of the world of the Rifts. A couple hundred years ago, the Cataclysm and the Great War had ended the advanced, high-tech civilization that had used to cover the world in the almost mythical times when there was no monsters, no magic, and everybody had plenty of food and houses with air conditioning and computers and the rest. But the billions of people who'd died in the Cataclysm had somehow caused the long-buried powers of magic to return, which is why ley lines were now glowing brightly and visible to the naked eye as they ran across the land when before they'd been invisible. Why dimensional rifts would randomly open at ley line junctions to allow all sorts of monsters and demons and other races from other dimensions to end up stranded on Earth. Why practitioners of magic and people with psi-powers were now common enough that everybody had heard of them and even small villages had seen at least one, instead of just being myths and legends. And why nobody went away from civilized areas without armor, weapons, or magical powers strong enough to stand up to even the 'mega-damage' threats that were impervious to ordinary weapons and required big lasers or rail guns to damage, or why they didn't live very long if they did.

So when I thought about it, I could understand why many people thought that being under the rule of the Coalition was better than being just one of the many anonymous little free towns. For that matter, given how Waverly was in northern Iowa and several days' foot travel away from the border zone between the Wisconsin magic zone and the CS, we'd actually been going lucky to be overlooked as long as we'd had. So instead of being an anonymous little town like other towns that vanished every year whenever they were unlucky enough to run into something large and nasty enough to overwhelm their local militias, now we had a Coalition army base maybe fifty miles away that would send flying power armor troops who'd be here in twenty minutes if the mayor used the distress radio. Instead of relying on a mish-mash of wandering techs (or 'operators', as they liked to call themselves) to keep old and scavenged gear running, now we had actual farm machines and electrical generators manufactured in Chi-Town itself and the opportunity to send folk to a licensed Coalition tech school to learn how to run them. Instead of people who knew just enough herblore or psi-assisted healing to do quick patch-ups and nothing to treat more advanced cases with, we had an actual medtech with actual medical supplies who'd been trained in the Coalition army before he'd been mustered out to a retirement assignment in a quiet village like ours and the ability to send really injured people to the base hospital. Even the cows seemed healthier and the beef better-tasting ever since the Coalition people had sold us some better stock from the big ranches down south.

But somehow all those things didn't seem to be as important when someone you'd known all your life vanished one day because they were 'different', and then hardly anyone ever talked about them again.

Uncle Gerald – well, he'd actually been some sort of second cousin removed from something, but we'd called him 'Uncle' - had been what they called a "mystic", someone who had minor magic that didn't need any kind of teacher to learn from. Who'd been born with the ability to see auras, do healing, and cast a random selection of spells just by intuitively knowing how to do them. I'd asked him once how he'd picked which spells to learn and he said that he hadn't picked at all, they'd just spontaneously come to him as he meditated and practiced his powers and generally picked up life experience. And then he joked that if he'd actually gotten to pick which spells he knew out of the limited number that a mystic could ever learn, he wouldn't have wasted one on a spell that did nothing except conjure up the sound of a thunderclap.

Of course, even magic that minor was a violation of Coalition law. The CS had a very simple and clear-cut policy about magic; no mercy. Psionic powers, powers of the mind, were just barely allowable if you turned yourself in so the CS could register and tattoo you and took you for 'State service', but at least then you were still alive and a Coalition citizen. At least then you could still write letters home from wherever they assigned you. One of the McCloskey girls had gotten to do that after she'd found out she was a Burster, a psionic with fire powers, and she'd gone to get registered and drafted into the army. But having any true magic meant that if the army ever caught a sniff of you they'd come and take you away, and you weren't ever coming back.

Just like Uncle Gerald had been when I was twelve. He'd always been super careful to hide his magic ever since he'd first found out that he'd had it, using a mystic technique that made him basically invisible to any kind of psionic scans whenever he meditated the right way. Any one of the Dog Boys – the genetically engineered canines that could walk on two legs and use tools and talk, just like humans could – that the Coalition had created to be living psionic trackers could sense any magic in use, or if they were close and really concentrated, anyone who had passive magic. The Psi-Stalkers, who were a sub-race of humans who also seemed to have been genetically engineered somehow, had similar powers as well as a built-in urge to hunt and kill psis and creatures of magic.

And while the Coalition made sure to sweep every inhabited settlement in Coalition territory with one or the other at least a couple times a year, Uncle Gerald had always been able to duck the patrols before because the country around here was mostly open farmland and we could see them coming in time for him to hide. Until we had an unscheduled visit from a CS platoon that had fought a battle vs. invading monsters from the Wisconsin magic zone a little ways north of here – our maps didn't say exactly how far – and after they'd won had been heading back to Fort Davidson through the road that led past Waverly. And they'd stopped to camp near town only late in the evening, when Uncle Gerald had already been busy using some of his psi-healing to help patch up old lady Jenkins' hip from where she'd broken it badly falling down, because old people never really healed right after that kind of bad fall if you just used normal medicine.

So he hadn't known about the nearby soldiers until it was too late, and two of the Dog Boy scouts attached to the platoon had picked up on what he was doing. And they brought a squad of 'Dead Boys' – Coalition regular army troops, so nicknamed because of the black skulls on their high-tech body armor – with them to check whether or not the psionic they'd detected was officially registered. And as soon as they took a close look at Uncle Gerald and smelled that he wasn't just an unregistered psi but also a mystic, they just wrapped him up and took him away. The platoon hadn't even camped far enough outside of town for us not to hear the gunshot. I'd been twelve years old at the time.

Ever since then I'd been terrified that I might end up having magic in my blood like Uncle Gerald had had, and that one day the Dead Boys would come for me. So I regularly made sure to check myself for any signs I might be starting to develop weird powers or abilities, and always tried to remember what my dreams were in case I started funny dreaming as well.

But I hadn't noticed any signs of anything until the day I helped my dad bandage his arm after he'd gashed himself pretty badly when the saw slipped while we were cutting down a tree. Because by the time we got back to the house and took the rag I'd wrapped his arm in off so we could clean and rebandage the wound with a proper first aid kit before taking him to the medtech to get stitches, it had already healed and scarred over like it had been professionally treated and then left to recover for almost a week. And me and dad and mom all sat around the table staring at his miraculously healed arm like it was a fatal diagnosis… because in a way, it was.

"I've got to go," I said hurriedly after the initial moment of shock passed. "I'm like Uncle Gerald was. And they'll treat me the same way-"

"Go where?" my mother said worriedly. "You're not even sixteen!"

"And I won't live to be seventeen if I'm still here the next time a patrol comes!" I said, trying to keep from panicking.

"Son," my father said firmly, trying to quell the mood. "Your mother is right, and you're right. You can't stay here in Waverly, it's not safe. But if you have nowhere to go, no one to be with? Then you won't be any safer if you leave."

"There's the entire Coalition border defense zone between us and Wisconsin." I said. "They built the fort to be part of it. That's how Waverly got noticed and conquered in the first place, when the CS swept the country around their new fort to make sure there weren't any monster nests. I can't go north, not by myself."

"But you can't go any other direction. We're almost on the northwest corner of Iowa. East just takes you towards the Coalition capital at Chi-Town, and south or west means you'd have to cross the entire state before leaving Coalition territory." my dad said despairingly.

"The Suttons," I said, snapping my fingers decisively. "Everybody knows that they're not selling the Coalition even half of what they're growing, but turning it into moonshine for the black market. That's why they keep having strange trucks stop at their farm every week or so, that mysteriously want to pull in there for food and fuel instead of using the trading stop next to the highway."

"The Suttons are not good people," my dad said, repeating what everybody in town already knew about the Sutton clan. "And I can't imagine that the smugglers they're dealing with are any more trustworthy."

"I know," I said. "But I can heal people. Even if all I can do is turn fresh injuries into week-old properly-healed injuries, that's still more than an ordinary medtech can. And you know how much a freelance body fixer is worth. The Coalition got more goodwill from the town when they sponsored Medic-Sergeant Samuels to retire here a few years ago in return for a boost to his pension and gave Waverly a good medtech for almost nothing than for almost anything else they ever did. Whatever those smugglers are doing, they'll want to stay healthy while doing it. And I can hopefully trade them my healing powers for a ride to… well, wherever people like that sell their bootleg stuff that isn't in Coalition territory."

"I suppose it's the only chance you have," my father sighed resignedly. "I certainly can't think of anything better, damn it."

"Are you sure you'll be all right?" my mother asked me.

"No," I said honestly. "But what else can I do?"

"What will we tell your younger brother?"

"Not the truth," I said immediately, to be met with my father's vigorous nod. "He's barely twelve. If he blabs it to anyone, the Coalition will come down on all of you. Uncle Gerald is just an outlier, but two practitioners of magic in the same extended family…?"

"We'll just tell him that you ran away to join the black market." Dad sighed. "It'll even have the virtue of being the truth, just not all of it."

"I'll send money home if I can," I said sadly. "And I'll try to write. Being a suspected petty criminal doesn't stop you from using the Coalition mail, not like being a magic outlaw does."

"You've always been a good boy, and we'll always be proud of you," my father said as I stood up and my parents drew me into a hug. "We'll pray for you."

"Thank you," I sniffled, and wiped my eyes. "I'm sorry this happened."

"It's not your fault," mom reassured me. "This is just… how things are."

"I'll need to come with you, at least as far as old man Sutton's," my father said. "They might not believe your story of healing powers without me to vouch for it and show what happened, and I want to make damn sure he knows what will happen to him if they don't keep up their end of the bargain."

"I'd… better go pack," I said nervously, and then fled the kitchen before anyone could reply.

Because I seriously needed a moment alone to just go ahead and get the panic attack out of my system before I had to actually function again.

Author's Note: The list of perks will be maintained at the end of the OP.

Perks This Chapter: Crazed Physician (Van Helsing)

Last edited: Aug 9, 2022

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cliffc999

May 11, 2021

#8

Chapter 1

"And, that should do it." I said to my latest patient. "You should be good to walk on that leg again, but don't do anything that involves running, jumping, or lifting heavy stuff for the rest of the weekend."

"The hell kind of healer are you?" the thug growled back at me. "I thought you had magic powers! I got a job lined up Saturday that's worth ten thousand and now I gotta skip? What am I even paying you for?"

"You got stabbed through the kneecap with a vibro-blade!" I replied to him incredulously. "Non-magical healing would have had to take the whole leg off at the thigh and replace it with cybernetics just to let you walk again after that kind of permanent joint damage! What I did will heal just fine, so long as you give the rejoined parts time to settle in! You know, like a broken bone!"

"You talk a lot of shit for a kid without any hair on their balls-" he began menacingly, to be cut off by the curt voice of Sandra, the cyber-doc who ran this particular black market clinic. She was a tall, hard-faced blonde woman who never admitted to any particular age but somehow managed to look older than my mother and young enough to have only recently graduated university simultaneously.

"Shut it, Ethan!" she growled. "You know the rules. Johnny here is the reason I didn't have to saw your leg off and replace it with metal – which would also have kept you sidelined until next week, genius - so say 'thank you', pay your bill, and then get out."

I didn't get a thank-you, but Ethan did at least grudgingly let Doc Sandra debit his credcard for the agreed-upon fee before leaving. I got paid on shares, minus the bribes the local black-market cyber-doc paid to the authorities to overlook any suspicious psionic or magical signatures that might be coming from the immediate vicinity of the shop, so I wouldn't see any of those credits until the end of the month.

"Your bedside manner sucks, kid." she drawled cynically. "Keep that up and you're gonna be my patient, not my physician's assistant."

Doc Sandra – she wouldn't admit to any other name – was a cyber-doc, a medical practitioner specializing in trauma care and implant surgery and repair instead of long-term medical treatment and diagnosis. She was also the seniormost, as in only, doctor for the criminal underworld in Cedar Falls.

Cedar Falls was a city old enough that it had actually existed pre-Cataclysm, although it had been entirely abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin after the war. Reclaimed and resettled about 50 years ago as the Coalition State of Chi-Town had expanded further and further into northern Iowa, it had a population of about sixty thousand people. It was the largest community I'd ever seen in my life, at least a dozen times larger than Waverly had been, and had a vigorous transient population due to its being at the intersection of one of the main paved north-south roads and the Cedar River, which ran all the way southeast to the Mississippi. Between truck convoys, flatboats, and the several local industries, it saw a lot of rough traffic. Which was why the Chicago Network maintained a permanent presence here.

Although it was commonly referred to as 'the Black Market' by people all across North America, it turned out that what was commonly talked about as if it were just one major continent-spanning crime syndicate was actually five separate crime syndicates in a loose but stable alliance. Iowa, like everywhere else in the Coalition State of Chi-Town, fell under the overall jurisdiction of the Chicago Network, oldest and most traditional of the five factions. Cedar Rapids was a relatively small yet still profitable outpost given its position and the traffic that passed through, so it had its own acknowledged Boss running his own Family as he saw fit so long as tribute was suitably paid up the chain and 'suggestions' from them were paid suitable respect. Not that I knew any of the details, I wasn't even a member. I was just somebody that a member had hired to be an extra pair of hands, and a kid literally fresh off the turnip truck – well, the moonshine truck – besides.

Still, the story old man Sutton had told his smuggling connection had been enough to get me on the truck, because the Network was hardly unfamiliar with the concept of a newly-discovered practitioner of magic suddenly needing a fast ride out of town and being willing to pay for it. My dad had to spend almost half our savings to buy that ride, but I had ever intention of paying him back as soon as I got paid. And the smuggler had taken me straight to Sandra's clinic as soon as we'd made it to Cedar Falls, and after I demonstrated what I could do for her on the next available patient she'd paid a finder's fee to the smuggler – and at my insistence covered the thousand credits my dad had already paid him out of the finder's fee rather than letting him double-dip – and hired me as her new assistant.

It didn't take much experimenting for her to figure out that whatever I was doing, it wasn't the standard form of magical healing she was familiar with. Unlike magical or psionic healing I didn't just lay my hands on the patient and concentrate. Instead I had to actually treat the patient like a medtech would, bandaging, suturing, or performing field surgery as appropriate. The magical part came in when whatever I did would have implausibly fast results and need far less in the way of medical equipment or preparations than an actual doctor would. I also seemed to have an intuitive sense for how human bodies worked and how they were put together, because when I graduated from things that simply needed cleaning and bandaging to actual scalpel work I was able to pick up the beginnings of general surgery almost literally as fast as Doc Sandra could point at what part of the anatomy was which and tell me what they were actually called. And that was months faster than it took normal people to learn a similar body of knowledge. At one point I even caught her muttering at how I was apparently like something called a 'psi-mechanic', only for living bodies instead of machinery. At the time, that seemed as good an explanation for what was going on as any.

With my talents added to hers we were not only able to handle the clinic's full normal workload and more and still have plenty of time to goof off, but the usual risk of complications that back-alley cybersurgery with used parts normally carried fell off to basically nil. Word was starting to get around that the Cedar Falls clinic had a new edge, and what independent operators and adventurers were available in this local region of the Coalition States were starting to consider it worth their while to make the trip here to get their implant work done. Since whatever my powers were didn't give me the slightest bit of insight into mechanical things, the actual setup, installation, and calibration of the cybernetics was still all up to Doc. Although with my magic touch available for the post-op care I was still more than earning my keep.

Not that I had yet to see any 'keep' yet, except for the cash advance of a few hundred credits that I'd gotten to do things like buy clothes and food. As I'd already mentioned, the clinic paid out shares at the end of the month. But at least I got use of a small room over the shop to sleep in for free and less worry of being taken out and shot by the CS mage-hunters, so that was something.

"Did he seriously think he could pick that kind of bar fight, need to be carried here by his friends with his leg half off and a tourniquet around his thigh, and dance away without a scratch?" I sighed. "It took us both twenty minutes to jigsaw puzzle all those bone fragments back together, and I still don't know how that adds up to me restoring his kneecap and splicing that vein back together."

"Kid, if he was smart enough to understand his limitations – or anyone else's – he wouldn't have needed us to fix him up in the first place." she replied dryly as she parked her hip on a nearby stool. "Ethan's a dumb, hotheaded goon, and he'll always be a dumb, hotheaded goon. You gotta learn that the world is full of people who blame everybody else for anything that goes wrong around 'em, because God forbid they ever made a bad choice. If I were you, I'd stick closer to the shop for the next couple of days until he's had time to find someone else to be mad at."

"I hardly ever leave here anyway," I said disgustedly, leaning further back into my own folding chair. "Too much risk of tripping over a Dog Boy from the local garrison."

"Eh, I told you, I already paid those guys," she reassured me. "You're not the only person the Network employs who does stuff, and the local ISS guys have incentive to understand that. So you don't need to hermit up so hard, just don't try to go right into the garrison post or anything."

"Thanks." I said. "So, can I use the spare computer?"

"Feel free," she said, heading over to the main office terminal and booting it up before she went back to doing… whatever she did on the computer every day.

I booted up the spare terminal, and got back to working with the bootleg program I'd spent a good chunk of my hoarded cash advance on as soon as possible, once I'd found the storefront run by one of Sandra's friends who sold 'interesting' electronics. Like anybody else who'd grown up in the education system of a Coalition territory I was a functional illiterate at best, because the Coalition aimed for a theoretical ideal of the only literate people being state-employed and licensed technical specialists, military officers, and high officials. Even the Coalition-run village schools would rather spend hundreds of credits for a simple cyberterminal per student to give us a primary education via audio-visual materials and a simplified icon-based language than buy us much cheaper books and teach us to read them, because the literacy was the exact thing they were trying to bypass by turning us all into a generation of rote-trained button pushers and propaganda-fed livestock instead.

Obviously this didn't work out as well in practice as the Coalition wanted it to in theory, but between the sharp fines for possessing unlicensed books and the fact that known "readers" somehow ended up given lower official priority for pretty much anything unless they'd already been licensed and approved before becoming literate, almost anyone who had learned how to read had also learned to keep it to themselves. Many people didn't teach their children even if they'd learned how somewhere, so as not to handicap them later in life. I'd only been in the big city several weeks, but Uncle Gerald's death had had me cynically re-examining everything I'd been taught about the Coalition in school for several years before that.

But that was then and this was now. I was already a criminal just for existing with magical powers, and starting to be a criminal twice over given how my first job after leaving home was as a physician's assistant in a Network-run illegal body chop-shop. So I had nothing to lose by learning to read as fast as I possibly could, and was gladly using the spare office computer in the clinic and the unofficial copy of the official Coalition Technical Specialist Introductory Literacy Tutorial I'd just scored to be doing that with.

And as if my urgent desire to learn more, to know more, was a trigger… I saw what only much later I would call the Forge for the first time.

As if in a waking dream, Doc Sandra's clinic faded away around me to leave me standing in a trackless void. 'I' floated there, unable to even see myself when I looked down, as if I were a disembodied presence. Thirty-eight separate constellations of themstars, each one composed of dozens and dozens of tiny lights ranging from tiny dots to ones at least half a dozen times as large, and several sizes in between. I could see one of the tiny dots already glowing at the center of all the whirling stairs, where an invisible 'me' was apparently standing. Somehow I intuitively knew that this dot, the one I already 'owned', was the reason I had such an intuitive understanding of human anatomy and could achieve magical results with simple medicine.

And I also knew that I had somehow accumulated enough… something… to try 'purchasing' another dot. Was this what mages meant when they talked about 'Potential Psychic Energy', the intangible essence that they stored up within their bodies and then expended to cast spells? Or was this something else?

The constellations were all whizzing around so fast, and my mental attempt to 'reach' out and 'grasp' one so relatively slow, that I didn't imagine I'd be able to grab one except at random. Lord knows my several attempts at picking a specific one and touching it and only it had 'missed' somehow. And more I tried, the more my chosen target just kept dancing out of reach at the wrong instant.

I was still a bit fuzzy from the dream logic in play, and I had a hunch that this waking dream wouldn't end until I finally picked something, so I finally got frustrated enough to reach out and grab at random. The first constellation I actually touched froze in my grip, letting me freely turn it this way and that while I 'looked' at the dots. I had the sense that I only had built up enough PPE to take one of the smallest-sized dots, and that if I'd waited until I had built up more I could have used the opportunity to take a larger one instead. Or take a smaller one and store the leftover PPE for later.

No. I didn't even know if this meant anything yet, or if it was just a dream. I had to test this theory, consciously, at least once. Besides, I might end up with another magic power more useful for defending myself against guys like Ethan as opposed to just being able to patch people up.

So I reached out, and the constellation nearest to me at that instant brushed against my hand and the whole whirling array of stars stopped dead. I tried to feel, to intuit, to sense if any of the dots in this constellation would be more useful to me than any other, and one in particular shouted out to me, so I grasped at it…

And then I was back sitting in my chair in the clinic, and my mind was full of new knowledge.

Suddenly I felt like I could understand the computer sitting in front of me just as easily as I could understand human bodies. I tried thinking about other machines I was familiar with, like the engine on dad's tractor, and instead of the fumbling rudiments of mechanics I'd been starting to learn from dad I could suddenly grasp the significance of every part and connection I'd seen, and effortlessly think of so many ways that they could work better. I could even figure out at least some of the operating principles behind the cybernetic components that Doc implanted, that had only a few minutes ago been anonymous hunks of machinery to me. And I'd gone from being able to click on icons on the computer to feeling like I could take the operating system code apart piece by piece, and then reprogram it into new shapes…

"Hey kid, you awake?" Doc's voice broke in.

"Huh?" I said articulately. "Sorry, drifted off there for a second. Did you need something?"

"Yeah." She nodded. "We ran overtime fixing that meathead so it's past closing anyway, so lock the front door behind me after I'm out. I'll be at Donovan's if there's an emergency in the next few hours."

"Got it," I nodded back at her. That's right, it was over an hour past dinner and that meant it was time for her evening bar crawl. If there was any explanation for why a cyber-doc with her talents was working in this place, it was probably her drinking. I wouldn't say Doc Sandra was a lush per se – she'd never been too drunk to function for a single day that I'd worked for her - but like the old village joke about the farmwife who didn't know that her husband drank until one day he came home sober, you could set your chrono by when she headed out to spend a few hours in her favorite watering hole lifting an elbow.

Well, I had just gotten a mysterious boost of mechanical genius from whatever my power was, which certainly wasn't any kind of magic either I or Doc had ever heard of. So I might as well try and look stuff up, and while my terminal barely had anything except CS-approved public entertainment channels and a few bootlegs, hers had her entire digital library of textbooks. So, feeling confident with my newfound technical skills I locked the door and flipped the sign to 'CLOSED', waited a few minutes to make sure she didn't come back to pick up something she'd forgotten, then drew the blinds over the storefront and headed over to her desk to see how quickly I could crack her login.

Damn, these powers are impressive. My fingers were almost moving on their own as I cracked her login, used her account to set up an admin account for myself, corrupted the internal monitoring tools so all traces of my account were invisible from hers, then erased all access log traces of my work and logged out to log in again using my backdoor. And with that done, I opened up her directory of e-texts and started looking for useful titles.

I spent a blissful hour going through a selection of medical books and textbooks on cybernetic and bionic implants and related medical fields, barely needing to glance at the page to suddenly have the words trigger a whole range of associations in my mind. It was if my power had already given me full knowledge of these and other related topics, but until I actually knew that such topics existed I wouldn't know that I knew about them. Which I suppose made sense; if you'd never so much as heard of the word "cat", then even owning a cat wouldn't let you know that you had a cat living in your house. It would just be 'the small furry thing that sits on my lap and purrs' in your head, or whatever else you'd chosen to label it as. So if you heard somebody else talking about their pet cat, until and unless they actually described it and you realized that your pet fit the same description you wouldn't know that you were both cat owners.

After I'd finished my initial knowledge binge, I leaned back in the chair and tried to think. I was almost shaking in awe at some of the implications of what was happening to me. Even leaving out the actual physics-bending nature of what happened when I gave actual medical care to a patient, the simple fact that I had what would have been a lifetime's worth of study at a major university for a genius when I was a kid barely off the farm who'd never gone to a real school, just a backcountry town's version of the already minimal education for Coalition proles… there wasn't any kind of magic or psionic power that anyone had ever told me about that could do this. Even the gypsy mechanics people called 'operators', the one who actually had the 'psi-mechanic' power of being able to intuitively 'see' the schematic of and troubleshoot any machine they touched for as long as they concentrated on it, didn't actually permanently download entire volumes of engineering knowledge into their head.

What was happening to me? What was I?

I pushed the uncomfortable thought as far out of my head as I could, but it kept coming back again and again. I finally got so desperate to distract myself that I decided to snoop into what Doc had been doing on the computer before she'd left, despite the invasion of her privacy. As it turned out, she'd just been putting the day's entries into the bookkeeping program. So I almost logged out and turned away, until I caught one of the numbers out of the corner of my eye. And then…

THAT MOTHERFUCKING BITCH!

I swore violently to myself as I stormed down the alleyway. She could let herself back into the clinic tonight, she had her own key! Hell, I wasn't even sure if I was going to come back tonight, or at all!

I'd always been good at math, even before I'd learned how to read. And the latest dose of knowledge my weird power had given me had finished the job of giving me college-level literacy and math skills, because it was basically impossible to have the knowledge of an advanced engineering degree without them. So I was able to understand the clinic's books almost as soon as I'd seriously looked at them, especially since Doc wasn't any kind of fancy accountant either so it was just simple ledger keeping.

And she'd been cheating me seven ways from Sunday.

As it turned out, I was much more profitable for the clinic than I'd been told I was. Which in hindsight was obvious given how much more she would have been able to charge from being able to essentially guarantee zero complications, when normally anyone asking for cybernetics from a back-alley body-chop outfit like this knew they were paying the street discount in return for playing the odds. So over the past almost-month alone she'd essentially doubled her revenue on me and more, and yet the way she was calculating my share I wouldn't even be seeing what she'd paid her last assistant.

I was also furious as hell that despite the fact she'd told me that the reason my share would be lower than I might expect is because of the bribe expenses to the Coalition, the local Internal Security Service post hadn't seen a dime out of her except a one-time expense that was almost certainly for the Psi-Stalker from the local garrison she'd paid on the side to come over and check out what kind of 'magical signature' I had and how hard it might be to hide. So either what I was doing wasn't detectable like magic normally was, or she was just milking me for what short-term gain she could get out of me before I inevitably got caught in an ISS sweep and killed.

And neither one was a thought that made me at all happy. So yeah, I got the hell out of the shop as fast as I could and determined not to go back until I calmed down enough I could at least have a conversation with the woman without screaming, because I might be a naïve farmboy but I still wasn't naïve enough not to understand what would happen if I told the local Black Market cyber-doc to go fuck herself to her face, or even let one that I knew how badly she was cheating me. After all, one of the other functions of an underworld body-chop-shop was disposing of inconvenient corpses in the medical incinerator…

Serves me right for getting involved with criminals, I guess. Well, I hadn't joined their mob, I wasn't even a long-time associate. I was just someone who'd paid them for a job and they'd done it for me, and then someone who'd taken a short-term job from them and they'd paid me for it. And since I didn't like the salary or the conditions, then I'd just quit. Short-termers like me came and went all the time, even I'd picked up that much in just my few weeks here.

Of course, determining that I'd leave wouldn't do me any good until after I figured out where else I could go.

On that thought I came out of the other end of the alley and turned onto a sidewalk in the docks district, making sure to head away from Doc Sandra's favorite bar. Fortunately, she liked to drink in a slightly less seedy part of town. Maybe I could go look at the riverboat traffic and see if any of them would be willing to take an apprentice engineer or something-

"Hey, asshole!" a very familiar and very unwelcomed voice broke into my thoughts from behind me. Look, I get that this isn't the largest of cities but there's still more than sixty thousand people here. I shouldn't have run across Ethan this fast. Well, time to take advantage of the fact that he was on medical restriction against any high-impact exercise for the next couple of days-

I didn't even bother to look back or say anything clever, I just booked it. The good news was, I was in excellent shape and he was still healing on that knee. The bad news was, he must have been either really pissed or really drunk because when I glanced over my shoulder I realized that he wasn't even feeling the pain from his recovering joint injury, not judging by how much effort he was putting into sprinting after me.

I flew down the sidewalk until I hit the corner of the nearest intersection and faked left, then went hard right and across the street. Ethan swore and started cutting the corner on me diagonally across the street, and he'd made up half of my head start by the time we both leveled out on the other sidewalk. I kept scanning frantically ahead looking for anything-

Kentucky Windage suddenly blared at me from a garish neon sign. Apparently a dockside bar catering to riverboat crews, it looked like the sort of rough joint I'd normally be loath to even think of stepping into. Except that right now what was crossing my mind was that a rough bar would have rougher bouncers, and I could really use some people who were paid to break legs to break some on the guy following me.

"Whoa, what're you in such a rush for?" said the girl restlessly shifting from one foot to the other as she waited outside the door of the bar. She looked only a couple of years older than I was but was still a couple inches shorter than me. She clearly worked out though, because her arms were at least as thick as mine. She had a cute triangular face underneath messy black hair and a figure that was completely shapeless inside her loose rain slicker. Which a momentary portion of my mind wondered at because we hadn't had any rain in two days-

"That guy's after me!" I said, deciding honesty was my best policy. The bouncers probably had a rule about keeping trouble outside, but trying to lie my way inside would just get three guys pounding on me instead of one-

"That little sonofabitch stole my wallet!" Ethan yelled as he drew close enough to hear what I'd said and decided that in his case honesty was not the best policy. "Grab him!"

"Wait!" I said, holding up my hands. "I'm supposed to have knocked him down and taken his money?" Because I was actually in pretty good shape having grown up on a farm and all, but I was still a teenager who wasn't even six feet while Ethan was a professional legbreaker well over six feet and thick enough to make two of me.

"He kinda has a point there!" the girl laughed merrily. "So, can you actually describe this wallet big guy?" she continued smartly. "Before the kid here actually pulls it out to show us, that is."

"Step aside, little girl." Ethan loomed over us. "Smartass disrespected me earlier today, and he's earned a pounding. You wanna share in that pounding, keep running your mouth. Or maybe you want to share something else? You on the stroll?"

"Oh puh-lease." she eye-rolled. "Could you possibly be any more of a walking stereotype?"

"Uh, miss, I don't want to-"

"Sssh!" she said to me, actually putting one finger up to her mouth like this was the biggest joke in the world to her. "You're ruining the fun part!"

"What, you like the rough stuff?" Ethan leered. "OK, lemme warm you up by demonstrating on dickless here," he pointed at me, "and then I'll be-"

"Your mouth is moving but all I hear is blah blah blah," she cut him off sarcastically. "Hey, Romeo, hold my coat will ya?" she said, and in a motion almost too quick to follow shrugged herself out of the rain slicker she was wearing and tossed it to me. I absent-mindedly caught it as my jaw dropped when I saw exactly what she'd had on under the coat-

"Oh shit." Ethan moaned despairingly, immediately before both of her feet left the ground and slammed him square in the chest, one on top of each lung, and sent him flying almost ten feet down the sidewalk to land in a heap while she turned the momentum of her bouncing off of the much larger man into a rolling backflip to land almost exactly where she'd started, sticking the landing on her toes like a gymnast.

"Ta-da!" she smirked triumphantly, posing dramatically with her hands over her head as the armor-vest and drug harness that she'd been wearing that rain slicker to conceal were now plainly visible for all to see. Apparently Kentucky Windage had known what it was doing when it had had a girl her size guarding the door, because she was one of the chemically-augmented super-soldiers commonly called "Juicers". With an external combat drug harness hooked up to specialized cybernetic implants, the continual IV feeds and electro-stim boosts would overclock her body to make her at least four times stronger and several times faster than a normal person, almost superhumanly agile, able to go several days at a time without sleep and at a sustained activity level almost like a continuous adrenaline rush, and more.

"Thank you for-"

"For fuck's sake, Val!" another voice broke in, and we looked over to see a large ugly man more in the Ethan-esque mold walking up to us from inside the bar. "I asked you to cover for me for just ten minutes while I went to piss, and you already got in a fight?"

"I kept it outside, didn't I?" she shrugged back at him. "Besides, he tried to mug someone right on the doorstep and then tried to back me off when I said not on your sidewalk. And you know what happens then."

"And this is why nobody with half a brain hires a Juicer to be a bouncer," the man sighed. "Not even on temp. Anyway, thanks for filling in. You wanna come back in and finish your drink now? Next one's on the house."

"As long as he gets one too," Val said, cocking her head back at me. "I'm curious as to what his story is."

"You want to pick up guys, you buy 'em booze with your own cred," he said tolerantly as Ethan quietly moaned in the background to let passers-by know that he was still alive, but he wouldn't be feeling frisky any time soon. "Still, have fun."

Val grabbed my arm and pulled me inside after her while I was still making up my mind if I even wanted to be a part of this. Still, she had just probably saved my life, and spending some time talking to a pretty girl – even if she was a bored Juicer – certainly beat brooding over everything else I had going wrong. Besides, she was strong enough to pick me up with one arm so if she wanted to drag me somewhere then I was getting dragged.

"Valerie Valkryie." she introduced herself as we both grabbed a beer at the bar and then sat down in a booth at the back. "What's yours?"

"John." I said. I'd kept my first name because it was more than common enough, but I didn't use my last name anymore. If I got picked up by the Coalition the last thing I wanted was to be traced back to my family.

"I don't drink with people who don't tell me their real name" she said suspiciously, before busting out into a grin. "Psych! Nobody uses their real names in a place like this. I mean, you think my parents actually named me 'Valkryie'?" she snorted.

"I just started working at the local body shop," I said. "But I'll probably be moving on that from soon, as soon as I have somewhere else to go."

"Somewhere else to go," she said wistfully. "Yeah, that's a place I've been to a lot. But you look a little young for the long road, John."

"You don't look that much older," I flirted as best I could. I mean, I was a teenaged farmboy, I wasn't dead.

"And a gentleman, too!" she replied cheerfully, before taking another long gulp of her beer. "So, how long have you been doing this?"

"First month," I admitted. "I had to leave in a hurry."

"Oh," she said, far more seriously. "Was it-" she chewed her lip. "But you might go back home someday, right?"

"Oh, it wasn't that." I reassured her. "I-" I looked around, before deciding to just let it out. After all, Juicers were never part of the Coalition military; the CS considered it not only an illegal enhancement procedure, but one that wasn't cost-effective in the long run- "Let's just say I had to duck the Dog Boys."

"Oh, one of those situations," she nodded knowingly. "Yeah, you meet a lot of people doing the wandering thing who started out that way. But if you had magic, why'd you need me to deal with that schlub?"

"So far it's just healing," I said. "Nothing with any offense at all. That's why I started working at the doc's."

"That jackass actually wanted to mug a healer? Who hadn't done anything to him?" she said disgustedly. "I should've kicked him harder!"

"Oh, you don't know the half of it," I snorted, and then started telling her the whole story behind Ethan, and the clinic, and everything else except the full story behind my powers, while we finished our beers and got some refills.

I woke up alone the next morning, in a strange bed in a strange room. It looked like the sort of flophouse that rented by the day-

My mind flooded with mental images of exactly where things had progressed after Valerie and I had gotten drunk enough to do what came naturally. So. That had happened. In fact, it had happened for almost half the night. She'd been very enthusiastic, and while I'd gone into the night entirely inexperienced – Valerie had actually been tickled pink to find out it was my first time – I certainly had learned a few things by the end. I grinned to myself while mentally reviewing highlights of the night before even as I washed up and got back in my clothes.

Normally even a freelance mercenary like Val wouldn't be so quick to fall into and out of bed with some stranger she'd just met… except for the fact that she wasn't an ordinary merc or headhunter, but a Juicer. Juicers tended to bounce around 'living in the moment' as a matter of course, both because of how the drug regimen enhanced their life like an almost-continual amphetamine rush… and because of the shortened lifespan that their metabolic overload gave them.

Even a novice body-shop tech like me knew the cold statistics. The average Juicer would die within six years of initial implantation. No one on record had gone for longer than eight. Detox was only even mostly reliable if done within the initial two years, and still left behind metabolic damage in the process. Past three years there was virtually no chance of coming off the juice without being left a semi-invalid at best, if not dead. And that didn't count the fact that the Juicer regimen was physically and psychologically addictive. By all the folklore it had been a very rough-and-ready human augmentation program rushed to completion during the early days of the Cataclysm, when augmented warriors had been needed right then to fight against a world going mad, and had only been incrementally improved ever since. It still operated on the basis that it made more sense to pay for maybe twenty or thirty thousand creds' worth of augmentations for five years of performance than to pay a quarter-million or so creds for a suit of power armor that would last twenty. This is why even the Coalition military wouldn't use Juicer conversion. Medic-Sergeant Samuels back in Waverly, in his dual function as the local recruiting officer, had explained to me once that CS military policy was built around preserving a core of elite trained people for as long as possible.

So, I'd just lost my virginity with a girl who was basically suffering from a self-inflicted terminal illness. No wonder she'd looked so sad at the idea that maybe the reason I'd left home is because my home had been a bad place or a place that I'd lost. Whatever Valerie's story was, it clearly involved somewhere that she felt she could never go back to. Why else would a girl as young as her – she was only nineteen, a little more than three years older than me – become a Juicer in the first place?

"Hey, you up?" her voice broke into my thoughts as she gently – for her – kicked the room door open and charged on in, holding a couple of plastic bags that looked like breakfast. "I went and got some stuff from the diner."

"Thanks," I said. "Did you get any sleep last night?" I asked her curiously.

"Four whole hours!" she said amusedly, tossing me the smaller of the food sacks as she tore into her larger one. "Which for me is a pretty long time. A for effort there, stud!"

"Thanks," I tried to smile back, deliberately reminding myself to not start the lifespan talk. Even I knew that Juicers never appreciated the lifespan talk unless they were already very close friends. It had been one of the first things Doc had cautioned me about, the first time we'd had one in the shop to get their implanted bio-comp recalibrated.

"So, I'm pretty sure you're late for work – it's almost eight – but weren't you quitting your job anyway?" she asked me, as we both inhaled the egg-and-bagel sandwiches she'd managed to find somewhere.

"Only after I had an idea where I was going next," I said, groaning slightly. "I mean, I wouldn't trade last night for anything-"

"Flatterer." she broke in.

"But last night I was kinda leaving my problems for future me, and now past me is sticking me with the tab." I said. "So, you know anywhere out of town that a talented body fixer with no certificates could maybe earn more than pocket money from a boss that's maybe half honest?"

"Merctown," she replied unhesitatingly. "But that is a long way away from here. Like, halfway across the CS and down by the Magic Zone in Kentucky long way away."

"Little out of my reach, yeah." I agreed. "And while I've heard it's easy for a guy like me to get lost in the Chi-Town Burbs, I've also heard it's easy for a guy like me to get lost in the Burbs."

"Newbie like you sure wouldn't want to go there alone," she nodded, drawing one finger across her neck to illustrate the point. "I was just there last month, before I decided it was time to pick up sticks again."

"Looks like I'll have to go back to Doc's and apologize for being late," I said resignedly. "At least until I can spend a month or two more building up at least some kind of stake, and getting the lay of the land. You know anyone in town I could talk to about a riverboat passage when that time comes?"

"Yeah, Kevin down at the Kentucky Windage is good for that kind of hook-up." she agreed. "I'll take you by there after breakfast and before you go back to that old bitch. Hell, I'd thought I'd maybe get my drug harness adjusted there while I was in town, but if she's that kind of chiseler then maybe I should find a different doc."

"If I walk a customer in the door at the same time I apologize for being late, we can both get what we want." I said. "Especially since I'd do your bio-comp for you."

"You're too nice a guy to be in this line of work," Valerie said back at me. "But sure, I'll take that-" and then she paused in mid-word.

"Val?" I asked her.

"Damn it." she swore sadly. "I-" she coughed once, an alarming sign in someone who was supposed to never get sick. "It was really nice to meet you, John." she said weakly. "I'm-" and then her eyes rolled up in her head and she slid bonelessly off the bed.

"Val! VAL!" I said, lunging forward to lay her out flat on the floor and pulled up her t-shirt to reach the external bio-comp plate just below her sternum, where the drug harness attached. One look at the pulse and BP readouts told me me everything. Because a Juicer, someone who almost continually mainlined a stimulant and combat-drug IV drip, had a heartbeat and blood pressure that low at only one time in their lives.

Last Call. The moment at which a Juicer's decaying metabolism finally hit the end of its rope and entered sudden systemic collapse. Either Val had gotten the Juicer conversion done to her at before the earliest remotely safe age, or else she'd rolled some of the unluckiest dice any Juicer had ever rolled. Because six years to death was an average. Which meant that some went out longer, and some went shorter-

And one Juicer in particular was clocking out right now.

Before I even realized what I was doing I was over to where Val had dropped her rucksack, tearing it open to find her portacomp. I ran back to where she lay, popped out the connector cable, and plugged it into the datasocket on her bio-comp. Come on, come on- diagnostics, vitals, dosage heuristics, firmware settings-

My strange, mysteriously-granted knowledge of both the most intimate workings of the human body and of an eclectic mish-mash of all sorts of engineering and programming flowed together in my mind as I prayed I could work perhaps the biggest medical miracle I'd ever attempted. Forget turning a shattered kneecap and a half-amputated leg back into a healthy limb with surgical glue and stitches. Forget doing a weeks' worth of healing in a moment with nothing more than an improvised bandage. I did several weeks' worth of reprogramming the firmware on a package of one-use emergency medical nanobots stored in her external drug harness that weren't even supposed to be reprogrammable, somehow expanding and revising their internal repair functions to entirely new categories that the manufacturer had never intended. I recombined and recompiled the drug administration algorithms built into her bio-comp on sheer instinct, abusing unplanned and out-of-schedule drug interactions to jump-start parts of her failing metabolism even as the reprogrammed nanobots went to work detecting and sealing off the burst abscesses that were causing her internal circulatory failure. And then I was frantically jamming my finger down her throat and tilting her head to clear her airway, before I started one-man CPR and kept breathing and pushing and breathing and pushing and pushing-

"What the hell?" Valerie gasped weakly, immediately after I'd pulled my lips off of hers the instant I felt her start to breathe again. "I don't pass out normally. I'd thought it was-"

"Last Call?" I answered her grimly. "It was."

"… then how am I alive?" she whispered, as our eyes locked on each other while I knelt over her.

"Magical healing powers." I said. "Also, I hacked your bio-comp… and your IRMSS nanites… and maybe invented an entire new drug recombination technique to help level out your metabolic spiral?" I finished weakly. "It's not a cure, not even close, but you should have more time."

"That's not possible." she replied heatedly, as I helped her slowly to her feet. "The big research hospital down at Kingsdale couldn't do something like that, not even if I paid them Emperor Prosek's ransom to try! And they helped invent the Juicer process! Who the hell are you?" she finished, flopping awkwardly down on the bed.

"I don't know." I said. "I mean, I know who, but I'm totally clueless as to how."

"Damn." she swore. "Okay, even if it's just for another month and not the years I was supposed to have, I still owe you my life." she finished.

"Uh, you stopped Ethan from probably killing me last night, remember?" I said. "If you want us to be square, I'll agree we're already square."

"Get real!" she shot back. "I just beat up a goomba I could push over with one hand. You pulled a technological miracle straight out of your ass. One of these things is not like the other!"

"You said something about the time you were supposed to have?" I changed the subject.

"Three years." she said flatly. "I'd gotten converted when I was sixteen, the earliest I could. It's only been three years and-" she shook her head. "I started feeling the shakes a month ago, and the crashes. The ones that let you know Last Call is coming soon. You hear about the ones who beat the average, who go like eight years and more, but nobody tells you about the losers who get it early. And I lost." she shrugged. "And now I haven't."

"I can't begin to give you a first estimate," I reiterated, "especially since I was doing most of it by the seat of my pants."

"You can't give me one yet." Valerie said intelligently. "Because you're going to be checking my readings on a regular basis until you've built up enough of a baseline to guess. Because guess who your new partner is?"

"Um, what?" I said intelligently.

"You dope," she said as she lightly – for a Juicer – punched my upper arm. "You already know I'm at loose ends with nowhere to go. So why wouldn't I stick with the nice guy who saved my life, at least until I've taught him enough to survive on the road and he's able to figure out exactly what he did to my augs and how he can maybe do it again?"

"You're talking about a cure for the Juicer process." I said. "I can't remotely promise that."

"You can't even remotely breathe a word of it to anyone else unless you want warlords and crime bosses from everywhere between the Alleghenies and the Rockies all coming to stuff your ass in a sack." she agreed. "Seriously, don't even talk in your sleep about that. But I already know, and if you think any Juicer would ever walk away from the slightest hope to duck out on ever seeing Last Call again, you're crazy." she finished, before poking me in the arm where she'd punched me. "Sorry, lover boy, but it looks like you're stuck with me."

"Oh no," I said, entirely deadpan. " The horror. The horror."

"That's only if you get between me and my morning coffee," she shot back, and then we both laughed. "So… partners?"

"Partners," I agreed, and we shook on it.

Perks This Chapter: Engineering (Teen Titans)

Last edited: May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

May 11, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 11, 2021

#9

Chapter 2

"So," Valerie said after I'd finished explaining everything I'd learned so far about my powers to her. "You said it builds up a charge over time? But that it seems to not be a constant rate?"

"Yeah." I agreed. "All the weeks I spent at Doc's gave me just enough for one little spark, but I woke up this morning feeling like I had enough charge for several since just last afternoon."

"So either it's a weird sex-based power-" she began with a perfectly straight face.

"Ewwww!" I waved my hands frantically to ward off the mental images.

"Oh, like that was such an ordeal for either of us," she jibed. "But seriously, either the funky charge rate is just random ley line phases of the moon type crap-"

"Which is entirely possible if we're talking about magic here." I said.

"Point." she nodded. "But yeah, either it's random or it's linked to your activity level somehow. Like, time flies when you're having fun but drags like hell when you're just doing the daily grind?"

"Well, it's not like either of us are magic experts." I shrugged.

"Not hardly," she nodded. "So, the biggest place to learn about stuff like that is Tolkeen, but you can't reach it without going straight through the big DMZ that Emperor Skullhead maintains between here and there. Not without a bit of a dog-leg."

"Tell me about it. I didn't even dream of trying it on my own, and even with you to help-" I began.

"Hah, no." she agreed vigorously. "Do I look like Larsen's Brigade? But in the category of 'possible closer sources of information', has it occurred to you that you're overlooking the nearest one?"

"What would-" I began, and then blinked. "Wait, you mean me?"

"Your power gives you knowledge, right?" she shrugged. "Try asking it for a clue as to what the fuck is going on."

"Half of it's random and even the non-random part is me picking from a blind bag." I told her. "I mean, even the latest spark I grabbed – the engineering one – only 'called' to me in the sense of it seemed more attractive than the others, somehow. I still had no clue what I was going to get."

"Again, if it's your own subconscious doing this then maybe that hunch is telling you what you need. I mean, even with your funky medical powers you still wouldn't have been able to save my ass without the cybernetics tweaking as well, so even if it was a blind hunch it was still a useful hunch, right?"

"Or maybe I just got lucky. But yeah, you're right. I might as well try." I agreed.

I wasn't any more certain of what the mechanism was for letting me summon the field of stars in my mind's eye than I was of the mechanism that controlled how fast the charge would build up, but I dropped into the mindscape again and grabbed the first constellation that whirled 'close' enough to me to touch. I tried to stop and concentrate on what I wanted, on something that would tell me more about what was going on, but this time there was no hunch at all. Every spark felt the same, so I finally sighed and grabbed one at random.

"Did it work?" Valerie asked me as I returned to an awareness of the flophouse.

"I'm not certain," I said dazedly, because I felt different somehow. I tried to quantify the sensations, and was- not shocked at how suddenly a precise, crystal-clear awareness of my blood chemistry, neural activity, and vitals somehow 'appeared' on a heads-up display?

"Valerie, do you see anything floating in front of my eyes? Numbers, letters, anything?" I asked her. "Because I've got a whole HUD about my vital signs and stuff that I didn't have a minute ago."

"Not a thing," she said. "Hold still!" she continued, and went over to where her field jacket hung on a nearby hook to pull out a penlight and then came back to grab me by the chin and shine it directly into my eyes. "Wait… okay, those eyes are organic, I can see the little blood vessels and everything, but I can also catch a little bit of metal gleaming there at the back. You get the doc to give you retinal implants or something?"

"No," I said, and blinked to try and clear the spots out of my eyes after she let me go and sat back. "So, apparently my powers just spontaneously gave me cyberimplants. While I was sitting right here next to you-" I shuddered. "Val, this shit is weirding me out!"

"Eh, I've seen weirder." she tried to play it off. "… okay, no I haven't. But your weird shit saved my ass, so it's got a lot of credit banked with me right now." She rubbed her own chin and tried to analyze. "So you asked your power for a clue as to what was going on with you and all you got was a biomonitor and an internal display? Your power's a troll."

"Actually I got the impression that what I was asking for wasn't even on the menu, so I just grabbed something at random. For all I know I could be full of implants right now and not have a clue until I trip over one, just like I had a ton of anatomy knowledge I didn't know I had until I thought to try and index it."

"Then ask your new bio-comp for a diagnostic on your new implant suite and let it tell you what it does, genius!" Valerie shot back at me, and I facepalmed at the obviousness of what I was missing here and did so. And then my jaw internally dropped at the results.

"Um… according to the readout I just got, I now have an 'Adeptus Mechanicus Baseline Cranial Augmentation Package', whatever the hell that means. Cybernetically boosted memory and computation, internal hormone regulators to dampen emotional surges, pain editing… the list goes on and on." I trailed off weakly.

"The fuck?" she gaped articulately. "I've never heard of anything like that! I mean, it sounds vaguely like those brain spikes the Crazies give themselves to boost their reflexes and stuff, but those guys are just knock-off Juicers who trade their metabolism not burning out for their nervous systems burning out instead."

"Actually, the Mind-Over-Matter augmentation technology doesn't need the big metal spikes in the skull." I said. "Those are cosmetic, the actual neurological changes are taken care by a few micro-implants inserted between the lobes of the brain. The spike-head thing is just a visible trademark of 'Hey! Crazy brain-borg coming!' like your drug harness advertises what you are, which most of them like to use because, well…" I circled my finger around my ear.

"And speaking of-" Valerie replied, circling her own finger around her ear. "Your brain implants gonna do the same to you? Because we'd make a hell of a matched set that way if my organs were collapsing at the same time your neurons were."

"Would you believe there's actually an instruction manual?" I said, the encoded knowledge from my new implants flickering through my mind's eye as soon as I thought to access it. "And, no, according to this the baseline package doesn't cause any cognitive degeneration. I can think of several ways to augment it that would seriously mess up my capacity to have emotions if I pushed it, but I'm not going to push it. And… wow, I've basically got a computer spliced into my cerebral cortex now. No more forgetting stuff for me, instant calculator, boosted analysis-" I whistled softly.

"That kinda crap is way outside the normal M.O.M. range," she nodded. "Like, the Crazy aug package is doing good just to give some sensory and reflex boosts, and some hormone adjustments so they bulk up to the top end of the normal range instead of 'roiding up like me," she said, flexing her bicep demonstratively. "I've never heard of a brain chip that actually makes anyone smarter."

"So, yet another golden egg that half the continent would gladly try to rip out of my goosy ass with a vibrosword." I groused. "Well, at least this does something to help me. Maybe I could…" I shrugged and asked my implants for a little clarity boost and augmented focus. "But that can be a project for later. Right now, we've got more immediate concerns."

"Yeah." Valerie agreed. "Helping you quit your shitty job."

Step one for Operation Get John Out Of Town was looking around places like the Kentucky Windage until we found a mercenary Psi-Stalker willing to take a hundred creds to check if I was radiating any detectable psionic or magical signature. When the results came back negative, that both confirmed that Doc Sandra had been entirely ripping me off and that special precautions wouldn't be needed to get me past any Coalition check points. I'd arguably never needed to leave home at all… not that I was going to go back. Not until I at least had some kind of grip on what exactly was happening to me and why. Not until I'd helped find a more permanent solution for Valerie's problem.

When I took a moment to follow that train of thought and use my new self-analysis capability to try and see if I was getting in over my head here… well, I already knew that a whole chunk of my willingness to go along with this was that Valerie a hot, athletic girl who was into me and that I was a teenager. I even knew which parts of my metabolism to tweak to get rid of that particular bias in my thoughts. But hah, no. Those warnings in the instruction manual of how you could end up as some kind of uber-logical machine man if you went too far into the cybernetic emotional damping on a regular basis were very much being taken to heart. I didn't want to end up as sexless and joyless as a mining 'borg or anything.

Besides, the preliminary hindsight analysis I'd conducted of my recent actions and experiences had also highlighted that for a Juicer merc she was actually towards the upper end of the ethical scale. Being an impulsive violence junkie was almost inevitable for a Juicer given the nature of their drug regimen and the whole outlook caused by their short lifespans, but even in the short time I'd known her I could see that she actually had rules on who to punch and why. And while she had a definite motive of self-interest in sticking close to me now, that didn't explain her behavior prior to her brush with Last Call. And it also didn't explain why her first impulse when she'd thought she was dying was to use that dying breath to try and reassure the person she'd just met that it wasn't his fault.

Yeah, maybe I was already falling a little bit in love. Or in lust. Or in something. But the scariest thing about leaving home was the thought of having to spend the rest of my time alone out here, and now I wasn't. So yeah. Partners it was.

Once we no longer had the possible complication of 'I ping positive on ISS mage/psi sweeps', step two became as simple as walking into Doc's clinic and telling her I was ditching her cheapskate ass. We dealt with her objections regarding outstanding salary and giving no notice by deciding that the couple of thousand credits she was holding out on were chicken feed and she could cry herself to sleep on top of them if she wanted. Not that a wad of credits like that was actually chickenfeed, even if it wasn't the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre either, but if forfeiting it got us out of here without actually being blackmarked by the Chicago Network than it was cheap at the price. Valerie had assured me that a talented medic never went hungry on the road, and despite the fact that she'd been throwing her credits away for the past few weeks like a Juicer who knew they had nothing left to live for, she still had enough savings left to restock supplies and keep us fed for the next month. By which point we'd certainly have found more work of some kind.

So, with everything we both owned loaded in the back of her four-wheel ATV - a lightly armored 'Big Boss' model from Northern Gun, the kind with the four monster truck tires and elevated compartment - we jumped in, hit the gas, and triumphantly peeled out of town-

-to come to a stop barely a mile outside city limits as soon as she found a convenient place to pull off out of sight from the road. Wait, what?

"Everybody unass the vehicle!" she called, sliding out the driver's side window without even opening the door. Confused, I climbed down and caught up with her at the rear end as she was busy digging through the trunk. "Come on, where'd I put it- ah!" she said triumphantly, coming back up with a short, clunky-looking energy pistol of some kind in her hands. "Okay, can you tell me the four rules of this?" she continued, without the slightest trace of humor in her voice now.

"That is always loaded unless you've just unloaded it yourself. Never point its muzzle at anything you couldn't live with being blown into mist if you had to. Never put your finger inside the trigger guard until after you've already decided to fire it. Don't shoot at something unless you're sure it's hostile and nothing friendly is behind it." I recited without hesitation, remembering Medic-Sergeant Samuels had made me get the Four Rules letter-perfect before I was even allowed to touch one of the militia weapons. You normally didn't start until sixteen but I'd been bright enough they let me start attending a few months early.

"Exactly!" she beamed approvingly. "So, you already know how to use one?"

"On a training range? A few times?" I replied, because I certainly wasn't going to impress a veteran Juicer by claiming any expertise I didn't actually have.

"Right then," she said. "Watch out, she's a little heavy for squishies like you." she cautioned, and I made sure to brace myself before I took it from her. Oof, this damn thing must have weighed almost twice what the Coalition-issue pistol did. Must be one of those Northern Gun weapons, the ones everybody said were built like bricks.

I checked and safed the weapon like I'd been taught, making sure to keep the muzzle aimed away while I used my mechanical intuition to figure out where the controls were on this unfamiliar model. Valerie waited until I was finished, took a look around, and then nodded to me.

"Okay! Now this is one of my backups – it'll be a loaner until we've had a chance to get you your own loadout. She's an NG-57 heavy ion pistol, a short-ranged high-powered option that puts almost as much payload downrange as the CS-12 heavy laser rifle but can barely reach one-quarter of the distance as one. So, why am I loaning this to you?"

"We're outside patrolled zones now, and you can only look or shoot in one direction at a time?" I guessed.

Valerie nodded, and then briefly looked around again. "Now, the key words for this weapon are high powered and short ranged. I'm not giving this to you so you can help me go out and kick ass. Until after you've gotten a designated marksman's badge you will not even dream of putting the beam anywhere near I'm fighting to try and cover me, especially not the way I bounce around on a battlefield. Because one hit from this thing anywhere my body armor doesn't cover and I've got superheated air pollution where I used to have an arm or a head! You yank the crank on this baby if and only if something big and ugly has already gotten past me and is about to drop right on top of you, or else I will take it away from you and beat you with the blunt end until you learn to follow simple directions, you got me?"

I nodded vigorously, and she checked our surroundings again and then continued.

"She's got only ten shots per E-clip, so don't plan on doing suppressive fire or dealing with multiple attackers. But if we're that outnumbered we already fucked up badly somewhere, so my fault. And don't forget, that weapon's not a quick-stopper versus anyone in Mega-Damage body armor either. Even my ceramic plate-vest can stop three or four shots from her before its burnt through, and the Dead Boys have armor twice as thick as mine and it's airtight from head to toe. This pistol is pretty much only for more informal situations, or nasty wildlife. Which is always a concern even if you're close enough to town to see the walls, follow me? But don't actually use it in town, because that thing will overpenetrate in one side of an ordinary building and out the other and then across the street to do it all over again. The beam crosses the sky, the ground, or MDC-rated backstops only, you got me?"

I nodded again.

She briefly dug through the trunk again until she grunted in satisfaction and came out with a particular piece of web gear. "All right, strap that on and then holster your new pistol. You always keep her in arms' reach until the next time we're in a town, every moment of every day. You walk with it, sit with it, sleep with it, and even bathe with it." She chuckled. "Literally, because one of the things Northern Gun built that model for was underwater use. Now repeat back what I just said."

After doing so, she nodded and continued the lecture. "Okay, now we'll discuss the rules of the camp-"

The three E-clips worth of ammo we used up during my orientation barely qualified as weapon familiarization, let alone qualification, but between my prior range time - such as it was – and my new Mechanicus implants promising the ability to remain totally calm and focused at need even during high-stress combat situations, I was at least adequately confident that I could hit a man-sized target at point-blank range with the ion pistol. Especially given that it had a laser sight mounted under the barrel. So even if we got jumped and Valerie was too busy dealing with things to stop someone from getting around at me, I could at least make them nervous enough to stop and find cover and give her time to deal with them. Not that I was champing at the bit for a chance to find out the limits of my competence the hard way, but out in the wild trouble came to you on its schedule and not yours. So nobody except an idiot ever went past town borders without either being armed and ready for trouble or else travelling in a properly escorted party – or ideally, both.

Since our discovery that my power wasn't actually magic – or at least, any kind of magic that could be detected – meant that our original plan of finding a way to dog-leg up to Tolkeen was maybe not necessary, we'd eventually settled on a tentative plan of heading to the Chi-Town Burbs and seeing what, if anything, we could learn there about anything even remotely resembling what was happening to me. Because the two main things that had discouraged me from trying it alone – the risk of being detected by Coalition mage-sweeps and the odds of me getting killed trying to live solo in such a rough and unfamiliar community – didn't apply now that I seemed to be not a mage and with Valerie along as my partner and native guide. Especially given that she'd been working consistently in the Burbs for the past few months, and had only left when she'd felt the early warning symptoms of Last Call and wanted to get back out on the road one last time.

"So, what are the Burbs really like?" I asked her as she slowed down to wind her way past a fallen tree blocking the road. Instead of taking the main highway to straight Chi-Town we were currently busy following a secondary logging road through one of the forests in northeastern Illinois instead. We'd left the main highway to start dog-legging north as soon as we'd crossed into Illinois, both to loop around to one of the more northern highways so we could travel down that instead of arriving at the Chi-Town Burbs via the direct route from Cedar Rapids and so Valerie could touch base with one of the "free trader" outposts up here to get a better idea of border conditions near Wisconsin, just in case we ended up deciding on Tolkeen after all. And since our forest run was the first time that we hadn't stopped along the way to take some time out for another session of Valerie Valkryie's Travelling Boot Camp – she didn't want us spending any extended time out of the vehicle when the underbrush was too close to see what might be sneaking up on us - it was the first day I actually had enough energy back to be intellectually curious about things.

"You've gotta see it to really believe it." she answered. "Seriously, it's the biggest damn sprawl of humanity I've ever even heard of in my life. You know the basic story of the 'Burbs, yeah?"

"Yeah, decades ago it started as a refugee camp for people trying to get into the Chi-Town fortress city proper. Because everybody in the Coalition wants to live in the capital megaplex, and they don't want to let hardly anyone in. So, after the army tried and failed multiple times to drive everyone away-" I finished.

"New ones would just keep coming back." Valerie nodded absently, still keeping her eyes on the road.

"And eventually the Coalition just decided to let them squat there, as long as they kept their refugee camps far enough away from the city walls. So, tens of thousands of people were all out there, waiting and waiting for a chance that would never come-"

"And more and more kept coming, because it's a fucked up world pretty much everywhere, and there's a whole lot of people who didn't want to just sit in their own rural district and live the live of a CS prole growing shit, grubbing in the shit, and eventually dying without ever earning shit." Valerie agreed.

"Like me." I nodded back. "So, more and more people coming to try and make it in the big city, but the big city won't let them in. Refugee camps eventually turn into shanty towns. Shantytowns start turning into regular towns…"

"But still never officially recognized by the Coalition. Miles and miles of people who aren't legally people. Big Daddy Skullhead could just wake up one day, order 'em all nuked by his army, and go eat lunch without having broken a single Coalition law. Not even the ones they at least pretend to obey." Valerie spat. "Why the fuck do they stay?'

I didn't need my cognitive implants to solve that puzzle. "Why should they leave? Because life is uncertain, and the town might get wiped out some year by something entirely unpredictable? Where isn't that true?"

Valerie laughed bitterly. "Inside CS borders? Only one place, and that's inside a proper fortress-city. The place all those Burbies are dying of old age waiting to get into. Okay, yeah, now I see it."

Several connections came together for me. "There's also that that the inhabitants of the 'Burbs are a skilled labor pool comprising hundreds of thousands of people, who have no one to speak for them and no way to get legal redress if they're cheated. And the combination of exploitable talent and lack of defenses just begs for a certain type of person to move in and try and sweatshop them."

"Like Doc Bitch did with you," Valerie realized. "So, the Coalition lets the Burbs keep existing because its cheap labor?"

"And also puts a lot of potential troublemakers all in one spot, where they're scared of making enough of a ruckus to be seen at a distance because the Coalition capital is barely a day's walk down the road and they can just legally burn a whole shantytown down on a whim if there is a ruckus. After all, Burbies have forfeited their citizenship by living in an 'outlaw settlement'. They're stateless persons." I finished analyzing.

"Fuckin' Prosek." she swore wearily. "Bastard's figured all the angles-"

The sound of a sudden thunderclap echoing through the trees around us cut her off.

"Turret!" she snapped, and I yanked the handle that rose my seat so I could man the heavy automatic laser pintle-mounted above the passenger seat. Not that I was any kind of great marksman, but even a novice like me could hit something using a fully-automatic line-of-sight lightspeed weapon that had zero recoil, which is why Valerie had remounted the weapon she hadn't had much use for when riding alone. We'd spent most of one morning just teaching me the basics of how to use it-

"Clear!" Valerie called after hastily checking her side.

"Clear!" I replied, having swept my side.

"The fuck was that?" she said, her foot still on the gas. "And is it in front of us or behind us?"

I used my Mechanicus implants to rerun the exact sensory impression my ears had originally picked up, then 'asked' them if they had any analyzing algorithms that could make sense of them.

"Sounded like a jet turbine suddenly disassembling itself the hard way." I said. "A couple miles off to our left side and up in the air."

"We're driving under a dogfight?" she swore. "Fuck! Keep it trained on the sky, John!"

"No, wait." I said. "I think I know what happened-" I reached down and turned on the ATV's radio, then flipped it to aviation guard frequency.

"-ayday, mayday, this is CS-Vistar-511! Both engines lost, major onboard fire and structural damage! Mayday, mayday, CS-Vistar-511 is going in, we are going in-"

"He lost both engines?" Valerie said amazedly as the pilot kept repeating his distress call in-between various swears, curses, and exhortations to try and get at least one turbine back on line. "And he's got an internal fire? Even a Coalition Vistar light transport is still overengineered like a flying bank vault! If nobody shot him then how'd he break that hard?"

"How well do they fly without either of the engines?" I asked her.

"Like a non-flying bank vault," she said resignedly. "Those poor fuckers had better eject fast or else they're-"

And then the distress call cut off as an even louder explosion and a bright fireball rising up over the tree line to the north told us exactly how that story had ended.

"Shit." Valerie swore. "Rough way to go, even for skullheads."

"Unless one of 'em got out." I said. "Do we leave 'em, or…?"

"Hmm." she pondered. "Well, neither of us are actually doing anything illegal here, and it's a long fuckin' way to walk from the middle of these woods… sure, we can go look. Search-and-rescue fees for recovering a Coalition pilot or two would be a nice addition to the kitty. Or maybe we can score some salvage from the wreck if they didn't make it-" she thought out loud.

"You're the boss." I agreed, and she slowed down and turned hard left to take us off the dirt road and start four-wheeling it between the trees.

The plume of smoke gave us a clear beacon to home in on, so between that and Valerie's superhuman reflexes letting her think the proper value of 'off-road speed' for this terrain was pushing 50, we were there in maybe ten minutes. The CS 'Vistar' was a twin-engine fixed-wing turbojet, relatively lightly armored – for a Coalition milspec aircraft - and unarmed. A far cry from the massive armored Death's Head assault transports or even the smaller Death Bringer VTOL APCs, a Vistar was essentially the militarized version of a medium-range commuter air jet. Luxury models were used for ferrying Coalition VIPs through safe zones, and ones like this were used for cargo transport small enough or short-legged enough to not rate one of the massive heavy-lifters.

"You see any chutes?" Valerie asked. "'Cause I didn't."

"They'd have touched down by now, but we'd have seen them dangling on the way in." I agreed. "And damn sure nobody's still alive in that mess." I said, looking down on the crumpled and still smoking wreckage that was only partially recognizable as having once been a Coalition military aircraft. The pilot had done an exceptional job to land it even as semi-intactly as he had, but there wasn't anything flying skill could do when you slid nose-first into a tree. "Broadwave scan doesn't pick up any active SAR beacons, either. Nobody got out."

"Salvage it is, then." she replied matter-of-factly. "Keep the scanner on so whatever flying squad the Coalition sends out doesn't fly up our asses before we notice 'em, but given how far away the nearest base is…"

I calculated times and distances in my head. "Assuming they punched out a SAMAS flight the instant they got the first mayday call, we still have at least twenty minutes to poke through the wreck, then turn around and bail back to the road and pretend like we never left it. And if these guys had been flying with any escort alongside, we'd have heard them talking on guard frequency."

"Good!" she said cheerfully as we stopped and got out. "You get the toolkit, I'll get the wrecking bar, and we'll see if they were carrying anything worth stealing."

Valerie did a fast-scan of the wreck with the infra-red in her nightvision goggles to see if anything was still on fire inside, but since CS military aircraft used the far more expensive nuclear power cells instead of chemical engines so as to be independent of fueling facilities, there really wasn't the 'thousands of gallons of burning kerosene' problem that would have normally occurred going into a wrecked plane this soon after the crash. If we were really lucky, one of the power cells themselves would be intact enough to salvage – replacing the ATV's powerplant with it would allow us to explore as far off the beaten path as we wanted, or on the black market it would be fenceable for several hundred thousand credits-

"Okay, I'm pretty sure I can wriggle in under the wreckage there, and then I can pop the rear hatch open from the inside-" Val said, as she unslung her rifle and crouched down prepatory to crawling through the dirt loosened by the crash to get in through where we could see the hull had crumpled enough to leave a gap.

"Hey!" I said to her. "No moving out of each other's line-of-sight when we're in the field, remember? Those were part of the rules you drilled into me?"

Valerie glared at me, but sighed in resignation at the justice of my remarks. "Okay, fine. I'll do my muscle girl act from the outside of the hatch, even if it takes longer that way-" she groused as we went around to the back of the plane and she rammed the point of the breaker bar in through a seam adjacent to the warped hatch and then planted both feet and pulled.

The jammed hinges screeched, and the hatch moved several inches.

"Mmmph!" she grunted. "Stuck pretty tight, but-" She grunted and pulled again, this time turning around to throw her shoulders against the bar while doing a solid brace against the earth with both legs, and it screeched even more and popped open a couple feet.

"Whew!" she said, stopping to mop her brow. "All right, that's enough of a gap I can peek inside. Let's see if- CONTACT FRONT!" she screamed, instantly diving to the side at a speed only a panicked Juicer could achieve as the brilliant white-red of a mega-damage laser beam passed right through the volume of space her head had just been occupying.

Her panicked call went right past my brain to the beginnings of my conditioned reflexes and I flopped straight down in the dirt just as I was supposed to do if we were taking incoming fire. Whatever impossibly tough bastard in there had actually survived the plane crash also had excellent fire discipline, because after his first shot missed he didn't do another. Valerie had hit the ground rolling off to the side where she'd leaped, and then sprang up and sprinted right for the left side of the plane. I got up to a crouch and frantically duck-walked over to the right wing root, and she parkoured right over the top of the wrecked fuselage to join me.

"What the hell was that?" I asked her.

"All I saw was a glimpse of a black metal skull and then the business end of a rifle." Valerie said. "How the fuck he lived through the crash, I don't know! Maybe there was a borg on board?"

"A full-conversion borg could possibly survive that level of impact, but why would he shoot without a challenge?" I whispered back to her. "For all he knew, you were a Coalition search-and-rescue team! It's not like you came in with your weapon out!"

"Well it's out now," she said sensibly, her NG heavy plasma rifle already covering the likeliest angle of approach. "But yeah, skullboy in there is just… waiting. I get that he can't shoot through the fuselage because its MDC armor too, but why isn't he coming out? He's got to at least be some kind of wounded, he can't wait all day!"

We shrugged at each other, and I decided to try diplomacy.

"Hello?" I called out. "Sir? We're here to help!"

A red-glowing patch near us on the fuselage of the plane gave us our answer. He actually was trying to burn through it to reach us, he'd just wanted a target to shoot at first… and apparently he had really good hearing, too. As quietly as we could, Valerie and I both crept off our position. As near as we could tell, he'd decided that his best course of action was to kill two attempted rescuers in cold blood.

"What's his problem?" she mouthed silently at me. I shrugged, and pointed at myself, then did a walking-motion with my fingers down the side of the plane, then pointed at one particular item hanging off of her web gear. I'll distract him, you go around and chuck a grenade in the hole.

She smiled and nodded back at me. Good idea!

"Okay," I called out as I made sure to adjust position so that he'd be facing away from the rear hatch. "I'm backing off now! I don't want any troub-"

FWOOOOOOOOOM* Valerie yet again dove for cover and hit the ground rolling, this time to avoid getting the rear hatch swinging into her face from where it had just been blown open by the heavy plasma grenade she'd tossed into the cargo compartment.

After a long moment of nothing else moving, shooting, or spontaneously catching fire Valerie rose up to a crouch from her prone position and, her plasma rifle still covering the now smoking and open hatch, called out for me to circle wide around and take up a station behind her.

"Anything moving in there?" she called. I pulled out some binoculars and hit up magnification and low-light, then peered inside. One black humanoid skeleton-figure lay sprawled on its back, immobile and empty-handed. The half-melted ruin of a Coalition laser rifle – some advanced model I wasn't familiar with – lay on the floor next to him.

"Well, even if he's not dead, his weapon is toast." I said. "So, do we leave him for his friends or go wrap him up?"

"Leaving him would be sensible, but I reallllly want to ask this asshole what the fuck was he thinking." Valerie swore. "OK, stay to my left and try to keep the corner of the hatch between you and him as long as you can. Let's go."

Our nervous yet hasty advance towards the target produced no results, and eventually we bent over him. Valerie took the simple precaution of jamming the muzzle of her laser pistol directly into his eyesocket and leaning down hard enough to nail him to the floor while I bent over the borg to examine him for signs of life. Oddly, he was really skinny for a borg, almost skeletal. Full-conversion military cyborgs always liked to layer the armor as thick as possible.

I finally found an external jackpoint, then ran a plug between him and my headware. Even with the significant boost my Mechanicus implants gave me, it took me a couple of minutes to crack the encryption- weird, not even CS military borgs guarded their onboard bio-monitors with this kind of paranoia-

"Fuck. This isn't a borg, it's an android." I realized.

"What?" Valerie swore incredulously. "You mean an autonomous robot weapon? Something that could traverse a battlefield, pick targets, evaluate, all that jazz without needing a drone operator? That's way beyond any tech avail-" she stopped herself.

"Except who has the best tech in North America? The Coalition States." I swore, and once I knew what to look for I could pick out the pattern in the remaining markings even though Valerie's grenade had obliterated most of them. "You know why this aircraft crashed? The robot activated in mid-flight when they were shipping it, then its IFF must have glitched and it defaulted to 'shoot everything moving'. The crash messed it up enough that it was already moving pretty slow before we got to the party, your grenade-in-the-face trick finally finished it off."

"So they crashed because it shot the plane up from the inside." she said, and went to one of the several human corpses lying broken and dead towards the front of the cargo compartment. "Yup. These guys didn't die in the crash, they were lasered. The pilot compartment was too heavily armored to break into quickly enough, it's why they lived long enough to splat. But metalhead here had already fragged as much of the plane as it could reach from the inside-"

"Maybe it had sabotage programming." I shrugged. "Maybe it was just a lucky hit that chain-failed right into the engines. Anyway, regardless of the exact details the overall theme is the same either way - their own malfunctioning killbot killed them all."

"Fuck." she swore. "Well, this kind of ultra classified shit will certainly have someone come looking for it. We can't afford to take anything, and we need to go. Like right now."

"One moment," I said, and then pulled a copy of as much of the code as I could out of the robot's surviving processors before I deliberately trashed the file allocation tables and as many disk sectors as I could. Unless very carefully examined it would look like the robot had simply destroyed itself in the crash-

"A-hah!" Valerie cried triumphantly, as she yanked a plasma grenade identical to the one she'd just used off of the web gear of one of the dead Coalition soldiers. "You get the picture?"

"Death metal boy here goes on a rampage, last survivor of the guards sitting on the package pulls a dying 'fuck you' with a plasma grenade, then everybody dies in the plane crash. And we were never here." I grinned back at her.

"Bingo." she said. "Finish wiping your traces off the deathbot?"

"Done," I said, unplugging the interface cable and retracting it. "Time to go."

We'd made it back to the road and were busy highballing it as fast as she dared go for road conditions before we spoke again.

"So. Androids." she said.

"The biggest major limitation on the Coalition's military expansion speed is the amount of time and cost it takes to train grunts." I agreed. "And now, soldier robots. Even if they're just glorified gun trucks with feet and have no real AI at all, simply not needing drone operators for each one means you can turn every living grunt into a squad leader for digital cannon fodder."

"Assuming they ever get it to work." Valerie said. "I mean, we did just pick through the wreckage of the world's worst field test."

"They'll get it to work." I sighed. "Eventually. I mean, I could fix their fuckup for them right now if I wanted, I already debugged what went wrong with it. And sure, I'm a supernatural genius, but that doesn't mean I'm the only person who can solve the problem ever. Unless Coalition R chooses to quit first, they should make it there in the end."

"As if our beloved Emperor didn't already have enough of a war machine." Valerie sighed. "Fuck. What the hell is coming, that they're already trying to do this kind of build-up and these kinds of experiments?"

We both momentarily turned to look at each other before turning our eyes back to the road. Neither of us really had an answer for that one.

Author's Note: Before anyone asks 'What sourcebook was the CS Vistar in?', this is one of the things I meant in that section of the OP where I said I'd have to make things up. The Rifts sourcebooks were mostly only interested in detailing things that the party might be shooting at or getting shot at by, so any author who wants to do things like go 'So, what does the Coalition use to move light cargo that's not a flying milspec doom ship?' has to just wing it.

Perks This Chapter: Cranial Implants (Warhammer 40k: Adeptus Mechanicus)

Last edited: Jun 4, 2021

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cliffc999

May 11, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 12, 2021

#63

Chapter 3

"Valerie Dumont, CS licensed bounty hunter, Juicer." she said matter-of-factly, as one of the heavily-armored Dead Boys glaring at us suspiciously from both sides of the traffic lane stepped forward to take her ID card and slot it into his portacomp. He grunted at the readout and handed it back to her, and she tucked it into her jacket pocket.

"John… Stilwell, Operator." I said when he looked at me, giving the common slang term for 'freelance mercenary technician' . "Uh, no ID, I'm from outside."

"Hrmph." the Dead Boy grunted, and despite his helmet being a featureless skull faceplate I still got the distinct impression I was being glared suspiciously at. "You vouch for him?" he turned to Valerie.

"Yeah, he's ridden with me for a while. He's cool." she said far too breezily for a woman whose vehicle was surrounded by at least ten Dead Boys, most of whom had their weapons not quite aimed at us but still far too close for comfort.

"Any readings?" the soldier said, turning to look back at the Dog Boy auxiliary standing about ten feet back from the road and flanked by several more troopers and the squad leader of this detachment. Good thing neither of us had any magic or unregistered psionics, even we still weren't remotely sure what I did have.

"Nothing, sir." the genetically engineered canine humanoid replied. "They're both clean."

"All right." the soldier doing all the talking said, as the rest relaxed back to port arms. "Pull off the road into the marked spot over there, then dismount your vehicle's turret weapon and stow it. As soon as that's done you're cleared for entry."

"Got it," Valerie nodded, and the trooper stepped back as she took her foot off the brake and we idled forward to where we'd been directed. We'd run into the impromptu traffic checkpoint of an entire platoon of CS infantry and their APCs parked across the highway about ten miles out from the 'Burbs. There was still an entire line of cars and trucks backed up behind where we'd just gone through.

"Does this happen every time?" I asked Valerie as I expertly disconnected and demounted the squad automatic laser from the turret and she easily hoisted it free and jumped down off the ATV's roof with it cradled in her arms.

"Fuck no, I've never run into this kinda crap here before." she answered as she disconnected the laser's power pack, put it in the cargo compartment, and strapped it down. "Something must've happened to put the whole district on alert."

"Should we turn around?" I said as we both got back in and resumed our journey. "If we're riding into a battle or something?'

"If there was still shooting going on those guys would have been a lot more tense than they were, and we'd hear the close-air support still buzzing around." she answered. "Nah, they're definitely wired about something but it's not actually a battlefield right now. Besides, kinda suspicious to hit an official checkpoint and turn around as soon as you see it. The kinda suspicious that gets them calling in the flyboys to run you down and ask you what's in the trunk at railgun point."

As if to punctuate her sentence the 'winged angel' silhouettes of a pair of SAMAS power-armor troopers flew overhead at several hundred feet, as their patrol sweep brought them over this particular checkpoint.

"I see." I said, before the question burst out of me. "Oh, and Coalition licensed bounty hunter?!?"

Valerie turned to look at me in honest confusion. "Um, yeah? What did you think allowed me to just stroll around through the heartland with all sorts of ordnance and grenades strapped on and a laser machine gun on the roof? The CS wants permits for that shit, y'know! They only allow it because the world's got more demons and shit than they've got troopers to handle, so why not pay the 'right' kind of freelancer to shoot the 'wrong' kind as piece work?"

I put my head in my hands and groaned. "When we first met, I thought it was safe to admit I had magic – thought I had magic - because Juicers are never part of the Coalition military-"

Valerie guffawed. "Yeah, you were being a total dumbass back there. It took everything I had not to laugh until I peed!"

"Fuck me. You could've-" I began.

"Hey!" she cut me off angrily. "I do not sell people to the skullheads just because of what they were born as. There's mercenary and then there's just plain shitty. I got the paperwork because you need it if you don't want to spend all your time hiding in a Burb or outside the borders, that's all." She sighed and continued less angrily. "But yeah, that's only some of the freelancers who get licenses like me. You've got some real assholes in this line of work, and then there's the true believers who think that Prosek pisses vodka."

I decided thumping my head on the dashboard would serve in lieu for an answer. Because if Valerie had been an even slightly different type of person, my adventure would have ended right there in the Kentucky Windage.

"Pretty much." Valerie agreed. "Relax, I was once fresh off the farm too and not that long ago. So live and learn."

I raised my head and looked at her. "Speaking of that… Dumont?"

"And yours was so much better, Stilwell?" she snarked back. "Don't think I didn't spot you pulling that one of your ass."

"Even the Coalition can't cross-reference everyone and everything in a world where lots of people are still born in places without computerized birth registries, can they?" I riposted.

"Nope," she said. "And thank God for that, or else people like us would never be able to eat."

"I'm surprised that guy didn't insist on ID tagging and logging me right then and there." I wondered. "I mean, I'd just told him I was a non-citizen."

"We're heading into the Burbs, he doesn't care who we are." she shrugged. "He just cares we're not radiating any of the forbidden vibes or isn't whoever they're looking for."

"Wouldn't want to be them." I agreed.

"Oh, hey, we're coming up on a really good view." Valerie broke in. "Just over this rise-"

And then we crested the low hill and for the first time, I saw the capital city of the Coalition States.

The Fortress City of Chi-Town was what I later learned was called an 'arcology', an entire city contained within a giant indoor structure. Contrary to what some people would assume from the CS military aesthetic of black gleaming MDC cerametal everywhere, Chi-Town glittered like a polished silver mirror in the sunlight. With each succeeding layer built up on top of the preceding layer, it formed a vaguely pyramidal shape over 2 miles wide at the bottom and almost a mile high, with a giant flat top almost one mile square. Inside it lived the two million most privileged people in the Coalition, the ones who were the most safe. None of the dangers of the world could touch them in there, not without going through a literal high-tech army equipped with the best that money could buy and backed up by the most overengineered and thorough network of static defenses on the continent.

I'd never met anyone, not even a Coalition soldier, who'd so much as seen the inside of the place. Part of me believed that it couldn't possibly be as good as everyone said it was. Part of me was afraid that it might be.

But it didn't matter, because Chi-Town wasn't where I was heading. I looked away from the reflec-metal miracle of engineering towards the horizon and down, down at the big ugly sprawl covering the plain between us and the city. Kept an absolute minimum of five miles' distance away from the walls, outside the outermost of the triple ring of sensors and defensive emplacements that ringed the city, the Chi-Town Burbs was a big sprawling tangle of camps, shantytowns, and little villages and townships that had somehow gotten actual resources for permanent construction and cared to put in the effort. No one had ever taken an accurate census of the population or surveyed a proper set of maps for the place, but the common estimate was that it was at least as many people that lived in Chi-Town proper. It was more spread out than you'd think, because not every little community or shantytown within the Burb wanted to rub borders with the next door neighbors. Unlike Chi-Town proper the Burbs were a large collection of separate little settlements all squatting in close formation, not a single unified arcology.

And this infamous den of depravity and desperation was our next stop.

"Huh," Valerie said, and only then did I realize that she'd pulled off the road as soon as we'd come over the low ridge so she could get out the binoculars and start looking down at the Burbs herself. "Yeah, it's what I was afraid of. You see that?"

She pointed down at what I could only vaguely see at this distance. It was one particular shanty town that had several large pillars of black smoke rising from separate points, and seemed to be have a lot fewer buildings than the other ones around it. "Damn. Big fire got out of control?"

Valerie shook her head sadly. "Nope. They cluster-bombed it. "

"What?" I sputtered.

"Welcome to the 'Burbs." she said disgustedly. "Contrary to popular belief there's hardly ever large-scale violence around here, because everybody knows what happens if there is a riot. But people are people, and eventually shit builds up to the point that mob hysteria kicks in and 'everybody' doesn't remember in time. Boom, flash mob. If they're lucky, then whoever's the local militia for that particular 'burb is able to crack enough heads to get people to sit the fuck down and shut up right away. But if you get something that goes loud enough or long enough to start being noticed up in the big city?"

"The Dead Boys go in shooting?" I said, feeling a sick taste in my mouth.

"Everything that moves." she agreed. "And if that doesn't work fast enough, then they call in the air support and toast the entire grid square." Valerie said tightly. "One way or another, they don't stop until there ain't no riot no more. Just like what must have happened to that place… yesterday, judging by how its still smoldering."

"Yesterday? What, does this kind of thing happen often?!?" I said heatedly.

"I was here for like five months and never saw it once," she said. "But from what the old-timers say, you get a boil-over like this maybe a couple times every couple years. No wonder the whole zone's on alert status today. It'll probably be a week before everything calms down again." She exhaled heavily. "Well, this doesn't really change our plans, but it does suggest we should slow our roll a little about trying to find some mystic to talk to. So we're just a pair of young mercs in for some rest and refit, and you're just fixing shit off the back of the truck for beer money like any other Operator."

"Got it." I said. "Except we don't have anything except the one little toolbox."

"Yeah, we'll have to hope somebody's flea-marketing some stuff you can use. We're not busted, but I want some more income before we do any major outgo."

"I've built up some more charge. Want me to see if I can try for anything that might be useful there?"

"Well, nothing you've done actually was visible at a distance yet, so… yeah, better here than there. Do it."

I closed my eyes and concentrated, the field of stars coming up even more easily than it had last time. I guess practice did make perfect. So, I went through the now familiar motions of letting a constellation come to me at random, and then sifting through each spark of it praying for some kind of hunch, any kind of hunch, as to what might be useful…

I'd built up enough charge that I could just afford one of the largest ones now, and I was more than curious to see what kind of power or knowledge might come with it given how much I'd already gotten just from three of the little ones. But eventually, caution prompted me to pick one of the intermediate-sized ones instead. Besides, I had a little tickle of feeling about it…

"So, anything?" Valerie asked me when I opened my eyes.

"Looks like I don't know any new sciences," I said disappointedly, as my now implant-enhanced memory re-indexed itself in a moment. "And my diagnostic says no new implants. That's the first time I've ever gotten nothing."

Something drew the corner of my eye and I looked out the passenger's side window. My eyes widened incredulously as to what I saw lying on the ground next to the ATV. Without thinking I popped the door and slid to the ground, prompting Valerie to look over, grunt in surprise, and rapidly come out to join me.

"Did someone just sneak up and dump a whole blacksmith's shop next to the truck without us even noticing?" she said incredulously as we both stared down at a forge, bellows, anvil, and all the rest that could have been drawn straight from some picture-book illustration of the ideal conception of a village blacksmith from the pre-industrial era. "I mean, okay, you wanted tools, but-" She swore. "On top of the whole fucking weirdness city here, it won't even fit in the trunk!"

My brain seemed full of hunches as I ran my hand lightly down the side of the anvil. Something about this setup intuitively spoke to me, and I tried wishing for something more porta-

"Where'd it go?" I said, as suddenly we were standing on bare grass again.

"Try wishing for it back," Valerie said, and I did so. Suddenly the outdoor blacksmith setup was here again like it had been here all along and we'd just been overlooking it.

"Gone again," I said, with a thought. "And now, if I want it over here…" It came back, but in the new location I'd pointed out for it.

"Okay, if you can do that indoors then we can just rent any old shack, close the doors, and pretend we just set up your stuff the regular way. Not that you can do electronics or anything with this kind of outfit, but people do still pay for basic smithwork." Valerie said. "But first I wanna test something."

"Go ahead," I said, and then immediately regretted my impulse when she grabbed one of the blacksmith's hammers one end in each hand, then brought it down sideways with all her strength right into the corner of the anvil. And given that her full exertion could probably have lifted the back end of the ATV off the ground, the hammer's handle snapped in half like a dry breadstick. "Hey!" I said.

Valerie tossed both halves of the broken hammer over her shoulder. "Look, we can buy a hammer." she said reasonably. "Before we do that, though, try wishing the setup away and then back again."

I did so, and immediately spotted what she was getting at. When the shop came back there was a new, identical hammer hanging in the same spot she'd taken the broken one from. A brief search told us that the broken pieces of the old hammer were no longer where she'd tossed them either.

"So, it's a conjuration." Valerie said. "Instant workshop whenever you want. I wonder what else it can restock."

"I think…" I said, touching and trying to commune with the anvil again. "I think I can upgrade this. Like, if I add some more tools to the workshop than they can become part of the workshop. But maybe we should save more experimenting for when we're not out in the open."

"Good plan." she agreed. "Right, banish that stuff and we'll get moving."

We spent our first afternoon and evening in town doing what came naturally, because neither of us was undisciplined enough to distract ourselves like that while out in the field so we had a bit of a dry spell to get over. We also got me checked out and qualified with a lower-powered Wilks laser pistol more suitable for use inside built-up areas, because walking around a place like this unarmed was an invitation to getting jumped. Not that we weren't planning to ditch the buddy system or anything, but we did have to actually use the toilet now and then.

We'd also found out what the riot had been about. Apparently, something called "The Edict of Planetary Distress" – and wasn't that a reassuring title – had been put out a few days ago by Plato, the ancient dragon that was the head of the ruling council of the kingdom of Lazlo up in Canada. Lazlo was, like Tolkeen, a place founded on principles completely opposite to the Coalition. Instead of hating and outlawing magic, it was a routinely used part of society. Instead of making D-Bees legal unpersons and third-class citizens, they had full rights alongside people. Instead of being a military dictatorship it was a republic. And instead of having the highest technological base on the continent and placing all faith in Science and Rationality, they used an eclectic hodge-podge of engineering, mysticism, and techno-wizardry. Obviously I knew virtually nothing about the place that hadn't come through the official Coalition propaganda, and even Valerie had never been there, but we both knew that the odds of that propaganda being true were somewhere below the odds of Emperor Prosek retiring to become a pacifist monk.

At any rate, Plato had said that all the psis and seers in Lazlo had been having recurring visions of a great doom, and it was time to warn the planet to be on guard against the Four Great Dangers, as he'd termed them. The first one, the 'Devouring Horde', was supposed to be something that would be arriving on the East Coast any day now. Then there was something about the 'Four Great Demons', 'the Deceiver', and a final threat that wasn't even vaguely named. And Lazlo and Tolkeen and all the other kingdoms of magic had entreatied the Coalition to declare a truce and all come together in readiness against the threats to the entire world.

Yeah, you can imagine how well that one floated. Emperor Prosek's answer basically rhymed with "duck shoe", along with dark mutterings of how it was all clearly a plot to get the Coalition to lower its guard. And the Federation of Magic apparently wouldn't drop whatever grudge they had against Tolkeen and Lazlo even for the end of the world, assuming the prophecy was real at all. And everybody else talked about it but didn't really do anything about it.

But the announcement had caused riots and panic in a lot of places, both inside the Coalition and without. We'd missed the entire thing because we'd been on the road that week, having apparently left Cedar Rapids just before the announcement broke. And one of the shantytown riots had just spiraled completely out of control, and what with the CS military already on a nationwide yellow alert due to the Emperor's response to the Edict the local commander hadn't waited twelve hours before ordering the assault gunships to just level the place.

And then after we'd gotten the lay of the land, we did something even Valerie found a little ghoulish but was a sadly common part of the freelancer life. Notably, driving to the site of the burnt-out former 'Burb to pick through the wreckage.

Seeing as how we'd only gotten there two days after the initial strike, most of the easy gleanings had already been picked clean. Of course, that was part of the plan. Neither of us had any interest in getting in a fight with other looters over the valuable stuff, especially since we weren't looking for cash or jewelry or such things. No, we wanted heavy bulk items of the type that most looters wouldn't find cost-effective or easy to move, or small durable items that weren't individually worth much but likely to survive the firebombing relatively intact. Things like mechanics' workshops or machine tools.

Now, given that the average Burb had enough unregistered psis, D-Bees, and minor magic practitioners per square mile that even the ISS sweepers couldn't narrow down who the troublemaker was unless the Dog Boy or Psi-Stalker happened to be looking right at them in short-range line-of-sight, not to mention the rarity of actual CS street sweeps in a Burb to begin with, the very fringes of the Coalition capital paradoxically had far more magic, critters, and all the other forbidden things than the most remote Coalition border zone settlement would. A genetically-engineered psi sniffer that could pick up an active usage of power at hundreds of feet away was too sensitive an instrument for such a crowded environment as this one, so almost anyone born with the wrong powers who didn't choose the strategy of leaving CS territory entirely instead came to a place like this to try and hide.

Not that there weren't any number of informers or freelancers like the 'wrong type' of bounty hunter Valerie had talked about who wouldn't sell them out for a few hundred creds here anyway, so many people who came here seeking safety still didn't find it for long. But that never stopped new people from coming. Desperation was a hell of a motive, and it didn't look like that would stop any time soon.

But the practical upshot of this was that we could afford to risk experimenting with my new powers a little even if something as overt as the workshop summoning might radiate detectable magic, so we felt it fairly safe for me to use my new 'magic workshop' conjuration as we picked through the ruins. It didn't take us long to figure out that I could move something 'into' the workshop just by summoning the workshop around it, and then immediately banishing it with intent. We had a brief excited moment of thinking that we'd found the ultimate cargo-handling solution until we realized nothing could actually become part of the workshop unless it was actually part of a workshop, but that still meant that something like half a ton of various sundries useful to an aspiring Operator all quietly vanished from the wreckage without any sign as to where it went. And while anything we 'put into' the shop became part of the shop and stopped being a separate item, so we couldn't just use it as an endless duplicator, this ability was still stupidly useful. Especially once I learned that I could selectively summon only the facilities I wanted, which meant no awkward questions about why an antique blacksmith's setup was in a machine shop.

Then we spent about half of our remaining cash reserve for a month's rental on a storefront shack near the market square of the shantytown of Harveston, and "moved in" my workshop, hung out my sign advertising 'John Stillwell, Operator and machinist', and watched the money roll in. Not huge money given that there were already other mechanics in town, but even in that first day my just cleaning and servicing weapons and fixing household appliances brought in enough that at this pace we'd more than make back that week's rent and expenses by the end of the week. A good Operator was pretty scarce and people paid accordingly. A couple more weeks of this and some good luck finding short-term contracts for Valerie and we'd have enough put by to afford a set of gear for myself so I could give back her loaner pistol. And also so I could actually have proper protective gear, because she only owned one suit of MDC armor and even if she'd wanted to go into a fight without wearing it it would never have fit me anyway.

"Hey, you okay?" Valerie broke into my thoughts as I stared glumly at the wall of my workshop.

"No," I said honestly, after a long pause. "Val… after your first battle, how did you do it?"

"I got really, really drunk." she said, already knowing what I meant. "Sorry, I didn't think-"

"Scavenging the wreckage was the logical move for setting this up and keeping us solvent." I reassured her, the forced clarity of my Mechanicus implants letting me get that out evenly. "It's just-"

"I fuckin' walked a newbie right through burnt rubble that still contained crispy critters and ashed skeletons." Valerie said. "Shit, I've been doing this long enough I don't even register that kinda crap anymore. You had to stop and remind me that creeps out normal people." She put her head in her hands. "Sorry."

"Not your fault," I said. "I mean-" I shook my head. "I walked out of the village and headed down the mercenary path before I even met you. I was gonna run into something like that eventually if I stayed out here at all. Because the world's that fucked up."

"Yeah, but-" she shook her head. "Dammit! They don't make words for this!"

"I'm thinking I should have relaxed my implants at the time so I could just puke it all out of my system then. Instead I jammed the emotional dampers all the way on so I could finish the job without completely losing it. And now-" I shook my head. "I don't even know how I should feel. I'm just pretty sure that I should feel. If that makes any sense."

"It does to me," Valerie said softly, and then got briskly to her feet. "Right. Close the shop, put away the tools, and turn the emotional dampers off. I gotta get you out of this spiral before you really depress yourself."

"How?"

"Like I said. We're gonna get really, really drunk."

"HEY YOU!" the voice blared like the thunder of an angry god. My head felt like I was being hammered on by a tribe of blacksmiths.

"Ow!" I said, painfully jerking awake as I lay there on a bare steel platform of some kind. Judging from the aches I was either really hungover, really bruised, or both. I barely squinted one eye open and looked around-

"Fuck." I swore. "Am I in jail?"

"You're in jail." the beefy-looking bruiser standing on the other side of the bars agreed. Not a CS soldier of any kind, just one of the enforcers that Harveston paid to keep order in the streets and toss excessively rowdy mercs into the tank to cool off a little. "Anybody ever tell you to pace yourself, kid?"

"First battle." I said, deciding that it made a plausible story given my age. "My partner said there was only one cure for that."

"That Juicer chick?" he said amusedly. "Yeah, well, she wasn't wrong."

"So, how much trouble am I in?" I asked the obvious question.

"Drunk and disorderly, assault with a barstool, and the big one, resisting arrest." he answered. "Not that you came anywhere near actually landing a hit on us but the rule is, when we show up to the bar fight then you stop swinging. The fine's five thousand creds."

"Fuck, that's almost everything we had." I cursed.

"It was." he agreed. "And we already took it out of your pockets when we picked you up. Now that you're sober enough to walk again, time to go."

"Guess so." I agreed, and stood up while he unlocked the door. "Where's Val?"

"Still sleeping it off. Which is weird because with a Juicer's metabolism she should burn alcohol off way faster than either of us could. What the hell was she drinking?" he asked.

"I don't even remember what I was drinking." I groaned as I asked my implants to start doing whatever they could to make this hangover leave faster. "You'd better take me to her. If a stranger tries to wake her up he'll probably get a fist in the eye."

"Why else do you think I rousted you out first?" the heavy snorted. "Do I look like I was born yesterday?"

We went down the row until we reached the women's section, and the turnkey unlocked the specially reinforced cell for us. The guy escorting me drew a neuro-stun baton from his belt and switched it on before waving me forward. "Right, you go in first. If she flips out then you get the fuck out before I shut the door behind you."

"Yeah," I said disgruntledly, and then went in. Val was facedown in a puddle of drool – thankfully, only drool – on the metal shelf these cells used for beds. Having already learned the proper way for waking up someone who had ingrained combat twitches, I stopped outside the full arc of extension for her foot and nudged the sole of her boot with my toe. "Val?"

"Uhhhh…" she gurgled.

"Val!" I said, nudging hard enough to shift her an inch down the bed. "Wakeup call! Reveille! Time to go!"

She twitched awake hard, but the sound of my voice kept her from instinctively lashing out. "Few more minutes…" she moaned.

"We got arrested. This is the jail. They're tossing us out." I said. "Time to go."

"Oh," she said disgustedly, slowly and painfully raising herself to a sitting position on the bed. "What'd I drink?"

"I don't even know what I drank." I answered her. "Can I look at your bio-comp?"

"Yeah," she said, raising both her arms to let me have access to her chest while I tapped a couple buttons on the plate right on her lower sternum. "Okay, according to this you're got a blood alcohol level of 'if it's still this high after this long you must have been halfway to embalmed last night', along with…" I stared again at the blood chemistry readouts. Not that she actually had a full analyzing station tucked away in there, but I had enough medical knowledge downloaded into my head to diagnose one of the few things that could leave that kind of signature. "Fuck me, Val, you dropped a tab of Crash last night?" I said, referring to one of the nastiest synthetic drugs you could find on the street. "Why the hell would you do that?"

"Crash? Oh man, I ain't done any of that in years." she moaned. "Feels like I got run over by a tank-"

"Come on, you two, settle it outside." the guard said. "We need to rent out the room to the next unlucky customer."

With a little work I was able to get her moving. This place was used to moving drunk mercs in and out as expeditiously as possible so it only took me the work of a minute to sign for our stuff, get a receipt for our fines, and head out the door. We didn't even have to appear in court later thanks to the informality of the jurisdiction – you got drunk and fucked up on R ? Whatever, just pay the man and go.

So after that all wrapped up I helped Valerie outside. She was still so messed up from what she'd done to herself last night that she needed to lean on me just to walk in a straight line. And then I resumed our conversation. "Okay, Val, I realize you're medicated to at least some degree pretty much all the time but that's exactly why Juicers shouldn't drop Crash." I said. "You had a pretty severe stress last week, remember? Did you want to hurt yourself?"

"Didn' wanna be them." she mumbled drunkenly. "I tried to make you be me. Like they made me be me. Shouldn' have been like them. You should be you-"

I sighed, and turned her around and drew her into a loose hug. "It's okay."

"Not okay." she mumbled into my shoulder. "You were innocen'. Now you're not-"

I hugged her more tightly. "It's okay. I forgive you."

"Ya do?" she sniffled.

"Of course I do. We're partners, remember?"

"Partners." she said, finally hugging me back. Oof!

"Come on home. You need to finish sleeping it off." I reassured her as I got us turned around and moving on. "We can talk when neither of us has a headache."

"Heh." she giggled drunkenly. "Thish is why you're the brains o' the outfit."

By that afternoon both of us were cleaned up and at least reasonably sober again and had gotten some actual food in our stomachs. We sat at the little folding card table that served as our 'dining room' in our rented shack.

"We lost that much money?" Valerie moaned.

"Yeah." I agreed. "Almost everything we were saving up."

"Fuck." she swore. "So, no gear for you, let alone saving up enough we can pay some magic expert to try and help figure out what's up with you. We'll be lucky to afford groceries."

"Yeah." I agreed. "Hey, not your fault. I'm the one who agreed alcohol was the solution."

"Don't remind me." she moaned into her hands. "I didn't say or do anything too embarrassing, did I?"

I winced inwardly as I realized that she'd been too blackout drunk to remember our conversation outside the jail. "Well, part of the reason you crashed so hard was, well, Crash. Or so your bio-comp readout told me."

"Fuck." she slammed her forehead into the table. "I haven't taken any of that shit since before I juiced up."

"Is there… something you want to say about that?" I asked diplomatically.

"No." she said flatly, before kicking the table leg lightly and slumping back with her arms crossed. "Just- I was young and stupid, now I'm slightly older and less stupid. But apparently I reverted to full-on stupid when stressed."

"So, we don't go drinking again for a while." I replied.

"We don't go drinking again for a while." she agreed. "And I'm gonna have to go out and dig up a short-term contract of some kind to make up our little financial shortfall here. Especially since it was my fault anyway."

"Something with looting opportunities." I agreed. "Because getting me some actual armor and weapons is a pretty urgent priority, and we just went way off schedule on that."

"What do you mean we, John?" Valerie replied. "You're barely qualified to defend yourself, let alone come hunting with me!"

"Where else can I be while you're doing it, here?" I waved my hands. "Without our shop security?"

"Dammit!" she swore, swinging out to kick the lathe instead of the much more breakable card table. "You can't-" she stopped, and only the things she'd admitted while too drunk to remember allowed me to see the real fear in her eyes.

"I've got to learn sometime, Valerie." I said as maturely as I possibly could. "You said it yourself our first day on the road. If anything gets past you, I've got to be able to handle it on my own."

She pursed her lips, too white-faced with old memories I couldn't even guess at to answer. Eventually she nodded once, slowly, minutely.

"But I won't have any objections to starting as slow as possible." I said more lightly, trying to lessen the mood.

"You'd better not." she finally answered, one corner of her mouth barely trying to smile.

Since we were going to be heading into combat deliberately this time, I'd prepared for what was coming as best I could. I'd somehow managed to build up a good charge again just from the whole getting drunk and emotional experience – my power simply did not make sense sometimes – so I mentally went into the field of stars again to see what helpful thing I could pull out this time.

I took one of the intermediate-sized stars again, as I was just short of having enough charge built up for one of the largest ones, but I came out with so much incredibly more than I'd expected to get that I'd barely been able to keep Valerie from freaking out again at the depth of my shock.

Genius. What I'd gotten this time was pure and simple genius, and at such a high level that I'd never dreamed such a thing could even exist. I'd thought I'd become substantially more intelligent more with my cranial implants – and I had - but now, somehow, my unaugmented brain was leaping ahead of the implants by entire orders of magnitude. What had once been a substantial boost to my mind was now a simple prosthesis for various interface and autonomic functions, because my mind had entirely outgrown its finite circuitry. Indeed, I could do supercomputer levels of computation and analysis with my bare neurons and in barely the blink of an eye. It was entirely possible that I'd just become the most brilliant person on Earth.

For just one example, it was the work of moments for me to comprehend the Mechanicus implants in my head right down to the most basic layers of its machine code, to deduce from all the information contained within it how it had been manufactured and how to reproduce them at will. I even managed to reason out the basics of M.O.M. augmentation from first principles and start internally recalibrating my cranial implants to provide me with a basic reflex-accelerator function, without risking any derangement. Still a crude and early effort, but once I found time to actually study M.O.M. technology I felt confident I could reproduce any of the boosts that a Crazy would have with my own neural augments and without the side effects. So already I was notably more combat-capable than I had been, and would only become more so in the future.

And speaking of my partner, my newfold genius now let me mentally calculate the answer to her earlier question of how much extra time I'd bought her with my hasty recalibrations. My efforts back in Cedar Springs I'd actually managed to delay the onset of Last Call by at least two years, if not quite three. I still didn't have a cure yet, but I now felt confident I could engineer one given time and opportunity to learn. For right now I recalibrated Valerie's bio-comp so that she'd continue to get the full effect of her combat boosts while remaining at least slightly less biochemically stressed, thus letting her last even longer and giving her better odds of surviving detox in the future if we went that route. Also, with her permission I loaded a new subroutine into her firmware that would immediately start a bloodstream purge and filter if she ended up ingesting Crash again.

To be honest, I was actually getting a little frightened out of how many things I was calling "simple" or "trivial" now. And the cranial implants still helped in that the heightened objectivity they provided let me avoid getting too carried away with my new intellectual powers. Intelligence was not necessarily wisdom, genius did not always imply knowledge, and brilliance was not the same as experience. So despite my mind leaping to several entirely different ideas for making a lot of credits fast and not in entirely unethical ways than simply taking a contract, I chose to follow Valerie's lead on this anyway. The point I'd raised with her before augmenting my brain was still valid; I needed more field experience if I was going to be able to survive in this world, if I had any ambition of ever doing anything except wasting the rest of my life in a Coalition enclave toeing the line. I certainly wasn't going to just stay here in the Burbs.

Valerie, however, had a different opinion. This latest brain upgrade had been so extraordinarily out of anyone's experience that in her opinion it wasn't safe for me to use my powers anymore until we got at least some kind of clue as to what was happening. Especially since my own heightened capacity for analysis had produced the theory that the most likely explanation for how my powers worked and why was that I was being granted these abilities by some external agency for its own purposes. If it was something innate, something that I'd been born with, it should have occurred at least very rarely among my ancestors – which it hadn't. If it was some new form of magic I'd stumbled upon, as several other varieties of magic had been, then it should have followed the pattern to such prior events and recurred in several places – which it hadn't. Obviously this was still only a theory, but as the likeliest theory it's what we had to go with for now.

And in this world you simply didn't take the revelation that a powerful supernatural being of some kind had chosen to forge a link with you, and empower you for its own purposes, and just laugh that off. According to my partner that's how things like vampires and witches got started. Or the crazier kind of shifters, the mages who specialized in dimensional magic and pacts and things like that. And I certainly didn't want to end up like them.

So, since we didn't have any money to pay someone to try and analyze my aura or something, we chose to kill two birds with one stone and go looking for a contract where we could get that kind of service in trade.

Which is how we ended up hijacking a Coalition prisoner transport.

"Couldn't we do something safer, like hunt vampires at night with glow sticks?" Valerie hissed. "So much for starting slow!"

"You're the one who decided that the opportunity was worth the risk!" I whispered back. "I rely on you to judge these things, remember?"

"I think I proved I don't always judge right with the drinking thing!" she shot back, white-faced with worry. I shrugged in response and finished setting up the improvised EMP mine by the side of the road.

Our client had offered us 50,000 credits through an underworld broker to rescue one Bakr-Edolin, a D-Bee mystic and seer who'd recently been picked up by the ISS – the Internal Security Service – as a suspect in the 'Planetary Edict' conspiracy allegedly being run by Lazlo and Tolkeen to sow panic and division among the CS populace. Bakr-Edolin had been arrested twelve hours ago by the local constabulary of Staunton Heights, one of the more loyalist 'Burb communities and chock-full of CS wannabes who hadn't yet given up on their dream of making into Chi-Town proper. His arrest had apparently escalated to the ISS as a possible agent of Tolkeen, but at the same time our mysterious patron had gotten word of it and wanted us to break him out before the ISS got him back into Chi-Town proper where he'd be absolutely unreachable.

Since whoever our client was had only been able to make arrangements to hire someone for a rescue after he'd been in the system a few hours, we didn't have enough time to set up an approach to the Staunton Heights police department – a considerably better-equipped and organized setup than the drunk tank we'd bailed ourselves out of back in Harveston – so our only real chance was to hit the ISS prisoner wagon as it headed back to Chi-Town. Fortunately they hadn't considered this case high-priority enough to use air transport. Outside of the relatively infrequent airstrike and the ever-present SAMAS patrols, the local defense command liked to keep the airspace as clear as possible.

Even the little preparation time we'd had available, plus the capabilities of my workshop and my miraculous new brain, let me come up with a few force multipliers. For one, I'd invented a directional EMP mine that I intended to use to disable the transport and the weapons of the ISS guards. While their fully-sealed environmental armor would be enough of a Faraday cage to stop the pulse from fragging their armor's circuitry, their guns were outside the insulation.

I'd also had an immediate insight as to how to get several times the performance out of Valerie's favorite rifle. The Northern Gun heavy plasma ejector was a reliable battlefield tool for use against hardened targets, but while thoroughly reliable its engineering was rather crude. The exact dimensions of the plasma chamber and the venting of the charge pulse had apparently been done on the 'close enough' principle and by rule of thumb instead of involving actual computer modeling, so a simple rearrangement of the fusing elements into a tri-phase configuration that would have over 2.5 times the thermal energy potential while self-spreading on impact in a way that lessened overpenetration dangers but still reliably burnt through the initial armor layer. The ion pistol she'd loaned me had not had such an obvious inefficiency so I was limited in my ability to improve its firepower without a full redesign but I still worked out a way of extending the life of the charge pack by at least 150%. I also found it trivially easy to adjust the balance and sights on both weapons so that they handled better and shot as accurately as match-grade target weapons instead of like soldier-proof bricks. So even though we were hoping not to kill anyone tonight, if things did go wrong then we still had options even vs. the best CS body armor.

"Here they come," she said as we crouched down low by the side of the road, having moved a ways down out of the range of our own mine. There were several possible land routes out of Staunton Heights, but unless they were especially paranoid they wouldn't be dog-legging enough to use anything except the nearest on-ramp to the Interstate highway leading into Chi-Town proper. So, we'd set up a couple hundred yards down from that ramp and camouflaged our position as best we could. "I see… one van, no chase cars. Plan A, then."

"You'd think a suspected espionage case being taken to the city for interrogation would have an escort." I said, feeling a niggling of suspicion. "I don't hear any jets, but could they have SAMAS up?"

"Not unless they're running totally passive on sensors," Valerie replied, flipping the safety cover off the command detonator for our mine and holding her thumb over the button. "Or else your scanner would be picking up their radar. And it's kinda dark out, you'd think they'd have more than just their nightvision goggles on if they really were doing sweepers."

"Well, we're about to find out the hard way." I said as the prisoner transport drew close.

"Okay. Entering the zone in 3… 2… 1… fire in the hole!" Valerie called out as she hit the detonator. The bright blue flare of the EMP mine detonated and the van immediately had its headlights go dark and its engine stop running. It drifted to a stop almost exactly right where I'd calculated it would, adjacent to where we were.

"And, jammer going… now!" I said, using a hotwired tactical radio jacked into my implants to rapidly scan available frequencies, lock into the one being used by the helmet radios of the CS team riding inside the van, crack their scrambler code, and then broadcast an ultrasonic tone through their headsets at a pitch and cyclic rate that would induce severe nausea in 97% of human subjects.

"Knock knock, boys!" Valerie called out cheerfully, as she slapped a burn strip across the lock on the rear of the prisoner van and let the MDC incendiary cut a hole through the latch as neatly as a laser torch could have. We each grabbed a door handle and pulled out, leaving the rear of the van open to the world while we safely scooted back around the sides.

"Fucking sonofa-" the first soldier cursed as he leapt unsteadily out, his bare head gleaming in the dim moonlight. Literally no one puked inside of a full face-covering helmet if they had any choice about it, so my ultrasound gambit had not only slowed up and disoriented the troopers but also forced them to pop the seals on their armor and leave their head exposed.

I was far, far less experienced than Valerie, but she needed her hands free for the next part so I was the one who got to roll the stun grenade under the van and between their feet. Fortunately I had my implants to give me the steady nerves of a veteran even as a novice, and its not like it was the most challenging task. The several ISS troopers had made it out of the van in very good time considering what they'd just gone through, but without their helmets on the flashbang left them all staggering and seeing spots. And when you had a Juicer in close-combat range with you, and armed with a neural-shock mace to boot, you didn't have time to stagger around blind.

Bop-bop-bop, she brushed the zappy stick across their heads almost in one continuous motion and the three troopers fell over like tenpins. As soon as I saw them taken care of I followed my part of the drill and moved to the driver side door and slammed on the window with my pistol butt to draw his attention. He looked at me, then looked at my gun muzzle, and then didn't look at anything because he could only look in one direction at once and his indecision as to whether to try popping the door and going for me or turn around and go for Valerie gave her enough time to leap into the van, run to the front, and get him in a choke hold.

"Thirty seconds!" she called, as I made sure all the downed ones were really down and then leapt into the van. Our rescue was sitting there, chained to the bench and with a bag over his head – a full magemask, keeping him from seeing or hearing anything or even talking. I got out the laser scalpel and started cutting through his bonds.

"That's him." Valerie said, comparing his face – a gray-skinned bald humanoid D-Bee of some kind with stub horns – to the picture we'd been given by the fixer who'd hired us. "Bakr-Edolin? We've been hired to rescue you. Can you walk?"

"I can," he said. "Bless you, children."

"Wait!" I called. "This is too easy-" I mused out loud. I rapidly calculated probabilities and came up with one far too likely set of conclusions. "Okay, strip!"

Before Bakr-Edolin could even react Valerie reached out and tore the orange prison jumpsuit right down the middle with her bare hands, leaving him sitting in his underwear - and bare feet, as they'd already taken his shoes. "You think they stuck a tracer on him?" she said, as she finished reaching down to shred his pant legs and yank those free too.

"In him, actually." I said, pointing at the field dressing wrapped around his upper arm. I hadn't expected that, to be honest – I'd thought it would be in his clothes – but you took good fortune as it came. "If they used enough local anesthetic he probably never even felt it. Good thing I've got my sort-of medical degree-" I reassured the man, as with several deft moments of the laser scalpel I cut the dressing off his arm, nodded at the neatly but freshly-stitched incision under it, popped the stitches, and extracted the metal capsule they'd inserted into the muscle fibers of his arm. Some surgical glue and a new dressing, and the healing touch of my hands, and he was as good as new. "Okay, now we go!"

Before another minute had passed we were back in the ATV and hauling ass. I reached back and passed Bakr-Edolin a raincoat to at least cover himself with, and while Valerie concentrated on the escape route we'd planned to circuit around several shantytowns and underneath a stretch of ruined overpass and the refugee camp that had sprung up under it to reduce the risk of aerial pursuit, I talked to our new acquaintance.

"Are you all right? Did they mistreat you?" I pressed him.

"No. Their worst sin was indifference." he replied calmly. "I thank you for the gift of my renewed life. I am forever in your debt."

"We're getting paid," Valerie said forthrightly. "But speaking of debts, my partner was hoping he could ask you a question?"

"You seek the wisdom of a Gray Seer, then?" he asked.

"You're a what?" Valerie said. "Okay, damn, jackpot!"

"Gray Seers are…?" I asked.

"You know of the Mystics?" Bakr-Edolin asked me. "The ones who simply know magic, but are never taught?"

"My uncle was one," I admitted. "The Coalition… took him away."

"My regrets for your loss," he said. "Gray Seers are a specialized form of Mystic. To us is given the gift and burden of prophecy, to know without knowing. But not on our terms, but the universe's We are humble mouths through which the cosmos occasionally chooses to speak."

"So, the Edict of Distress." I deduced. "You were one of the people who actually saw it?"

"One of hundreds," he agreed. "Lord Plato did not issue such a controversial document based merely on the testimony of a few. All of us had been seeing visions for quite some time- unclear to all, different on details for many, but with the same common themes in every one of them. So after we pooled our wisdom as best we could, most of us scattered to bring what warnings to others that we could."

"So this huge doom vision is real?" Valerie said worriedly. "Why the fuck is it always something?"

"Because your friend has been touched by something immeasurable," Bakr-Edolin said calmly.

After a moment of stunned silence Valerie pulled us underneath the remnants of a low bridge and hit the brakes, and we both turned to stare back at him. "Okay, fucking unpack." she spat.

"I did not see it until I met you, but now that my eyes have beheld you so has my Inner Eye." the Gray Seer replied. "Fate wraps around you, young crafter, and holds you close."

"But why?" I said. "Why me?"

"Do I have your permission to attempt a scrying?" he asked.

"Fuck yes!" we both swore.

"Then give me your hands." he said, still in that calm, otherworldly voice, and I did.

And then suddenly we were both standing in the field of stars, myself and the seer both.

"Young one, you have come here several times, and always tried to behold that which lay before you." Bakr-Edolin said. "I have come here but once, in your company, and doubt that I ever will again."

"Do you know where we are?" I asked him.

"An astral realm of some sort, that is all I can speak of with certainty." he said. "But I also know that if I want to see all that lays around me, I should look all around me."

And having been given the clue, I finally thought to look away from the thirty-eight constellations that whirled and danced to try and see if anything else was around here. And when I did, even my newly expanded mind could barely hold it all.

"What… what is that?" I said, looking at the incomprehensible silver glory that ran across the dark 'sky' here in a broad strip, much like a galaxy lay across the starry night sky.

"I don't know." Bakr-Edolin said. "It doesn't speak to me. It speaks to you."

"But I don't hear anything." I said. "I see the constellations, I touch the stars, but I never know what they are. And the knowledge I gain never tells me what or why, just how."

"The child may not know that the sounds the giants make are speech, but the adults are still speaking to the child." Bakr-Edolin said. "Such I imagine is also true in your case."

"Why me?" I burst out, like the petulant teenager I still was. "The past couple of weeks I've had more weird shit come down on me than I ever imagined, and you tell me it's only starting?"

"I am afraid so," he agreed with me compassionately. "You appear to be a fulcrum by which something far greater than you hopes to shift the course of Fate. And if you are the fulcrum, then you will always be under the lever. This is why so many odd things are happening around you so swiftly, and I imagine the pattern will continue for some time."

"Well I really wish somebody would tell me what they're trying to use me for, then!" I burst out.

"To save a great many who would otherwise never be saved." an otherworldly voice rang out via Bakr-Edolin's mouth. "Two questions remain."

"Why me?" I asked after a moment of thought.

"Because there is hope that you might bear the burden where so few others could. Choosing you does not guarantee success, but choosing another would have guaranteed failure."

One question left. What would I ask? What to do next? What my powers were? How best to use them?

No. One question was even more important than that.

"Who are you?!?" I shouted out, my cry echoing across the stars.

"Many are the names we have been called by many tongues. But the eldest of our names is also the truest. We are the Forge."

And then we were back in Valerie's truck,

"Whoa!" I heard her say. "You guys okay?"

"We will be fine," Bakr-Edolin said faintly. "A vision of that magnitude is… strenuous."

"You can tell me later, right?" she asked me worriedly.

"I can, and I will," I said, still trying to process it myself.

"Okay then, because we're almost late for the drop-off. Time to go." she finished, and hit the gas.

Author's Note: Before anybody complains about the shocking swerve in Valerie's character, it ain't no shocking swerve at all and was planned from the jump. Nobody signs up for Juicer conversion because they had a happy life beforehand, given the whole 'walking dead man' part. So... stuff comes out sometimes.

The Gray Seers are totally a thing in Rifts, and they exist to serve precisely the role they did in this fic - letting the plot give the characters their next clue, but only on the plot's schedule. So, I just continue the proud tradition. Although yeah, I actually do know what I'm setting up later.

And yes, on my fourth and fifth power rolls I land right on the category that gives me the access to a magical workshop I can summon and desummon anywhere with full fiat-backed upgrading and the category to Reed Richards level intelligence - because the last perk he scored was the Genius perk from Fantastic Four jump.

To say that my fic ain't going according to the plan I had two chapters ago is an understatement. But I'll still see how much of that I can still keep, because our two young guns do still have to worry about drawing excess attention - especially considering they're in the heart of CS territory right now.

Perks This Chapter: Swordsmith's Hut (Fate Legends/Land of the Rising Sun), Genius (Fantastic Four)

Last edited: May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

May 12, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 13, 2021

#150

Chapter 4

"Here we are," Valerie said as we pulled around and parked in back of the small, two-story building. The brightly lit sign out front said Black Max's Tavern, and judging by the volume of sound spilling out of the front doors and the number of vehicles parked out front they were doing a brisk business.

The trip here had taken about twice as long as it would normally have because we'd done several dog-legs and switchbacks to make sure as best we could that we weren't dragging any tails. But if anyone was following us then they'd have to have been doing it from the air, and given the lateness of the hour and the several communities and elevated highways we'd driven around and under than any aerial tail would have had to have been flying low enough we'd have heard the jets. Either that or they've had to be using radar, but that would have shown up on the frequency scanner I'd installed.

So, as confident as we could be that we'd thrown the Coalition off, we arrived at the place we'd been told to meet the client and drop off the package. Bakr-Edolin walked between us, still wearing only his skivvies and the raincoat and sandals we'd given him to cover himself, as we approached the back door and Valerie thumped her fist on it.

"Tell the boss-lady her delivery's here!" she called out, and the slot in the armored door opened enough to show a suspicious pair of eyes. After being looked over, the viewing slot slammed shut and the bouncer opened the door to wave us inside.

"Up the stairs, at the end of the hall." he said, and then trailed after us as we went up as directed. Soon enough we were in the proprietor's office.

"I didn't order a strip-tease," the hard-faced Hispanic woman said. "Go fetch a bathrobe for him or something." she told her guard, and he trudged off.

"They had a tracker planted on him," I explained. "So, we ditched everything but his shorts."

"Valid," Max replied. "I sure don't want the skullheads following this shit home any more than you do."

Bakr-Edolin shrugged into the bathrobe that the guard brought in and sat down in one of the chairs across from Max as I reclaimed the borrowed raincoat. "These young ones said that you paid a considerable sum for my rescue. May I ask what makes me worth so much to you?"

Valerie took a discreet step sideways at that question, and after taking a moment to catch on I stepped the other way. The farther apart we were standing, the more the guard had to split his attention…

"Pffft," Max snorted. "I ain't no slaver, if that's what you're asking. No, I'm just brokering for someone who's worried enough about this whole 'Planetary Distress' thing that he'll throw good money after bad to consult with a real Gray Seer about it. You actually are one of those, right?"

"I am," the sage nodded gravely. "But this curious party, they are not here?"

"Whole point of being a fixer is the front end of the deal doesn't plug directly to the back end," Max said matter-of-factly. "I'm supposed to take your statement and then get it to the client. None of you will actually meet him."

"Wait, you said your client 'threw good money after bad'?" I probed. "You'd originally been hired just to find a real seer and arrange an introduction, hadn't you? Only after you called back and said that the one you'd found had just been arrested, he came back with a bigger offer to hire some muscle to bust him out?"

"Well aren't we just the boy detective," Max snorted amusedly. "Yeah, stroke of luck for us all-around. My contacts ran gray-boy here down but then the ISS pulls him right off the street, so that's all I can report back. I was expecting to have to argue like hell just to get anything for my time, but instead they come back with like five times the original deal to do a jailbreak. So, I get paid, you get paid, he doesn't get dead, everybody wins!"

"Except the skullheads," Valerie said amusedly. "You'll be all right?" she turned to Bakr-Edolin. "You've got somewhere to go after this?"

"My part of the job is to debrief him on everything about this 'Edict' he didn't publicly say, then get the recording to the client and let him walk." Max assured us. "He'll be fine."

"This is where we part ways," Bakr-Edolin said to us. "I thank you both again for what you've done, and will pray that you reach the end of your journey successfully." he said, making eye contact with me at that last.

"You too," I agreed. "Val, can we spare him some travel cash?"

"'Course we can." she agreed, and turned to Max. "He gets ten thousand out of our split."

Max shrugged. "You're soft in the head, but it's your money," she said apathetically, and pulled a wad of banknotes out of her desk drawer. Twenty thousand each for me and Val and ten for Bakr-Edolin, and we were done.

"Paid in full," Valerie agreed as we each pocketed our fee. "Pleasure doin' business."

"Bon voyage, you two," Max replied. "Okay, take 'em downstairs for drinks on me while I talk to the man," she continued to her bouncer, and he led us away as she got on with business.

We spent the next day converting a lot of the cash we'd just made into a set of proper gear for me. Not that I intended to load myself down as heavily as a veteran headhunter would, but at minimum I'd need a suit of MDC armor and some decent weapons. However, even with everything we'd made off the rescue job and our shop earnings we still had to buy slightly-used-at-a-discount just to afford the armor.

We'd still be flush if we'd just bought me a suit, but I'd convinced Valerie to upgrade her old familiar flex-vest into a proper suit of full-coverage armor so that neither of us would be going out there with exposed limbs or heads, and mollified her grousing about 'not being able to move freely' with a promise that I'd make sure to disassemble it and rebuild it into something with improved flexibility at the first opportunity. So, that took at least another day as well as another shopping excursion for a couple of the specialized machine tools necessary to reshaping and re-tempering MDC composites, but given my magical workshop any upgrades of that nature were a long-term investment we could never really lose out on.

"Okay, this works." Valerie said as she kicked out of a one-handed handstand to roll-and-flip to her feet. "Barely feels like I'm wearing anything. Definitely a change from the last time I wore full Juicer armor."

"Well, it's not the weight that slowed you down." I said. "That's only 18 pounds, which with your muscles is about as heavy as a raincoat. The problem was the distribution, as well as whatever idiot didn't know exactly how human shoulders actually bent. So, I broke apart and then reforged the joints and counterweighted the back a little, and voila."

"Damn straight," Valerie said. "The second rule of a gunfight is if you're taking hits then you already fucked up somewhere. This is why I want to be able to move in this stuff! The only valid reason to wear armor at all is because to err is human and to be wrapped in MDC composite is to not be a dead human at the first misstep. Now quick, what's the first rule of gunfights?"

"Don't forget your gun," I threw back.

"And speaking of that, you got any thoughts yet on what your primary weapon's gonna be?" she asked.

"Probably the Wilks 457 laser rifle. The three-shot pulse on that model is very nice; does almost as much aggregate damage as a rail gun, but at one-tenth the weight. And that's before I see what I can tweak it with."

"Yeah, and that rifle costs more than that new Huntsman suit you're wearing did." she said. "Sure you can't just soup up an older model like you did with my old NG plasma spitter?"

"It was easy for me there because the NG-E4 had a pretty obvious design inefficiency I could just patch," I pointed out. "The only reason Northern Gun hasn't caught it themselves is because it's not really that popular a model, so there hasn't been enough customer feedback for them to bother making a project out of doing so. It's too heavy for most unaugmented people to use easily, but anybody with the muscle to swing it around as easily as a hunting rifle usually goes and gets something bigger if they're using heavy weapons at all. You just have particular tastes."

"But most of the laser rifles in our price range don't have that kinda thing?" she said sagely.

"Lasers are the most common MDC option for all us squishies out here," I said. "So yes, any model in long service has been through enough iterations that they've tuned it pretty much as well as they can. I could still squeak something out, but why spend the man-hours when I can just keep using your loaner and staying in a support role until we can afford more top-line gear?"

"You're the techie," she shrugged. "And speaking of, nothing new from this 'Forge' thing yet?"

"I didn't want to distract myself before I finished up our re-gearing project." I admitted. "So I only got a new thing just now after I'd finished up the work. Downloaded it while you were busy working out in your new armor, actually."

"So, what was it?" she asked curiously.

"Chemistry, mostly." I answered. "The workshop grew some new kind of chem lab, and I got a lot of basic chemical knowledge and some recipes and formulas for things I've never heard of."

"And?" she asked. "Recipes for what? Explosives? Nerve gas? Shampoo? Details, John!"

"Pharmaceuticals, mostly." I said. "There was a whole range of stuff that looked like the Juicer package, but only in the vaguest possible sense. Looked at least as addictive as what you're already familiar with. But there was also a whole range of medicinal stuff, some of it a lot like things already in common use and some just plain weird. One of them claims to even be able to treat radiation sickness!"

"Seriously?" she said, gaping. "Just stick in a needle and bam, irradiated cells are suddenly healthy again? Okay, that has got to be some kind of techno-wizard shit because even I know physics doesn't work that way!"

"And yet it does," I shrugged. "I could explain exactly how and why – well, if you had that kind of medical education, which you don't – and write it down, and any other doc could brew it and use it. Suffice it to say, not magical at all."

"Sheesh," she huffed. "Anything else?" she probed.

"Is my face that easy to read?" I counter-punched.

"Little bit," she said, while waving her hand side-to-side. "What's got you worried?"

"Addictol," I said. "It's the last chemical I know how to make. And…" I chewed my lip. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"Maybe," she said, going defensive.

"The other day, when we ended up in the drunk tank. You said a few things while you were drunk that you probably don't remember-"

"Hey!" she cried, punching me hard enough on the arm I actually felt it a little through my armor. "I fuckin' asked you to tell me if I'd said anything embarrassing, remember? And you said I didn't! And partners don't lie to each other!"

"It wasn't embarrassing!" I shot back angrily. "And I didn't want to embarrass you by tossing it back in your face just for my curiosity!"

"But it's on-topic now all of a sudden? Why?!?" she shouted.

"Because Addictol could be used to guarantee a successful Juicer detox!" I shouted back. "Even outside the normal time range of safety, which you are! So now I have to actually ask you about what I'm pretty sure is a really sensitive topic for you!"

"I-" she stopped and took a deep breath. "Really, really don't want to talk about that part of my life right now, okay?" she finished challengingly.

"The only question I wanted to ask was… did someone make you undergo the Juicer process, Val? Did you get a choice?" I pressed.

"Oh," she said relievedly, as if she'd been terrified I'd ask her something else. "I…" she gritted her teeth and continued on, her voice tonelessly level. "I did." she said. "I did it all to myself. I was-" she waved her hand angrily, as if slapping an invisible younger herself in the face for terminal stupidity. "Fuck!" she finished inarticulately.

"Hey, I'm the guy who's been regularly taking your bio-comp readings for weeks," I said. "I know you don't juice just for the high. You keep it tuned as low as you can and still be fully combat-effective. So yeah, you get a little tweaked from time to time – it's impossible for a Juicer not to – but it's about staying ready to fight for you, not staying high."

"I was flying pretty high the day we first met, but that's because I already knew I was on my way out so I had it turned up as much as I could to kill the pain." she admitted with relief. "After you rebooted me, yeah, I got back on a more responsible dosage." she admitted.

"But you already admitted you dosed occasionally before you Juiced," I said. "Which means…" I shrugged that away. "I could detox you right now. It would only take a couple days and with at least 99% guaranteed success. Addictol basically handwaves away physical withdrawal symptoms, even long-term ones, on a level that's somewhere between magic and bullshit. But while I know you want a normal lifespan – who doesn't? I'm not sure you want that lifespan as-"

"-A squishy." she shook her head. "And no, I don't. I've seen what happens to Juicers who actually manage to drop it before they clock out. Even the best-case scenarios, the ones who don't still die in like fifteen or twenty years from liver failure or some shit? They're still miserable. One old-timer I talked to described it like trying to live with cancer or some shit. You always feel tired, you always feel as slow and weak as a baby, even if you're what pre-juice you would still have called in good shape." she sighed. "So yeah. You clean me out now and suddenly you're the chief muscle of this crew, even as green as you are. Because even if I still have all my experience it'd take me forever to even begin to re-learn how to use it in my new body – my old body – you know what I mean! And even at my best, I'd still suck!"

"All right," I said. "It's your body. I offered, you said no, so there it stays."

"Thanks," she breathed heavily. "I mean, if it's stupid but it's necessary then it ain't really stupid, right?"

I wasn't entirely sure I agreed with that but I certainly wasn't going to call her out on it right now, so I just kept on with the practical concerns. "Of course, this still leaves us with some decisions to make. For one, there's a lot of Juicers out there who do want to detox but aren't trying to because they're either past the safe period or otherwise afraid of the odds. This could help them. And then there's the part where if I can't find a better cure for you-"

"-then I'll need a dose of that stuff eventually, which might be hard to arrange if you've stopped a bullet somewhere along the way." Valerie said. "So, you want to get this 'Addictol' formula out in circulation so eventually me or any other Juicer can just go pick it up at any doc's, yeah?"

"Without painting a giant golden bullseye on my ass." I agreed. "So, how do we release a big new medical miracle without drawing any attention to the guy who invented it?"

"And sometimes you are the world's dumbest smart person," Valerie said with most of her old insouciance back. "Because that one's easy. We just let 'em think that we stole it from its real inventor."

Our first impulse, to fence our 'loot' to the Black Market and let them take it from there, ran into the practical objection that the Chicago Network would have every reason to suppress a technology that would make it far easier for drug addicts to kick their habits. So instead we decided to bring our carefully made-up package of a dozen Addictol capsules and a datatape explaining its mechanism and manufacture supposedly written by a research scientist in Kingsdale trying to share this discovery with a healer colleague up in the northern kingdom of magic, whose 'courier' had been 'found dead' by us as another tragic victim of the random violence so endemic to the Burbs, to one of the largest, fanciest clinics in Prosekville.

Prosekville was what they called an 'Old Town' Burb, a community that had managed to last at least several decades without suffering any purges or major upheavals. As the name implied it was also a Burb founded by and maintained by Coalition ultra-loyalists, people who figured that toeing the Coalition line with 200% dedication would one day get them their dream of being accepted as full citizens in the capitol. The CS even encouraged this kind of dream by carefully picking a few candidates every year from the Old Town Burbs to actually get their dream tickets to a new life. And even those who were left behind were still dedicated and prosperous enough to have built up a standard of living that was almost indistinguishable from an actual Coalition city, if a small and outdoors one. The buildings were relatively new and all of modern construction and up to code, all the streets were paved, they had full utilities everywhere and all the amenities. Not even Cedar Rapids had looked remotely like this except in the very richest neighborhoods, let alone the old hometown.

And while we normally wouldn't have been caught dead in this dump, it was exactly the place to go if we were trying to sell something that we wanted to end up in Coalition hands as soon as possible. Because the doctors in Prosekville's hospital were only one degree of separation away from officially certified CS medical personnel, with at least some of them having gotten their training in a real medical school at a real university.

So what we pigeon dropped here would end up in Chi-Town soon enough, and as a technology with no value as a military secret but which would be socially useful to put in as wide as circulation a possible – after all, the less addicts cluttering up the streets, the more the forces of law and order could put a crimp in the Black Market's revenue stream – then Addictol should be a commonly prescribed drug in every official clinic in the Coalition States by the end of the year. Which means that every body fixer and outlands drug manufacturer on the continent would start having it in very little time after that, and in a manner that not even the full force of all five of the Black Market syndicates could hope to oppose. By next summer, Valerie should be able to walk into any general clinic anywhere for an Addictol regimen at any time she chose, and so would any other Juicer who'd ended up stuck in a lifestyle they couldn't see any way out of alive.

It might not have been the most dramatic start towards my helping save all the people this mysterious 'Forge' apparently wanted me to save, but it was still a good one.

And a good thing too, because if we'd been it for the money then we would not have left remotely satisfied. Damn cheapskates would barely give us five thousand for the lot.

"The word on the street is that the district alert eases off sometime tonight," I said, as we sat around our 'kitchen table' finishing up dinner the next day. "So I was thinking-"

"Not tonight," Valerie said, cutting me off with her mouth full. "Everybody else waitin' for the starting gun is gonna jump down the highway as soon as the traffic checkpoints ease off. Tomorrow around lunchtime, maybe."

"One step ahead of me," I agreed. "Yeah, I'm feeling like it's time we slid out of town."

"Agreed," she said, finally swallowing. "Back of my neck's been itching. And we came through here mostly to find some magic expert to consult to ask about what's going on with you, and we already took care of that. So, definitely time to bingo out of here."

"Yeah, we found out that some mysterious extradimensional being has a use for me, and is empowering me to make sure that use happens." I said. "Didn't you say that kind of thing was bad?"

"Normally," Valerie nodded matter-of-factly. "Every other time I heard about some extradimensional pact like that it meant things like witches, diabolists, crazy summoner assholes… you know, demon stuff. But there's no way that's what's going on with you, or else Bakr would have reacted like you were covered in poisonous spiders. Aura-seers like him can spot that kinda taint a block away."

"Maybe whatever's linked to me is also masking me?" I thought out loud.

"Can't be," she said. "He went with you to see your patron, remember? In that astral realm place? If you'd been talking to the dark gods there, then he'd have come out with his head on backwards or not at all. Nope, looks like you've got a whole Powers of Light thing going on with you." She exhaled and continued more reflectively. "I actually met a priest of one of them once, guy called 'Brother Lance'. Dude would not stop talking about his whole pantheon and everything. Still, he could actually hold off demons with the power of faith and heal with glowy hands, and it wasn't any kind of healing magic our wizard ever knew about, so empirical evidence suggests that gods are real!" she concluded with a flourish of her hot dog.

"Well, that's something." I agreed, feeling a little reassured by her obvious sincerity. Because Valerie was not what you'd call the most intangible believer type of person, and yet she'd still accepted what she was saying as a matter of fact. "But that only underlines all the more that whatever this Forge god wants me to be doing, it's probably not to sit around the Burbs and run a repair shop."

"Nope," she agreed. "So, yeah, we slide on out of here. You get any visions or hints or anything as to where?"

"Not a one." I said. "But logic suggests that if we were meant to meet Bakr, then it was not a coincidence that the same oracle this Power used to pass on its message was also one of the ones involved in the Edict of Planetary Distress. That plus the statement that I'm intended to help avert some great calamity means that those four calamities in the Edict are probably what I'm supposed to help with."

"So you're chasing the Devouring Horde, then?" she said. "That's not only something that sounds like a high risk factor for horribly dying, but we don't have any more location for it than 'somewhere on the East Coast'. Which is a couple thousand miles of nothing but vague."

"We don't have any location at all for any of the others," I pointed out reasonably. "So, until and unless another clue shakes out then all we can do is go east. But we can still kill several birds here with one stone, because the main route to the East from here leads through…?"

"The Federation of Magic," Valerie nodded. "Dweomer, Stormspire, even Dunscon's City of Brass, although only a fuckin' devil-worshipping lunatic would go there. All of 'em kingdoms of magic and full of every kind of spellcaster, loremaster, sage, and everything. We can try to learn more about what's up with you, pick up on what news is travelling from the East, maybe join up with a company heading out that way if anybody else is trying to respond to the Edict-"

"Somebody has to be." I agreed. "Or else this planet's fucked anyway."

"So, Kentucky it is then." she agreed. "And that's not a place I've been. Furthest east I've gone is Merctown, but that's almost straight south of here and way closer to Missouri than Indiana. Unless we wanted to cut well south out of our way to head there – and I can't think of reason why - then we'd be going south of the lake through middle Indiana to Dweomer first, then see what we can pick up from there."

"We might want to hit Merctown first for more gear, because from how they describe the Federation the only tech you can buy there is either older models or Techno-Wizard stuff." I mused.

"You're still pulling a charge from the Forge every couple of days, right?" she said. "If you get one that suggests Merctown, then we turn and peel south. Otherwise, Dweomer."

"Even if you haven't been down that way you'll still be the one doing the driving," I replied reasonably.

"Actually, if we're going through no-man's-land then I want to be on the turret," she pointed out reasonably. "So, you know how to drive?"

"… I'll learn." I sighed, already anticipating yet another 'fun' series of lessons out on the road.

"Oh that you will, my young apprentice." Valerie cackled hammily. "That. You. Will!"

A day out of Chi-Town I hit the Forge again, and walked away with my already prodigious knowledge of chemistry expanded by a truly awe-inspiring mastery of alchemy. This was the first true magic that my ever-expanding source of knowledge that given me, and while it would have been amazing by itself the fact that I was already a master chemist made me an even better alchemist – at least for practical applications.

Things like 'polyjuice potions', 'shrinking solutions', and even a Philosopher's Stone whispered at the back of my mind, even if some of the ingredients required for them were nothing I'd ever heard of in this world. But even without them my fingers itched to distill, to precipitate, to brew, any number of substances from the mundane to the mystical, and I knew that I could do so with incredible ease.

Also, oddly, I'd somehow become a master chef in the process. Valerie's reaction was to immediately stick me with the job of camp cook for eternity, but given what I could now do even just with wild game and random herbs it still infinitely beat out ration bars.

The southern border of the Coalition State of Chi-Town was of course patrolled, to interdict and destroy any wandering monsters or Federation of Magic scouts that might try to make the journey up from Kentucky and Indiana to northern Illinois. But the southern half of the state was very lightly settled if at all, and there'd been no attempt at a major attack from the Federation since the war of '77 in my parents' generation, so it wasn't as relatively thick a defensive line as the Tolkeen border had become. Instead they dotted the border with heavily-reinforced yet scattered outposts, then did air patrols from them on a regular basis to spot the more obvious signs of incursion and drop fast-reaction squads on them from the VTOLs as needed.

And then there were the freelancers like us, always going in and out. Even though trade with the Federation was illegal, Merctown was not yet on the proscribed list so there were actually legitimate vehicles regularly taking the route down through southern Illinois that couldn't just be blasted from the air. In addition, Valerie had her official CS bounty hunter license and a transponder code that the ATV could broadcast to complement it, and irregular assets like her often made a fair living collecting monster bounties in border zones. So unlike the Tolkeen border, which had been declared a strict no-travel zone for anything but CS regular forces since earlier this summer, getting to the Federation of Magic was as simple as driving there.

Every couple of days there'd be an outpost or a village we could lay over at, ranging from straight-laced farming centers like Waverly had been to roadside trading posts that were barely one step above the Burbs. We'd refuel at places like that, get some fresh food, maybe spend a night in an actual bed, then swap gossip about road conditions with travelers coming the other way and move on.

Valerie got to give the turret a brief workout when a pack of some big purple lizard-things with lots of teeth – some alien dimension's ecological equivalent of a large hunting cat that had fallen out of a Rift – made a run straight at the ATV – and given that they could run at over 60 miles per hour, they'd kept up with it too - because they were apparently too unfamiliar with man or his works to know the danger. While they'd easily have shredded any group of unarmed people caught out alone, the laser MG and Valerie's sharpshooting reflexes blew them into mist with me barely needing to take my foot off the gas at all. As dangerous as they would have been to ordinary folks they weren't even MDC creatures as all, as many magic-warped critters became. So people equipped like we were didn't even sweat them... but it was still a sharp reminder of how unfriendly the world of the Rifts was outside a safe and defended enclave, though. Because even so much as two months ago back in Waverly, even if I'd my dad's laser rifle with me while out hiking, I'd have been lucky to get one or two of that pack before they'd have shredded me.

But, outside of little things like that we had an uneventful trip. Of course, we'd barely made the Indiana border by that point, and were only beginning to draw near to the real heart of the Magic Zone. I had yet to see any kind of big monster or actual demon, or even any human or humanoid raiders or bandits.

But I already knew that I inevitably would, and probably sooner than later. If this Forge had chosen me for some kind of holy champion, then that sort of thing never promised an easy life.

Interlude: Chi-Town

It was the most luxurious office he'd ever seen in his life, Lieutenant Emmerson mused to himself. Then again, that thought always crossed his mind whenever he reported in person to this particular superior officer. While Emmerson certainly had no complaints about his own lifestyle as a hand-picked special agent of the CS Intelligence Division, the perks and privileges he enjoyed weren't a fraction of what the man sitting behind the desk enjoyed. Of course, that only made sense given his particular position. And his particular parents.

"The young man still has no identification beyond what he gave to the traffic checkpoint eleven days ago as him and Dumont first approached the Burbs from the Waukegan road." Emmerson said concisely. "He identified himself as 'John Stilwell', a freelance Operator. Valerie Dumont is already in our records as a licensed bounty hunter of slightly over two years' standing."

"I reviewed her file," the young man, incongruously too young to be wearing the insignia of a full Colonel as he did, answered the operative standing at attention before his desk. "According to our records that license was originally applied for when she was a member of the 'Demonbusters' mercenary company, as their… less exotic… operatives routinely do whenever deploying for an assignment in a CS-patrolled border zone. Her record of bounties claimed was consistent with that until almost eleven months ago, when she apparently left them to take up independent freelance work inside the Coalition proper."

"Yes sir," Emmerson confirmed. "To be honest, her logged activity patterns – as partial as they are – are not what I'd call promising."

"Of course not," his superior replied tolerantly. "Virtually no D-Bees or practitioners of magic turned in unless they already had outstanding warrants for violent crimes in addition to their proscribed status? Monster bounties as opposed to bounties of the person collected in an almost two-to-one ratio? A prior career with Demonbusters, of all people?" the man elegantly snorted. "You might as well stamp 'I only obtained this license for the weapons permits and have no real loyalty to Coalition ethics at all' on the cover sheet and be done with it. It's an old, familiar pattern. We just tolerate it because dead anathema are still dead regardless of who kills them, and even a politically unreliable freelancer is still reluctant to openly bite the hand that pays them."

"My point, sir, was to highlight that we can't rely on any loyalty from Dumont to actually report anything we might be interested in. For that matter, I don't know why her and Stilwell are persons of interest."

"Lieutenant, I remind you yet again that you are allowed to ask me things if they are necessary for you to do your job better. I've never sanctioned a man where a simple 'No' would suffice." the colonel replied tolerantly. "So in answer to your question, the answer is… I'm having a hunch."

"A hunch, sir?" the Lieutenant asked stolidly.

"The operation with the D-Bee seer was productive on its own, of course. We have him arrested by the ISS, the prisoner shipment is made as easy to hijack as we can plausibly sandbag without being blatantly obvious, then we arrange for one of the Burb's criminal underworld to have him rescued. End result; a creature who would never have told us the truth even under torture cheerfully spills everything we're interested in hearing to his rescuers, who then takes the tape of that debriefing straight to you just as you'd paid her to do. So now we know that if this whole 'Edict of Planetary Distress' thing is a plot, then it's a plot that even the Council at Lazlo is being duped by alongside us. And that it's entirely likely not to be a plot at all. Which is certainly knowledge of strategic value."

"I understand that, sir." the Lieutenant replied. "What I don't understand is why the two gutter trash that I indirectly hired to actually do the hands-on part are now persons of interest in and of themselves. Or, for that matter, why we let 'Max' and the creature go their way unscathed."

The colonel sighed. "Because the creature was a precognitive, Lieutenant. The only way to reliably prevent a psychic sensitive like that from sensing future danger is to not actually present a future danger. From the moment they were rescued from the prison van, it was essential that their path from there involve actually surviving to escape Coalition territory unscathed. Nothing less would reliably give us the opportunity to hear what this 'Bakr-Edolin' subhuman would reveal only after he'd escaped us. Genuinely escaped us. You understand?"

"I see, sir." Emmerson replied, reminding himself yet again that if he was an intelligent and dedicated operative then the man before him was at least twice as intelligent and subtle as he was. "But-"

"But you want to know why I developed a sudden interest in the street trash, yes." the colonel said amusedly. "Tell me- did anything about the rescue operation itself strike you as unusual?"

"They didn't kill any of the ISS team." Emmerson said immediately. "And while normally trying to pull punches at two-to-one odds versus trained men twice as armored and heavily armed as you are would only be a fast route to suicide, their bag of tricks turned it into a walkover instead."

"Exactly." the handsome young man replied. "A mine that selectively disabled technology without physical damage, then a method of cracking a secured multi-frequency scrambled tactical network in barely a moment. We thought the mine had to be Techno-Wizard work until the forensics team confirmed it was non-magical, and it had self-destructed so thoroughly we still don't have the slightest idea how it worked. Which means that young Mr. Stilwell is, at minimum, a very talented technician. Not to mention how cleverly they spotted the listening device we'd implanted in the subhuman in the first place; we were quite fortunate that the fixer you'd hired actually did everything you paid them to do or else we wouldn't have had any audio tape to review at all. And so that alone drew my eye enough for me to put a low-level flag in the system for Miss Dumont's ID, so that the next time they popped up somewhere I could send someone to make him a little recruitment offer. But they weren't more than just 'maybe a little interesting' until after the next time they popped up somewhere, with the 'Addictol' formula."

"He might be a talented hacker and engineer, but extending that to being a pharmaceutical genius as well would be a bit much, sir." Emmerson replied. "Not unless he was the next Dr. Desmond Bradford or something."

"The possibility of a next Dr. Bradford is precisely why such an individual would be worth any level of recruitment efforts." the colonel reasonably pointed out. "But the thing that particularly made Mr. Stilwell's case of great interest to me was a piece of knowledge neither you nor any of the other analysts could be reasonably expected to have."

"Sir?" Emmerson prompted him.

"There was no such 'Addictol' research being conducted at Kingsdale." the colonel replied flatly.

"You're certain of that, sir?" Emmerson replied quickly.

"Almost entirely," the man said. "Our good Colonel Lyboc has had his own off-the-books project regarding Juicer augmentation going for almost a year now. He doesn't know that I know about it, but I knew about it. One of the tame scientists on his little black operation is actually mine. And since one of the logical places to recruit for high-level researchers into Juicer technology is the augmentation center at Kingsdale, seeing as how they're perhaps the leading authority into such on the continent-?"

"If it had been an actual research project there, then one of Lyboc's hired outland scientists would at least have heard of it. Or at least a rumor of it. But they hadn't?" Emmerson analyzed.

"Precisely." his CO replied. "My agent in place had a quite frankly amusing report of how utterly flabbergasted Lyboc was when news of the discovery was brought to the University Hospital at Chi-Town. The fact that someone had single-handedly come up with a nigh-infallible method of Juicer detox even in the late-stages of the syndrome would have been an invaluable recruiting tool to his attempts to set up his own private 'Juicer Battalion' within our military… but only so long as he alone possessed it. And there he was, having entirely missed his chance to get a monopoly of it. So no, one plus Lyboc's own lines of contact into Kingsdale plus no effort to gain that research for himself earlier equals three – notably, the overwhelming probability that wherever this new miracle drug came from it wasn't anywhere remotely near where our young couple went to the lengths of a rather impressive forgery job to make it appear that it had come from. Honestly, if I hadn't already known about the lack of a Kingsdale connection I'd have been entirely convinced."

"Which, since they'd have no reason to go to such elaborate lengths of concealment if they'd just stolen it from someone else, strongly suggests that they'd never stolen it at all." Emmerson said intelligently. "So the mission is Stilwell?"

"Not a mission," his superior replied. "Not just yet, at any rate. I may suspect that that young man is apparently the next polymath genius of the age, but he's hardly proven that yet. So we will take no positive action at this time. After all, even if he was what I suspected then it would still be of the utmost importance to figure out how to win his willing loyalty before we made any overt approach. Trying to make a mind of Dr. Bradford's caliber perform with a gun to their head is only an elaborate method of committing suicide. And with our own suspicions about Bradford's loyalty, I would be overjoyed to find someone capable of performing at a similar level of genius but with a far less complicated personality attached to that genius."

"I entirely understand that, sir." Emmerson nodded vigorously.

"So it's observe and report only for the indefinite future. On my verbal orders – we don't want any official record of this – you will make the arrangements to flag any sighting of either of those two young people for our personal attention. I want you to set up the analysis desk for this yourself, and to make sure enough back channels are used that it doesn't become general knowledge even within the Intelligence Division of what my interest is in this case or why. I'll take care of making sure General Cabot knows what he needs to know about this, and outside of that it remains our concern until and unless things proceed otherwise. After all, once is happenstance and twice is coincidence. It's three times and more that means something purposeful."

"Will you also be briefing your father, sir?" Emmerson asked.

"Not until well after I'm certain that this is what I hope it is," Colonel Joseph Prosek II, Director of the CS Propaganda and Information Division and only son and heir of Emperor Karl Prosek stated calmly. "But if it ever becomes necessary to, then I certainly will."

Author's Note: Joseph Prosek II is perhaps my most favorite Coalition villain. He's at least as evil as the rest of them, but despite his relative youth I still find him compelling because he's a very rare example of being the Evil Emperor's Even Smarter Son (and Karl Prosek is himself quite a sharp guy) without the self-destructive backstabbing that normallly accompanies the role. He's so smart that he's smart enough to know that he doesn't need to be impatient, he'll be Emperor himself in the fullness of time and until then he's still being given more than enough power and responsibility to keep him reasonably satisfied while he finishes adding life experience to talent.

Seriously, Karl Prosek himself is a dangerous enough ruler of the place, but the day his son eventually takes power the Coalition's enemies are really fucked.

And sadly, he's now noticed the existence of our MC. Because while our hero's plan was legitimately good, the CS black ops juicer project of Colonel Lyboc is canon, ditto Prosek Jr's knowledge of it, and so the cover story they concocted would be utterly exploded by a piece of knowledge they simply had no way of knowing. Two pieces, because young Prosek's false flag operation with the seer's rescue was deliberately designed to keep even a psychic from spotting the gaff - that's precisely why Emmerson (the client) never went near anyone but the fixer.

Dr. Desmond Bradford is also an actual game NPC - he's the greatest scientist the Coalition has, runs their most essential research complex, and is an untrustworthy megalomaniac on every level. Sadly, he's also Karl Prosek's old buddy from college (I'm not kidding) so his disloyalty has gone entirely unnoticed. And it's not like he's trying to overthrow the CS or anything, after all, his best friend runs it! He's just... really hard to work with if you're not his boss. And, well, only one person in the CS is his boss. So while I'm not sure if he'll ever get onstage, the fact that Prosek Jr. would sell his own sister to the Splugorth (if he had one) for the chance to ditch the man and replace him with someone else capable of doing his job that wasn't such a psychotic asshole is certainly motivation enough for him to spend time following up on any reports of strange geniuses. Sadly for our MC.

The Demonbusters mercenary company, and their chaplain, are also canon NPCs from "Rifts: Mercenaries".

Perks This Chapter: Chemist (Fallout 4), Alchemist (A 'Happy' Harry Potter Fanfiction)

Last edited: May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

May 13, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 14, 2021

#234

Chapter 5

Not everyone agreed on the best way to navigate through the wild lands.

Legend had it that in the Pre-Rifts era, anybody could buy a tiny device that would tell him exactly where he was to within one yard anywhere in the world. That nobody ever got lost so long as they had even a basic commlink and drivers and pilots would gladly go anywhere off the beaten path, or even thousands of miles over water, and never worry about being lost. That you could carry a digital atlas of the entire world and any specified region of it at almost any scale, right on down to being able to pinpoint the corner store and have the computer automatically plot a route between it and your house, right in the palm of your hand.

But that certainly wasn't true anymore, assuming it ever had been. Unless you were talking about those few dozens of square miles enough to a civilized town to have been formally surveyed, almost any detailed maps of the countryside by definition predated the Cataclysm. Which, given how the coming of magic and the Rifts had actually changed the entire landscape in places, meant that they were reliable only in the broadest outlines. Outside of that the common charts merely gave you dots on the map that told you where settlements were, maybe some well-known roads in between, and a lot of blank space. Navigation beyond that point was more of an art than a science, relying upon travelers' tales, personal experience, hired guides, and feeling your way as you went along.

One school of thought was that when journeying long distances overland you should stick to the old Interstate highway system as close as possible. Most of the old ruined cities were still connected by long, long stretches of multi-lane highway, most of them reinforced with MDC engineering and still mostly useable. "Mostly" being a relative term, seeing as how Rifts-induced geological upheavals or outright dimensional swaps of chunks of land had broken the system in some places. Or how erosion and flooding and earthquakes had taken out gaps of the road in other places. And then there were all the various hazards that liked to cluster around known travel routes. But even so, so long as you knew which one of the old numbered routes you were actually following and stayed close enough to at least parallel the road at a distance, you didn't have to worry about getting lost.

The competing school of thought was that hugging the old long-distance highways was for suckers, because predators always clustered heaviest around game trails. That school relied upon using backroads and off-road routes, trusting to the inertial navigators and gyrocompasses that any serious explorer mounted in their vehicle to give them an accurate direction-and-distance reading to a preset zero point. With that they could locate themselves on a large-scale map to within one or two miles, and from that point on you'd go off of your own personal knowledge of the lay of the land (if you'd ever travelled that way before) or stopping at known waypoints and trading posts to touch base, as well as a good pre-Rifts atlas and your ability to interpret landmarks and ruins. As a strategy I supposed it was a valid trade-off; anything trying to intercept you was far less likely to anticipate your route ahead of time or be set up to ambush travelers as a general business. However, the substantially reduced risk of banditry and robber barons was paid for with an increased statistical risk of being first-discoverer of a new outbreak of trouble, by driving straight into it unawares.

And that, plus a goodly dose of curiosity almost killing the cat, is what happened to us.

We were several days out of the last belt of Coalition-affiliated towns and settlements in the border zone and over into Indiana proper when we hit the ruins of West Lafayette. It was always wise advice to avoid any substantial pre-Rifts population center when you could. Between the wreckage from the war, the part where ley line nexuses occasionally cropped up at such places, the ruins attracting monster bait, and the occasional heavily armed scavengers trying to pick through for more pre-Rifts artifacts and willing to discourage the competition with lasers, ruins like that were a place you went into as a dedicated expedition and not as a way stop. However, the Wabash river was far too deep and wide to ford so it was either find an old surviving pre-Rifts bridge or go well out of our way trying to detour around. And that meant heading towards one of the towns marked on the old maps, because the old USA didn't waste concrete and steel building bridges in the middle of nowhere.

Even though it would have been a little expensive, it still would have been preferable if some toll-taker gang had set up at the bridge to charge people for the privilege. At least that would mean that some kind of armed force had done a sweep of the immediate zone for monsters and bandits recently, even if the gang themselves were essentially bandits. However, our last-minute binoculars reconnaissance didn't show any signs of movement or lights, or any fortifications, so we'd have to try and get through the small city on either side of the bridge all on our own.

"Damn, that collapsed building's cutting off the main road there," Valerie swore. "So much for a straight shot, we'll have to detour around that whole block."

"Maybe we could go up that side avenue instead and just jink over at the last north-south cross-street before the river." I replied.

"Assuming that isn't blocked, because that street's behind those rows of buildings. All we can do is see straight down the east-west avenues from where we are," she pointed out reasonably. "You remember what everybody calls someone trying to solo it through uncleared ruins, right?"

"A one-car funeral," I finished the joke. "Well, unless you want to turn around and head for Merctown-" I suggested.

"Tempting," she chewed her lip. "Really tempting. But… nah." she exhaled. "The Devouring Horde is in front of us, not behind us. And if you've gotten stuck with a crusade to have to go try and stop it then you're not going there without me." she said resolutely. "Well, at least it's morning, so we've got hours and hours of daylight to shoot this chute with."

"That we do-" and then I stopped swiveling my pair of binocs, as one particular road sign riveted my attention. "Holy shit, do you see that?"

"See what?" she said, swinging over to look where I pointed. "Nothing's moving for me."

"No, the sign!" I pointed again.

"John, you know I can barely sign my name and read maps!" she said exasperatedly. "You're the scholar, so what's it say?"

"Purdue University, one mile" I read off to her. "An actual pre-Rifts university! A whole library to pick through! Talk about jackpot!"

"Talk about a pile of mold, because books don't survive this long when exposed to the elements." she said cynically. "Also, a bunch of uncleared old buildings to go get eaten in? If we had a few friends to make it an expedition, then yeah! But we're a little thin on the ground right now, and well off the beaten path."

"Being off the beaten path is exactly why there's still a good chance that place hasn't already been picked clean." I pointed out. "It's broad daylight and we don't have to go into any building that doesn't smell right. And think of the opportunities!" I said eagerly. My recently-augmented mind positively hungered for new data, for new knowledge, and the Forge had yet to offer me any libraries-in-the-head so I just couldn't resist the urge to go poke into the first library I'd happened across not inside a guarded Coalition enclave.

"We poke one toe in," Valerie conceded grudgingly. "And if I say bug out, we bug out. No asking me to reconsider, no 'just one more book', none of that."

"Yes ma'am." I acknowledged smartly.

"Okay," she sighed. "Let's go to the bookstore."

The university campus seemed to make up a goodly portion of the small town, so between the irregular condition of the streets and the rusted-out hulks of abandoned cars and collapsed rubble our route through the remains of the street grid was a meandering thing largely dictated by circumstance. What few building signs survived said nothing about containing a library or a bookstore, and some of the taller buildings looked far too dark and forbidding to risk getting inside, so we eventually chose to try our luck at a two-story building whose said had been the Department of Computer Science.

"Searching through a building full of paper books is too likely to find those piles of moldy paper you were afraid of," I thought out loud as we parked the ATV and got out. "So f there's anywhere on campus a surviving electronic database exists, it'll be here. Even if it's fragmented I can try several data recovery methods on it, and that's an advantage regular salvagers wouldn't have."

"So go in, yank the box, get out." Valerie said tightly. "Okay… helmets tight, headlamps on, weapons free, and let's go." she finished, her plasma rifle's muzzle coming up level as she led our way in the door with her head on a swivel and her finger right alongside the trigger guard.

"You've got the choke on that thing, right?" I asked her as we slowly walked across the lobby, with her on point and myself on drag. Since we were using sealed helmets and short-range communicators, we weren't worried about being overheard. At least not with ears, but if anyone in this town had a radio on then they'd somehow managed to completely shield their carrier wave.

"Do I want to drop the building on our heads?" she replied. "Yeah, she's dialed down. Did you remember to put the E-clip in yours?" she finished sarcastically.

"I'm not sure, let me check." I jibed back, and she barked a laugh before we stopped at the foot of the lobby stairs.

"Second floor or down the hall?" she asked.

"Hang on, let me clean this thing off," I said, walking over to a dirt-encrusted panel by the badly-sagging reception desk that seemed to be a directory listing. Some vigorous rubbing with my armor's elbow managed to knock enough clods of mold and grit off that I could start reading some of the listings. "And… okay, this says that the server room is in the basement."

"I fucking hate basements." Valerie swore. "The worst thing about fighting in the bottom of a hole is that you're in the bottom of a hole! You sure what we're looking for is in there?"

"Well, according to my implants a 'data server' is one of the terms for a dedicated storage facility for electronic files, so… yeah."

"I'm really tempted to just say-" Valerie paused in mid-word, and I tensed and started looking around.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Listen." she hissed into her mike.

My eyes widened as I realized what she was getting at. The faint, normal sounds of wildlife from outside the building had stopped. No more bird calls, nothing. Which meant something nasty was coming.

We'd both just gotten turned around to cover the door when the first of the zombies silouhetted itself against the daylit opening, holding some type of melee weapon-

"RUN!" she shouted, and slapped me hard on the back to send me stumbling in the direction of one of the ground-floor hallways. I didn't even ask questions but took off sprinting just like she'd told me to do. Valerie paused just long enough to toss a frag grenade at the door and then started running, overtaking me and resuming point before we were a third of the way down the hall.

Immediately after the explosion I asked her "Why are we going this way?"

"Zombies are stupid, so if they get between you and your wheels you pull 'em after you and then just loop around the block back to the car." she said quickly. "Now eyes front and find the back door!"

"Building map!" I said, pointing to the little laminated sheet on the wall next to the fire alarm. It was very old and faded, but at least I could get the basic outline- "Side door's that way."

"Good spot!" she said, and after hanging back just enough to let the surviving shamblers start coming down the hallway after us – and away from our ride – we headed right down the hall to the fire escape door that had been marked.

"Stuck," she said after trying the handle. In one easy motion she brought her boot heel up hard into the lock plate and popped it right open. "Let's go!" she continued, leading the way out into the-

What happened? I dazedly wondered. Because I clearly wasn't outside anymore, and was definitely missing a black of time in there somewhere-

My Mechanicus implants responded to my vague mental meanderings with a quick replay of the last several seconds of sensory impressions that I'd consciously overlooked during my blackout.

-leading the way out into the sunlight. We'd come out on the side of the building 90 degrees off of where we'd left the car.

"Contact left-" Valerie began to call, responding to the one zombie that had apparently wandered next to the door we'd come out of. I finished glancing to make sure nothing was on my side and turned to back her up, and time seemed to slow down as I took in everything at once.

The one zombie standing there, in rotting clothes but wearing a brand-new web gear strip that someone had dressed it in.

The explosive charge hanging from that chest belt.

The blinking red light on the detonator indicating that it was armed.

The small antenna sticking up from the detonator.

Valerie's terrified expression as she spun away from the lone zombie to look at me-

And both her hands blurring forward to grab onto my own web gear with all her strength and throw me as far down the sidewalk as she possibly could just as the bomb detonated-

Everything after that was blank, because not even onboard cranial implants could record your visual impressions if your eyes were closed and I'd been knocked the hell unconscious. The internal clock said I'd been out at least fifteen minutes. Oh, and I was also stripped of my armor and weapons and chained to a wall. So, we'd been set up, ambushed, rendered defenseless, and now I was in the lair of the enemy trussed up like a turkey.

But none of that mattered right now because I didn't see Valerie anywhere.

In between one panicked heartbeat and the next, everything fell away. There was neither fear nor joy, neither hope nor despair. The inward scream I'd been building up to over the loss of my partner was gone before it could begin. Nothing remained behind except an impersonal, precise awareness of what I could do as gauged against what yet remained to be done.

"Good morning, John." a cultured, urbane voice said smoothly. I was not alone.

"And you are?" I said, with a slow, exacting turn of my head towards my captor. I could dimly feel something inside me faintly echoing the emotional reactions I imagined I would have had under normal circumstances. The sheer ordinariness of the man would have been incongruously creepy in another time and place, I imagined. The neatness of his ornamented robe, the neatly-trimmed and coiffed hair, the clean hands that even had nearly trimmed fingernails, all of it looked more appropriate to an ordinary respectable citizen of some Magic Zone city than a mad necromancer hiding in the ruins.

"I am but a humble messenger," he said softly, his voice as calm and even as if we were discussing the price of bread. "A priest of the Harvester, the Lord Who Takes."

"And what does your lord harvest?" I replied.

"Souls." he said matter-of-factly.

"Then why not go for the two-for-one deal?" I probed.

"Your lover?" he sniffed with disdain. "The little addict, too disgusted with herself to live but too cowardly to die? The world of man positively crawls with common filth like that. Why would I pay such as her the least attention when I could study such as you?"

Assuming I escaped here I would need to make at least some kind of priority out of researching methods of mind-shielding, because my captor was displaying a level of awareness that suggested he was somehow perceiving my thoughts.

"Such as I?" I inquired.

"How can one harvest what one cannot perceive?" he asked wisely. "I can see the souls of the living, John. I can read them as plainly as a scholar reads his most cherished books. Do you know what I see when I look at you?"

I simply stared back expressionlessly, hoping that he could read Finish the monologue already in my thoughts.

"I see eternity." he said, a note of awe coloring his voice. "I see things beyond the world, beyond the stars, beyond anything I could dream of! As I am linked to my Lord, so are you linked to something vast as well. The common run of aura-seers are too blind to behold what is around you, but the servitors of He Who Takes are blessed beyond other men."

"Tell me something I don't know." I said.

"Did you know that you will die in the next minute if you do not show me your power?" he said without hesitation, as a zombie standing to the side out of my field of vision made itself known with the edge of a blade across my throat. "Call upon your master! Let me see their gift in operation, divine their name, that my Lord would know which new god arises to challenge him!"

While it was normally bad form to do what your enemy asked you to do, the fact remained that what with me being chained to the wall by both wrists and my tools taken away from me, hoping that I could gain a new power from the Forge of more immediate use was one of the valid moves in my position. And I really couldn't imagine that whatever was empowering me was vulnerable to whatever kind of 'crazy summoner shit' that the mad necromancer here was into-

No, wait. A moment of dispassionate thought was all it took to spot the flaw in the necromancer's presentation. "If your ability to read my soul allowed you to probe my mind at will, you would not be interrogating me. If your ability to harvest souls could be done quickly or easily, you would simply have done so already- after all, a harvested soul yields up its secrets to you, doesn't it?" I finished.

"Summon your power, name your master, or die." he repeated.

"You won't try to harvest my soul in whatever ritual you use until after you know enough about what I'm linked to to judge if you'll survive the attempt. Which means I need to live long enough to reach your ritual chamber." I finished. Without a word or a gesture from the necromancer, his zombie's blade fell away from my neck.

So he had been bluffing.

"Very astute of you." the man replied angrily. "But what does that deduction gain you-" he continued, as he stepped forward to dramatically loom over me-

And then I brought up both feet and kicked him as hard as I possibly could in the chest. He was wearing an MDC breastplate for protection but not any heavier armor – mages didn't work well when enclosed – and armor didn't prevent you from being knocked off-balance. So he fell backwards at my kick… and landed directly on top of a particular item from my magical there/not-there workshop I'd summoned onto the floor directly behind him. Notably, the coal forge used for heating items to be pounded on the anvil.

"AAAAARRRGGGH!" he said, notably distracted by landing smack on his ass – apparently he didn't have armored pants on, either - on a red-hot bed of coals that hadn't been there a second ago. That moment of distraction was all I needed to summon a Wilks miniature laser cutter from my extradimensional tool rack into my hand, using the highest-power setting – a minor MDC laser with a range of about a foot and a half - to slice through the steel chain holding me to the wall like butter, then reaching out without a single wasted motion to jam the still-operating laser cutter into the temple of the zombie standing stolidly to my left. By the time the necromancer finished shedding his still-burning robe and recovering enough of his mental presence to remember that I was here, I was already on top of him.

Taken too off-guard to cast any spells, I brushed aside his clumsy grip and took him solidly around the throat with both hands, then bore down with all my strength. And while I wasn't remotely as strong as Valerie I'd still grown up on a farm. I'd done manual labor all my life; baling hay, digging post holes, felling trees, the lot. So I had more than enough muscle power to choke this miserable bastard hard enough to keep him from speaking any spells, then force the back of his head back down into the bed of red-hot coals and start roasting him alive. The pain of the burns In my hands eventually broke through my anger enough for me to realize that I could just dismiss the coal forge, then summon the table saw and use that to finish him off. A moment's thought, a simple press of the power switch, and his head was bisected in the blink of an eye.

I waved away the tools, wiped my hands clean of blood and brains on what was left of his robe, and sank to my knees and did not weep.

A shuffling noise from the doorway snapped me out of my reverie. I'd already seen that he didn't need to speak or gesture to issue commands to his zombies, so I shouldn't have been surprised when his dying act had been to summon all of them to his aid. The first one was entering the room now, and I was barely able to stop its rush at me by summoning the anvil for it to trip over. I frantically backpedaled towards the other side of the room, looking for any kind of weapon… there!

Valerie's old ion pistol lay on top of a nearby workbench, along with my portacomp and some other valuables. I dialed it down to the lowest possible setting, used it to blow the zombie's torso into mist – apparently they weren't MDC creatures – and trained the muzzle on the door. The remaining zombies straggled down the hallway outside wherever the necromancer had dragged me to single file, and I target-shot them single file. Dispassionately, methodically, I kept at it. But things drew to a conclusion far sooner than I expected, because after only the fourth zombie I drew a bead on the fifth-

-to immediately lower my weapon in shock when the tip of a vibro-sword came directly out of its forehead, and was then pulled back through as the zombie fell over to reveal the woman who'd backstabbed it in the skull.

"Val?!?" I shouted, suddenly overwhelmed with-

"John!" she cried back desperately. "Are you okay?"

"I am now," I said with my eyes full of tears. "I am now-"

And then her helmet was tossed aside, and we were hugging desperately, and there weren't any words at all.

Ironically, the necromancer's last attempt to kill me is what had let Val both find me and lead us safely out through the ring of traps that had surrounded his lair. With an entire city to search Valerie would never have been able to find me, especially given that even with her drug dispenser turned up to full and her bio-comp's internal first aid capacities taxed to the limit she was still walking wounded after having caught the detonation of a class one CS military MDC satchel charge square in the back. Without her armor on she'd have been vapor, and even with it she'd been battered with enough bruises and internal injuries that anyone without Juicer stamina would have needed days of bed rest before they could walk again. I certainly wouldn't have gotten off as relatively lightly as she had if she hadn't tossed me to the edge of the blast radius in time, even if I'd still been knocked galley-west enough to be easy meat for my captor.

But his dying command for all his zombies to return and kill me had left the most blatantly clear trail for Valerie to follow straight to me, and so all she needed to do was limp along behind the naearest zombie and sneak attack them one by one as their trails converged on the lair, leaving only a few to point the way to where I was. So she was led directly to the sanctum sanctorum that the nameless and now thoroughly dead necromancer had set up elsewhere in the city – and safely through his traps, because the zombies had been programmed not to step on them - and we'd been reunited.

In hindsight, the necromancer's ambush plans were fairly obvious; wherever any party of scavengers stopped, he'd then send a rush of zombies armed with vibro-weapons to cut through MDC armor in through most obvious entrance. And then he'd have a specially prepared suicide bomber zombie waiting at the other exit (or exits). If the targets were unaware or foolish enough to just stand and fight a heavily armed zombie squad, they were either too tough to capture or else he could take his pick of the survivors. If they were smart enough to fall back, they'd run right into the route ambush he arranged and either they'd be too tough to capture or he could still take his pick of the survivors. And either way he'd never have to expose himself to enemy fire until after he was certain of victory, just send in his expendable troops while he watched from a safe distance. Simple, clever, direct, and in the service of goals that were utterly insane.

Honestly, you just never knew what kind of crazy shit to expect out here.

Since we weren't remotely in shape to brave the dangers of the road right now, we decided to fort up for the night in what was left of the computer science center. I took the opportunity to brew some "stimpacks" out of the same dump of chemical knowledge that taught me how to make Addictol. From my knowledge I'd just been expecting something to help speed healing, but instead we got an almost magical degree of tissue regeneration. A few of those and both Valerie and I were back in prime condition almost immediately.

"Whoo damn!" she whistled expressively. "And I thought that Addictol stuff was prime! Everybody in the wastelands could use this!"

"And every established medical practice would want it suppressed with extreme prejudice." I said. "Because while it won't replace every doctor, it would mean they'd have at least 90% less work-"

"Yeah." she said. "I don't know you're gonna release this without big trouble."

"By giving it to the healers," I realized with a flash of insight. "The psi-healers, the mages, the herbalists, that kind of thing. The non-traditional medical practices don't have a med school degree and a clinic's worth of equipment they need to pay off. Their main limitation is how much PPE or ISP or how many elixirs' worth of ingredients they've been able to scrounge. Show them how to make stimpacks instead, and they'll be happy to."

"And we're already headed to Dweomer." Valerie agreed. "So, that fits."

"That it does." I said, and we fell silent and stared out the window on the upper floor of the CS building to look at the sunset.

"Are you okay?" she asked after a long pause. "I mean-" she shrugged. "He had it coming. He so had it coming. But even so, you've never-" she trailed to a halt.

"Killed anyone before?" I finished for her. "I-" I sighed. "Is it bad that I'm not torn up over it?"

"Are you using those implants again?" she glared suspiciously at me.

"I didn't use them at all." I answered to her surprise. "Not from the moment I woke up chained to that wall. The detachment, the cold-blooded analysis… the fucking berserker rage… that was all me. Nothing else."

She hugged me closer to her with one arm around my shoulders. "That still doesn't make you a bad person." she reassured me. "He was a psycho demon-worshipper, and he was tryin' to put you on an altar. He had it coming."

"I wasn't even thinking about that," I said, low-voiced. "The only thought in my mind was that I'd thought he'd killed you. And I wanted to kill him a dozen times over for that. I wanted to make it last as long as possible."

"But you didn't." she said. "You did him up because you had to, to stop him from murdering anyone else, and then you didn't do any more to him. That's why you switched from slow-roasting him to doing it quick and-" she trailed off. "Well, figuratively clean."

"Yeah, remind me to use a laser-cutting lathe instead of a rotary saw next time." I tried to joke.

"Try not to get chained to any more walls next time," she tossed back. "But…" she reached out with her other hand, and turned and drew me into a hug with my head on her shoulder. "I've seen, I've worked with, all sorts of people. Good, and bad, and real bad. You… you're good people. Don't ever doubt that, okay?"

"I won't if you won't." I challenged her, and felt her tense momentarily before she relaxed into me again.

"I'll… I'll try." she conceded.

We sat in silence for a long moment, as the sun sank lower over the plains and scattered trees we'd driven through to reach the city. The long grasses glowed orange in the sunset as they lazily waved in the wind, and everything was quiet.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" I eventually said.

"Every time." she agreed.

That night, after Valerie went to bed – usually she stood all the night watches with her vastly reduced sleep requirement, but she was still healing up a bit so I'd taken one this time – I delved into the Forge again. And this time I determined to my best to spend as much charge as I possibly could to get one of the largest sparks I possibly could.

Because I couldn't let myself fail again.

We spent the next couple of days picking through the city for salvage. Given that the Harvester priest would have used his zombies and dark magic to clear out anything lurking in the ruins that might be hazardous to him, and that we'd just cleared him, that meant we had a window of opportunity to safely loot some pre-Rifts city wreckage – and fairly intact wreckage too, given that no actual bomb impacts had occurred anywhere near here – that wouldn't normally have come along.

Collectors would pay good credits for virtually any Pre-Rifts artifact at all, even things like pottery or statues. We didn't find any great art treasures in the ruins of West Lafayette but there was a small hoard of things like precious metals and jewelry that the zombie master had already looted for himself in addition to several sets of gear and weapons that he'd taken from unlucky explorers before us.

Since I couldn't read the language his collection of magic books was written in and we had no way of telling which ones were the cursed stuff or not, we just torched the entire set. However he'd also had several books actually written in English, and those I took for myself. It was largely nonfiction reference works but there was one volume of fiction among them, several books collected into one large volume. Something called The Lord of the Rings, whatever that was.

But the real treasure was an intact datachip I'd found, preserved from atmospheric decay by having fortitiously been left in a sealed carrying case in his desk drawer, in the office of the University's head of the Physics Department. It was an e-text of The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 178th Edition. It was almost 3000 pages long, but according to the table of contents it was a concise yet complete overview of the fundamentals of most scientific and engineering fields ranging from biochemistry to particle physics. The introduction explained that it was intended as a handy reference for people already educated in the relevant fields, but with the superhuman genius the Forge had granted me in Chi-Town I felt confident that most of the many, many blanks the fragmentary access to educational resources I'd had to labor under in the world of the Rifts could be filled in by a detailed study of this volume and enough time and effort to interpolate and extrapolate from first principles. I certainly didn't intend to stop my studies just with this, but this… I felt certain that this one pocket archive would be worth the entire trip just by itself.

And then there was the latest gift the Forge had given me. If I had to describe it in a sentence, I would say that it seemed almost the distilled essence of the concept of weaponization. A single glance at anything would tell me how much force would be necessary to destroy it, how much of that force the weapons or other resources immediately available to me could hope to deliver, and a number of useful suggestions for trying to close any gap between the first and second amounts.

So I started by using the spare components from all the weapons we'd salvaged to upgrade and enhance our own kits. Valerie's weapons got a further retuning – I didn't manage to eke that much more out of her plasma rifle but her various backup weapons were now hitting at least slightly harder than the most advanced CS cutting-edge prototypes in similar classes could hope to. I'd also finally managed to return her loaner, because one of the dead explorers had been carrying the very same model of high-performance laser rifle I'd hoped to purchase, a Wilks 457 pulse laser. Only now, with all of my gifts from the Forge and my access to new research materials, I was able to boost that weapon into a next-generation high-intensity laser, operating on an entirely different and more penetrating frequency band than any arms manufacturer in North America had been able to achieve or would be likely to at any time in the next twenty years.

Between the already exceptional damage capacity that Wilks' top-of-the-line model could achieve and my invention of an entirely new concept in laser excitation chambers, both myself and Valerie were now carrying long arms that could rip straight through CS heavy body armor in a single blast, as opposed to the several hits that would normally have been required to wear down a Dead Boy in a frontal assault. I'd actually gone out of my way to install dimmer switches on both of our customized long arms so that we wouldn't have to reveal our unprecedented new capacities to curious eyes unless we wanted to, and done similar things for our favorite pistols. Including Valerie's own NG-57, because after our adventure with the zombies she'd decided to commemorate our first deadly battle together by giving it to me permanently. And… I could certainly appreciate the sentimental value.

I'd also started putting thought into optimal weaponization of something that most people wouldn't think of as a weapon, notably, my own body. One of the necromancer's prior victims had been a Crazy, and with an actual set of M.O.M. implants to reverse-engineer I now had all of the firmware source code necessary to emulate the same functions using my Mechanicus neural implants. Between that and a proper workout program and some enhanced nutrition, I'd be capable of operating on the same level as any other M.O.M-enhanced person in just a few short weeks. And the sensory, agility, balance, and reflex boosts the conversion promised would be only incrementally short of Juicer-grade, even though my strength and resilience would still only be at 'exceptional human athlete' levels instead of Valerie's clearly superhuman ones. And thanks to the far more sophisticated and integrated neuro-cybernetic links of the Mechanicus technology, I wouldn't have any side effects like they would. I'd only just finished up the first set of neuro-enhancements when it was time to pack up and leave, but completing the remainder of the process would only take a couple of days even working slowly and carefully and I could do most of that as we drove.

So a couple days later, when the hostile wildlife began to creep back into the city without the undead to keep them away, we took our first sight of a Rifts-mutated grizzly bear sauntering unconcernedly down one of the main streets as an oracle that it was past time to be on our way. As we crossed the bridge over the Wabash and sped through the ruins of Lafayette on the other side and off towards the eastern horizon, I took a brief moment to reflect on how so many things had changed for me – and about me – in just the time since I'd left home. I couldn't help wondering for a moment just what Mom and Dad would think about me now.

But it's not as if I'd have a chance to ask them any time soon.

"Hey, eyes open there partner!" Valerie broke into my reverie. "I didn't let you take a turn on the gun just so you could daydream, did I?"

"Nope!" I agreed, putting my focus back on the road in front of us where it belonged. "Definitely not that."

Author's Note: Do you know how little support there is in the rules for actually roleplaying the details of overland travel? About that little. I had to make damn near everything up. Likewise, I completely ignored actual combat stats for the purposes of the combat because the numbers were very unhelpful to my purpose. So screw it, story mode uber alles.

Actual residents of West Lafayette or Purdue alumni, feel free to laugh. *g* I've never been there, I fudged it off of Google Maps.

And this time around I actually totally tossed the dice and just picked the power narratively. His first 600cp draw was rather a big moment, both narratively and for purposes of character development. (It was Just Another Gun from Factorio, for those unable to just click to the OP and check the character sheet at the bottom).

Perks This Chapter: Just Another Gun (Factorio)

Last edited: May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

May 14, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 15, 2021

#292

Chapter 6

It was my sixteenth birthday.

I didn't get a party, because it was just the two of us around the campfire somewhere in the wilds of Indiana. I didn't get a cake or a candle, either, even though I got a song. And while Valerie had promised to buy me a present at the next available opportunity when I'd mentioned what day it was, I'd decided that there was something she could give me right now.

"Val?" I opened as gently as I could, as we sat by the fire with her leaning on my shoulder. We'd pulled over the day – even with nightvision gear you didn't drive in the dark unless you had to – and with the reduced sleep requirement I was getting from the neuro-enhancements I'd recently programmed for myself on top of Val's even lesser requirement from Juicer stims, we had quite a few hours to kill. So I'd spent several of them reading the The Hobbit out loud to her from the omnibus bound edition of Tolkien that we'd found in the Harvester's lair, and then we'd drifted into a comfortable silence.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Back in West Lafayette, that creepy necromancer said he had a 'soul gaze' power. He'd noticed something special about me, that's why he was so interested in me."

"That's not good," she said, drawing upright. "If it's something anybody can spot in your aura-"

"He also said that it was a special power of servants of his god of soul taking, and that normal aura-seers couldn't." I reassured her. "But yeah, he knew some stuff. Like, he'd gotten my name without being introduced – and unlike you, I don't have a Coalition ID card in my pocket."

"What's your point?"

"You've made it plain that you don't like talking about your past-"

"I certainly don't." she interrupted firmly.

I ignored the hint and continued on. "-but something he said made me worried about you." I hastily corrected. "For you, not of you."

"Whatever he was talking was just more crazy." she put me off firmly. "We don't need to-"

"The little addict, too disgusted with herself to live but too cowardly to die." I said, pulling her into a hug as she tried to pull away. While she could have easily broken free of my grip, she apparently didn't want to physically force the issue. "Valerie, what he said about you did not sound like you're okay. And if you're not okay, I want to help."

"I'm fine." she mumbled stubbornly into my shirt front.

"You promised me a birthday present, and I don't want a golden ring. I want to help my best friend, okay? I want you to let me help you. That would be the best present I could get right now." I finished.

"I don't-" she said, looking up into my eyes. "I want to stay your best friend, okay? So I don't want to share my history, because that part is disgusting."

"You said I was 'good people'." I pushed, taking ruthless advantage of her words the other day. "And you meant it. And good people don't ditch their best friend on the first mistake."

She eye-rolled. "They do if-" she broke off, and gently slipped free of my arms to sit and stare down into her lap. I felt really tempted to say something, but took a deep breath and let her go at her own pace. But after several minutes of a silent stand-off, I decided to try another approach.

"Valerie Dumont, over and over I've seen you do the right thing, the kind thing, even when there was nothing in it for you. Hell, you agreed with me about handing part of the payoff to Bakr-Edolin without even arguing. I was sorta expecting to have to beg!" I finished passionately. "Which means somewhere, somehow, you had a good role model to learn that from! So if at least one decent person thought you were worth something before, then why shouldn't I?"

"'Cause they're all dead!" she eventually cried out, her voice breaking.

Okay, that was not what I was expecting. So I let that one roll around in my brain for a few seconds, and eventually kept going. "Did you kill them?" I asked matter-of-factly.

"… no" she conceded, letting me put my arm around her again.

"Did you mean for them to die?"

"No." she sighed.

"So what happened?" I asked, and waited.

Eventually she kept talking. "Remember when I said that I was fresh off the farm like you, once? Well… I didn't exactly go straight from the farm to the Juicer facility. I-" she stopped. "We lived outside Fort El Dorado, down in Arkansas. You ever hear of that city?"

"Just once, last year." I replied, my implants' eidetic memory function letting me automatically retrieve and cross-index the reference. "Last year, when the city of Newtown joined the Coalition States the announcement was all over the newsnet for a day. It mentioned that Newtown's nearest neighbor city to the south was-"

"Yup." Valerie agreed. "The Newtowners went in, we stayed out, but we still had a Coalition embassy and trade stuff because of the natural gas fields. So they got to be part of the Coalition State of Arkansas and we just kept on payin' taxes to King Stuart like we always had. So there I was, a sharecropper living in a little clan of sharecroppers, growing food for the big city nearby."

"Sounds just like Waverly was, only with a shorter drive to a bigger market." I reassured her.

"We didn't have a town, just a little cluster of farmsteads." she said. "But yeah, it was only like an hour in the truck down the road to sell our stuff and buy supplies." She whistled. "But that was still far enough away that when we got hit, even with us getting out a distress call-" She shook her head. "It took 'em at least half an hour for some of the king's men get there, and the place was already torched by then." She stared into the fire and kept speaking, with the toneless voice of someone who'd already long since run out of tears. "Simvan- you know those cannibal D-Bees, the monster-riding clans? Ride around raiding and pillaging anybody that ain't their own kind? That was what got us."

"Did anyone-?" I asked, horrified.

"Just me." she said softly.

"You don't have to tell me any more right now." I said.

"I- fuck it." she swore. "When they hit the fence, the last thing I heard was mom telling me to run. But who the hell could outrun someone like a dozen Simvan on those big-ass riding lizards they use on foot? I mean, I could now, but when I was like fourteen?"

"What did you do?" I asked, stumped as to how she could have possibly have survived what she was describing.

"I jumped down the well." she said embarrassedly. "And tread water for what felt like half of forever, while I could hear all the shooting and screaming going on up top-"

I wrapped her up and let her shiver it out against me for a minute before she could continue.

"I had this idea that I could climb up the rope after they were gone. Dumbass me, I could barely get maybe ten feet up before my arms got tired. I mean, there's in shape, and then there's in shape." Valerie said. "Only thing that saved my ass was when the troops showed up. When I heard people moving around topside, talkin' actual English instead of whatever the hell Simvan speak, I started yelling for help and they fished me out."

"But by then, everything was gone." I said grimly.

"Yeah." she nodded. "Nobody left, and everything torched." She spat at the fire. "And it was all such a fuckin' waste! Not even the goddamn raiders got anything out of it, because they were barely a few miles down the road when the soldiers caught 'em and blew 'em to ash! What the hell did they even think they were doing, hitting that close to the city? Sure, they had riding monsters but our guys had hovertrucks!" She cursed and started weeping. "Everybody gone, for a little pile of loot they didn't even get to own for an hour!"

"Val, I'm not hearing the part where even you think you did anything wrong." I tried to reassure her.

"We're getting there." she replied grimly. "So, anyway, there I was, an instant orphan and with any inheritance I might have gotten turned into mulch. The soldiers asked me if I had anywhere to go, and I said my mom was originally from the city – she'd left to marry my dad – so they took me back to El Dorado."

"Did you find your mom's family?" I asked.

"My aunt." she sighed. "Mom's big sister, she owned this dingy little lunch counter down in the slums- and that was all she had left, 'cause everybody else was dead or drifted away. My mom left to go marry a 'cropper in the sticks because she was tradin' up." Valerie pointed out matter-of-factly. "So, she took me in, put me to work, kept me fed, but-" she shook her head. "She didn't know what to do with me."

"Did she at least try?" I asked, not sure of where this was going.

"Maybe?" Valerie replied. "I mean, she didn't beat me or anything, or starve me, or none of that shit. But I was still in all kinds of shock from what had happened, and she-" Valerie sighed. "I mean, I get why she was pissed when she found out I'd been stealing her booze, but drinkin' till I passed out was about the only way I could get any sleep." Valerie said, looking up at me pensively. "Because of the nightmares, you understand?"

"Ouch." I said inadequately.

"So, yeah. I mean, she was trying to run a business by herself in a neighborhood that would've needed to be cleaned up to deserve bein' called a garbage dump. Get up every morning at first light, work hard all day without a break, fall into bed at the end of the day, seven days a week. Over and over for years. And she couldn't save up anything because you had to pay off the cops, you had to pay off the local gang, you had to pay rent through the ass to the scumbucket landlord she had-" Valerie shook her head. "By the time I got there, she was so beaten down by life I don't think she knew how to do more than go through the motions. So when she got the world's moodiest teenaged girl dumped on her out of the blue, the only thing she could think of to get my head on straight was to keep tellin' me that life was hard and you just sucked that shit up instead of whining about it."

"Even when that's true, that's still only if you're not legitimately with something to… worry about." I trailed off weakly.

"So I started goin' home less and less, and hangin' out with the local gang more and more." Valerie continued as if I hadn't spoken. "To the point I was thinking about giving a shit about her opinion at all, I was telling myself that if I could actually get in and wear the colors then Auntie wouldn't have to pay the protection anymore. Could actually rest a little or save a little. Just look at me, the little altruist." she sneered.

"I'm assuming that's where the 'addict' part came in." I tried to redirect her, because even having to talk about something she was genuinely ashamed of would still beat this kind of unfocused self-loathing.

"Yup," Valerie admitted unflinchingly. "You know what a Wannabe gang is?"

"Want to be what?" I asked.

"Juicers." She said. "You get a bunch of slum kids who've already decided by the time they're teenagers that their life is shit and living long enough to grow old will only make 'em… well, like my aunt was. So they all wannabe Juicers instead, because why not just live fast and die happy instead?" She said. "I mean, you can get a Juicer conversion from almost any chop-doc in the country that can score the juice, but there's still cities that actually have big hospitals that specialize in that stuff. Places that inherited it from before the War, or got into it for historical reasons. Newtown was one of those places, but the Coalition made 'em give it all up when they joined because Juicer tech is illegal in the CS. So, UTI – that was the company that did all the Juicer manufacturing and pharma stuff in Newtown – just moved down the road to El Dorado, and that's when every punk in the city started dreaming of scraping the creds together to buy himself a quick ticket to the fast lane."

"Including your gang," I said.

"Yeah. So- look, there's a usual way girls get into the gang. But one of the reasons Auntie lived the way she did is because she knew that tryin' to make your living on your back wore you out inside – emotionally, I mean - even faster. I'd paid enough attention to her to remember that part. So I fought my way in instead. And, well, bein' too emotionally messed up to give a shit how much of a beating you're taking because it still sucks less than your own memories? That lets you do one hell of an impersonation of bein' a tough chick. So I made it through initiation, shrimpy as I was, and got out there runnin' with the rest." She sighed. "I didn't kill any civilians, but in gang fights… there were casualties. And I definitely still beat people up, stole stuff, trashed places, all of that shit. And I was high all through most of it. So, yeah." She finished, staring intently at my face looking for any signs of revulsion.

I took her chin in my hands and kissed her on the forehead instead. "You're obviously not still there." I reassured her.

"It gets worse." she cut me off. "So, a couple years of that and I barely stop by my auntie's place ever anymore. And then comes the big break." she said sarcastically. "Navarre's Raiders."

"A mercenary company?" I asked.

"A bunch of bottom-feeding jackals, more like." she said. "Oh yeah, to us dumbass punks they looked like the goddamn Coalition Army itself, but they were just a third-string low-bidder outfit at best. And Colonel Navarre had himself a little scam for getting himself troops on the cheap. Notably, hiring the dumb and stupid like us. One year workin' for recruit wages with our pay docked to cover the costs of the augmentations – which meant basically nothing but room, board, and beer money – in return for Juicer conversion up front. And then after that first year they promised prime wages, full scale for a veteran Juicer merc."

I ran the numbers in my head, using what fragmentary scraps of mercenary accounting I'd picked up by osmosis in Chi-Town. "One year's worth of wages for an unaugmented mercenary private would still pay for a cheap Juicer conversion. Juicers, even novice ones, are worth at least twice that much. He was pocketing at least twenty or thirty thousand credits on every single one of you." I frowned.

"Yeah, but gutter-trash buttplugs like we were wouldn't know that. And didn't." Valerie said. "So yeah, just by trolling through wannabe gangs like us he'd get a couple dozen new recruits in every city he hit, and even a raw Juicer only needs a few weeks of basic before you can throw her at a squad of squishies with at least a fair chance of getting her back alive. So all he needs is enough dozens of morons every year-"

"-and it doesn't matter if he burns through most of them. That even makes it cheaper for him, because anybody who doesn't make it to the end of their rookie year can't start charging actual market rates." I said. "So- that's how you got into merc work?"

"Yeah." she said. "And the contracts that kind of garbage outfit took were garbage. Trash this town because that town didn't like their faces, fuck up this guy because his business competitor wanted less competition, back this asshole petty kingdom in a war versus whatever unlucky neighbor he wanted to conquer next. The only decent thing I can say about that time of my life is that I didn't actually shoot anyone who wasn't armed. But the worst part is what I didn't find out until a couple months into my hitch…" she sighed, and slumped forward to put her head into her hands.

"Val?" I asked her softly.

"Right after we got our Juicer conversions, right before we shipped out, we ran amok exactly like you'd expect a bunch of teenaged gangers to run amok while flying high on their first big boost of Juicer drugs. And yeah, that part of El Dorado is used to that kind of troops having that kind of payday party, but it still-" she stopped. "This… this is the worst part."

"Take your time." I said.

"One of the fuckers who'd enlisted with me, one of the fuckers in my own fire team, had decided the night before we shipped out that despite having his signing bonus in his pocket he was still too cheap to pay for his fuckin' food. So when the proprietress handed him the check, he laid into her with his fist. And he was only a couple days fresh off the table by then, and drunk and high, so he didn't know his own strength."

"Your aunt?" I asked, horrified.

"Bingo," she said. "Like, I wasn't there when it happened," she hastened to reassure me. "I was busy drinkin' and dancin' in a place like blocks away. But-" she shook her head. "I didn't go to say goodbye to my aunt. I didn't want to talk to her. I figured I'd just write her a note. Maybe on my first home leave, when I was already an established merc with actual cash and could come buy her out or somethin-, then I'd go home and do a face-to-face." she stopped. "But all I was doin' was sendin' mail to a dead person the whole time!" she cried, slumping into my arms. "I thought she wasn't writin' back 'cause she'd just- but really she was-"

"One of the people you fought alongside had killed the only family you had left?" I said, not believing what I was hearing. "And he didn't even have the guts to admit it?"

"Fucker knew who she was, knew who she was related to, because the whole gang did. Like I said, part of me joining was her not having to pay the protection any more. But no, chickenshit never admitted what he'd done to me even after I sobered up. He saw me writing the letters home every couple of weeks, even sendin' money, and knew nobody was getting' 'em, and still-" she trailed off.

"But you found out." I said.

"Dumb shit never could keep his mouth shut while toked." she said. "So yeah, soon enough the truth bomb finally drops. He didn't even remember he'd said anything." Valerie slumped. "And then I did the worst thing I think I ever did in my whole life."

"He had it coming." I reassured her. "Even more than that Harvester guy did."

"That's just it!" Valerie cried, sobbing in my arms again. "I didn't do anything! I mean, I wanted to roll a grenade into his tent so bad I could taste it, but I-" she said. "And no, it wasn't 'cause I thought murder was wrong. It was because when push came to shove, getting' any kind of justice for the last family I had in the world wasn't as important as coverin' my own ass. Because with the kind of scum troops Navarre hired, the way he kept 'em in line was with what he liked to call "a strict application of cause and effect". First failure to obey orders or other major fuckup, shot in the leg. Second offense, shot in the forehead." she said matter-of-factly. "And by then I'd already gotten one in the leg."

"How did it end?" I asked softly.

"I shut down," she said. "Like Auntie had, like-" she shook her head. "I mean, I'd already gotten off the shit I'd been using before Juicing. The conversion slams your metabolism hard enough that whatever the else you were addicted to before doesn't matter anymore, and you don't psychologically need any high other than the one the Juice already gives you. But now I didn't even need that high anymore. Or care. I was just… numb. Because-" she shook her head. "It was too much, and the only way out was one I still didn't want to take. So yeah, 'too disgusted with herself to live but too cowardly to die'? Crazy boy back there nailed it like a sniper." she said.

"That- who you're describing is not remotely the person I've been riding with." I said to her passionately. "You laugh, you joke, you love- you do everything!"

"Remember, this was only like a couple months into my Juicer career. I wasn't even seventeen. So-" she shook her head. "A few months after this, the Raiders had taken a contract from El Paso – you know, the big city-state over on the other side of CS Lone Star? To go cover one of the outlying affiliated settlements from a raider gang that was supposed to be moving into the area. Typical run-and-gun, bread-and-butter stuff. So in goes Colonel Navarre, expecting just another bunch of routine Pecos riff-raff to go shoot up for credits. But he's never really worked this south before – none of us had - so he didn't remotely take into account or plan for what sometimes comes over the Rio Grande from Mexico."

"Which is?" I asked, because I certainly didn't know either.

"Vampires." she said flatly. "Thank God there's a lot fewer of them up here then there are down south, because Mexico is just crawling with the bloodsuckers. And they might be nasty enough by themselves, but when they run in packs?" She shook her head. "Turns out those 'raiders' we were supposed to ward off were actually a nasty-ass group of wild vamps running loose up and down the desert, and we went in with not remotely enough gun or remotely enough plan to deal with that kind of opposition. Wild vamps aren't all that smart, but they are fucking strong. And if you aren't packing the right weapons you won't even tickle 'em. Seriously, I saw one eat enough railgun slugs to tear a tank in half and walk it off, because tungsten penetrator does sweet fuck-all to those things. If you're trying to perforate 'em with metal then it's either silver or enchanted or don't even bother."

"Jesus Christ, you were the sole survivor again?" I said incredulously.

"Hah, no." she barked. "They shredded us like paper, and I was about to be shredded right along with 'em when the cavalry came riding in. You see, the place that the vampires had hit before us had also passed the hat to hire mercs for a search-and-destroy on vampires in the area, because you don't let that kind of infestation just roam around your backyard loose. Those things multiply. So these guys were specialists, and loaded for bear besides, and they tore the vamps a new one and made it look easy. Navarre and all the officers were dead – the vamps had just enough brains to know who to eat first – and so all that was left was a bunch of stragglers who didn't know their ass from their elbow. And so much for the Raiders." She sighed. "Including the fuckhead who'd killed my aunt, which meant I didn't even get to decide what to do with him."

"And you signed up with this new merc company?" I guessed.

"Demonbusters." she said. "Guy called General Smith ran it, even if nobody knew what army he'd ever been in or if he'd ever actually been a general. Man was a Rogue Scholar, would you believe? Not any kind of military man but a historian and occultist. If you wanted to know anything about magic or demons or the time before the Rifts or anything like that, he could lecture you on any topic you could name for at least an hour. Which didn't stop him from also being one hell of a combat commander." She said admiringly. "And yeah, we did what losers do in the merc biz and tried to sign up with the winners. Smith actually sent most of the surviving Raiders packing – he didn't like how they smelled, and I don't blame him - but I was one of the few who made the cut somehow."

"Were they good?" I asked.

"It was good," she agreed, nodding reminiscently. "I mentioned Brother Lance before, that priest of the light gods? He was the chaplain, no duh, and he was- look there we were, several hundred of the toughest monster and demon hunters anybody ever saw, and there wasn't a single one of us that wouldn't hesitate to go cry on his shoulder whenever we felt like it. I-" she paused. "I think if I'd had someone like him to talk to in El Dorado I probably wouldn't ever have joined a gang. Or swiped Auntie's booze stash." she finished musingly. "So yeah, that's when I stopped shutting down and started to actually feel shit like a normal person again."

"Then God bless them." I said sincerely.

"Technically at least one god does thanks to Brother Lance," she actually managed to joke. "Anyway, yeah, I spent like a year and a half there. Learned things about fighting I'd never dreamed of. And to give Navarre's shitshow credit where credit was due, he had sergeant-instructors who were pretty talented at beating a professional level of drill into the heads of juiced-up idiots like us so I was already pretty good. I got to work with all sorts of people, learn about the different kinds of magic and how to fight all sorts of monsters and vampires and stuff like that. We had a dragon in the company, would you believe? Little guy – well, twenty feet long 'little' - only hatched for a few years, but still as tough as a tank all by himself. And some mages, and the priest, and everything else from D-Bees I'd never heard of to this whole squad of Glitter Boy mechajocks all the way from freaking CS Quebec, would you believe? Deserters from the Coalition Army for some reason or another. Never really learned what their deal was." she trailed off. "But yeah, that was Demonbusters, Incorporated. It was… unique."

"But you didn't stay?" I probed, even though by all rights I should have backed off given how much she'd already shared. Then again, she seemed to be a little less tense now, so maybe catharsis was helping?

"Demonbusters was the exact opposite of a 'life is cheap' kinda place." Valerie pointed out. "I mean, yeah, we were mercs. People die on battlefields. But General Smith's philosophy was that there was no such thing as 'expendable'. Which meant that, among other things, he didn't go out of his way to hire Juicers. As in there were only two of us in the whole company while I was there." She sighed. "So they made us partners, because that way both of us could use our full battlefield mobility and still stay in sync." Valerie shook her head. "And it worked… for a while."

"He betrayed you?" I asked.

"Nope." Valerie said. "He just… after a while, I just couldn't stand to be around him. Or anyone." She sighed and continued. "Y'see, him and me were too much alike in a lot of ways. For one, he'd lived on a settlement too, just like I had. Only in his case he got to the surviving dad when his wife and kids got eaten, not the surviving kid. And while he didn't go join a gang after that happened, he did go off his nut."

"He Juiced up." I guessed.

"He Juiced up." she agreed. "Sold everything he had left, took out a loan to pay for the rest, then skipped right out on the loan as soon as he had his augmentation. Started trying to hunt down every demon and monster in the world – it was a big nasty demon that had gone through his home village – all by himself. Crazy, and not in the brain-spike way."

"But he got picked up by Demonbusters too." I nodded.

"Yeah, they mopped up what was left of him after he got stomped biting off more monster than he could chew when they were already in the area taking care of business." Valerie nodded. "Kinda like I had. So General Smith patched him up, paid off his loan, took him under his wing, because hey – man wanted to fight the supernatural for a living and that's what Demonbusters did. And the General was always a sucker for a stray. But…" Valerie shook her head. "Cutter was still one messed-up guy even with a support system. I was coming up on the window for my safe detox – I'd thought I was, at any rate – and I asked him if he was going to go for it when his time came, seeing as how he was a few months behind me. And the look he gave me…" Valerie shivered. "For a moment there I honestly thought he was going to kill me just for asking." She gulped. "Soul-boy might have talked about me being afraid to die, but Cutter? He was praying to die. 100% sure that the man's solution to Last Call coming will be to grab a proton warhead and jump down a monster's throat with it, assuming he hasn't already found his Valhalla some other way."

"Wait, you were thinking about detox?" I asked her, puzzled. Because she'd rejected the notion rather emphatically when I'd raised it-

"I was going to detox." she surprised me. "General Smith and Brother Lance had been gently encouraging me to think about it all the time I was there, even if they didn't push. Told me about all the stuff that a future could have for me even without fighting or juicing or anything. You know, like a grandpa would." She chuckled weakly. "He was about that old anyway. And then…"

"And then?"

"And I finally decided to do it. I went into the clinic and everything. A real clinic, in a real city, not some backalley chop-doc. General Smith had paid for the whole thing. And so the doctors checked me in, started the blood work… and then told me it was already too late to safely try." Valerie trailed off faintly.

"Oh no," I suddenly realized, as several things suddenly came together in my head from my own medical knowledge. "Everybody talks about the two-year safe period to start detoxing in, but that time estimate assumes-"

"That the subject was already 100% healthy before they went in," Valerie moaned. "And I'd spent like two years before Juicing already abusing drugs on a regular basis. My metabolism had been compromised before I'd gotten my augs installed at all, and so by the time I came up on what would still have been a safe window for a normal person I'd already missed mine."

"That's why you went into Last Call after only three years instead of six." I realized. "Pre-existing conditions."

"You're probably right." Valerie agreed. "So, there I was, having just learned that maybe I wanted to live again - and then finding out I wouldn't get to anyway." She shook her head angrily. "And then I just couldn't stand all the fucking sympathetic looks. And I definitely couldn't stand next to Cutter watching his organs fry from the inside out the same as mine were and him just not feeling it. So I mustered out and hit the road, and-" She shrugged. "And I didn't make too many plans about anything from that point on, until I ran into you." she finished.

"And without you, I'd be dead several times over." I said to her.

"That's why I can't stop now." she said. "You're not a whole mercenary company that can afford to carry a passenger because you feel sorry for the kid. You've got nobody except me to watch your back, and you're carrying something valuable enough in your head for whole countries to kill over. You need me at full power and more." she said, and then continued more venomously. "Or at least that's what I'm telling myself so I can flip-flop on my earlier decision to kick the habit without any guilt. Because if you took anything away from my life story, it should be that I am really good at justifying bullshit to myself."

"If I took anything away from your life story, it's that you impress the hell out of me." I said passionately.

"Are your circuits frying?" she glared at me suspiciously. "Or are you just trying to kid me along? Because the only times I've been worth more than half a shit in my life is when better people were carrying me!"

"And that isn't true for me?" I flabbergasted her by saying. "Valerie, you say I'm a nice guy… and okay, I am. But I grew up in a nice place raised by nice people! Would I have stayed half as decent as you have if I'd been through everything you have? Would I be free of nightmares if I wasn't lucky enough to not go through that kind of loss? Would I have learned to distrust the Coalition propaganda about magic and D-Bees if they hadn't killed my uncle just for trying to help sick people? As the number one authority on me sitting around this campfire, let me officially testify that I don't think so!"

"I think you underrate yourself," Valerie shot back. "You- you don't see your worth from the inside. Not like I can see you so plainly from the outsi-" and then she fell silent in realization.

"Just figured it out?" I said to her with a twisted little grin.

"Oh fuck you." she said, but without any actual heat behind her words. "You mouse-trapped me right into that, didn't you?"

"I wish I was that good." I retorted, because I certainly hadn't done more than luck into this turn of the conversation. "No, I'm thinking someone just mouse-trapped herself into admitting that she's maybe just a little less than objective about how awesome a person she really is." I finished with a smile.

Valerie tried to stare me down, but completely failed to because her heart just wasn't in it. "I thought it was your birthday today, not mine." she finally managed.

"Well, when your birthday comes and if I'm feeling depressed about stuff then, your birthday present is getting to verbally kick me in the butt about it." I offered. "Fair's fair."

"Guess so," she said, and leaned back in to hug me again. "So… you're not…?" she trailed off.

"The only thing I am is incredibly happy to have met you." I reassured her. "And I don't think that's ever going to change."

Author's Note: I cannot believe I got an entire chapter out of one character's life story. I mean, I was expecting the conversation to be just one half of a chapter and the other back to rising action, and then it's 5.9k words later and I've barely covered everything. This conversation just flowed onto the Word doc.

But yeah. John's life was largely a blank page before the story began but Valerie's was epically not. So eventually I'd have to get it all on the page. And yeah, now a lot of little things she revealed earlier make more sense.

In fact, I'm mildly worried that I've shot the character development wad here and should have left stuff for later, but I just kept having the hunch that to be IC the dam should be breaking right about now. Of course, I need to develop my MC a little more, because so far his deuteragonist has had much more depth. Well, the creative squirrel knows its mission now and hopefully it will chitter up something soon.

And yes, those who own 'Rifts: Mercenaries' will know that General Smith, Brother Lance, Delgardo the Dragon, and Cutter are all canon characters. Maybe not every Rifts book was full of interesting NPC concepts, but some authors were definitely better at it than others.

Last edited: May 15, 2021

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cliffc999

May 15, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 17, 2021

#370

Chapter 7

I suppose that I started to grow up when I first admitted to myself that the people I loved didn't always know everything.

Like any child from a functional family, I'd originally thought that all wisdom was embodied in my parents. But while my folks had been entirely supportive of my decision to escape the Coalition back when I'd thought I was a mage, outside of negotiating with the Suttons to buy me passage from the Black Market there was nothing else they could do for me. They didn't know anything more about the outside world or how to operate outside the safe little boundaries the Coalition drew around all of its citizens than I did, and so I'd had to fumble blindly out on my own.

And Valerie? Well, I'd been a lost boy who'd just found out that the first person even resembling a mentor figure he'd found in the outside world was actually a bitchy old drunk who'd been cheating him in almost every way possible. And then I ran straight into a fun, badass, and incredibly sexy girl who picked me up – almost literally - in a bar and dragged me home with her. Then she turned out to be vulnerable in a way only that I could save her from, and after that bonding experience we'd headed off to a life of adventure together like something straight out of a novel. Kinda like how Gandalf had crashed in to show little Bilbo Baggins that there was an entire world outside his safe little Shire and tempt him to go running off into the wild, only with less ancient wizardly wisdom and more… adrenaline.

But hearing her life story had made me realize that despite all her training, experience, and determination, Valerie's decidedly quick wits on the immediate tactical level were not matched by any real aptitude for long-term thinking. Because pretty much every stage of her life as she'd narrated it to me had either been about navigating the necessities of immediate survival, or about her being lucky – or unlucky – enough to fall into an opportunity and let other people do the big-picture thinking for her. And in that context "other people" now meant me.

So, while I'd certainly still follow her lead in a firefight, I couldn't just ride along and let her make all the plans anymore. I'd have to review and assess and strategize and actually contribute to our brain trust, and not just in a technological way.

Of course, the first step towards making a strategy was figuring out exactly what your goal was. And right now all I had was a vague sense that 'stopping the four calamities in the Planetary Edict of Distress' was mine. All right… now, if we ran with that premise, what would be the optimum way to start doing that?

To be honest, I still had very little idea. But I was having the growing realization that driving straight towards the probable epicenter of trouble with only two people and one militarized utility vehicle was probably not going to be it.

"How's the fuel?" I asked. Because on top of our long term problems, we also had that little short term problem.

"Between one-half and one-quarter." she replied. "And yeah, we're overdue for a fuel stop. Problem is, there's been a mysterious lack of 'em recently. This is supposed to be a trade road, but there hasn't been anything. Not even beacons."

"And out of all the loot the Harvester had managed to score for us, he didn't have so much as a single drum of diesel. What, did he walk all the way there?" I swore. "Anyway, I'm thinking we should head come about and head south."

"Hrm?" Valerie inquired.

"Interstate 65." I said. "We already crossed it just east of the river, but if we swing south then we can pick it up again as it angles up from the Indianapolis ruins maybe 60 miles southeast of here. And it runs from there to the old wharves at Gary, meaning it's an artery for anyone heading up any of the Interstates from the southern Magic Zone to the Great Lakes."

"Which everybody and their brother uses to smuggle past Chi-Town to everywhere from Green Bay to Tolkeen, because the land route needs driving through the CS territory we just came from." Valerie realized. "Good thinking," she congratulated me as the yanked the wheel and swiveled us around to our new heading.

"So if we're lucky, we find a fuel stop. If we're not lucky we can still wait to flag down a trade caravan and siphon some from them, even if they'll charge us God only knows how much for the 'you ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere you dumbass' premium." I shrugged.

"I really hope you're right, or we'll either have to ditch my wheels and spend weeks hiking to safety or bust our humps pushing my baby a long fuckin' way to nowhere." she groused.

"We really need to get a better power plant for her if we're going to do more long-distance exploring." I agreed. "Well, it's not like my specialty's gotten that much less random for me but I'm back up to a medium charge by now, so let's see what I can get."

I withdrew from the Forge and reviewed the latest gift of knowledge I'd received. Hmm… advanced demolitions? Well I could certainly see how that could come in handy later, but it didn't do much to solve our problem right now.

"Nothing." I said. "Not for getting us a power plant anyway. I've already got enough from prior charges that I could build a little bio-fuel plant, but that would still need us to find somewhere to stop."

"Well, she's flex-fuel so she can burn moonshine if she has to. Even if cleaning her out afterwards is always a bitch," Valerie said. "And at least that changes the problem from 'anywhere with a fuel stop' to 'any settlement at all where we can buy yeast and shit to make the mash out of'."

"Actually I was thinking more about making bio-diesel with a trans-esterification process-" I stopped and simplified it. "I'd need some strong acid for a catalyst, a lot of bio-mass of any kind – even pig slop or manure would work – and some steel pipe and something to make a pressure vessel out of, but I could do it."

"So that's how come I can still buy diesel even in an outpost that hasn't seen a fuel tanker come up from the oil country in years." Valerie shrugged with mild curiosity. "Always wondered how they did that."

We drove along in a companionable silence for a while as I went back to pondering possible long-term plans. "After we find some fuel, we need to get somewhere we can pick up news before we actually go much further into the Magic Zone." I finally thought out loud.

"What kinda news?" Valerie asked.

"Mercenary companies and if they're moving east." I said. "If there's really big trouble on the East Coast, one of the first indicators would be them sending envoys west to try and drum up more troops. Nobody would likely be this far inland yet, but if there was anyone making legitimate contract offers then the settlements further east should already be radio'ing news down the grapevine, right?"

"I don't have the faintest idea what settlements even are on the East Coast," Valerie said. "You never hear about much out that way except about how Old New York's supposed to be some legendary ghost ruins or suchlike. One of the 'Busters used to swear that he'd come from down around Florida though, and that they had something called 'dinosaurs' out in the swamps there."

"Valid point, we also need to find somewhere that people from the East have come across the mountains so we can get some maps that aren't a couple centuries old. Or better yet, a guide." I thought.

"Well, step one to getting that is to find- and there we go!" she said, as the long gray strip of I-65 became visible several miles ahead.

"Okay, let me-" I began, and then stopped in shock. I'd been reaching for the binoculars to get a look at the road ahead, but suddenly my vision seemed to refocus somehow and I was clearly seeing fine details at long distances without them. I felt like I could read a road sign at two miles. I blinked again and the effect seemed to drop away.

"Val, did you ever hear a Crazy say that they had long distance vision?" I asked.

"Actually, yeah." she said. "What, your boosts starting to kick in?"

"Yeah." I nodded. "I was expecting the reflex boost, but not this kind of thing."

"Your hearing's gonna be funny too until you adjust," she said. "They can pick up on all sorts of fine details."

"Well, I'll adapt." I agreed, refocusing my eyes on the horizon again and managing to reproduce the trick more easily this time. "But on the more practical level, road looks clear."

"All right, I'll pull on." she agreed. "Normally I hate bein' that visible, but right now we're hopin' a caravan sees us." After a couple minutes we reached the highway and, since this stretch was still smooth and unbroken, pulled up onto the still-unworn road surface – pre-Fall MDC-reinforced architecture was certainly impressive – and started heading down between the dashed white lines at a good clip.

We'd made it maybe ten miles down the road with me musing over long-term ideas again and running into 'insufficient data' yet again when suddenly I had an impish thought on how to kill two birds with one stone.

"Hey Valerie?" I said. "Tell me a story."

"About what?"

"Anything," I said, more seriously. "I keep trying to make plans but keep running into that I'm green as grass. All I know about how the long road works, about how merc biz works, is what I little I've already picked up by osmosis. So… toss some stuff out there? Almost anything would work, as long as it's got details I haven't heard before."

"You actually want me to bore you with my old war stories." Valerie replied sarcastically, and then burst out chuckling. Apparently I'd guessed right; her reluctance to talk about her past had at least partly gone by the wayside what with the breaking of the ice last night.

"Never heard that one before?" I jibed.

"Not from anyone sober." she threw back. She took a deep and continued in the hammiest voice I'd ever heard her use. "So no shit, there I was…"

At highway speeds, it only took us a little less than an hour to reach the loop around Old Indianapolis. It was typical of the old Interstate highways to have a separate route that detoured around a city in addition to going through them, presumably to let the long-distance traffic segregate itself from the city traffic. So we took the loop exit heading east, and shortly saw signs of upcoming civilization – literally, in that someone had mounted them alongside the shoulder on wooden posts that clearly weren't any kind of remnant pre-Fall work.

KINGDOM OF HAMILTON, 5 MILES the sign said. NO GIANT ROBOTS WITHIN CITY LIMITS.

"Well, at least that means gas." I said the obvious.

"Good thing too, because the needle's at about one-eighth." Valerie said as she pulled off at the highway exit that the sign indicated and drove down the packed dirt road leading from it towards the small city we could see several miles off in the distance. "But that's still like 25 miles in the tank, so we'll make it."

"I have got to overhaul the power plant somehow before we leave this place." I said yet again. "300 miles of range just isn't enough."

"Haven't done much drivin' outside CS territory while not in a convoy." Valerie semi-apologized. "Or else I'd have thought of it earlier."

"Check point up ahead." I peered through the distance.

"Clean-lookin' troops or dirty?" Valerie asked me.

"Clean weapons and gear, rumpled uniforms." I said. "But at least they are uniforms."

"Clean gear means officers who actually pay attention. Uniforms means people they actually care about lookin' like soldiers in front of." Valerie explained. "So probably not a bandit town."

"Not that we'd have much choice if it was." I said, raising the gun to travel-lock position and then lowering my seat down from the turret position. Valerie took her foot off the gas and we eventually drifted to a stop.

"Just the two of you?" the squad leader at the checkpoint said.

"Yup." Valerie said.

"Out here?" he probed.

"We're between companies," she shrugged. "You know how it goes."

"Your business in town?" he continued, mildly rebuffed.

"Fuel and food." I answered him. "Also I might want to look at the engine. Any machine shops in town?"

"The Operator's Guild should have whatever you need." he said in a bored tone of voice. "All right, fifty credits. Each."

Valerie handed it over and he handed us back a pair of engraved brass tokens with some kind of official seal and a serial number. "Those prove you paid the visitor's tax. You ever get caught without yours, it's another fifty creds on the spot. Body armor is fine but no MDC weapons in town, you leave them in your vehicle or in a lockbox. Public drunkenness or brawling is just a fine, but a knife or a gun makes it a serious offense. Stealing gets all your gear and your vehicle confiscated, and killing gets you executed. And if we show up then no second chances, no excuses, everything stops right then or else. You got all that?"

"We got it." Valerie nodded matter-of-factly.

"Welcome to Hamilton," the gate guard finished and waved us past the check point. About half a mile behind him lay the city gates proper.

Hamilton looked to be a city of about eighty thousand people, which was a goodly size for an independent settlement in the wildlands. If it followed the usual pattern then twenty or thirty thousand more people would be living in the settlements in a near belt around the city, growing the food that fed the town. The date on the more ornate sign at the town borders proper said that the city had been founded in 19 PA, or over 80 years ago. Judging from the construction this city had never been the site of a pre-War settlement at all, but had grown up organically over the decades starting from a much smaller town.

Defensively, it had a tall earthern berm around it topped by steel spikes, not a wall, but the earth had still been piled thick and wide enough to stop all but the heaviest vehicle-scale MDC weapons. A military garrison large enough to hold at least two thousand men huddled against the city's wall, surrounded by its own separate defensive fortifications – proper metal and ceramacrete, in their case. The 20-foot-tall silhouettes of what looked to be half a dozen Coalition-surplus UAR-1 Enforcer assault robots poked up over the edge of the wall.

And approximately a quarter mile away from the city, surrounded by its own gleaming black cerametal wall, guarded by even more gleaming black-armoed troops, and proudly flying a very familiar flag overhead, lay another smaller military compound that looked to be large enough to hold several hundred troops and their support all on its own.

"Coalition embassy." Valerie said evenly. "We had a couple little outposts like that outside Fort El Dorado, remindin' us who really owned the gas pipeline."

"Yeah, but that was at least a hundred miles closer to CS borders than we are now." I said.

"Hey, they had an embassy all the way out in fuckin' El Paso and that wasn't much further from Lone Star than we are right now from Chi-Town." Valerie shrugged. "Don't ask me what makes 'em pick one spot on the map over another to try and 'diplomacy' at." she finished, complete with air quotes.

We arrived at the city gate proper, showed our visitor tags, and slowly down the main street looking for a fueling point. Unlike the Burbs or Cedar Rapids, here D-Bees apparently felt safe enough to openly move on the street in daylight. At first glance they looked to be roughly one-fifth of the population, and Valerie quietly identified a couple of the more common types for me. At least half of the D-Bees were all one race, 'Aardan Teks' Valerie called them, but the rest were a barely alike mish-mash.

"Well, at least they're not a total Coalition state yet," I said, acknowledging the non-human population.

Valerie grunted and found the truck stop to pull into, and as soon as we found an open pump I called out 'Diesel!' to the bored-looking kid only a few years younger than I was. He leapt up from his chair to grab the appropriate nozzle just as I jumped down to unlock our gas cap for him. After we'd finished up and paid, we pulled around back and rented a room.

After dismounting the turret gun and locking it most of our weapons in the cargo compartment, Valerie strapped on her neural mace and we both loaded and holstered an SDC pistol each – just in case.

"We've still got that salvage from the university to unload. There's an outfitter supposed to be a block away, might as well see what he'll pay for it." she said.

"The spare gear, sure. I want to hang on to the books." I replied.

"Figured." Valerie joshed, and we headed on out. Half an hour of haggling later, we'd unloaded the armor, weapons, and adventuring gear we hadn't had any use for or cannibalized for parts and walked away richer by over thirty thousand more credits.

"So, there's a town law that no mechanical work may be done except by licensed mechanics." I groused as we left the outfitter's. "So much for us just renting a garage while I retune her ourselves."

"Yeah, and this Operator's Guild monopoly on any technical stuff sure hasn't helped the local prices." Valerie groused. "So, you wanna just boost some parts and find a quiet place out of town to do it?"

"Well, there is one particular part I want to try and find first." I said. "And I'll need to talk to someone senior in the Guild to get it."

"And they'd give you the time of day why?" Valerie asked suspiciously.

I pulled the little plastic carrying case containing the datachip of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics out of my pocket and smiled at her.

"I thought you wanted that for yourself!" she said.

"I already downloaded a copy of it into my headware," I said, tapping my temple with one finger. "Which means I've basically memorized it by now." I finished.

"I sometimes forget just how much that you got boosted by the you-know-what." Valerie said quietly.

"And we don't tell them about it, or that I'm only selling them a copy." I prison-whispered back to her.

The Operator's Guild chapterhouse looked almost as fancy as the palatial residence of the King of Hamilton, which certainly wasn't a comforting sign. The receptionist tried to brush off us riff-raff with a sneering mention that we should take our trade to the annex that sold repair services and not the Guildhouse itself, then tried to buy it off of us with an insultingly low offer. Only my identifying myself as a 'Rogue Scholar' that was perfectly capable of reading it and knew its full value got me us into the Guildmaster's office.

"I apologize for the faulty appraisal by our clerk," the rotund little man smiling at us unctuously from behind his ornate desk faux-apologized. "Ten thousand is indeed far too low an offer for such a treasure. We will gladly pay seventy-five thousand."

"I'd like to take it in trade rather than cash. Specifically, one PA-class nuclear power unit in good condition." I said reasonably.

"Don't be absurd. Eighty-five thousand." he retorted, jerking upright as if nettled.

"I'll accept a used NPU, but it has to have at least 10 years of fuel left in the core." I counteroffered.

"Even 50% depleted that would still be worth a value of one quarter of a million credits." the Guildmaster replied heatedly. "Your datachip is a not a trivial find, agreed, but it's not the lost Great Library either!"

"One quarter of a million is market value for a used NPU like that, not cost. Especially since you should have at least a few of them that you've already pulled out of salvaged and recovered vehicles or power armor for less than seventy-five thousand credits of your cash actually invested in it."

"But we can still sell them for market value, which makes that the true measure of their value to us." the Guildmaster pointed out with a huff. "And if you need a vehicle power plant that badly, that suggests you're not in any condition to leave Hamilton and find a better sale elsewhere. And who exactly is going to make you a better offer for such an item in our city than us? Ninety thousand, and not a credit more."

"The people with the nice shiny skull hats who set up right outside your gate?" Valerie drawled. "I mean, sure, they wouldn't pay us as much as a whole NPU, but they'd certainly beat out a measly ninety thousand. So are you really sure you want to take such a hard line at the bargainin' table?"

"Are you so certain that you want to see me take a 'hard line'?" the Guildmaster said very quietly. "After all, by at least one interpretation of Hamilton's laws that chip could be considered a vital strategic resource." he continued as one hand started to slowly dip beneath his desk-

I rapidly flicked the chip sideways to Valerie, who easily caught it in her fist. "Hey!" she interrupted him. "Wanna see what happens if I squeeze really hard?"

"You wouldn't." he said, frozen in mid-motion. "That's worth a fortune!"

"But all the money in the world still isn't worth more than oxygen." I said in an entirely calm and reasonable tone of voice. "So yes, if the alternative is you shooting us for it? Then we should entirely remove your motivation to shoot."

"And if you shot anyway, we'd at least spite the fuck out of you on our way out." Valerie smirked.

Two pairs of eyes locked with one, and eventually one blinked. His hand came up from below his desk to press the intercom button instead. "I want one PA-class nuclear power unit, in good condition and with at least 10 years' of fuel left in the core, waiting for pickup at the front desk. I'll escort the customer there myself." the Guildmaster said tonelessly into the mike.

"Yes sir." whatever flunky he'd paged acknowledged him, and he clicked off.

"And a bill of sale too, please." Valerie chimed in. "Signed copies for both of us."

"Of course." the Guildmaster replied acidly. "We wouldn't want any misunderstandings, now would we."

So after an uncomfortably silent wait of a few minutes, the intercom buzzed to tell us that our delivery was ready. I did a hasty yet conclusive examination of the goods to make sure we weren't being sold a lemon before we completed the hand-off one step inside the door of the Guildhall. And then as soon as we got outside we tossed the NPU in the back of the truck and drove away as fast as we legally could within city limits.

"Fuck me!" Valerie swore vehemently. "I was expectin' a haggling session, not armed robbery with a badge! What the hell was wrong with that asshole?!?"

"I don't know and I'm not funding an expedition to find out." I said.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," Valerie agreed as we drove towards the eastern gate. "We filled the tank, we got the new engine you can install later, so now we bail."

But despite our haste, we didn't even make it past the gate. Whatever "in" the Operator's Guild had with the government of Hamilton it was far more considerable than we'd guessed.

Despite our best efforts to expeditiously clear the zone, we still didn't beat the speed of radio. The gates were closed to traffic by the time we reached them, and there wasn't anything we could do versus over a dozen armored troops with MDC weapons except put our hands up. That would have been true even if all our own MDC weapons hadn't still been locked in the trunk. So we were arrested on the spot, and our trial was a travesty of justice that didn't even take half an hour.

The charge, of course, was the alleged theft of 250,000 credits worth of nuclear power unit from the Operators' Guild. Despite our prudence in obtaining a bill of sale it turned out to be a pointless precaution when the arresting officer simply sneered and threw away our 'obvious forgery' before snapping on the handcuffs. The Guildmaster swore that he'd never spoken to us at all, and his secretary and receptionist backed him up. One guard from the Guildhall, with a bandage wrapped around his head that I was certain nobody had even bothered to unwrap to check if a genuine wound was under it, swore that we were indeed the two miscreants who'd allegedly beaten him over the head and stolen the NPU right off the loading dock. As if such a thing would even be stored there in the first place.

Nobody asked us for our testimony, or even acted like they had the slightest concern for what it might possibly be. And the judge's verdict, of course, was a foregone conclusion from the start.

"Out! Everybody out!" the guard shouted at us, as we were both unceremoniously shoved out the back end of the VTOL. The view the all-too-nearby ruins of Old Indianapolis confirmed what the compass function in my implants had told me about which way we'd been flying.

Across the low river, the ruined city of Indianapolis glimmered at night in the eldritch light of the multiple ley lines that criss-crossed directly through it. The large population centers had seemed to attract such things during the Cataclysm; the multiple rifts opened during such nexi at the Age of Chaos was the primary cause for why most if not all of the old pre-Rifts cities were utterly uninhabitable now. The tide of monsters, demons, spirits, and space-time distortions would have killed everyone as quickly as a bullet to the head if nowhere near as neatly. Even now, centuries later, ruins like this were typically extremely hazardous to anyone except the most skilled and lucky explorers.

My eyes widened as I realized that while there were several prefab buildings scattered around in a small compound, there were no fences or walls. Likewise, the small group of people scattered around the packed-dirt landing pad were all wearing the same orange-colored survival jumpsuits we were, and wearing the same collars.

"Some fresh meat for you, Anna." The guard said, giving us a rough shove towards the tall narrow-faced redhead who seemed to be the head prisoner around here. "Okay, roll call!" he barked out, and everybody formed up on a line. "You two, stand at the end!"

We grudgingly stood where we were told, and the chief guard aimed a portacomp at us and all our collars bleeped. "So, where's Jenkins?" the chief guard asked sardonically.

"Got eaten." Anna said tonelessly. "You gonna leave his rations anyway?" she continued coarsely.

"Fuck no." the guard swore. "One weeks' worth of rat bars for everybody alive, no more, no less. And you're lucky you're getting that much, because last week's take was shit. You lazy-asses keep underperforming like this and the next time we come out here, we might pop a random collar just to encourage the rest of you."

"You know the salvage runs aren't as predictable as going to the corner store." Anna said firmly. "Some months it's boom, some months it's bust. We've got a whole city to pick through across that bridge."

"Cry me a river." the guard retorted. "You don't make enough points, you don't stay alive. It's just that simple."

"Can we unload the food now? You don't want to stay here any longer than you have to, I'm sure." Anna said with weary contempt. At the guard's wave four prisoners stepped forward to start unloading the supply boxes while the rest of us stayed back behind the marked line facing more guns. Soon enough they were done, and the VTOL sealed back up and took off leaving behind us two, a small pile of ration boxes, and our new camp mates.

"Anna Welles." the red-headed woman introduced herself to us jadedly after the VTOL was gone. "Welcome to hell, kids."

As it turned out, 'Hell' was more formally named 'Special Salvage Camp Number One'. Hamilton had more prosaic facilities for most of its prisoners, including a nearby zinc mine they staffed with most of their 'hard labor' sentences. But anyone judged to have the right aptitudes to survive "special salvage duty" – such as adventurers like us - was sent here. Because there was a lot of Old World wealth still available in those ruins, along with the ever-present faint hope of one day making a miracle strike like I had in the ruins of Purdue University. And the Guildmaster wanted as many of those lucky finds for himself as he could get, and was entirely willing to expend human lives to get it.

The salvage camp was a prison without guards or walls. Instead, we had the encrypted MDC bomb collars locked around our necks, that could be detonated singly or in batches by anyone with the codes and a radio transmitter. If they used the main long-distance antenna, someone could push a button while sitting at their desk in Hamilton and we'd still all die.

On top of that, the camp was strictly limited by the food supply. Once every week the shuttle flight brought out the next week's food, with suitable precautions to prevent the transport from being hijacked. Not that doing so was a viable threat anyway given that any one of the guards could kill any number of us with a button push, let alone their full MDC body armor and weapons. In addition, the collars had a two-week resettable dead-man clock; even if you somehow managed to shield yourself so the detonation broadcast they'd send after you failed to make roll call once didn't reach you, failure to make two weekly roll calls in a row was a death sentence anyway. So you couldn't hide out or run, even if you had anywhere to run to.

We were actually allowed some basic weapons, because sending us into the ruined city to explore without any would have simply been a roundabout way of executing us – but the cheap CS-surplus laser rifles they issued us all had been installed remote locators and shutoff switches. And the circuits for those were as heavily encrypted and sealed as the bomb collars. As an additional precaution all the laser rifles had to be stacked and locked in the cases provided for them in camp, with their locations checked by transponder before the VTOL would land at all. There were two flights each week – one to pick up the week's takings, and another half a week later to bring out the food. Assuming there'd been enough salvage to earn enough food.

The chief cause of death in the special salvage detail was the various hazards of exploring Old Indianapolis. The second-greatest cause was suicide. And the third was being the person who drew low-card loses when the guards would randomly execute a prisoner for the team's consistent failure to make quota. They didn't even bother keeping individual score of our efforts; everybody worked or everybody starved. Outside of that, we were free to do whatever we wanted… for what good that was worth.

"Don't blame your friend, girl." Anna said as we sat together in her hut. She'd explained the rules of the camp to us, then had us introduce ourselves and heard out our story. Now she was busy explaining the historical background behind the mess we'd gotten caught up in. "Our beloved Guildmaster has been running that scam for years. The minute you walked in the Guildhall and showed him that chip, it was already too late for you to get out."

"I don't blame John," Valerie reassured me. "I blame that fat little fuck in the big fancy chair. But how the hell does he run that high-handed a scam and get away with it? That kinda shit would be a little too raw even for the Burbs!"

"Because he doesn't do it every time," Anna said. "If he did then yeah, explorers would eventually get wise. He only takes a pigeon whenever there's a really good profit margin on stiffing them and he's sure there's not gonna be a comeback. Hell, from what you described he kinda jumped the gun with you two by his usual standards. Then again, if that old reference book you found was really that valuable then he wouldn't be able to help himself." She sighed. "It didn't use to be this bad. Skillings is a bastard." she swore.

"How did he get into power?" I probed.

"Okay, the Guild's always been the power behind the throne since the early days." Anna explained. "Without the engineers to maintain the power plant and the mines and everything, we wouldn't remotely have the economy to sustain our size. But up until Skillings became Guildmaster, the Guild and the King worked together. He had the prestige and the army to hold the city around him and defend it, they kept all the tech working behind the scenes, everybody stayed satisfied. But some people just can't-" she trailed off venomously.

"Asshole's gotta asshole." Valerie said. "Yeah, I've seen like ten dozen of his kind. They don't usually climb this high and survive this long, though."

"Oh, he's a tricky sonofabitch, Guildmaster Skillings is." Anna swore. "At any rate-" she sighed. "More and more, the Guild stopped being a trade union and a guarantee that Hamilton would always have its own independent technical institute and started being a shadow government. Didn't do them the right favors? Technical failures, and somehow the repairs would never take. Or else they'd reassess you an arm and a leg and bankrupt you for access to things you couldn't live without. The King tried to clamp down, but-" she swore. "Suddenly the army couldn't keep its robots and high-tech vehicles working reliably without Guild aid."

"The military had to have its own technicians." I protested. "Your King wouldn't miss something that obvious, would he?"

"No he wouldn't." Anna nodded to me as if I'd scored a point. "But the Guild had still trained the military technicians, and that meant Skillings knew which ones would like to live on more than their pay. So to cut a long story short, for on about the past decade nothing's jumped in the town without asking the Guildmaster how high. Because he's sleazy enough that he never quite gets caught sticking his greasy fingers into the government on every level. The King tries his best, but can never get anything done without the technicians and the clerks-" she wrung her hands. "His Majesty's barely hanging on now as anything more than a figurehead. He's gotten desperate enough that he's actually deliberately dangling the threat of a Coalition takeover of the town to try and get Skillings to unclench a little. Or so I've been told, anyway. I've been in this shithole seven years, so I'm a little behind on any news that isn't second-hand."

"How long is the average sentence?" I asked.

"Kid, there is no average sentence," she said, looking at us in grim despair. "You get put on the special salvage detail, you stay here until you die." She sighed. "I'm the old-timer of the camp. Nobody I started with is here anymore. None of their replacements are even here anymore." She sighed. "We all do what we can here to keep each other alive, even if we hate each other's guts, because we all sink or swim on how much salvage we can collectively score. There's no individual grading."

"And how is it that your collar is never the one that pops?" Valerie asked suspiciously. "You've lived through that many random draws?"

"That is the obvious conclusion, isn't it?" Anna nodded to her respectfully. "But no, I'm not that fat bastard's snitch. Ask anyone else in this camp and they'll tell you it just ain't possible. Sometimes I think that it's God's own joke that I'm never the one whose number comes up. And sometimes I think Skillings arranges it that way, because he likes to know that I'm still out here and helpless to do a goddamn thing about-" She stopped and swore. "He killed my husband, you see."

"Shit. I'm sorry." Valerie apologized.

"Michael-" she stopped and swallowed, then continued more calmly. "My husband was one of the high-ranking in the Guild. He and Skillings were both up for guildmaster in the last election eleven years ago. Then he died and let the fat fuck win uncontested. I had my suspicions for years that the accident was no accident, and one day-" She chewed her lip. "It was no longer a suspicion. So when I found out the truth I lost my head. Then I tried to blow his head off. One of my own men must have snitched on me though, because he already knew I was coming. I never got close."

"One of your own men?" I asked her.

"Colonel Anna Welles, late of the Hamilton Royal Guards, at your service." she said ironically. "And… fuck me, why am I telling this all to you?" she trailed off confusedly.

"Because John's a manipulative little shit who can con you into dumping your life story on him before you even know you're doing it." Valerie said affectionately.

"Oh, are you two together?" the Colonel drawled, while looking us over again with a knowing eye.

"We are." I admitted.

"Okay, then you kids get to bunk together." she said matter-of-factly. "It causes trouble in the camp sometimes when people pair off, but if you're already a couple on intake then nobody gripes if you stay one. Just don't make us hear you, okay? Trust me, nobody wants to listen to that."

"Duly noted." I said. "So-"

"So, time for bed." Anna cut me off, rising to her feet. "We do a city expedition every day until and unless we've already scored enough for the week we can risk taking a break. Some days we stay out and fort up in the field, and don't make it back until the day after. So get your rest, and no lollygagging!"

We quietly left the woman to her own regrets and headed over to the hut she'd told us was ours. "Val, I'm-" I began as we stepped inside, only to be interrupted.

"What the FUCK?!?" Valerie exploded. "They took everything from us, and now they'll keep us here until they've worked us to death? And all because one fat frog in his own little pond thinks he's free to take everything he wants? We gotta get the fuck out of here!"

"Val, there is no 'out of here'. " I said tonelessly. "We're gonna die in this hole."

She turned to face me in incredulous shock, then immediately bit back her words as she saw me cupping one hand around my ear while pointing at my collar with the other.

"Damn it!" she wailed as despairingly as she could- and then nodded at me and winked.

My attempt to consult the Forge that night bore no fruit. The only spark I could access this time was one of the largest tier, and I hadn't yet built up enough charge to be able to assimilate it. I'd just have to solve this problem with the considerable gifts I'd already accumulated, then.

My sleep requirement had been cut at least in half by my M.O.M. firmware, so I had plenty of time left over to case the camp. There were currently seven prisoners in the "special salvage detail", counting both of us, so we didn't even fill up the ten prefab huts that had been provided. Apparently Guildmaster Skillings had ambitions for this little scheme of his.

"Can't sleep?" the gray-haired man standing watch from the roof of the common hut called down to me as I slowly paced around the camp. I looked up to see a scarred face split by a crude, glowing bionic eye looking down at me with a laser rifle held at port arms in one mechanical and organic hand each. He was almost an illustration of the typical Headhunter, a career soldier of fortune who used light bionic and cybernetic augmentation and extensive training to keep up with the more heavily augmented competition.

"Nope." I called back to him, and kept walking.

"Well, try not to let it get to you." he said matter-of-factly. "We're shorthanded enough as is. You go off your nut and get yourself popped, that's no good for anyone. I don't wanna go through another 'quota enforcement'." he said witheringly.

"How'd they get you?" I changed the subject, leaning my shoulders up against the side of the common hut. I heard his weight shift as he stepped back from the edge and resumed his patrol.

"I was passin' through town with one of the caravans, and ended up hittin' a guy with the wrong end of the bottle in the wrong bar." he replied. "He died, and I got sent here." I heard him hawk and spit one right off the roof. "Now the fuckhead had gone and pulled a vibro-knife on me first, but he was a local and I wasn't so there you go. What'd you do?"

"Me? Oh, I did two horrible things," I replied with as much sarcasm as I could muster. "First, I implied that the Guildmaster was a greedy asshole."

"Hah!" I heard him bark from up above. "And what was the second thing?"

"I proved it." I finished, properly deadpan.

"Pffffft!" I heard him hiss from up above as he desperately stifled a laugh. "You're all right, kid."

I got up and resumed my slow circuit around the camp, and he returned to his lookout. All right, I mused to myself. If I were you, now where would I be- ah!

As it turned out, the power for the camp's various utilities was provided by a small group of solar panels set up around back of the common hut. And one of those panel arrays just happened to be pointing in the right direction that a directional signal beamed from it ould be leading directly back to Hamilton City. I walked over to get a good look at the outside of the unit, and sure enough, there were slight differences in the mounting and layout as compared to the other panel arrays that suggested an entirely separate device had been built into the casing. As well as the wear patterns around the locked access hatch as compared to the ones on the other panels, suggesting that whatever was in there, the maintenance techs from the city paid significantly more attention to it than they did to the rest of the power collectors. Bingo.

Before I'd even left our hut a close visual examination of Valerie's collar had been enough to confirm my original suspicion that one of the things they'd built into them was indeed an audio pickup. But the collars wouldn't have the range or the power to transmit a signal all the way back to the city, and even despite the 'sensitive' nature of our camp I couldn't imagine the Guildmaster had an eager line of volunteers to spend all day listening to us. So there would have to be a storage buffer and relay transmitter built into the camp itself somewhere, and set up so that our collars would dump into it and then the collected take would be beamed back to the city at regular intervals. That way they could go back over the recorded talk listening for any attempts to make escape plans whenever they had a reason to suspect, but didn't have to spend any effort on real-time monitoring. Presuming he had access to a sophisticated enough programming set-up he could even set up some kind of speech-recognition engine with key-word search capability. If you were the sort of techno-fetishist that the Guildmaster seemed to be, it was one of the more likely setups you'd fall back on instead of simply paying off someone in camp to be an informant.

Then again, there wouldn't be much of a bribe you could offer an informant in this camp that he could possibly hope to keep hidden from the rest of us. Except perhaps a guarantee of never being caught in a random draw, but if Colonel Welles was to be believed she was the only one who'd survived long enough to be a candidate for that and she had an excellent personal motivation not to be a collaborator. Assuming her story was true, that is. But unless every other prisoner in camp was an out-of-towner and her the only native – which would be a dead giveaway by itself and also render any such scheme pointless – exposing her story as a lie would be as simple as asking them tomorrow, so it very likely was true. Just because the Guildmaster was a greedy asshole didn't mean I could safely assume that he was an idiot.

Since the sophistication of this setup was already bordering on being elaborately over-engineered, I didn't imagine that there'd be any major redundancies set up for that relay point. I'd still search the camp for signs of such before I turned in, of course, but unless I found them then I'd rest assured I'd just located my first possible point of attack. The entire concept of the "special salvage camp" could only have occurred to someone far too much in love with their own cleverness and mean-spirited and small-souled enough to oppress and rob where he could simply have paid.

And while the Guild had done a scan for implants during our prisoner in-processing, they simply didn't have the tech base to begin to comprehend that my Adeptus Mechanicus cranial insets were anything other than some local variant on headware memory or maybe an implanted portacomp. They hadn't even suspected that I had enough computer processing power inside my skull to let me crack open even state-of-the-art CS encrypted tactical networks, let alone whatever local innovations the tech base of an isolated city-state like Hamilton could provide. As soon as I could scrounge a new interface cable in the city somewhere, I could get at the programming port for that unit and selectively deafen every microphone in this camp. Because it didn't matter what the collars heard. It only mattered what the storage unit in that relay chose to record.

And once we could actually talk freely to the other prisoners, then we could really get started.

Author's Note: And so our heroes run into the first obstacle on their journey that will take longer than a single chapter to resolve. And it wasn't even their fault this time!

One of the things post-apoc fiction only sometimes gets into is the fact that if you're enough away from civilization and you run the only civilized enclave around, there is a lot of abuse of power you can get into without hitting the 'Do You Hear The People Sing' threshold. Especially if you're clever enough to not do too much of it to the locals, or at least not in such a manner that you're not successfully dividing and conquering. The royal family of Hamilton aren't necessarily saints any more than any of the petty kings ruling little fiefdoms in the badlands are, but people like Guildmaster Skillings aren't necessarily as rare as they should be. Likewise, just because someone is not down with the Coalition way of life doesn't automatically make them good.

Oh, and if you're wondering at the name then yes I did deliberately name him after the old CEO of Enron. There's no real resemblance outside of the name, but it still gets the point across. :)

Perks This Chapter: Baboom (Smash Up)

Last edited: May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

May 17, 2021

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cliffc999

cliffc999

May 18, 2021

#479

Chapter 8

It wasn't until over two weeks later that I first broached the subject of escape with anyone except Valerie. And even then it wasn't entirely by my choice.

Of course I'd had my reasons for waiting. First off, the new M.O.M.-type enhancements I'd programmed into my Mechanicus implants to fully sync in. If we were going to take on these kinds of odds then I needed to be as combat-capable as possible.

So I allowed time for my implants to gradually adapt to and apply nanoscopically-precise targeted stimulation of exactly the right electrical impulses in the brain to tap latent capacities that no unaugmented human could achieve. now I had access to all of the abilities that any Crazy had without any of the drawbacks. Little things like my strength being augmented to levels notably in excess of human maximum. Valerie and I working together could probably have picked up her ATV one of us on each bumper and carried it. Oh, she was still at least twice as strong as I was given that Juicers had the edge in raw physical prowess over Crazies, but being second only to a Juicer as far as augmented humanity went still left you notably past what even exceptional normal athletes could accomplish.

My endurance and speed was similarily boosted. I could now go for up to three days before lack of sleep began to impair me and refresh myself fully with only a few hours. I could continuously exert myself for over ten times as long as I would have been able to prior to augmentation and yet still recover all my stamina twice as quickly afterwards. My mental reaction time increased so much that like Valerie I now could automatically try to dodge or parry attacks with zero wasted motion and without interrupting my own attack sequence. I still wasn't guaranteed success any more than she was, but I was much harder for any less-augmented opponent to actually land a blow on now. And I could briefly sprint at almost forty miles per hour now, and do a sustained run at twenty. My jogging pace was now at least comparable to a normal human running pace. Again, my Juicer girlfriend was still incrementally ahead of me in all physical categories, but then again she was running a far more physically invasive augmentation package than I was.

And in the category of sensory enhancements I was actually ahead of Valerie, given that my enhancements were computer-augmented and directly to the relevant centers of the brain. I could see clearly so long as there was any light at all, had a distance vision resolution so fine that I could read small print at almost two miles away, hear a muttered cough or a snapping twig up to a couple hundred feet away, and smell and taste almost like a bloodhound. Even my sense of touch was boosted to where my fine motor manipulation was now in the range of precision machine tools and I could almost feel individual threads in cloth just by running my fingertips over it.

The sheer amount of latent capacity already present in the human physique that the M.O.M. brain implants could reach and stimulate merely by artificially firing the right neurons in sequence was amazing. Pre-War science had certainly done some amazing things, even if they hadn't been able to stop human brains from eventually melting down under the side effects. But whatever other-dimensional science lay behind my Mechanicus implants already included a smoother, deeper level of mind-machine interface than any Earth scientists had ever achieved. The original designers simply hadn't known about certain latent potentialities in the human mind, but my reverse-engineering the firmware from a set of Crazy implants and programming them into me had taken care of that.

The second reason was to take advantage of the opportunity for combat training with my new body. The outlook that my knowledge of weaponization granted me had an effect I hadn't anticipated. As soon as I made the intuitive leap that my body was a weapon as well, I was able to intuitively comprehend exactly how to use it to best effect. Augmented even further by my knowledge of human anatomy, my talent for weaponization meant that I was able to start creating the optimum unarmed combat style for myself as quickly as I could be exposed to the relevant concepts to be inspired by and work from.

And given that several people in the camp were also operating on reduced sleep requirements like we were, and that we routinely had to brave the ruins with limited weapons and no armor, working out was a very popular pastime. Max, the old Headhunter I'd met standing watch on my first night here, was one of the first to volunteer himself for unarmed combat practice. And he'd turned out to be an invaluable resource towards that end. He was even less of an intellectual type than Valerie was, but anybody who'd been in his line of work long enough to get gray and balding knew quite a lot. He'd even picked up actual commando training in hand-to-hand somewhere, bringing a degree of science and refined skill well above Valerie's own practical but still rough-and-ready mastery of the field, and he was entirely happy to teach a willing and talented pupil. If nothing else, it gave him something to do besides the same old weary salvage runs and patrols.

"So, why didn't you get the spikes?" Max asked me one day during a spar, as he'd yet again proven that even with all my unique talents old age, treachery, and limited bionics could still trump youth and top-line neural augmentations. At least for now.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Kid, I've gone around with more than enough Crazies to know." he said tolerantly as we fell back into position and started feeling each other out again. "You don't twitch like they do so you must've just gotten your plugs, but you're definitely not just a rogue scholar with those moves." He shook his head. "Why the fuck somebody with all your book-learning would fry his brain like that, I have no idea. Pity you got dumped in here before you had a chance to figure out how dumbass a move that was and get your chips yanked out."

"They're not a normal set," I said. "I was… sort of an experimental subject."

"Huh," he grunted as he stepped back to dodge my attempt to catch him blinking. "You volunteer?"

"What do you think?" I non-answered.

"Fuckin' mad scientists," he grumbled. "So, was it the Coalition did you up or some other assholes?"

"They didn't really introduce themselves." I said. "But yeah, I'm not sure where what I've got in my head comes from. I think they were using tech from somewhere on the other side of a rift."

"Yeah, I heard something about that." he surprised by saying. "There were these new guns starting to show up on the black market just before I got tossed in here, real exotic stuff. Rare as hell and pricey to match but not even CS or Northern Gun stuff could touch what they did. 'Naruni' tech, they called it. Nobody really knows where it's from except rumors that some new bunch of D-Bees are all behind it, guys who actually have a regular way back home."

"Really." I said, raising an eyebrow. "Maybe that's worth looking into."

"Yeah, right after you get your free pardon from Emperor Prosek," Max snorted, and then grunted as I finally got one past his guard and into his solar plexus while he was distracted. "You little fucker, you hit me when I wasn't looking!" he growled with comically overdone anger.

"Isn't that the best time?" I retorted, and he laughed.

"Your girl taught you your basics just right," he acknowledged. "That is entirely the best time."

The third reason we waited was to have time to start getting to know our fellow prisoners and try to figure them out. Who was here unjustly and who genuinely deserved to be here. Who could be relied upon to keep a cool head in a crisis and who'd run off half-cocked. Who had what kind of useful skills and who didn't.

There were three prisoners remaining after me, Valerie, Anna, and Max. One of them, Leonard, was a Juicer merc like Valerie. Unlike her he was also a career scumbag, sentenced to death for killing two cops and injuring several others while resisting arrest after going on a drugged-up rampage through the adventurer's quarter. Nobody liked him and few people got anywhere near him. He'd survived almost ten months in here so far, most of it as the lone expendable scout sent ahead of the group to draw fire.

The second, Hayley, was a tall, pretty blonde girl only a year older than me. And she was a Burster, like Jenny McCloskey had been back home before the Coalition took her away. Her psionic powers allowed her to mentally sense, create, and control fire to an extent, even making it hot enough to burn through MDC armor if she exerted herself. She could also sheath herself for brief periods of time in an aura of superheated plasma, giving her an MDC force field and allowing her to do great amounts of damage to anything she touched. While she could only exert herself in short bursts and her powers were still largely untrained, she was still the most powerful person in camp.

Her backstory was even less fair than most of ours. The first manifestation of her powers had accidentally burned down her house and caused major property damage and several injuries. No one died, but it was still enough for the justice system to sentence her to ten years in prison when her family couldn't pay the damages, and then the Guildmaster decided that her powers would be of better use on the salvage team – plus some concerns about the inability of the prison mine to safely contain a Burster – and had her sent here.

And the last was Ulthras. Ulthras was a practitioner of magic, and a mysterious and taciturn one that kept largely to himself. You could pick him out of any crowd at a glance because he was over six and a half feet tall, yet almost freakishly thin with it. He was the most recent prisoner intake before us, having only been here a little less than a month. As near as anyone could tell he wasn't one of the more powerful ley line walkers, or else they'd likely never have risked him out here, bomb collar or not. But he could still cast spells, sense nearby ley lines and nexuses, and tell a rift was about to open. Such divinations were of great use when exploring a ruined city, and that plus his spell magic and a set of reflexes that hinted at some noteworthy adventuring experience in his mysterious background had already earned him a place as a valued specialist on the salvage crew.

But in all the time Ulthras had been here only Colonel Welles had barely ever heard him answer more than in monosyllables – and that only once, during his own welcome-and-orientation session to the camp. Even during brainstorming sessions he largely confined himself to simple affirmatives or negatives. You never even saw him without his everpresent robes and hood. He more than did his job and was reliable in the crunch, but he was simultaneously the most exotic and the most isolated figure in the camp.

Of course, one of the things about not having an extensive social circle is that it gave you plenty of time to people-watch. Which is why we were surprised in our quarters in the middle of the night, a couple of weeks after our arrival.

"I come in peace," a quiet, cultured voice interrupted us. It was the voice of a bard or an orator, a polished and urbane diction with a faint yet unidentifiable accent. It was as out of place in a camp like this as a brodkil demon in a fancy restaurant. We both shot to our feet as fast as our augmented reflexes could manage to face the door.

And we stared in shock at the surprising figure of Ulthras, who had somehow managed to slip into our hut and close the door behind him without either of us sensing a thing. "Aren't you being chummy for someone who keeps to himself so much?" Valerie challenged him, as Ulthras, keeping his hands in plain sight, slowly folded his six-and-a-half foot stature down to sit down on the floor with his against the door he'd just entered.

"You two are different than the others." Ulthras countered smoothly. "You play at being the common Juicer living only in the moment, as your nieran plays at being the brilliant yet naïve scholar whose journey of discovery has been tragically cut short. But whenever you believe yourself unobserved both of you are always peering with hawk-like eyes. Always memorizing and judging everything you can." He smiled with a lazy yet still somehow charming arrogance. "You remind me of myself, actually."

I mimed People are listening and pointed at my collar, and his little smirk grew even wider. "If you could sense magic then you would know that a field of silence is currently encircling all three of our collars. We may speak freely, at least for the immediate future."

"If you can magic 'em like that, why are you still wearin' yours?" Valerie probed.

"The mechanisms are very complex, and the explosive charge quite formidable." Ulthras replied matter-of-factly. "I was reluctant to conduct any extensive experiments by myself, not when I'd have only a single opportunity to get it right."

"So you want to form an escape committee with us." I analyzed.

"I certainly have no intent of spending the rest of my not inconsiderable life in this pit." he replied resolutely.

Valerie's expression firmed up as something the man said seemed to confirm a suspicion for her. "Wrists." she said simply.

Ulthras nodded at her with respect, as if she'd somehow scored a point. "You've met one of us before, then?" he smiled.

"Rode with the Demonbusters for more than a year. We had a pair of Undead Slayers with us, tattoos and all." she replied.

Ulthras nodded again in acknowledgement and pulled back the sleeves of his robe to reveal that both of his wrists were wrapped in gauze dressings. With long, nimble fingers he unwrapped one and then the other to reveal two of the most elaborate tattoos I'd ever seen, ones that somehow seemed to glow faintly in the dim murkiness of our unlit hut. On the right wrist was the stylized yet almost photorealistic image of a heart-shaped icon being pierced by a stake, and the left wrist bore the image of a long sword wreathed in black flames whose hilt was a silver cross. And I was just barely puzzling out the tiny letters spelling out some alien motto on the horizontal section of the cross when suddenly the tattoo faded from his wrist just as a life-sized version of the same sword appeared in his hand!

"Whoa!" I yelped as I jumped back in shock. Valerie tensed but didn't move.

The sword vanished in-between eyeblinks and the tattoo reappeared on the inside of his wrist. "The Marks of Heritage." he said meaningfully as he began to rewrap the bandages.

"A True Atlantean," Valerie breathed in awe. "God damn, how'd you end up in this dump?"

"I also brought a salvaged relic to the greedy little one, and I also was taken as a slave." Ulthras said with a hiss that seemed to rip the very air apart for all that it was barely above a whisper. "And if you know of my people, young warrior, then you should know how dire an insult that is to one of us."

I looked at Valerie, and she nodded at me. "Trust him. True Atlanteans have been fighting the demons all across the multiverse since before human civilization." she reassured me.

"All right, we admit it. We're working on an escape." I acknowledged to him.

"Good! Now as to that, I have the beginnings of a-" he began, and broke off as I held up one finger to ask for the floor. He looked annoyed but eventually conceded.

"I already know where the relay transmitter that collects and digitizes the recordings from our collars for batch transmission back to Hamilton is." I said. "And if I can get the proper tools, I can leave it reporting only what we want it to."

Ulthras raised an impressed eyebrow at that. "Now that would be useful. Does your technical expertise also extend to doing anything with these collars?"

"I don't want to risk probing into one while anyone is still wearing it." I said. "But I understand that the camp had a casualty just a few days ago? Do you think you could show me where his body is?"

Ulthras looked at me more soberly and tilted his head, as if seeing me for the first time. "I think that this just might prove to be a more fruitful collaboration than I'd hoped for."

"Hey, what's nieran mean, anyway?" Valerie asked suddenly.

"Life-partnered. Spouse. Husband." he replied matter-of-factly, and then smirked at our respective blushes. "Oh I'm sorry, was I wrong?"

"Well-" I began to fumble. Valerie's blushing somehow increased to where she should have been setting off IR alarms and she couldn't even speak.

"Lords of Light, I had forgotten just how young humans can be." the insufferable jerk chuckled at us.

After he finally left and we both let the embarrassing moment just slide right past by mutual silent consent, Valerie instead chose to bring me up to date what little she knew about the 'True Atlanteans'.

In the ancient mythical past of Earth they'd risen to power as perhaps the first human culture to discover magic. They'd used their knowledge to give themselves special powers and long life – True Atlanteans could apparently live for centuries. As a magically-distinct subspecies of humanity they'd risen to great heights and then apparently had their own version of the Cataclysm millennia before the one that everyone was familiar with. Only instead of drowning the world in mana and opening all the rifts, what theirs had done was close the barriers between Earth and other dimensions. The magic went away and with all their civilization and technology dependent on magic, their world fell apart. Atlantis itself – the whole island – somehow vanished into the dimensions, and the few surviving True Atlanteans left Earth while they still could to wander all the myriad ways of the multiverse. Most of them traditionally became crusaders, champions against the same sorts of supernatural evils and hubris that had doomed and ruined ancient Earth. Or at least that's what Valerie remembered from what the other True Atlantean warriors who'd been with her old company had said.

And then the Cataclysm had eventually happened, bringing magic back to the world and at a higher level than even the heights of Atlantean civilization did as well. The island of Atlantis likewise returned from whatever dimensional sargasso it had been in the entire time, but had been taken and possessed by the Splugorth, vastly powerful extra-dimensional slavers and demon lords and all their minions. And only well after that had the scattered millions of True Atlanteans left in the multiverse learned that the way to their ancestral homeworld was now again open, but that their old homeland had been lost to some of their greatest enemies and in such numbers that they couldn't possibly hope to retake it. So most of the scattered Atlantean clans still remained in whatever homes-in-exile they'd found out there among the other dimensions and stars, but scattered sages, demon hunters, undead slayers, and dimensional scouts and pilgrims still gradually trickled back here in greater and greater numbers to learn what had happened while they were gone for so long, and to do what they could against the dangers of the Rifts. Scouts and pilgrims like the pair of Undead Slayers Valerie had been acquainted with. And like Ulthras.

So now we had at least one formidable new ally. That was a good start.

And the fourth and final reason we'd delayed so long in starting to seriously recruit people for a breakout? To give time for suspicion to fade and Guildmaster Skillings to grow complacent again, of course.

Of course, we didn't spend all those weeks just lazing around. The Guildmaster's "special salvage detail" had to keep producing useful finds in order to stay fed, so there was no rest for the wicked. Or the rest of us.

Old Indianapolis had been somewhat less devastated by the Cataclysm than some other pre-Rifts cities – the ruins were still vaguely in the same shape as the original city limits, and at least a few of the larger buildings were still standing – but it had still suffered enough from the ley line storms and the rifts from the several large ley lines that crossed here to be entirely depopulated and abandoned. And even over two centuries later, it was still hazardous. Our team was lucky to avoid mutated wildlife or minor demons maybe one out of two into the city, in addition to the amount of alertness and prudence it took to falling prey to the treacherous terrain. There were still occasional raids and harassment from a nearby goblin tribe that had been lurking around the ruined city somewhere for years, even after they'd learned the hard way to respect MDC firepower. And on or near the night of the full moon, when the ley lines surged and more Rifts opened, we didn't dare risk a city excursion at all.

I wasn't the only literate person in the group – Anna, Ulthras, and surprisingly Hayley all could read and write as well. So they'd already been doing a fair amount of work towards locating likely scores by using old city maps and signs. But as a new scholar I was also put on the research team, and when we weren't raiding we were busy using whatever documents, guides, clues, or anything else we'd picked up to try and plan new routes.

As far as the overall organization of the team want, Anna was squad leader and Max was our squad sergeant. Since both of them believed in the value of training, so our team actually took a training day whenever downtime allowed to rehearse various patrol scenarios and drills, as well as be assessed and slotted into roles. Everyone was first and foremost a rifleman – except Hayley, who hadn't even touched a weapon before being press-ganged to here and had her artillery built-in anyway.

Tactically, we had our officer and our NCO anchoring the middle. Valerie was paired with Leonard as a scout and skirmisher. Ulthras was our magical support and Hayley was the squad heavy weapon and anchored our base of fire. And I was appointed the new medic. I was also made the sapper, meaning I got to be the one actually digging through the ruins doing the hands-on salvaging. At least I got covering fire from the rest of the team while I did it.

"Anything?" Anna called down as the team stood overwatch on top of the pile of rubble where a low building had once stood while Valerie and Max covered my flanks as I crept downward into the rubble-filled sinkhole that used to be its basement. This was hardly our first expedition into the city - we'd been in camp for over a month by this point - but it was the first major opportunity for a good strike we'd found .

"Looks like what might be a miniature strongroom of some type half-buried in that rubble over there." I called up.

"Damn. Looks like it'd be choice salvage in there, but it'd take too long to dig it out." Anna said. "And we can't spend that much time on it today, it's mid-afternoon. Mark it and move on."

"No wait," I thought out loud. "That rubble pile on top of it is just concrete and plaster and steel, nothing with heavy structural reinforcement. So if we use one of the rifles for a cutting laser, I can sever a couple of those I-beams and let the rubble's own weight slide it right down into the pit."

"Uhhh, what pit?" Anna said sarcastically.

"The one Hayley can burn out in that patch of earth over there with maybe two or three medium blasts." I pointed.

"Shit, I should've thought of that trick." Max growsed. "Yeah, a couple merc companies ago the CO used our Bursters to blow holes in the terrain for improvised combat engineering, whenever we were really in a hurry."

"Hadn't heard of that one before," Anna said contemplatively, before turning to Hayley. "You feeling up to it?" she asked compassionately. Everybody went easy on Hayley to the extent that she'd put up with being babied at all, because she belonged here least of any of us.

"Of course I am!" she said stubbornly, and only just barely held off just long enough for me to actually explain how large a plasma burst I wanted her to put where before she cut loose. The glass-edged hole she burned into the soil proved amply large enough for the purpose, and a couple precisely aimed laser rifle shots from Valerie broke the logjam and neatly dropped the rubble half-burying the strongroom enclosure right into the hole.

"So, you got a plan for the lock now brainiac?" Leonard called down sarcastically.

"Eyes on the street, Len." Anna reproved him, sliding down to examine the strongroom alongside me. "Damn. Walk-in safe made out of laminate cerametal. We're not burning through it like we just did with the dirt."

"No." I said. "But if I can get the icepick program in my headware to talk to the lock firmware through the maintenance access-" I said, clicking the interface cable we'd "scrounged" (in other words, that I'd pulled off a shelf of my workshop when I had a suitable moment alone) into the socket.

After the first couple of weeks in camp, when I'd finally built up a full-power charge and change I'd tried the Forge again. And this time received a gift so providential that I was starting to believe a higher power really was steering me to the choices it saw best and the process only appeared random. I'd already been a highly talented hacker between my engineering talents and my Mechanicus implants, but now that I'd spent a full charge and gotten back a specialized knowledge of the topic I was essentially a god of computers and cybernetics. Designs for impossibly advanced things such as nanotechnological quantum cores that could outperform the largest mainframes in Chi-Town all put together yet still barely be the size of a briefcase- assuming I ever got access to the equally impossibly advanced manufacturing facilities to work with such conjectural nanotech. Designs for true artificial intelligences, as well as a full understanding of how digitized sentience worked and why, provided I could build powerful enough processing cores to handle the load. And hacking and programming skills that would make stripping even the most complex digital constructs down to the bit layer and reshaping them as I desired as trivial as doing simple arithmetic.

And that last ability let me crack an advanced electronic lock built to pre-War standards and intended to stop professional safecrackers with trivial ease, just by jacking into it. I even deliberately sandbagged for a minute or so to look less impressive than otherwise.

The walk-in safe clicked open to reveal several hundred thousand credits' worth of gold and gems. Apparently this building had once held a jewelry store.

"Hot damn!" Max yelled happily. "We just scored enough points here for a whole month!"

"That's some impressive 'ware." Anna said inquiringly. "I haven't heard about anything like that, and I went to the military academy in Ishpeming." I mentally raised an eyebrow at that, because Ishpeming, formerly the Michigan upper peninsula and home of the legendary Northern Gun manufacturing corporation, was perhaps the most high-tech nation in North America outside of the Coalition.

"Experimental stuff." I gave her the same evasive answer I'd given Max once.

"Well however you pulled it off, good job." Anna congratulated me. "And you too, Hayley. We just got the Guild off our asses about quota for weeks."

"Not if fat boy is as fair about this deal as he is about any other deal." Valerie pointed out.

"Well, I didn't say we'd have to turn it all at once, now did I?" Anna said with weary humor. "Right, bag it all. We'll-"

"INCOMING!" Len yelled from his lookout position, and everybody immediately left the loot behind and scrambled up out of the low depression to see what was coming and hit their marks. "And it's goddamn huge!" I cursed at how even with my sensory boosts I could still apparently miss things if I was busy focusing my attention on something else. I'd have to work on that-

Hayley tripped going up the scramble and I got an arm around her and half-carried her up the slope while barely breaking stride. I let her go as we cleared the top of the rise, and came out of the exposed basement and onto the street to see-

"THORNHEAD!" Valerie called out.

It was hands down the single ugliest thing I'd seen since leaving home. Almost twelve feet tall and weighing what looked like a quarter of a ton, the blood-red demon was a bipedal creature with long clawed hands, a gaping fanged maw with several-foot-long tentacles tipped with smaller maws protruding one from each cheek, and two glaring yellow eyes sitting directly between an eight-foot spread of black antlers coming straight out the sides of its skull. I heard Hayley making a high-pitched squeak of terror from right next to me. Fighting goblins or mutated bears or other minor hazards was one thing, but even veteran mercs sometimes froze up when facing their first true demon. Without my enhancements, I'd almost certainly have been as frightened as she was.

"FALL BACK!" Anna ordered, and we immediately backpedaled and jumped right back down into the depression we'd just left. Since Hayley had frozen in panic, I just hoisted her over one shoulder in a carry while I legged it.

"Let me go! Let me go!" she yelled, only to squeak and lose her breath when I just flexed my arm tighter. Yeah, my strength was definitely boosted now.

"Alpha, there! Beta, there!" Anna called, pointing out the locations she wanted the two predesignated fire teams our squad was subdivided into to set up. Forfeiting the high ground to that thing might have been a mistake but you went into a fight with the terrain you had, not the terrain you wanted. And this was the only cover immediately available, and it would have been even stupider to try and trade volleys with that thing standing out in the open. Especially considering that we didn't have any body armor.

So while there wasn't much we could do in the way of elaborate preparations, we could at least spread out behind chunks of the wreckage and try to put the thing in a crossfire as soon as it crested the ridgeline. As Hayley was part of Alpha and Max, Val, and I made up team Beta, I finally put her down like she'd been demanding and shoved her hard in the Anna's direction before setting up on my mark as directed. Hayley took a moment to glare heatedly back at me before hunkering down behind cover where Anna put her.

"Anybody ever fought one of these things before?" Anna called out.

"Fireproof vs. normal fire, needs MDC heat, casts fire spells, strong and tough as hell!" Valerie rattled off very quickly.

"Okay, I've got it!" Hayley yelled as the Thornhead came over the rise, and leveled both hands and blasted it hard. It yelled in pain from the plasma spike she'd shoved into its shoulder but didn't slow down, and then it drew back its other hand while a ball of flame flickered in its palm-

"Oh fuck no!" Valerie said, and my heart leapt into my mouth as she came flying up out of our position and charged directly at the Thornhead, laser blazing away to distract it. The rest of us had to stop shooting as Valerie masked our line of fire, but at a full Juicer sprint she crossed the sixty or so feet between us and it before the creature could finish casting its spell. Leaping off the ground in a desperate flying kick, she slammed hard into the inside of its wrist, disrupting its spellcasting at the last moment, before using the momentum of her rush to bounce off backflip back down the slope just as one of the tentacles whipped angrily through the air where she'd been.

The demon screamed in rage, and then screamed even louder when Max, Anna, and I, expert marksmen all, simultaneously had the idea of shooting it in its open maw. But despite a triple laser blast to the inside of its mouth it still didn't go down.

"Spread out!" Ulthras called frantically as he momentarily staggered the Thornhead again with a lightning bolt. "We cannot let it catch us all in the same fireball!"

"Fuck!" Anna shouted, then confirmed Ulthras' order. Immediately we began separating from each other as best we could, because if that thing could throw fireball spells then against our unarmored bodies it would shred us like a grenade chucked into a room full of sleeping soldiers.

I frantically calculated options. My destructive intuition allowed me to sense that the Thornhead was a damage sponge. We simply didn't have weapons sufficient to hurt it quickly. If I couldn't find a solution, it would be a long slow attrition that we'd lose-

"Juicers, razzle dazzle!" Anna ordered. Valerie and Leonard both holstered their rifles and darted back upslope to try wolf-packing the demon, trying to keep distracting it with one on each side.

"Catch!" Ulthras called, and I saw him throw the same magic sword he'd summoned from his tattoo in our hut to Valerie. She eagerly plucked it out of the air and swung it around, slashing directly through one of the tentacles coming off the Thornhead's face and sending it flying… that sword must be an MDC magic weapon, I realized! There, that was it!

"We need to get it to open its mouth again!" I yelled to Anna. "Or we need to cripple a leg!"

"I can't get a clear shot!" Hayley yelled worriedly, because her firepower was too uncontrolled to try and work around our close-in distractions. The rest of us were skilled or augmented enough marksmen to reliably hit our openings with precise timing, but our biggest gun barely had any experience at all. Leonard picked up on his cue that Valerie had the big damaging option in melee so he started doing his best to unbalance the big guy with kicks and leverage, trying to ruin his timing and parries to give her more openings to bleed it in.

"Just stay in reserve." Anna said reassuringly as she kept firing steadily along with the rest of us, trying to chip the Thornhead down while our Juicers kept it too enraged to think straight or cast any spells. "When I call for fire, then you fire!" She turned to shout at me. "John, what are you thinking?"

The Thornhead screamed in rage as it managed to send Valerie sprawling with a glancing blow, then shrieked as Max blinded it in one eye with a shot worthy of a master sniper. As if in slow motion, I saw the muscles in its tree-trunk legs tense as if to start a bull rush…and that despite the wound it had just taken it was still glaring at our leader, not at Max.

"Ulthras, get ready to grease!" I called, praying that he could pick up a cue that I didn't have time to explain at length. "Anna, THERE!" I pointed towards a spot on the ground.

"Open it up!" I heard her order instead, and our Juicers obediently darted back out of range as they were told. "Hayley, BURST!"

Hayley screamed at the top of her lungs and pumped all of her remaining psionic strength into the biggest eruption of flame she could possibly manage, leaving the Thornhead staggering back in agony. Unfortunately, while it was wounded it was still nowhere near dead. But I still had a clear idea of exactly how I could weaponize this situation flowcharted in my mind, if I could only get people to move on cue…

Anna, having bought a moment of time in which to set up, then went and hit her mark like I'd asked her to do. I took advantage of the same moment of time she'd bought to hurriedly mutter to Ulthras exactly what I was planning. He laughed a wild laugh, the first time since I'd met him that he'd actually looked free of worry or grimness even for a moment, and prepared the spell as I asked.

"Hey, Toro! Toro!" Anna called, firing away steadily at the demon as it shook off the last vestiges of the fire and wiped its own ichor ouf of its eyes. Still focused with its own measure of brute cunning on demoralizing our group by killing its leader, it broke into a devastating charge directly at Anna. She stood there, staring it down unflinchingly, as if she either had complete faith in her troops or had already deduced at least part of what I was planning-

I blazed forward at my full sprinting speed, cutting off the Thornhead on the diagonal several times faster it would have been expecting from a normal human, and tackled Anna out of the way. She went limp and rolled with me as the furiously charging demon went right through where we'd been standing, and Ulthras cast his grease spell precisely on cue. The Thornhead couldn't begin to hope to stop in time, entirely lost its footing, and went flying headlong directly into the heavily-reinforced MDC walk-in safe Anna had baited it towards.

"Huh?" I heard Valerie say confusedly from upslope as Ulthras somehow resummoned his tattoo weapon back into his hand, then nimbly leapt in just as the Thornhead was staggering back to its feet and rammed the tip hard right into its mouth. In a single smooth motion he let go of the blade, leaving the hilt still jutting a couple feet out from between the Thornhead's teeth, and rolled aside as the creature swiped a massive fist at him and missed-

-just as Valerie and Leonard, who'd both seen their cue as if we'd rehearsed this part of the whole plan all along, came bounding down the slope. They each leapt and slammed into the Thornhead's shoulders with both feet, sending it crashing to its knees and slamming face-first into the wall safe again… while the sword was still sticking out of its mouth. The sword hilt caught on the metal and the demon's own immense strength and weight forced him right down onto the blade, and drove the point right out of the back of its neck.

And that, as they say, was that.

"Why couldn't we have gotten a smaller demon?" Max complained.

"That was a smaller demon." Valerie shot back. "You don't ever want to see a big one."

"Okay, kids, the fun's over for today!" Anna shouted as we both untangled ourselves and got to our feet. "Bag the shinies and let's jet before somebody's mother comes looking for it or something!"

"Don't have to tell us twice." I agreed, and we fell in and did precisely that.

Now that we'd scored enough salvage that we didn't have to actually make any more expeditions for several weeks, I had time to work on projects. Ulthras persuaded Anna that with a rogue scholar on the team, it would be a valid use of time for a small hand-picked subgroup to still make carefully selected excursions into the city for the purpose of scouting out possible targets for the full group to go after later. With Max escorting me and Valerie Anna agreed to let me do some scouting missions. After all, I'd already been responsible for one big strike and we were three of the most augmented people in the camp.

Of course, what we were actually doing was giving our escape committee a chance to make preparations out of sight. And while Max wasn't fully read in on our escape plans like Ulthras had been, he was savvy enough to sense that someone with my kind of brains wouldn't be doing something without a good plan behind it and was swilling to wait and see.

The first thing we did was track down the unlucky Jenkins' rotting corpse. Since the collars deactivated but didn't self-destruct upon death, that gave me a chance to reverse-engineer a collar without risking the life of the person wearing it. So soon enough I learned everything about the remote-controlled bombs we'd been locked into that I needed to know.

Next, we found one of the still-standing structures in Old Indianapolis and climbedup high enough to get enough line-of-sight to aim a relic satellite dish we'd pulled off a roof at Hamilton City. I'd repurposed the dish as an ELINT antenna to listen to what broadcasts we could. And even if I couldn't get much in the way of actual wiretapping done my computerized headware and my new and old hacking abilities stoll let me perform enough traffic analysis to pick up the useful fact that the Operators' Guild used a lot of wireless networking, far more than an independent kingdom of this size would have. Apparently the Guildmaster's attempts to get a technological stranglehold on the town's services was relying on his ability to remote-control and remote-monitor various critical functions all through the city, just as he'd arranged to do with this camp. After all, who out here in the wildlands could possibly hack something of such sophistication?

My new and nigh-ultimate mastery of computers and software was turning out to be exactly what I'd needed, exactly when we'd all needed it. I'd just had to persevere on my own a little first instead of being gifted everything I needed the first night I was here.

So with a little work one dark moonless night I had the relay transmitter utterly compromised. The onboard computer was hacked, spoofed, compromised, folded, spindled, and mutilated utterly to my taste, and from that point on not a single datapacket would heave here containing anything remotely suspicious or alarming no matter what we talked about around the campfire. And my new forays into the fascinating field of computer viruses not only let me use the relay's links to the collars to entirely compromise the collar's own control circuits, but the long-range data upload back to the city started containing several interesting little packets of code that I anticipated bearing useful fruit later.

In addition to cracking the firmware I'd also solved the problem of the explosive collars from a more physical standpoint. An examination of the late Jenkins' collar had told me that the collars used a thin strip of stabilized metallic hydrogen as the explosive – the same substance that was used in larger quantities to make up MDC-rated sapper charges like the one that the necromancer had used on his suicide bomber zombie to disable me and Valerie back in West Lafayette, the charges popularly if mistakenly called "fusion blocks" due to their use of hydrogen in the charge. And once I'd known precisely what type of exploding I was dealing with, a little work gathering several exotic ingredients and repurposing some remnant industrial solvent scrounged from the wreckage of a factory produced an alchemical catalyst that would harmlessly render the explosive charge inert. So even if I'd somehow missed some sort of backup detonator in all my hacking, there'd be nothing to detonate.

And so with all of that finally done it was time to take the next big step.

"Colonel?" I said, as myself, Valerie, and Ulthras all stepped into her hut.

"What-" she began to ask, only for her eyes to harden suspiciously at seeing not just one or two camp inmates with a problem, but an entire delegation.

"Cutting to the chase, we're getting out -" I began.

"Shut up!" Colonel Welles barked at us desperately. "Talk like that gets people killed!"

"Yeah, and so does this." Valerie said, reaching up and snapping her collar open before Anna's horrified eyes… and then Anna's dropping jaw, as the collar entirely failed to explode. "Except now it doesn't." Val finished, closing her collar around her neck again.

Anna slumped forward and put her head in her hands and moaned. "Oh God. You actually hacked the circuits. Now they'll kill us all."

"What is this?" Ulthras demanded contemptuously. "Where has the soldier gone?"

"Shut the fuck up." she hissed, leaping to her feet. "You don't know what we're up against! You don't know fucking insidious that bastard is-"

"Two audiovisual pick-ups in your hut, there and there." I pointed. "Looping and seeing nothing. One pickup each in every other hut, four in the common hut. Ready for deactivation at any time. One microphone in each collar linked to a first-in-first-out recording buffer sufficient for 96 hours operation, with an upload-and-purge to a dedicated SIGINT-collection package built into solar panel number two. Hacked and compromised on every level. Detonation firmware in every collar. Corrupted." I recited proudly, Colonel Welles' eyes going wider and wider at every new listing. "Stabilized metallic-hydrogen explosive strip in each of our collars, chemically neutralized with a tailored catalytic solution." I drew a sealed jar out of my overcoat pocket and held it up. "Ready to deploy on everyone else's collar, starting with yours."

"And hackin' the guns can be finished as fast as you can get 'em under his tools." Valerie pressed her. "Do you not get it? Everything the fast bastard wound around us, every layer of hemmin' us in – all gone! We've got a straight road out of here!"

"Shit." Colonel Welles said. "You actually pulled it off. But I can't-" She shook her head.

"Look, we know you're not a collaborator." I said, still confused at her reaction. "You wouldn't have fought for us so hard back there with the Thornhead if you were. You'd have just legged it and waited for the Guildmaster to send you a fresh batch of suckers, and called him to pop our collars if any of us lived to disagree. Instead, you stood there and baited a monster four times your size that could have splattered you with a twitch without even knowing why, just because you trusted your troops."

"You clearly have both courage and insight, Colonel." Ulthras agreed. "You prove that anew every time you lead us into the ruins and back out again. So why do you falter now?"

"And we already know you're a hostage." I said, surprising her again as Anna fumbled for an answer. "I saw it in the firmware for your collar. Yours is the only one that has a separate compliance circuit – it's linked to a miniaturized neuroshock pad at the base of your neck, like the one in a neural mace. The right button push would knock you out cold but not dead, and you wouldn't be the only person Skillings would remote-rig for non-lethal as well as lethal if he didn't have a need for you to stay alive."

"The King's my uncle." Anna finally admitted with a sigh. "Not surprising you didn't pick up on it. I'm his niece by marriage, not blood, so you'd have to know both the Queen's maiden name and who her kid sister married to recognize mine."

"And as you are the only native of Hamilton in our merry company besides our young Burster, who is cheerfully ignorant of higher politics, none of us could have picked up on it. " Ulthras drawled. "And I imagine that no dangerously knowledgeable natives have been assigned to this 'special camp' for quite some time. So yes, it's quite obvious in hindsight how your presence here was part of the pattern that kept your royal relative unable to keep the Guildmaster in check. But how does that bind you, especially now that your neck is no longer under his knife?"

"When you went through town, did either of you hear anything about any royal family member other than the King?" she asked us, her eyes flashing fire. "Or did you not stop to think that hostages can work both ways? If the King turns on the Guildmaster, I die. But if I escape his control, the King dies! I-" She stopped and swore. "It wouldn't be Skillings' first choice, but if I left him with no way out then he'd have nothing to lose by trying to do it the hard way. And even if he didn't make it, he'd still probably-" She broke off. "Look, I'd already have just taken my own collar off years ago and left him without a hostage to use against my uncle if he hadn't made sure I knew exactly how scorched earth things would go after that."

"Wait, he's already killed the rest? All the rest?" Valerie said. "But why the hell would anyone go that far and not finish the job?"

"Well, the Crown Prince died in a war – it happened the last time Dunscon's 'True Federation' tried pushing a major raiding expedition this far north." she explained. "But my other cousin, the Princess, was a tragic 'accident'. And Her Majesty was an 'illness'." She spat. "And both times, Skillings made sure to come tell me exactly why such tragedies had 'needed' to occur. The Queen was to punish His Majesty for inviting the Coalition here in the first place, but my cousin Alice-" she stopped. "That was on me." she said, her voice going hoarse with tears. "It was the last time I ever tried to get out of here. The one loyal man still stuck in here with me had agreed to fake his death and try-" she shook her head angrily. "It doesn't matter now."

I blinked. "Every member of the Royal Family is dead now other than you and the King?" I said. "That-" I sighed. "Your continued existence has to be the only thing keeping the King from going completely berserk! And for all of his gaping character flaws Skillings is a talented engineer, so how on Earth would he ever rely upon a single point failure source to keep something that vital in check for years? By all rights he should go for the outright coup anyway if he's already taken it that far, risks or not, because his situation can't remain stable for long!"

"The young scholar is right." Ulthras said musingly. "I am no general but I have a distinct familiarity with intrigue, and the Guildmaster's behavior as you describe it fits no sensible pattern. But… I have a suspicion. Your Highness, when precisely did Her Majesty die of her 'illness'?"

"… June 99." She answered.

"The sign on the front of the CS embassy also said when it was established. September 99." I said, confident in my total recall. "You've been isolated in this camp long enough that Skillings could fool you about the exact dates."

"Then he didn't kill your aunt to punish the King for inviting the Coalition." Ulthras said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "The King invited the Coalition here in retaliation for the Queen's death! I'm presuming the Princess had already died earlier?"

"The year before that" Colonel Welles – Princess Anna – said, the despair starting to slough away from her face. "But that means-" she whispered, and sat almost catatonic with shock for a timeless instant before her teeth suddenly snapped shut. "None of it was to enforce compliance." she spat. "Not ever! He's not just trying to be the power behind the throne, he has been going for the full coup the whole time! He's just been doing it slowly enough that nobody saw it!"

"Probably still ain't popular enough with the townsfolk to just dump the monarchy and be done with it, seein' as how he's so lovable by all." Valerie said caustically. "So he's stringin' it out as long as he can, hopin' to finally get his ducks all in a row before the skullheads finally get motivated enough to break the stalemate or the King thinks of somethin' else to break him."

"But it means that even if I don't go with your plan I'm still a dead woman walking. Just as Uncle is already a dead man walking." the Princess said firmly, sounding undefeated for what was likely the first time in years. "Which means… nothing left to lose." she exhaled heavily.

"Now that's more like it!" Valerie cheered. "So let's-"

Anna's hand hit the table like a gavel, cutting us all off. "No!" she shouted as we all startled in surprise, and then she showed her teeth like a shark. "We're still not planning an escape. Not if you want my cooperation."

"So what are we planning?" I asked her, already at least half-sure of her answer.

"A revolution." the Princess said passionately.

Author's Note: I feel like I could have gotten a lot more about adventures in a ruined city if I'd tried, but I want to get out of Hamilton without spending half a dozen chapters here so we compress it a bit. But yes, meet the team! It's your fairly standard Rifts adventuring party, although notably underequipped for one due to the whole Penal Legion experience they're living through right now. Perhaps a couple of them will join our heroes on their journey, perhaps not.

A lone Thornhead demon is actually nowhere near the worst thing you can run across in a Rifts hazard zone. But at least a story lets me use combat tricks and dramatic stunts that the rules system totally doesn't support.

And yes, Anna turns out to be the lost - well, captive - princess after all. But while it is a tad unlikely, it makes sense in context. There's nowhere in the city that the Guildmaster could confine Anna for that many years without risking her being rescued by loyalists, after all, and it's not like he has any real base of power outside the city. But the penal camp setup already existed before she'd gotten herself arrested, so the sleazy fat opportunist took advantage of it to turn it into a custom prison without bars for his number one hostage.

Perks This Chapter: Never Underestimate the Power of Computers (Superman)

Last edited: Jun 6, 2021

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cliffc999

May 18, 2021

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