Chapter Forty-Five

The next few hours were spent in general ‘clean-up’ duties, doing maintenance on their suits, powering them up and plugging in the battery relay.

These were shitty batteries, literally, not full on fusion cores like the suits ran on properly, but they still held a fuck load of power, and they needed that after two missions, a crash and then an emergency cryo procedure.

I hooked them up, one by one to their suits and watched as the batteries were drained like a soldier with a beer, each of the dozens of batteries only adding a few percentage points to their systems, but even one point could be the difference between life and death.

I also reloaded their nanites, ordering their systems to start using the nanites to repair the damage done as they started the defrost cycle, plugging in more and more of the medikits as each hour passed.

That was my night—monitor them, unplug the old unit, plug in the new unit, wait, drain the system, repeat.

The suits were efficient fuckers, forcing the discarded flesh and parts, the dead nanites and so on into the clearance cycle, forming those, like they did all bodily wastes, into compressed carbon pellets that were stored.

I then had to order them to be ejected, and basically kick them away, as I didn’t think they’d appreciate waking up with their containment full and surrounded by shit.

Hour after hour passed as I monitored them, amusing myself by sending Lidar pulses into the back of the cave, where at some point a collapse had closed off the rest of the cave system from this one.

I looked over the resulting maps, checking them against the little I knew about geology, and the little I knew about the fingers, along with the evidence seen so far.

The result was that I thought I was starting to get a clue about the area, and why it was so insanely fucked up.

If—and this was a big if—but if the entire area had been ground zero for a gravitational lens or something, a seismic weapon that created the Fingers, then the whole area was hammered over and over with orbital weapons?

The end result wasn’t a mountain at all.

Not in the classical sense anyway. The end result was a massive pile of debris, rock, random building materials and warmachines, all piled atop each other.

That could be justified as a mountain, sure, fuck load of rock and metal, boom.

But the warmachines were also using nuclear and fusion plants, there was an insane amount of radiation here, add in the layered metals and more, roll the stones and more across all of this, and leave it to settle?

Then let the weather be pulled in by whatever weird elemental shit that caused all of that—I didn’t understand it much more than the water cycle—but I knew that mountains seemed to drag in storms and that was definitely happening here.

The end result was that over hundreds of years, as the mountains settled, spaces would develop, not so much from standard erosion by millennia of water and ice and so on, but because those gaps were left in the forming. There’d be pockets of open spaces, and then as the water ran down the mountains they’d smooth these places out.

The random bits and pieces that took up most of the space inside say a battleship might be washed away, but the overall superstructure would last long enough for sediment and more to coat it. Over centuries the result would be caves…

They’d link up as the rainwater and snowmelt ran down the mountains, and then…

I moved to the back of the cave and locked everything down that I could, using the Lidar one last time, running a test, no longer amusing myself, but deadly serious.

The result when it came back? It made me grin.

We had a way down the mountain. Probably.

Two more hours passed before the first of them—Sync of course, Richie was notorious for being slow to wake normally, never mind when frozen—began to wake.

An hour after that, and the pair of them were almost able to speak again, making me reassess my plan of getting them up and out as fast I’d expected to, as a bloody stupid one.

Maybe I’d actually lucked out with the helo pilot, because if I’d have had to physically carry them out and load them onto the helo? There was no way, realistically that I could have done it with the helo being battered by the storm.

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, in this regard I was a total novice. Next time I’d book the helo myself and have a damn good conversation with the pilot about the realities of life as well.

For now though?

My friends were back.

“Ka…butt?” Sync mumbled and I nodded, unable to keep from grinning widely at her being alive and awake. I sent them both a virtual link, the three of us sharing operating and processing power to create a virtual location that we could all be in, instead of sitting in the armor.

In a blink, we were sitting around ‘our’ table in our favorite bar. Fergie and Scott were playing on the stage with their band, and there was beer in front of us.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

It was virtual, and did fuck all to quench the thirst that we all felt at seeing it, but it was part of the overall image.

We all sat there for a few minutes, watching the pair with the rest of their band, before I forced myself to turn away. There was a risk to virtual like this, to recreating dead friends and having them act from memories.

It was a balm to the soul at times, but you knew, and if you let yourself forget, really? You suffered all over again from scratch when you let yourself feel again. I waved a hand and the band appeared as if on a screen instead, obviously not live and right before us.

It hurt, but seeing the looks on the other two’s faces, I should have thought to load in a blocker. My RI had built this virtual from my orders, and had fleshed it out with subconscious desires. Scott had once made a HELL of a mistake when he’d created one of these, and we’d never let him live down the ‘serving staff’ that he’d had wandering around.

It'd been weeks, maybe a month for me, and I’d been insanely busy all the time. I’d had time to come to terms with losing Scott and Fergie, but for the other two? It was literally yesterday.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly, shaking my head.

“It’s okay,” Sync said, her head hanging a little, before she looked across at the vid and smiled, despite the heartache.

“They really were good weren’t they?” she said wistfully. “In the old world they’d have gone all the way…”

“The band?” I asked, and she nodded.

“If they’d stop chasing ass long enough, then yeah, but they lived for the life, not the fame,” Richie corrected, smiling and shaking his head. “Fergie smoked anything he could, drank more than four men, and shagged anything that moved, and Scott? He’d be distracted by a pretty girl or a new martial art every five minutes! In the old days when bands were real and toured the world? They’d have spent half of each day tracking the pair down and dragging them back onto the transport.”

“It’d be wonderful to have seen though,” I admitted.

“It would.” Richie sighed, before coughing and straightening, clearly burying his emotions as he tried to get himself under control. “So, how long then boss? Are we free? Are we fucked? How we doing?”

I snorted. “We’re doing about as well as we usually are.”

“That bad?” Sync asked, wincing. “Come on boss, give us some good news…”

“I beat the shit out of Tyrannus,” I said, picking an image out of my memory and displaying it on the screen before us, then starting it playing from memory, as they watched me beat the absolute shit out of him.

Richie winced when I cut through his hand, and even Sync looked at me sideways as my beating him to death went on. Watching it again, from the recording the RI made automatically, I had to admit it made me slightly uncomfortable.

Without that rage against him, without the adrenaline, the anger and everything else? Sure he deserved to die for the shit he’d pulled, but…

The truth was he was no worse and no better than a load of others I’d dealt with of late, and while I now knew he wasn’t responsible for everything that happened, I knew that if he’d been given the chance he would have done it all.

“So…” I said after a few more seconds of blood and screams. “I might have been slightly more upset with him than he deserved.”

“Was he responsible?” Sync asked flatly. Did he take our friends from us?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “He fucked up, and he took bribes, but the mech? The scavs? All that shit? It wasn’t him.”

“Fuck.”

“It was Major Marcial.”

“You’re shitting me!” Richie grunted.

“Nope.” I sighed. “He’s running a black ops APS unit, freelance as near as I can tell, and…”

I explained everything I knew, and I suspected, making sure they knew the difference, and that I could prove only this much. I told them about Luna, Gessh, Todds and Reign.

Weirdly explaining that I was sleeping with Reign, and that we were just setting into the relationship, as well as that she was my second? I felt far more defensive explaining that, than I had justifying torturing Tyrannus, and killing the people I had of late.

Richie, of course, gave me a fist bump and asked if I had any images of the team I’d like to share, waggling his eyebrows.

Then he grunted, and rubbed at his ankle as Sync apparently kicked him under the table.

I set the recording playing again, and showed them the two black ops teams battling it out. That led to me explaining how I’d survived, and led to the recording of my fight with the APS, then specter harvesting and hunting…

An hour later and Richie was laughing his ass off about the ‘Errant Mergers’ guild job, that they’d kicked the crap outta me, and that I’d then gone back and burned their guild down and pissed on the ashes.

Eventually, after explaining what I thought about the mountain and our possible escape route, I stopped the virtual. I ordered them both to have an hour’s sleep while I topped up their nanites, and then cleared the passage at the back of the cave, getting ready for what was to come.

‎