"You're not a standard Healer are you?" The matronly woman asked Florette, looking on with interest as she worked her magic on a man who had nearly been bisected, his spine just about the only thing keeping his pelvis on his body. She shook her head, focusing as tissue grew, bridging the gap much like the drones keeping the Agnimatajay from tearing itself apart.
"More of a Biomancer, but branding myself as a Healer brings in more pay for some reason." She admitted, sighing with satisfaction as meat knit itself together. I hadn't been much for the bone-sawing, even in my intern days, but the tissue simply didn't look right. It reminded me of what I'd seen of Chimera, where his primary body had laid in the amniotic pit. Just a little too sickly yellow, which you could appropriate to body fat if you wished to, or weren't simply assuming the worst like I was.
It was a better bet than I'd like. The place was under surveillance, sensors tasting the air for chemicals, thermal and terahertz imaging sensors peering under the skin, ostensibly to help the Healers navigate to grievous wounds, if their intuitions weren't sufficient. One could hope they'd have spotted any invasion of metahuman flesh normally, but I had little doubt they were turning a blind eye at Machina's behest.
I was torn myself, wondering if they intended to keep this ship intact. Wasn't the worst bet, given that they'd taken the initiative to board it, and while they hadn't received the same offer of a shuttle off, I'm sure they could have made me ask on their behalf.
"You remind me of my daughter, you won't believe how much I'm looking forward to seeing her when we finally make it to Sedna." The woman said, she had nothing better to do, her powers, while strong, operated in bursts. She'd turned some metahumans on life support into something better than brand new, and there were a long line of more, including Iskra's cocoon. Florette had exhausted her share, she'd been stabilizing most of them, then moving on to the next, which was either all her power could do, or she was feigning weakness. Maybe the suppression field was taxing her, it didn't do much to me, no superpowers except an abnormally dense skull, titanium plates excepted.
They weren't kidding about the life support system on the flagship, we were receiving the bare minimum from the external feeds, yet I could tell the ship was moving, fast, the stars occasionally streaking during a sudden turn. Gotta be turning on a dime, if you could make the sensors do that. It wasn't all momentum dampening by normal means, there was a decent telekinetic on board, who was doing their best to shore us up against being dashed against the walls. Honestly, I was grateful I didn't need to be immersed in more shock foam or fluid, that stuff was sickly sweet, maybe a little bit of antifreeze, and left your skin itchy even after a shower.
There. It was beginning to kick off again. While I didn't have the same visual acuity or the helpful overlays I'd become accustomed to, I saw the broad strokes.
Remember when I told you that these days, just because someone turned the lights off upstairs with a brick doesn't mean the body is only fit for the glue factory? Same deal applies to warships. They were massively redundant, barring the places where the bean counters decided it was better to go all-in instead of spreading components out. Think primary amat stores and so on. After all, if you lost confinement on amat bottles even if there were redundancies in place, all you'd achieve would be a few milliseconds till the massive fuck off explosion on one end of the ship reached the other.
Still, they could take a beating, weapon mounts that didn't absolutely need the maximum output from the engines could run off ultracapacitors, each crewmember, barring the supes with MRS, could stand in the place of the human Admiral (some ships had Captains that were human, with the AI getting the next rank down), seamlessly taking control if the bridge was cored through. A lot of the munitions, like the fusion warheads the size of a small house, couldn't care less that the mothership was out of action, they could acquire targets all on their own, and if they were expected to operate when launched in volleys that could cross a system, they had to.
Many of the ships I'd seen lifeless weren't truly reduced to scrap metal and charred graphene. The USSF and the UN had been negotiating terms, unwilling to destroy ridiculously expensive craft if they were out of operation, if they could be towed to a shipyard, they could be refurbished, the grey matter pressure washed out of cocoons; quantum computers heated past usefulness, their qubits now the helium filling the room, could all be replaced far faster than building a craft from scratch.
I'd seen snippets of a peace treaty being constructed even as missiles flew and lasers signed their initials on a declaration of war. USMA and the USSF were willing to hand over almost all of their derelicts, to be fully subsumed into the autonomous UN forces instead of being on loan as was typical. An acceptable loss, for the US. They might not dominate the globe as they'd been accustomed to, but they'd been the first to truly take to space and that lead was hard to dimish even if everyone else was hustling as hard as they could. Most nations didn't even build their own ships, preferring to buy time on the foundries and yards, considering the output to be their own. The UN was no slouch either, while behind both the US and China, they had the backing of most of the smaller nations, and achieved economies of scale by building standardized vessels. That's where most of the budget goes, UNSEEN, in comparison, is about what's lost when you round it down.
Sadly, this minor consolation prize was stolen off the podium, dragging itself away with zombie legs.
While many ships had lost their AI, and the smarter backups too, they had more backups, which were all too quick to respond when Machina/Prometheus ordered them to rise from the grave and have their rotting hands reach for blunted swords.
They wouldn't have been much of a threat if the rest of the fleet(s) had been intact, but the dead would outnumber the living around Mars for a good while yet.
I hoped Ares was proud, he might even get to propose to Aphrodite with the fancy new ring of debris that was steadily agglomerating around his culturally-appropriated namesake.
Iskra was rushed up the queue, while the Agnimatajay had a better teleporter aboard, likely the best in the fleet, he had been struggling himself, his Class 5 power taxed to the limit to operate when the Reality Anchor had been indiscriminate. If he burned out, even the massive loss in capability Iskra represented was better than nothing.
Still, the former was alive and working, the external field shifted, Mars now down and to the side, then we were pointing away altogether, staring at the unblinking sun, unimpressed by our attempts at usurping its powers.
While we were outnumbered, the ships were restraining themselves, the zombie craft were hideously durable yet had depleted most of their munitions, and even if Prometheus was puppeting them, he couldn't achieve miracles. That took Machina as well.
The reanimated ships lumbered, hardly keeping a straight course, and were peppered with targeted attacks, aiming to disable engines and the stronger weapons without destroying them utterly past repair. This seemed to work, I had come to recognize the difference between amat warheads and mere fusion ones, the former were slightly more blue, dumping more energy in the gamma range, the latter smaller, yellower, not that unenhanced eyes could really tell. Everything looks much the same if you're blind.
The Kill Star refused to engage, it was simmering as well as shimmering, my tendency to ascribe anthromporphic properties ascribing it with boiling rage, it didn't attack the zombie ships unless they strayed too close, and even then, it mostly used its invisible gravity weapon/tractor beam to displace them or hold them in place for finer weapons to dissect.
It was still almost 20:1, UN ships accepting the USSF into their ranks, both smiting the undead.
I was doing something quite illegal (what's new?). I didn't know how long my temporary XRAY clearance would last, but what Gupta had done was the equivalent of breaking the locks. I was going through terabytes of information and trying to transfer what I could to less secure storage. Machina winked at me, before continuing his disassembly of an autodoc that had worked till it broke.
The Matron, which indeed turned out to be her supe name, had been convinced that while Machina wasn't much of a Healer, he knew his way around medical instruments, which he confessed was an aspect of his powers. Not particularly remarkable, the classification systems in use were blunt instruments, primarily referring to what the primary and most useful power someone possessed. Some capable of healing also able to work with machines made for the same? Believable enough.
Machine, heal thyself
I started to suspect that the brief I'd received from USMA about BULWARK hadn't been widely promulgated, nobody seemed to have any clue what they were capable of, not that the people who mattered, the AI and the ship commanders, were so much in the dark. I suspected they'd assumed, like me, that most of BULWARK had been on the surface, it was entirely possible that Frost and Beacon were drawing the heat, and Chimera, he could be almost everywhere he wanted to be, even if his powers grossly diminished as he sent his minions abroad.
There were thousands of bodies in the med bay, neatly covered by body bags. Nobody paid them any heed, they'd been the byproducts of metahuman fuckery, there was another Biomancer who could grow clones of people, without any consciousness of their own, but they had been chucked into autodocs to be broken down for bespoke spare parts.
Maybe when I'm in a better mood, I'll tell you about such "metaphysical constructs", a broad category covering everything from Crafter toys to the byproducts of biomancy that didn't have any preternatural power themselves. This isn't the time.
Did that one twitch? It was so subtle I almost convinced myself I was seeing things. The robots didn't care, it was loaded up and carried off for incineration, much like the dead Space Marines had been on the Promises Kept.
I was calmer now, trying to keep myself pre-occupied by looking at forbidden knowledge. I'd gotten closer to that supe who had the calming aura, he was a doctor himself, a shrink to boot, and we'd chatted for a moment, his powers even restraining my heart's innate desire to leap out of its chest.
You get why mind control is a capital offense? This was far from the worst it could get, while I was an open book to Machina, my mind seemed to be my own. Laces could get far more invasive, but the model I and most others opted for had checks in place to prevent a hack from easily subverting one's psyche. Easily, emphasis.
This seemed like a far slower, more considered engagement instead of the frantic firefight I'd seen before. The onus was on getting the subverted ships to places where they didn't risk hitting the planet with their fire, not that I didn't think most of Mars was toast. Did Silt ever leave Hellas? Otherwise it was likely the place with the most robust tunnels and shelters, but I knew that there had been measures in place to build underground elsewhere. The mining bots were free, producing ore from Martian dirt usually more expensive these days than just dragging one of the many asteroids in the belt closer for disassembly.
You can't stay on the edge forever, even if you know the shoe will drop any moment. It had been long enough that, with the pacifying effect, I'd calmed down, going through my options.
Didn't find any. I tried pretty damn hard.
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Where was Consul? I'd been told he was close, and while he was slow at times, he should have been here by now. Did someone successfully hail him and get him to turn away? Gupta had certainly seemed to think he wasn't on our side. Maybe it had been the US, they were being servile, maybe they'd decided that their paid merc should stand down.
XRAY was hardly enough to understand him, nor the twin. That was almost all GAMMA, and while I'd held XRAY for minutes or hours in the past, GAMMA had yet to grace me with its green glow. I just knew the very basics, the current Consul had been mindwiped, not that it would work again. Not just him, great effort had been made to perform memetic engineering on the wider populace, as well as the Censors going over the rebuilt internet post-SAMSARA to help clean up the digital trail. I didn't know his name, just barely qualified to be told he'd existed before even that was summarily scrubbed.
There were hints, periods I didn't quite remember, with an hourly wage higher than I'd expected. Better than being underpaid, so you can understand why I didn't go to the bots masquerading as humans in HR to fix it.
Whatever they'd tried to do to him, it had gone badly wrong, he'd been consigned to damnatio memoriae. Not the first dirty secret nor the last, and the people who still complain about fluoride in the water won't be happy to know how often amnestics get introduced either. Then again, the reasons were more prosaic, antimemes, either natural or metahuman, feral egregores and the like. Forgetting was often the best defense against truths you couldn't bear.
Ask me how I know.
"Afzal, what's the plan?" I asked Machina. I tried to call him by his real name, Gerald, but it had been seamlessly replaced.
"Did someone ever tell you you're going to burn out, doc? Take it easy for once." He didn't look my way, busy upgrading another robot.
I tried to give him psychic damage by unleashing all the many imprecations I'd heard in my head, but he just whistled away, delicately manipulating mundane tools and occasionally checking in with a Crafter missing a leg. Both a biological and cybernetic replacement floated beside him in a vat, with an autodoc figuring out which one could best handle his MRS.
The whistling grated on my nerves, and I gave up insulting him just for a bit. I'd have to think of worse.
ALERT
ALL COMBAT CAPABLE METAHUMANS REPORT TO STAGING AREA
The wounded groaned, some malingerers not particularly gently ousted by the Matron. I felt nostalgic, a lady who could have passed as her twin had been a fixture in my first hospital. She could be so nice that the people in the throes of psychosis often became meek as a kitten, and I'd heard she'd wrapped up some of the more violent ones before security had even gotten there.
"Should we go too?" Florette asked, visibly sweating. I didn't know if it was real nerves again, or if she'd been taxing her powers.
"No, not Healers. Everyone else, why are you still here?"
A few hopefuls lost theirs, muttering more insults under their breath as they trudged out. I memorized a few, the next time I wanted to yell at Machina.
"Sen. Find a cocoon, we have an unknown Metahuman threat, potentially Lumen or BULWARK." Gupta pinged me, and I left, not even able to turn back and stare at the two ne'er-do-wells in the most vulnerable part of the ship.
Metahumans were preparing again, those expected to leave the ship were donning power armor, void hardened. Most of it was Crafter gear, they were worth the expense, though unless you were a real nerd the difference wasn't obvious. They tend to look high-tech, all scifi greebles or sleekly utilitarian. A few were obvious, unless you have a better explanation for why a medieval knight was waiting in the airlock.
Others formed groups, focusing as they tried to make their powers work in synchrony, often with a weak telepathy to aid them.
An enormous black man, in Naruto cosplay gear of all things, was arguing with a member of the crew.
"Don't just leave me out of it, I can take Consul! I just got this brilliant idea, wait, hear me out, I think if you turn down the Anchor, I can cobble some of the dead ships into arms and legs, and then Voltron them together! I don't even need the backup!"
The woman he was shouting at was thoroughly unimpressed.
"Gargant, if you don't learn to watch your tongue, I'm going to have to rescind your privileges or even get you a slap drone. Nobody has the time to go collecting ships for you, the conglomerate would likely be too big to control, even if you can convince your power it counts as a mech. And if you haven't noticed, the ships are shooting at us again."
"But I never got to try! Haven't you seen Gurren Lagann? If you let me shoot galaxies, I'll take care of the Centaurs in a few minutes!"
"You'll have to settle for a mecha the size of a house for now, bring it up with the logistics committee in about a million years. Isn't this one big enough?" She pointed at something in AR.
"I don't care if you tricked it out with Arvind's help, he doesn't get me, you know? No body pillow or neural jack, and it isn't the same." He sighed, donning something I swear had belonged to Asuka. What a weeb, I thought to myself, I wonder if he likes the new Dragon Ball Z remake?
"I'll arrange for a body pillow, but even you know the neural jack doesn't do anything, you have MRS." She pointed out, long-sufferingly ordering a 3D printer to fire up.
Supes are fucking weird man. Especially the really strong ones, they're spoiled as hell, I'm sure someone even did a feasibility study for turning the galaxy into a mecha if he asked. Then again, you don't want them thinking too hard about being slave soldiers.
I found an unoccupied cocoon, and strapped in, accepting the actually functional occipital jack. Gargant was strong, even if he was niche; he could barely turn an old beater into an F1 car, but hand if him anything remotely humanoid, and he'd make it fly even if he was in a cave with a box of scraps. Maybe this replacement could hold a candle to Consul.
I let the ship's noosphere flow through me, grateful for hard data. That gratitude quickly faded as I was informed of what had drawn attention to me again.
A tenth of an AU away, there had been an asteroid, coming straight down into the plane of the ecliptic, moving so fast that it had barely noticed the sun's tug. Given enough time, it would likely sail right out of the galaxy. Big one, if not quite a planetoid, it was close, but there had been far easier targets to tow home, so barring a beacon to track it down later, it was untouched.
It had disappeared.
A low res wide angle sensor on a ship had noticed an unusual flash of purple light, which the reconstruction algorithms barely teased into an oval shape. Too blurry for real detail, but the silhouette of the object had shifted, becoming slimmer so it could squeeze through. It wasn't entirely gone, scans revealed plenty of rocky debris, but there had been a whole lot of metal in that thing, and that was all gone.
ALERT
TIEYI DETECTED
CLASS 6 EXTREMIS THREAT
PROBABILITY OF MATCH 83%
FTL CAPABILITIES NOTED
ERROR: UNABLE TO INCREASE ALERT LEVEL, MAXIMUM ALERT ALREADY REACHED
I'd been wondering when Lumen would join the party, they certainly thought of themselves as the cool kids.
"Sen. You personally encountered the entity formerly referred to Hu Junya. How accurate do you think your initial assessment was, in light of additional information from XRAY?" This wasn't Gupta, it was one of the AI Captains, the Agnimatajay a rare craft had had more than one Polonium class AGI aboard.
I had to lie, even without Machina's marching orders. When I'd sat before the UNSEEN committee handling the debacle in New Taipei, I'd still been under geass from Purple, condemning Hu Junya, convinced that he was a murderous monster. I knew better, or I had known better, as he went through Apotheosis, he'd changed and become far more capable, as if escaping the Chinese and raiding the moon weren't enough.
No, he was a proper Class 6 now, one of the strongest known rogue metahumans, in Lumen or not. He usually kept a low profile, but one time, a few years back, a random scan had discovered an unlicensed hab out in the Kuiper belt, holding civilians who might have been friends and family of Lumen.
The small Taskforce sent to capture them had run into a leviathan of metal, and while their weaponry hadn't been on the same level as a proper warship, they'd been dismantled all the same, the civilians evacuated with the same portal system.
"Do you agree it's safe to deploy Gargant?" It asked me, sharing its own projections, theorizing about the interaction between a pure metallokinetic and a Crafter who had complete control over his vehicle.
"I don't think we can afford to hold him back, diminished as he is. The range on his powers seemed to be a few thousand kilometers right? At least where he can outright manhandle metallic objects instead of nudging them."
"Correct. We appreciate your feedback." It cut the connection, doing inscrutable AI things.
"Wait, I need to know more about Consul. What's he even doing here?" I asked. It picked up the call milliseconds since it dropped it.
"We have strong reason to believe he's been hired by Lumen. The asteroid Tieyi infiltrated, it was claimed by a solar corporation. The same corporation has been discovered to have made a massive transfer of funds. They are primary stakeholders in the Martian elevator, we believe they ordered Consul to come here to recover the megastructure, but only as a pretense."
"Damn. What are you worried about then? He can see it's not there any more right? Maybe he'll fly off?" I was speaking out of my ass, maybe one of the supes here could turn dreams into reality.
"Unlikely. We are currently interrogating Consul's staff, they don't know the details, but apparently he was informed that a hostile force was attempting to destroy vital civilian infrastructure, and that he was needed to save it and human lives or destroy the attackers."
"And that's enough to make him attack us? Why didn't someone else buy him out?" I asked, quite incredulous.
The AI sighed, the sound of sandstorms on crumbling plastic.
"Automated negotiators convinced all terrestrial polities, including the US, to refrain from attempts at hiring him. Nobody wants this crisis to spill over on Earth, not even them. We believe the bid was over a trillion USDC, if nations were involved they'd have spent a hundred times as much. It was largely corporates bidding on him, nominally to protect civilians and infrastructure. We didn't think it would be an issue. We are not omniscient." It told me, giving me the impression of a guilty toddler trying to avoid blame for leaving the fridge door open.
"Can you get a telepath to get to him? Figure out some way of telling him to stop?"
"I'm afraid not. He has already destroyed multiple drones, and as a side effect of his increased resistance to WHISPERING SENATORS, he has a very strong subconscious antipathy towards obeying orders from the UN, and we expect his sense of duty to override it anyway." Consul appeared in my vision, biting his lips as he seemed uncertain about what to do. He was close enough that the scopes resolved him in great detail, I suspected they'd already tried to do more than hail him, his suit was burnt, revealing muscles and skin heedless of vacuum.
Had he always looked this old? Maybe it was the image reconstruction hallucinating.
"Get people to him? Teleporters?"
"It is in progress, but don't get your hopes up." Another disconnect, before I could tell it I would do no such thing.
Man, things made sense in hindsight, my normal vision was nothing to squint at, but hindsight? It spotted the incoming asteroid 65 million years in advance, counting backwards from impact. I'd heard he refused to take UN contracts, he'd turned down a princely sum for building ATLAS 1, back when funding was abundant.
"Wait. I know you can hear me. His mother, can you get to her?"
Of course it could hear me, but the VR environment turned hostile, dust choking the sky and gales threatening to blow away anything obeying the internal rules of the sim, not that my incorporeal form was one.
"That is a terrible idea. One of the worst I've heard, and I had to listen to Gargant. We are willing to attack him if needed, if only to neutralize him, but there will be no interaction with his mother. Take my word for it, it's GAMMA, or at least the potential consequences are."
The Djinn soared out of the lamp, acting as if my wish had been to hear bad news.
"Uh, right. A fake? Cloned?"
"WHISPERING SENATORS already burned that route a dozen times over. We are not joking when we insist that psychological nudges are our best option these days. Continue your work, Dr. Sen." I was left alone in howling sands, and I gestured in annoyance to a more soothing interface.
I did just that, alongside a deliberate attempt at breaking XRAY guidelines, hoping that someone would notice and yell at me. No luck.
Maybe Lycosa had drained it all.
Maybe this was busywork, an attempt at making me feel useful. I threw myself into analyzing known Lumen threats with as much energy as I could, for all the good it would do.