He found out the general layout of what was known as “The Core Run” or “The Run,” or even the “Run.” He had heard her refer to it each of those ways during his questioning. Apparently anyone who had gotten too old to fight crabs and didn’t have any other skills would be sent on “The Core Run.” It was essentially a death sentence.
The Cryo-Core had two massive corridors that ran into it, there might be some alternative paths to access the Core but she didn’t know them. In fact, she had never seen the Southern Run before, the entire idea of it was postulated from measurements and calculations that she knew nothing about and one big fact that she did know about.
The Run followed along the spine of the ship. His following idea of just forgetting the Core and taking the road to another part of the ship had been shot down almost as fast as he had brought it up.
There was no way past the blast doors and whatever other words she used to describe things he was pretty sure were Cryo-Lab nomad specific names, not the official ones. The only way to open the blast doors was with the Prime-CryoMainframe. The Prime-CryoMainframe required the Cryo-Core SI’s permission. Or with his AI, he added silently.
The two paths to the Core, as they were, had no intersecting hallways or doors after the halfway point. After the halfway point it was a straight shot to the Cryo-Core. That final stretch, which she described as, “several kilometers I think,” meant that the ship must be huge.
She didn't have any idea of how long it had been but she did have hazy memories of Earth. He found that fascinating but getting her to talk about it was as easy as removing hardened Medjel. It did lead to another interesting fact about the Labs, apparently Bays that had been locked down forever would suddenly open up or even get replaced by fresh rows of Pods. Most times, the Humans in Cryo were fine but it wasn't uncommon for some of them to wake up, wrong. This had all been going on as far back as anyone knew.
The only other thing she had known about the Run, as a member of her family’s Recon group, was that there were traps, weapons, and assuredly much more beyond.
He guessed that her group were probably the ones responsible for dropping off the less useful Humans at the Run and then harvesting their Nano afterwards. The more he thought about how risky she made it sound he guessed her squad probably just took them around the corner from their base and harvested them there. He did believe that she had seen the Run though.
She didn’t, or couldn’t, elaborate any more on the subject.
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When he had been looking at his remaining 11 Allocation he had known that moving fast was as important as the rest. He had pumped in 9 to bring Agility up to max at 20. The last two went into IQ bringing it up to 11. The feeling of Allocating to Agility was mediocre, at best. Maybe it was the sensation of it clashing with the fact that his hand was still trapped and he couldn’t move.
He saw that he had lost another point in EQ, but he couldn’t be bothered this time. He was starting to suspect that his states were lowering his EQ when he entered them.
At that he settled the hidden worry about the Skills having leveled up to 3. Perhaps their increased levels would stop this EQ drain. Even if they didn’t, EQ didn’t sound like it was going to save his life.
Balancing the Allocation drain was the free Permanent Allocation to Dexterity he got from Improvised Battlefield Surgeon v.2. For some reason the Version upgrade of it had focused on the precision of cuts based on his knowledge of internal medicine of whatever he was cutting into. It also provided some fine muscle developments while patients were in motion. The first part definitely came from diving into her dad’s brains but he wasn’t too sure when he might have had his P.U.S. reflect the movement upgrade.
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He hadn’t found anything special enough to buy at the Terminal that was guaranteed to be useful to him so he figured he’d save his Chits until he got to the Core, there had to be some good stuff in there. So he bought nothing new, except, of course, for several mini-duffels worth of Medjel. He stuffed them into two of the bags that barely managed to zip closed and hooked to his belt loop. The other bags he filled with open Magno-Tubes that he attached behind the Medjel bags.
The goal was simple. Get into the Core. They had been running into roaming hordes of crabs as they approached closer and closer. He hoped, without any expectation, that the streams of crabs would die down.
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He had been shuffling the Magno-Tubes in and out of his pockets so often that it wasn’t difficult to pick up the ones he regularly dropped.
What was difficult was when she had to decide whether or not to Magno-Tube her father. Her father was dead. She remembered when he had woken her out of cryo. The scene around her had been a fight between crabs and Humans as both had been pulling Humans out of their Cryo-Pods. She later learned that the Humans were trying to save and recruit Humans to build up their numbers while the crabs pulled Humans out to eat, or worse.
Now she found herself alone, mostly, and heading for the North Run.
She found both pressure and reassurance in the increased numbers of crabs they had been cutting their way through. More crabs was always some level of “bad,” but now it also meant that something was definitely happening.
She couldn’t figure if it was that Jack was responsible and the AI needed him or the other way around, but she wasn’t going to play with the balance now, whatever it was, it was working. Not while something was finally happening in the Labs. She swore to keep him, and herself, alive to see it through. This, she hoped.
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Korl and Tule had managed to fight their way completely through the swarm ahead of them, leading the other 11 in their group to near the start of the Run. Ahead they saw a small group fighting at the base of the Run.
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They had killed their way through the swarm ahead of them, what they hadn’t fully thought of was the problem of the merged hordes that had been steadily growing behind them.
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“Hold you useless fuck! We’re almost throu… left left!” Her hard-light cannon echoed a staccato tst-tst-tst-tst-tst-tst as each cylinder rotated and sent out tracers flashing with sparkling white light.
She had never figured out how the mechanism of her repeating cannon had worked but she had gotten very lucky when they managed a clean hack on a powerful, and rare, type of Terminal.
Her crew had stumbled across a remote Terminal on the very edges of the Labs that had managed to incorporate some scraps of low-grade hard-light starters that it then sold for cheap. She had made a practice of picking up unknown items if they were selling cheaply. Uller had figured that the starters had something to do with communication; the tubes quickly formed nearly weightless hard balls of light that dripped off the ends when energy was sent down the opposite end. When they had found the Machining Terminal she had Uller use it to combine the tiny foot long cables, a semi-derelict railgun, and a small gravity generator they had taken from a group that had just been attacked by a swarm.
She had had a dream. She had a rough idea of what she wanted and they had robbed, bought, and traded for every material to put together her pride and joy. She tried to avoid killing, robbing was defended less fiercely and avenged less often.
The only problems with the cannon was that it could only shoot in one direction and they were fighting off swarms coming from all three directions. Well and also its ammunition wasn’t unlimited, cells were cannibalized as bits of her life-force were converted into energy that flowed into the cannon. She recovered it completely over time but the matter-to-light conversion was draining. The rest of Kala Skill’s P.U.S. had focused on being able to deliver and use her cannon to greatest effect as she pivoted from position of stability to stability and shot around the other Humans into the attacking swarms.
HeLLbert was her baby. Rebuilding a Skill set was dangerous work in the Labs but he was worth it.
“Uller, what in the fuck is taking so long?” There was a high voltage electric grid, or an Electrical Grid Web, that arced in the corridor immediately beyond their position, a box of lightning and death, that stopped them from even starting the Run.
Two people had tried to push through it. Their shriveled, blackened corpses had kept absorbing current until they finally washed into dust. There had been a group of 8 that arrived near the same time as her crew; so utterly forgettable and average that she hardly noticed them if not for the fact that she recognized some of the faces, after all, she had robbed them pretty recently.
Still, any friends in a storm.
There was her group of now 5, including herself, as well as the newest addition, a group of 10 that had been running ahead of a swarm coming down the path to her right. One of their numbers had been the second to try and push through the electric web ahead. She had held her tongue hoping that it just needed another body to burn itself out.
It didn’t and now all 4 of their groups totaled 23 and were well on the way to losing more. The boys in her crew were smart, they kept towards the inside of the defensive circle and they picked up fewer wounds than the rest. She was walking her hard-light fire left, right, and center in an attempt to relieve pressure from the swarms that were simultaneously bearing down on their position. Slowly, bloody-inch by ichor-drenched-inch, constricting their defensive pocket.
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Uller knew he had to figure this out quick or he’d die here. He wasn’t worried about being electrocuted but he sure as fuck wasn’t going to be eaten by crabs, not before he had his chance at the Run. Plenty of people would dismiss the SI as “crazy” or “against the Humans,” but he had long known that the Cryo-Core SI was far past any of that. It had gone truly, and maliciously, insane. He had once found an undetected hard point that led directly to the SI and tried to copy the Cryo-Lab SI’s Shell; before he’d gotten shut out, he had a brief peek behind the curtain. The “logic” on display was brilliant and beautiful and inspired and drenched in dark madness.
“Shit I need a little longer!”
“No time Uller, you’re already late!” the tststststststst punctuated her words.
“Move! Let me help. Name’s Jonah.” The odd-looking man slid in next to Uller and brought up a Portable that looked even more scrapped together than his own. His whole appearance was scrapped together. Homeless?
Uller could tell Jonah knew what he was doing though. “I already tried running a local override through a pseudo-shell, it doesn’t work.”
“Maybe YOUR pseudo-shell didn’t work. Dammit.”
“Told you.”
Jonah spared a glance at Uller’s shell that the man had kept running on his Portable.
“Well how was I supposed to know I’d meet another man of culture here in the Labs?”
Uller couldn’t help but grin, he had noticed it too when Jonah had run his pseudo-shell, it was rare to meet another man of culture.
“Uller! It’s now or ne…”
“What’s that?” Korl had been reinforcing a massive push in the central corridor after someone had gotten pulled back to recover. He was the first to see it when a clawblade flew towards him to dig into his shoulder joint. Only the magnetic tether connected to his sword kept him from dropping it.
The crab swarm ahead of him split along a diagonal line. The crabs were separated sharp and clean along that line, but before the crabs could fall to the ground in different ratios the mass exploded outwards as a pink shield Bashed the split crab bodies into the defending survivors.
A wild haired, and eyed, man pushed and chopped his way through the remainder with a pink shield and a bladeclaw. Korl missed the woman behind the man precisely carving her own bladeclaw in and out of the surviving crabs. Behind the man flowed a river of Nano diligently following behind.
Kala’s attention could spare a moment to focus in on the newcomers, after all, the chunks of flying crab impacting into you had a way of distracting you. The left was, for now, mostly quiet and the center was clear for the moment due to this… these people, she mentally corrected as the small woman behind the man came into view. She too noticed the cloud of Nano that swept into the man’s body.
Jonah and Uller did not notice the golden-tip haired stranger, their focus was on the Terminal, although they did manage to throw out a few curses towards the rest of the group as they were showered in crab ichor.
“This is it?”
He looked directly into Korl’s eyes, who had paused to wipe some of the ichor from his face, and asked “What’s the problem?”
Tule answered succinctly from Korl’s side, “Electrical grid, can’t get through, two already got smoked in it.”
The man nodded once then looked at the claw-blade in Korl’s arm. Then in a single fluid move he yanked the blade out of his shoulder and wiped some Medjel he had taken out from a bag that was attached at his waist. Before Korl had finished processing the rapid sequence of events the man had already moved past them.
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Uller looked up from the Terminal towards the approaching man, Jonah followed his gaze.
“Figured it out yet?”
The guy was a bit rough, in appearance and attitude. After all it wasn’t just any problem that they were trying to solve, the SI had its personal attention on them. This was the Run and a Run that the Cryo-Core SI AND the crabs seemed to be doing everything they could to stop it. Jonah wasn’t sure what to think about the question. The guy did sound confident though.
“It’s locked down tight, neither of our pseudo-shell’s can get through before being jammed out.” The man’s left eyebrow rose in response to this.
Jonah was almost certain that the man had little to no idea what he was talking about.
The newcomer bent down and wrapped his arms around the Terminal, pulling his chest in tight as he stood hunched over it for a long moment. Then, still under their gaze, he stood up and walked into the electrical web grid.