What were the odds a kill team was NOT following me and using me as bait to draw out whoever was doing this?
Pretty low, I guessed.
Well, that was fine. Given the nature of our opponent, I rather expected it to take out the hounds-them before the rabbit-me, but that wasn’t my job, anyways.
I was past my target’s last contact point, so now I was officially Looking For Something. My course was plotted towards the path the Mekker squad had taken along his probable rout, and so I was skating slowly over the gratings and slopes of the access tunnels and stairs.
Lights here were few and far between, and the air wasn’t too good, either. I think The Hole nearby was partly to blame for the stagnation, because it was killing off even the micromolds nearby. Not to worry, I could tolerate some absurdly low oxygen levels with a Vajra, recycling my own carbon dioxide if I had to.
Likewise, the lack of lighting meant nothing to someone with devilsight... not that relying on eyesight was smart in a place with so many nooks and crannies to hide behind. No, the most important thing here was my tremblesense, subsonics echoing out through every step and breath. My feet were the primary sensor for the solids, my hair was reading the air, bouncing off the materials around and painting everything for me in a double-overlay that extended nicely past the visible and into the mass and matter of everything around.
The weeks I had spent wandering the city up above had given me an absurdly detailed map of the area directly under Downspire where I had walked. Now I was also filling in a Lived-Line map in my Virtual File that would make these Undermobs green with envy. Parallel corridors, hidden access points; where conduits, pipes, and vents led to; what might be in them, and hidden machinery behind walls and platings that might be important and all.
Mmm. So much stuff to look at.
And yeah, there were the footsteps, distant, shuffling remarkably quiet, but definitely on my tail. If I really wanted to, I could probably turn around and pick out the drone tailing me and keeping me in sight. As a matter of fact, Grim spotted it flitting across the exit I had just left, as I came to a stupidly unfenced walkway across a deep abyss, which was curiously silent and unmoving despite pressure differentials fairly begging for such things. OSHA was so gonna hear about this.
It was structurally perfectly fine. I skated across it on my lightfoot, tremblesense making sure nothing close was lying in ambush, and I proceeded towards the ladder I’d have to climb up to a connecting tunnel nearby. Nobody should have gone through here recently, which meant that a trail from dust being disturbed should still hold. My tremblesense was fine-tuned to look for it...
Hah, footprints in a size 10, his boot size, and it was even the right tread style. The ladder was just ahead.
Behind me, there was a sudden scream.
Ah, yes. So unexpected.
I stopped and bolted backwards.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to help the Steiners as I wanted to see what I was dealing with.
Slug-throwers and lasers going off. There was a lot of racket from ricochets. The thoomp of a plasma gun slagger going off, and the protest of durasteel getting melted. A rotary laser fired up shrilly, and lasted five seconds before it suddenly went quiet.
I was around a corner, down a slope, between some pipes, and rounded the curve to the abyss, a great ambush point.
To be on the safe side, I had a point of Essence in my eyes. Succubi got their True Sight at Eight, and I at best could be considered a Karmic Seven. But a couple Essence in the old eyeballs took care of that problem, and stark reality was laid out before me.
Of course, it made my eyes into blue and gold light bulbs, but what could I do?
The number of things shooting had been cut by two-thirds.
A couple Stiffs had been sliced into pieces just off that gantry on this side. There were remains of a couple more on the bridge, I assumed the rest of their bodies had gone for a dive. There were two Franks in power armor on the other side, also in multiple pieces, and three other Stiffs with them. The screams were coming from the tunnel on the other side, rapidly retreating... but not rapidly enough, as the pounding trio of footsteps faded one... two... three.
Looked like a twelve-man strike team had just bit the dust.
I bent down to the two corpses closest to me, rifling through them with professional discourtesy and tossing the interesting stuff into my Masspack. Finders-keepers and all that. I could disable any trackers on them in a bit.
I really hoped that rotary laser was intact. I hadn’t heard a boom, so at least the power supply was good. Portable micro-fusion generators were muy expensive.
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Would the killer come back out that corridor? Hmm. I waited by the edge of the doorway to see, my hand on Chalice.
It was a good thing that Grim shared my visual senses, ‘cause when the bastard came floating down right through the pipes in the ceiling of the room that I was in, he could have had me dead to rights.
Some sort of trans-dimensional phasing. Slid right through the matter without a wobbling or distortion. Invisible to normal sight, too, as it was in another dimension.
It was a three-eyed orb of crawling dark metal, spiked in odd places, and with five spiked arms spread in a half-arc atop it. The three eyes were set into a virtual skull of some kind, vaguely humanoid, but the whole thing was basically a floating ball with cleaver-blades on extending arms, and there were probably at least one or two energy projectors in those eyes.
Would have had me cold. Came drifting down right behind me in otherplanar silence, brought its arms back, and snapped them forwards as it materialized.
I fell down at five gravities, slamming to the ground backwards, my feet still in place, those scythe-blades whisking above me. I basically wound up right under the thing as I rebounded, blowing an Interdiction as Chalice came out to full Sword form, and I hacked into this floating ball of metal from below.
Orichalcum surrounded by Nimbus and Corona Flared once, twice, thrice as I hacked with top speed, shearing deep into its armor, letting loose vivic fire into its insides while I lamented not being Construct-Bane yet, chortled at this thing qualifying as Undead, and energies flared and blew out inside it with harsh unwhite light.
It tried to phase out, couldn’t for some strange reason I certainly had nothing to do with, and then its anti-grav gave way as whatever it was using for a power supply blew out and was consumed by vivus and raging banefire. It crashed heavily to the ground as I kicked away and out of range of it, evading two of the arms snapping back and whipping wildly, biting into durasteel like cheese as they did so.
The metal on it was burning. Huh.
I anchored my feet and slid upright easily, waiting for its motion to stop, and then glided up to the silent mass of it.
Okay, the vivus and banefire were actually burning it away very heartily. I tapped Chalice’s point to the flames, and they guttered and were sucked away, leaving me with a fried ex-floating piece of WTF Is This.
I touched it, and swore.
Necrochalcum. Negative-Energized orichalcum, organized in a dermite shell. By default, minimum QL of 40. This thing was worth a Spire to the right parties. There hadn’t been any orichalcum made in the Empire since the Emperor’s generation, which was no surprise. It took 17 Ranks in the right skills to figure out the process.
And someone built a death-bot of the stuff?
No, not a death-bot. Or, not a true bot. This had been an unliving creature, a soul captured in temporally-sensitive metal attuned to the energies of death. Instead of computer programming or an AI, it had digitized a soul for its animating intelligence.
If it thought it could just download its code to another shell, it had a nasty surprise with vivic fire, chasing down all that negatronic code and frying it. True Death was not forgiving of shit using negative energy, even if it was computerized.
Necrochalcum. Over half of it, by mass, was made from the stuff. If I could sell this, I’d be set for funds for like, oh, a week, ahem. I had too big a shopping list...
Just how serious was this? I didn’t know, but I was going to have to find out. I mean, this didn’t look like any human tech I’d seen in passing on any level, which meant alien, which generally meant Bad Shit.
My Disk came out of my Masspack, rotated and fell into the proper assembly-pattern as geomagnetism kept it nicely afloat next to me, despite the Interdiction.
I hauled the orb of death metal up onto my Disk, praising the fact that the spideroid Nexals were constantly empowering my Disk and upping its weight limit. I looked at the big awkward thing and those ten foot-arms, and being the practical sort, hacked off all the arms so they weren’t dangling all over the place, folding them at the joints and stacking them up.
And I should loot the Steiners while I was at it. I really wanted me that slagger, if he still had it, and that rotary-laser and its power source...
-----
Several slugthrowers, las pistols, las carbines, a clutched Impact-fist that never got used, the fallen slagger, the rotary laser (feed mechanism sheared through) and its power source later (along with sundry other ammunition sources, knives, and an assortment of grenades), I was definitely feeling satisfied and fine with myself. For some reason none of the armor and power armor was really worth salvaging...
Aaaaand then I started hearing movement down below me in that abyss.
Well, wasn’t that all expected and suchlike. I kind of sighed as I looked down there, and saw things moving in the (not!) darkness, crawling up the pipes with magnetized ease and tireless speed.
Oh, yeah, there was something from The Hole coming up here and on the way.
And not just from below. I tilted my head, and could hear footsteps and things moving in the corridors ahead and behind me. What was coming had closed in from multiple angles, boxing me in and denying me a way out.
I looked up, and sideways, calculated my chances. I eyed the thing floating on the Disk, thought about it. With an Interdiction up, the Disk couldn’t follow me if I had to jump, so I’d have to leave this thing and my physical proof, even if I had Visual File data to back it up.
Perhaps I should have run immediately, but despite the footsteps rumbling all around, sounding almost like the constant roll of a storm, I didn’t (couldn’t?) panic, and wasn’t even worried, really.
This wasn’t inside The Hole. Whatever was coming out of there wasn’t on home ground, and it didn’t know what it was dealing with in me. It could try chasing and fighting me, but at most what I was going to lose was the thing on the Disk behind me.
So I waited, as the first of them came around the corner behind me, advanced into the room and stopped, just as the wave from below reached the bridge on the other side, with a wave pausing on the piped walls below me, hanging on patiently.
They looked like human corpses, tricked out with circuits and gears of dark metal and sharp, yet fluid design.
Borg-zombies, real ones, not just cyber-zombies, which were corpses moving around with motors in them. Actual undead with cybernetic implants. Naturally tireless, a good weapon platform for all sorts of toys, like rib-cage missile mounts, sawblade arms, guns in foreheads, and the like.
I sat there and waited as they formed up, and I could see them in a couple other tunnels higher and to the sides, making sure to let me know there was no escape in those directions...